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This War Will Get Much Nastier Before It Is Won
Saturday, November 3, 2001
By Anne Applebaum / The Sunday Telegraph

After three weeks of cautious bombing, we haven't found bin Laden and we didn't force the Taliban leaders to defect or make mistakes.

What a difference geography can make. In London, America's war on Afghanistan has been described as "the slaughter of the world's poorest by the world's richest". A growing chorus of critics agree that the bombardment is too harsh, too dangerous to civilians - that after a mere three weeks, it has already expanded out of all proportion.

In Afghanistan, America's war on Afghanistan looks rather different. After the Soviet bombing raids of the 1980s, the Mujahideen would scour the deep craters for emeralds, blown out of the rock by the constant force of the blasts. To people accustomed to that sort of attack, America's precision bombing seemed laughably survivable. "All you have to do is move next door," is how one Taliban soldier happily described it. Equally, their opponents, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, have been mystified by a perceived lack of seriousness by the US air force.

But even by other standards, the American bombing campaign has been extraordinarily light. America's B-52s - the planes which drop cluster bombs - have flown some 40 missions in four days. During the Gulf War, they flew nearly 1,600 sorties in two days. The US strategy to date is not an attempt to destroy the Taliban with a harsh bombing campaign of disproportionate strength and violence.
(More: DailyTelegraph.co.UK News Source)
2001 © Telegraph Group Limited.

More bitching from armchair strategists,
Dan