It's been a good week for the Peace Movement

Written 15.11.2001 after the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance
Summary: Everyone should welcome the collapse of the Taliban in Northern Afghanistan. The Pentagon had deliberately overestimated their strength. The allies now have a another chance to do what they should have done before: feed the starving. The peace movement needs to keep active to prevent the war spreading to Iraq

The dramatic collapse of the Taliban in most Afghan cities has put observers into a state of shock, and that includes the Pentagon, the UN, the pundits and the anti-war movement.
The peace movement is a broad coalition, including many people who would like to support America and want it promote justice as it claims to do. The vast majority of the movement welcomes the fall of the Taliban and is hoping that with the eyes of the world on them the warlords will behave better than last time.
Those reacting fastest are the troops on the ground, the Taliban fleeing, the Northern Alliance, in defiance of Bush, taking Kabul, the various warlords moving to recreate the Afghanistan the Taliban conquered, the Afghanistan that welcomed the Taliban because it was so much of a disaster.
These warlords are practical men. They know it is a good bet they will not be facing a military challenge from America. Bombing people who have been allies quite so recently is out of the question and the Americans have helpfully ruled out a major intervention by Western troops. The longer it goes without any other military presence, the more firmly the warlords (who are the source of most of the world's heroin) will entrench their power. Even at this hour the precipitous evacuation by the Taliban can be seen as the Afghans colluding against the foreigner, in much the same way that Saddam Hussein turned his airforce over the Iran in 1991.
Is it too cynical to sugggest that the hawks' plan in Afghanistan was to exhaust both sides so that a bunch of PR savvy Afghan expats from Washington could move in, call themselves a broad based government and approve the oil pipeline?
Let's look at the Pentagon strategy. It is always the same, from WW2 through Iraq to Kossovo and now Afghanistan. Build up the enemy in the public mind, bomb, and keep bombing until the enemy is so exhausted his assets are so destroyed that you can occupy or do anything else you want without resistance. In Iraq the infrastructure of a modern country was destroyed (the public were told little at the time) and still they went on bombing. The reoccupation of Kuwait was prompted by the grotesque destruction of a civilian bomb shelter. There was outrage when the Pentagon denied it in the face of press reports to the contrary. The politicians realised they were going to start losing the propaganda war if they didn't act on the ground. Iraq proved to be a walkover.
In Kossovo the campaign was extended from the Yugoslav army in Kossovo to increasingly non-military targets in Serbia, famously the TV station which western leaders had expressly said they would not attack only a few weeks earlier. Milosevic capitulated not so because he was defeated by the alleged pinpoint bombing from 15,000 feet in Kossovo - most of his tanks came back unharmed - but because the allies were slowly and deliberately destroying the Serbian infrastructure.
In Afghanistan it's been the same. Pea brained warmongers like Anne McElvoy in The Independent are crowing with abuse of the peace movement. The peace movement said the Taliban would never give in - wrong Ann it was the Pentagon who overestimated them, and deliberately. As in the case of Saddam Hussein the peace movement was mostly well aware of the ugliness of the Taliban while they were still allies of the West. The hawks like to forget that Saddam's worst acts, the attack on Iran, the chemical attacks on Kurds were committed while he was an ally of the West.
The peace movement should be feeling good right now. We could not stop the bombing, but along with the muslim world and the Aid Agencies, we pressured the Pentagon until it at least stopped dragging its feet and attaacked the Taliban front line and not the Afghan cities. Now the hawks can no longer evade the job they should have made their priority all along - feeding the millions of starving in Afghanistan.
This week of military success could even prove to be a disastrous turning point for the Bush gang. It became official that Gore really won the White House, the goal of a lucrative oil pipeline through Afghanistan is as remote as ever, and future revenge attacks on America are as likely as they were when the bombing began.
There's still the nightmare scenario that Bin Laden will be taken alive, a muslim hero imprisoned in the US with a lot of damaging allegations to make. With the anthrax scare dwindling, and the war apparently successful, it may not be long before the American people, woken at last to the presence of the outside world, start asking some serious questions about what their country has been getting up to.
Already, though, the next war is on the horizon, heralded by a foolish article in The Observer by crime reporter David Rose presenting `evidence` (which turns out to be mostly intelligence community gossip) that Iraq was to blame. Rose, an unlikely member of the anti war coalition, argues that Bin Laden has not in fact admitted the atrocity and suggests, three weeks too late, that we may have been bombing the wrong country.
Like good military strategists, the anti-war coalition now needs to press home its advantage. See you on November 18!