As the United States intensifies its violent hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, the war is now seen to have established the prototype for campaigns elsewhere.
HIS last redoubt was smashed the day before the Muslim festival of Id-ul-Fitr, but Osama bin Laden, quarry of the most expensive and promiscuously violent manhunt in history, remained elusive. He had appeared on television screens worldwide just a week earlier, gloating over the September 11 terrorist strikes in the United States and celebrating the loss of life that had supposedly been more dramatic than anything he expected. The evidence had been assembled to put him before the new military tribunals that the U.S. has set up for the trial of foreigners involved in terrorist violence. There was only the small matter of capturing him before sentencing him to summary execution.
Since narrowing the focus of the war to the Tora Bora mountains in northeastern Afghanistan, the U.S. had kept up its intense aerial bombing, often bringing into action the lethal 'Daisycutter', the most powerful non-nuclear explosive in the world. By mid-December, the fighters holed out in the mountains, identified by U.S. intelligence as bin Laden's inner circle of warriors in the cause of the Islamic jehad, were signalling their readiness to surrender. Negotiations were conducted with military commanders of the Eastern Shura - one of a series of unstable military coalitions that has emerged in Afghanistan since the U.S. offensive began - but the deal was called off under American pressure.
Mohammad Zaman, an Eastern Shura Commander, insisted that a deal was being worked out when U.S. warplanes, without warning or notice, resumed bombing and strafing the hills. Afghan fighters were angered both by the unilateral abrogation of a ceasefire and by the U.S.' brusque rejection of the terms that were being negotiated for the Al Qaeda surrender. After the shameful massacres of captured Taliban soldiers at Qala-i-Jhangi and Takhte Pul, this was another wilful change in the conventions of war that the U.S. could not disclaim responsibility for. The special character of this war was brutally underlined in this disavowal of the principle that fighters seeking to surrender should normally be given a fair opportunity to do so. This was a war not of territory but of abstract entities, such as civilisation and barbarism. It required not the subjugation of an enemy but his elimination.
A large-scale carnage of civilians had been perpetrated just over two weeks before, when the U.S. began its massive assault on the Tora Bora hills. Disregarding the appeals of Eastern Shura forces on the ground, U.S. warplanes carried out a massive bombing of villages in the region, on the flimsy premise that they were playing host to large numbers of Al Qaeda fighters. A spokesman for the U.S. Defence Department at the Pentagon, when asked about these incidents, said simply that they had not happened. The description given by friendly forces on the ground just did not tally with the extensive documentation that had been gathered through video cameras on board the attack aircraft. Journalists travelling to the site of the bombing of course had a different version of events, with grisly accounts of entire villages being wiped out.
To nobody's surprise, no apologies have been forthcoming - not even the most half-hearted exercise in accountability. U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to put the best gloss on the later situation, particularly the prolonging of the conflict beyond the Al Qaeda fighters' expressed willingness to surrender. The U.S., he affirmed, would accept a ceasefire and surrender provided they were unconditional. "This is not a drill where we are making deals," he said at one of his numerous press conferences. That the "deal" was only designed to ensure the physical security of the prisoners, which the U.S. had infamously failed to guarantee when the Taliban surrendered at Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar, was of course a matter of detail that was lost on this hawkish relic of the Cold War.
Another five days of bitter fighting followed with casualties on both sides. On December 16, Hazarat Ali, another Eastern Shura commander, announced the capture of the last cave in which bin Laden's Al Qaeda fighters had been holed out. The fugitive Saudi millionaire, the ideological mainspring of an Islamic holy war against the U.S., was not found. U.S. intelligence agencies estimated that he could have fled into the higher reaches of the mountains with the remnants of the Al Qaeda. But captured fighters offered few clues. And as the soldiers of the Eastern Shura, with American and British special forces in attendance, set off in hot pursuit, few were taking any bets on the likelihood of bin Laden's capture. That left the video image that had been broadcast around the world shortly before as bin Laden's last testament in the cause of his holy war.
The video release was an event that world opinion had been primed for over a fortnight of tantalising hints from officials in the U.S. and the U.K. The results were not disappointing. No script written by the U.S. intelligence agencies could have produced a clearer self-incrimination by the prime suspect behind the September 11 terrorist strikes. Bin Laden is shown in a video probably filmed at Kandahar on November 9, receiving a Saudi Muslim cleric with profuse expressions of goodwill, before settling down to a discussion on the events of September 11 and their wider implications. At one stage he is shown holding up one palm and smashing the fingertips of his other hand into it in a figurative description of the aircraft hit on the World Trade Centre towers in New York.
"We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors," says bin Laden. Of all the estimates that were made in the ring that plotted the terrorist strike, bin Laden's was the most optimistic, on account of his knowledge of the fundamentals of civil construction: "Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for."
The actual death roll of course exceeded these macabre forecasts by several orders of magnitude. Crucially, bin Laden indicates that many of the executors of the massive terrorist strike, though aware that they were engaged in a mission that involved certain death, knew little of the operational details. "There is information on those tapes that again shows the world just how evil Osama bin Laden is and how he claims piety, while leading people to deaths that they very well were not aware of," said the official spokesman for the U.S. President shortly after the release of the videotape.
The world premiere of the bin Laden video was accompanied by a collective shout of self-righteousness from the U.S. media, the common refrain being that the U.S. was owed an apology by all those who had cast doubt on its insistence that the Saudi millionaire was culpable. Not everybody saw it that way. The leader comment in the U.K. Guardian, for example observed: "This video, moreover, is so audacious and astonishing that it is impossible not to think that something about it is a put-up job. It provokes all kinds of sceptical questions. When, where and why was the video made? How was it obtained by the Americans? Is it the sole piece of incriminating evidence collected against bin Laden, or is it just the juiciest bit? If the latter, where is the rest? How long has the video been in American hands and why has it been released at this time? It should not be wholly taken at face value."
Similarly, The Age from Melbourne, Australia had a more explicitly voiced doubt: "If computer-generated graphics can fake Forrest Gump shaking President John F. Kennedy's hand and the late John Wayne hawking beer, how can viewers be sure that a videotape of Osama bin Laden bragging about the September 11 attacks is real?"
These comments are clearly an index of the dubious image that has been engendered by U.S. efforts at media management since the war began. But they are well founded and based upon several seeming anomalies in the narrative that unfolds on the bin Laden video. The visiting cleric - who is only referred to as the Shaykh - speaks for instance of being severely constrained in his movements, ostensibly for political reasons. But then he speaks with seeming casualness of arriving in Kabul and being transported to his meeting with bin Laden on a night of a full moon. There is also an explicit reference to the holy month of Ramzan. The only full moon during the Ramzan month occurred on November 30, when the tape was supposedly already in the possession of U.S. intelligence. The immediately preceding full moon night, early in November, is outside the time-frame that is mentioned in the recording.
Since the bin Laden tape today constitutes the sole juridical justification for the large-scale havoc and devastation - not to mention the massive civilian casualties - that have been visited on Afghanistan, the U.S. will have to come forth with much more information before it is able to establish a semblance of legitimacy for its military operations. But this is clearly the last thing on the minds of the war-mongers in the Pentagon and the White House, who are making no secret of their belief that the war on terrorism can now shift its sights towards other targets. Principal among the candidates for the next phase of operations are Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.
The war in Afghanistan is now seen to have established the prototype for similar campaigns elsewhere. It will begin with massive aerial bombardment, and be followed in quick order with the insertion of a small team of Western special forces. These forces would then constitute the nucleus of a broader alliance with local militias, to effect a change of regime in 'States of concern' and eliminate forces hostile to the interests of the U.S.
Needless to say, the U.S. has little international backing for its proposed adventures in distant lands. Even the U.K., loyal thus far, has been muttering aloud about the risks involved in an invasion of Iraq when the situation in Palestine threatens to explode into a full-scale regional conflict. But the U.S. has clearly shed its pretence, thin at the best of times, that it would actually seek to restrain Israeli military actions against Palestinian civilians. Victory in Afghanistan has propelled the right-wing, 'America first' unilateralists to the top of the heap. Disdainful of coalition building and completely blind to the growing catalogue of Israeli atrocities, this clique sees little amiss in trampling upon Arab sensibilities in the pursuit of geostrategic interests. The crisis of legitimacy of U.S. foreign policy is clearly reaching a moment of reckoning. And the countries with the most reasons for worry might well be Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the most loyal allies of the U.S. in the Arab world.
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