President Bush is
talking about a "crusade" - it would be
difficult to find a word more likely to enrage
Muslims. But if he plans to wage it in Afghanistan,
the United States faces a military campaign more
fraught with disaster and potentially even more
costly than Vietnam.
Ground
troops may be necessary to seize Osama bin Laden but
they will be entering a country containing one-tenth
of the world's land mines, left by Soviet occupation
forces across 80 percent of the land.
Besides,
anyone who wants to invade Afghanistan needs friends.
The Russians had the communist government of Babrak
Karmal. But, with the murder of the only serious
opponent of the Taliban, Shah Masood, by Arab suicide
bombers nine days ago, the United States hasn't a
single friend in that cemetery of foreign armies.
So, are
the Americans planning a mere attack by cruise
missiles? They fired 70 missiles at Osama bin Laden's
camps after the bombing of the US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam - they knew where they
were, of course, because the camps were built by the
CIA during the Afghan-Russian war - but they did not
touch bin Laden. Do they plan to use special
parachute units to descend on the areas around
Kandahar where bin Laden has been known to live in
the past?
And what
about those mines? If the Americans are even
contemplating a ground force, it can enter only from
Pakistan - the most dangerous main supply route it
would be possible to find - and up the Kabul Gorge
from Jalalabad. The Russians seeded the perimeters of
Jalalabad, Kandahar, Khost and Herat with anti-armor
mines. There are, in Afghanistan today, more than 10
million mines. They lie in fields, on mountainsides,
beside roads, around the big cities, along irrigation
ditches. On average, between 20 and 25 Afghan men,
women and children are blown up by mines every day.
Even if we take the lower figure, this indicates
73,000 civilian casualties in the past 10 years
alone.
A
military incursion would, therefore, need an army of
mine clearance specialists as well as soldiers, men
who would have to inch their way over the roughest
terrain in the world - while under attack - to make
the roads and countryside safe for the Americans and
their allies. Of Afghanistan's 29 provinces, 27 are
littered with mines.
During
their savage 10-year occupation, the Russians planted
thousands of mines in "security zones"
around Afghanistan's airports, power stations and
government installations. Western non-governmental
organizations working in the country two years ago
estimated it would cost £80 per mine to clear
Afghanistan's 10-million mines and 45 days to clear
merely a square mile of land. There are now two
million disabled men, women and children in
Afghanistan. No infantry can march across this
territory.
And then
there is that main supply route. Pakistan has already
made clear that it will not involve its own military
in a campaign, although there are suspicions that
enough money might persuade General Musharraf - now
respectfully referred to as President by the
Americans, even though he took the presidency
illegally - to change his mind. However, the
"Jihadi" culture has already impregnated
the Pakistan army and there is a real possibility of
unrest turning to civil war if the Americans arrived
to invade Muslim Afghanistan.
The very
border areas through which a Western army would have
to pass are held by men loyal to the Taliban. On the
Pakistani side of the frontier, there are now 2,000
Taliban madrassas (schools) where religious teaching
is given not only to potential mujahedin but to
Chechen and Tadjik fighters as well.
The
policemen who guard these madrassas constitute a mere
facade of governmental control.
Even if
the Americans penetrated Afghanistan, their shells
would only plough over the ruins. The Russians tried
to destroy the Taliban's predecessors with 10 years
of bombing, destroying whole villages, with their
people, farm animals, fields, trees and mud huts. And
still they could not get rid of the mujahedin, still
they could not - to use Mr. Bush's inappropriately
folksy phrase - "smoke them out of their
holes."
With
Pakistan as its only, broken ally among Afghanistan's
neighbours, with no friends inside the country and 10
million hidden land mines lying across its mountains
and fields and cities, Mr. Bush's "crusade"
looks more than dangerous. We are now being told that
the United States is no longer afraid to take
casualties. America, the President says, will have to
accept losses. He'd better be right.
Robert Fisk
is a prolific journalist on current and historical
Middle Eastern affairs. Go to http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Fisk/ for
a listing of his articles. He writes for The Nation,
The London Independent, the Guardian and numerous
others. He won the Amnesty International Overall
Media Award in 1998.
