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COVER STORY: WAR ON TERRORISM
It's A Long Haul To Hell
Three weeks into the war and the Taliban has not
crumbled. There are discordant notes in the US war room. With diplomacy
making slow progress, this war could go on
and on.
By S. Prasannarajan
Every
war is justified with a lofty adjective. In the bleak mountains of Afghanistan,
where the footprints of the invader have survived snows and history, it
is raging in the name of "enduring freedom". If the towering
flames of one Tuesday morning in New York were terror's biggest breakfast
show, the controlled firestorm in the Taliban country is the rage of justice.
And battling to reduce the distance between terror and justice are not
only the men and machines of America. Nervous partners and desperate dictators
are at full play to make justice an idea that suits their convenience.
Yet, the distance is growing. Enduring freedom rhymes with enduring war.
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THE AMERICAN WILL: US soldiers loading bombs on
fighter jets aboard the USS Enterprise
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Washington DC, the headquarters of the global
war against terrorism, has itself become the site of a clash between the
ideal and the possible. The war zone, defended by the one-eyed mullah
and his barefoot warriors, is getting more treacherous with snows waiting
for fire. The smoke has not yet engulfed the prime target-Osama bin Laden,
the caveman of Islam. But the victim of collateral damage, the blood-soaked,
bandaged infant, every war's tearjerker, has reached the front pages.
The first war of the 21st century gives no easy answers on deadlines-or
even the dead.
Is America losing direction?
September 11 was America's date with discovery.
As the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, leaving 5,000
ordinary, decent people dead, the sense of horror and sorrow was accompanied
by an unprecedented national churning. New certitudes evolved and brand
new fears were born. The moment also saw the birth of a knowing national
leader with a global vision-George W. Bush, hitherto an accidental president
courtesy an electoral quirk, a conservative in the Dan Quayle mould. Then,
out of the sky came the most defining moment since World War II. It catapulted
a mundane Republican from Texas into the leader of the free world.
He spoke of freedom. Freedom from the worst
religious idea. Forget those initial cowboy outbursts, Bush's declaration
of war on terrorism was a display of statesmanship, that too from a politician
whose campaign rhetoric had ruled out engagements in godforsaken foreign
countries with unpronounceable names. There he was, ready to take on the
invisible evil empire of Islamic terror.
The only question then was about the size of
the empire. Did it stretch from the caves of Kabul to the bunkers of Baghdad?
Should it literally include all those who covertly sponsored and financed
terror? Should the offensive be a show of western firepower, an enactment
of the promised clash of civilisations?
The broad conservative consensus was: smoke
them out, all of them, cave dwellers as well as bunker residents, and
do it the American way, for America can do it. This gung-ho extremism's
chief advocate was Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Then there
were moderates, the wise men of Foggy Bottom, led by Secretary of State
Colin Powell, the Gulf War veteran who wanted a narrowly focused war-Osama
now, Taliban if need be and Saddam Hussein can wait-endorsed by a global
coalition. At first, Bush seemed to echo the extremists. But by the time
the first cruise missiles rained on Kabul, the Powell Doctrine had prevailed
in Washington.
Three weeks into the war, the doctrinaire general
is seen to be prolonging the war in Afghanistan. Though Washington often
resembles a war room with no discordant notes, the subterranean reality
is different. Powell is busy mixing nation building with nation bombing.
His peace talk is invariably different from the Pentagon's (read Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's) no-nonsense wartalk. This is Powell on the
role of Northern Alliance: "We're very interested in seeing them
take ... Mazar-e-Sharif. And I'm quite confident that they want to at
least invest Kabul. Whether they go into Kabul or not, or whether that's
the best thing to do or not, remains to be seen. It's a issue that is
under continuing discussion."
Not so many whether-or-nots and remains-to-be-seens
for Rumsfeld: "We have been ready and we certainly are ready to have
the alliance forces move, both north and south."
The Powell Doctrine is also a holy doctrine.
The holy month of Ramzan that begins mid-November could, ideally, be a
pause in Powell's war: "It is a very important religious period,
and we would take that into account. We'll have to see where the mission
is at that point and what needs to be done, and I would yield to my colleagues
in the Pentagon as to what we will do as we approach the season of Ramzan."
For Rumsfeld, the war against terror is holier
and history is firmly with him. The Prophet didn't stop his war for Mecca
during Ramzan in 624 a.d.; Anwar Sadat started his war on Israel during
Ramzan, that too on the Jewish sacred day of Yom Kippur; Ayatollah Khomeini
didn't give a damn to Ramzan throughout the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
But the unseen war in Washington is less holy
and more political. Powell wants to manage the politics of the war, and
that is the problem. His goody-goody-some would say pragmatic-ideas on
the architecture of post-war Afghanistan come in the way of the war itself.
It is coming in the way of America's self-expression. Instead of objectives
shaping the coalition, the coalition is determining the goals. Between
Powell on the one hand and Rumsfeld and public opinion on the other, the
US strategy against terror often seems less than coherent. The uneasy
coexistence can't last.
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