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Shadow Government
Beyond the war
by John A. Jackson
In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance captured Kabul after the Taliban's front-line forces disintegrated. Alliance fighters shot Taliban prisoners in front of Western reporters.
Secretary of State Colin Powell asked Muslim but non-Arab allies of the U.S., such as Turkey and Indonesia, to provide troops for the occupation of Kabul, thereby potentially sparing the capital another massacre and giving the U.S. some say in the composition of an eventual national government.
The United States clearly wants representation much broader than that of the Northern Alliance alone.
Whether the men with guns in their hands and legions of scores to settle will allow such moderation is unclear. Letting one's enemies live is very un-Afghan.
When the Northern Alliance last ruled in Kabul from 1992 to 1996, for example, some 50,000 opponents were murdered.
But an important victory of some sort is certainly in the making, whatever resistance the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's forces may keep up in their southern strongholds.
As Winston Churchill said at a similar point in World War II, this is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.
Frankly, the Taliban forces' collapse surprised me. In wars, even professional soldiers, which the Taliban certainly are not, will sometimes just decide en masse to head for home.
That happened in South Vietnam in 1975, for example, and I didn't expect it then, either.
In the short term at least, the Pentagon was right and I wrong about the need for U.S. ground troops. In the long term, that verdict may yet be reversed.
One recent headline particularly struck me, however: The war so far has cost the United States directly more than $25 billion, not counting the damage in New York.
Let's put that in perspective. The U.S. is spending all of Afghanistan's annual income every week the war goes on. But the war's cost will be much less than one percent of the U.S. income in 2001.
Do Americans and Afghans even live on the same planet?
Is it any wonder we see things differently?
When the Soviet Union fell, another sudden collapse, some conservative American intellectuals saw the survival of the U.S. as the world’s only superpower as the end to either history or ideology.
That opinion seemed arrogant then and absurd now.
The world holds many, many poor people. They may not appear on the wealthy man's radar, but they are fully human, with the whole human range of aspirations and desires -- and the fully human capacity to hate and make mischief.
We Americans who are not poor mostly ignore those people, as we have learned to ignore the no-hope disenfranchised who walk among us.
We have power and wealth and the security they bring. How can these poor people hurt us? What stake can we possibly have in them?
I don't really expect a monstrous crime like September 11 to teach us Americans charity, Christian or otherwise, toward non-Americans.
But can't we see, as a new century begins and as we weather the first great challenge to our hegemony, that we do have a stake in all our fellow humans and that nothing we have will be secure until their lot has been largely improved?
If Bin Laden had nuclear weapons, New York would not exist. So he does not have them.
But his assassins had box cutters and pocket knives, which they could afford and which proved to be enough.
Do we respond with terror to the terrorists? I sure hope not. Some wiser, braver, more compassionate reaction must be found in our souls, if not in our arsenals.
In World War II, remember, we fought for "freedom from want" for all people.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER