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OPINION: What Has a Week of Bombing Achieved?
Saturday, October 13, 2001
By Tim Cornwell -- Deputy Foreign Editor / The Scotsman Online

If America and the West hoped to reassure itself by attacking Afghanistan, it has conspicuously failed. FBI warnings and fear of biological warfare have kept the country on the edge of panic.

WE wished it hadn’t happened to Afghanistan. But one week into the US bombing campaign, what has been achieved? Have we put Osama bin Laden "on the run", as President George Bush claimed? Or was it all a massive exercise in closing the barn door, as the vast American defence and espionage apparatus went into overdrive against an enemy whose threat it had overlooked so calamitously?

This was supposed to be a different kind of war. So why, after a week, does it look superficially much the same as the last, with "bomb damage assessments" and dusty satellite pictures of buildings blasted into scattered rock? Bombing for bombing’s sake, because we couldn’t do anything else?

As the dust began to settle in Manhattan three weeks ago, some US officials at least were talking of a slow-burning "multi-year" operation aimed at Osama bin Laden. It was likened to a new Cold War, where the sound, said one, of "a quiet bullet in the back of the head" was better than a million-pound cruise missile slamming into a Taleban telegraph office.

In Belgrade or Baghdad, US planes could target infrastructure, government or military offices, communications centres and radar. In Afghanistan, Clinton administration officials used to joke about bombing the country into the Stone Age rather than back to it.
(More: TheScotsman.co.UK News Source)
2001 © TheScotsman.co.UK

Yet another complacent Euro-Dweeb, apparently missing the FACT that Osama bin Laden is NOT the target, where INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM IS.

Amazing, the people these rags find to be their editors,
Dan