Hold the White Flags
Please, no more surrenders.

December 13, 2001 1:30 p.m.

he surrender of an enemy has never looked so bad. In fact, this may be the first war in which an enemy's surrender has, in some respects, made it harder for an army to achieve its goal.

No wonder Americans on the ground have been discouraging the Eastern Alliance from accepting any surrender in Tora Bora, as the Washington Post recounts today in another excellent dispatch from Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan has never been primarily about winning territory. Territorial gains have been a means toward the real end: killing the top ranks of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Surrender, of course, has its uses. It has provided the important psychological boost of a string of demonstrable victories on the ground; it has toppled the Taliban government; and it has, we hope, drastically reduced the area in which bin Laden can hide.

Wonderful things all. But surrender has its limits as well.

A surrender laid the predicate for perhaps the most vicious fighting of the war, and the only American battlefield casualty at the hands of the Taliban: The hard-core Taliban plainly surrendered Kunduz with a double-cross prison riot in mind from the beginning, which they carried out in Mazar-e Sharif.

That riot is a metaphor for what the toughest al Qaeda fighters hope to gain by surrendering: the chance to fight another day, if not in Afghanistan, then in Chechnya or Tajikistan or wherever they infiltrate next.

This was clearly also the point of the surrender of Khandahar, which may have saved Mullah Omar's skin — at least temporarily — and allowed hundreds of Taliban fighters to head for the hills. (We would have been better off if negotiations there had stalled for, say, a week more.)

It would certainly be the point of a surrender of Tora Bora too. It has clearly been the point of surrender negotiations in Tora Bora, which have allowed al Qaeda fighters to escape to Pakistan.

The Afghan fighters allied with us on the ground seem unconcerned. "It's not good manners to stop a cease-fire," one field commander told the Post.

Not good manners. This is really the nub of the problem. We are experiencing a cultural conflict between the Eastern way of war, which tends to be a constant negotiation toward surrender or betrayal, and the Western way, which involves clashing armies directly confronting and attempting to kill one another.

On the ground in Afghanistan, we can't, of course, refuse to accept surrendering soldiers. If al Qaeda troops want to wave white flags and walk toward Eastern Alliance front lines, so be it.

But we shouldn't make it easier for them. There should be no negotiations, just one choice — B-52 strikes or your hands in the air.

And we should prefer the B-52 option. The al Qaeda holed up in the White Mountains have voted with their feet. Their presence there proves that they are the true believers, they are the fanatics who will only kill elsewhere if they escape, they are the army that crushed and incinerated thousands of Americans on September 11.

The more of them we kill, the better.

Sherman in the Civil War realized that there would never be peace until the roughly 20,000 hard-core Confederate warriors who were the young, brave heart of the Confederacy were killed.

Exactly such a task confronts us today. Please, no more surrenders.