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Posted on 11/16/2001 1:11:58 PM PST by aculeus

Sometimes, war works. Not always, not easily, not without horrible cruelty and suffering. But there are times when the legally tolerated — and even mandated — killing of thousands of people is effective, unavoidable and morally justified in order to save the lives and liberties of millions of others.

This awful truism about the troubled world in which we live has been accepted by philosophers and religious thinkers since time immemorial. But for some reason it was forgotten in the aftermath of September 11. A clear majority of Western experts on Islam and Central Asia predicted that the anti-Taleban campaign was doomed to failure. We were told by historians that Afghanistan had been the graveyard of foreign forces since Alexander the Great, by military analysts that bombing only hardened resistance, by ex-commandos that the Afghans were the world’s toughest fighters, by religious scholars that Islamic zealots knew no fear of earthly weapons.

This is not the time to delve into the psychological roots of these defeatist self-delusions, some of which I discussed on this page in mid-September, when the anti-Taleban campaign was first launched. The important issue now, with the first phase of the anti-terrorist campaign completed, is to remind ourselves why the US-led coalition chose the overthrow of the Taleban as its key objective. We can then consider what the mercifully quick achievement of this objective could imply for global politics and security in the months and years ahead.

Why didn’t the anti-terrorist coalition instead go all-out to capture Osama bin Laden himself? There were four reasons why I thought from the outset that the approach adopted was right. In ascending order of importance they are:

First, overthrowing the Taleban was an eminently achievable objective, since this monstrous, medieval regime was hated by the Afghan people, was incapable of defending itself against modern weapons and was so administratively incompetent that it was unable even to feed its people. Attacking the Taleban could therefore be clearly distinguished from attacking the people of Afghanistan — and the Taleban were likely to prove a relatively easy target. Certainly, President Bush could promise to topple the Taleban with much more confidence than he could vow to capture bin Laden.

As for all the “expert” claims about Afghans always uniting against foreign aggressors or never being defeated in war, these could be refuted by a few moments’ study of the two-page summary of Afghan history in the Encylopaedia Britannica. In any case, the objective of overthrowing the Taleban obviously differed from previous foreign efforts to invade and control Afghanistan. America’s ability and desire to liberate and feed the Afghans, rather than to occupy their country, rendered completely irrelevant all the facile historical comparisons with the Russian invasion of 1979 or 19th-century skirmishes with Britain along the North West Frontier.

The second reason for wanting to topple the Taleban became evident this week, as television cameras entered Kabul’s abandoned houses and showed the piles of al-Qaeda documents left behind by fleeing Arab fighters. By overthrowing the Taleban, gaining access to Kabul and bribing or otherwise suborning Afghan fighters, the anti-terrorist coalition will acquire priceless intelligence. This should help not only in the capture of bin Laden but in the even more important task of breaking terrorist networks operating in Europe and the US.

The third reason for destroying the Taleban was simple morality. This was a regime of unmitigated evil. Not only had it impoverished and oppressed all the Afghan people — creating more refugees than Congo and Rwanda put together, long before the bombing started — it had killed many thousands and enslaved tens of millions. As I said in September, if any government in the world had inflicted on Africans, Jews or any other racial group the sort of degrading and murderous apartheid imposed by the Taleban on the women of Afghanistan, it would long since have been targeted by the entire civilised world.

Morality alone is rarely enough to provoke war. Nobody is going to start a war with China because it mistreats racial minorities. But if a regime that is manifestly evil is also militarily weak and stupid enough to connive in the killing of thousands of civilians in other countries, it surely becomes a moral imperative to end this regime, if need be by main force.

This brings me to the fourth and most important reason why the West was right to target the Taleban. This is the argument that tells us most about the future and gives the greatest grounds for optimism about the long-term benefits of the anti-terrorist campaign.

By overthrowing the Taleban and scattering its mad mullahs, America has sent the clearest possible signal to other regimes which harbour terrorists or support violent religious fanatics. The carnage in New York defined the limit of America’s forbearance, both for its sworn enemies, such as Iraq and Syria, and for some traditional allies, such as Saudi Arabia. In future, attacks on civilians in America and other Western countries will be treated not as isolated crimes by individuals but as hostile acts of state. Any government that can be associated with such acts of terror can now expect the same treatment as the Taleban.

The Taleban’s defeat has set a precedent for the kind of treatment that other governments, in the Middle East and elsewhere, can expect if they allow their territory, their finances or their intelligence resources to be used for terrorist acts. For despotic rulers, whose main motivation in life has always been personal political survival, the overthrow of the Taleban after September 11 should prove a much more salutary lesson than the capture or killing of bin Laden.

By setting its military sights so clearly on a government, rather than on a physical territory or a geographic boundary, the United States may finally have undone the damage done by President Bush’s father when he failed to pursue the Gulf War to its logical conclusion by overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

To say this is not to suggest that Iraq should be the anti-terrorist coalition’s next target. On the contrary, given the absence of clear evidence to link Iraq with September 11, Saddam should be given the chance to learn from the object lesson in Kabul. Saddam’s strong survival instinct may well now inspire him to distance himself from overtly anti-American terror and perhaps even betray some of his al-Qaeda friends.

The salutary lesson about survival may now spread from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist Islamic regimes. The overthrow of the Taleban means that the West has become more sophisticated about targeting unstable regimes as opposed to attacking entire countries — a lesson that should surely give pause to the House of Saud. If the Saudis know anything about long-term survival, their mullahs should already be hard at work rewriting the vicious anti-American propaganda that masquerades for an educational curriculum in the tens of thousands of religious schools financed by Saudi money across the Islamic world.

But surely the Saudis’ anti-Americanism just reflects the emotions of the Saudi “street”? And surely the emotions of “pious” ultra-orthodox Saudis will only be further inflamed by the Taleban’s defeat? Fortunately, both human nature and history suggest exactly the opposite conclusion.

The sudden collapse of the Taleban has proved more clearly than ever that even Muslim fundamentalists are fundamentally human. They try to be on the winning side. They shun defeat. They respect power. They respond to military force and financial incentives.

The defeat of the Taleban has shown to the entire Muslim world that the mullahs’ vision of an ultra-orthodox Islamic Utopia is a catastrophic delusion. Not only does returning to medievalism lead to economic catastrophe. Even worse, it produces political humiliation and military disgrace. In a battle between religion and technology, between medievalism and modernity, between theocracy and democracy, the West has long known which side was bound to win. The collapse of the Taleban may now teach the Islamic world the same lesson.

anatole.kaletsky@thetimes.co.uk

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