BY EVA CHENG
As Washington's war against Afghanistan neared the end of its first month, US President George Bush raised the stakes by introducing the highly lethal 6800-kilogram "Daisy Cutter" bomb.
"Like a nuclear weapon without the fallout" is how the British Independent newspaper described this powerful killing device on November 7. They "detonate about [one metre] above the ground, covering a [1.6km]-wide area with a mushroom cloud of aluminium powder which burns at about 5500 [degrees celcius]", the paper said.
The US ABC News described it as "the world's largest conventional weapon" that "ignites a ball of flame that incinerates everything" within a 550-metre radius.
According to the Independent, the Pentagon is also set to introduce the Global Hawk, the "most advanced" long-range pilotless reconnaissance aircraft in existence, which at US$44 million a plane can cruise at 20,000 metres, far beyond the reach of anti-aircraft weapons.
The Hawk will replace the slower Predator which are worth one-tenth as much — another sign of Washington's willingness to dump big dollars in the quest to kill more effectively.
Parallel to the introduction of the "Daisy Cutter", in a move to extend carpet bombing, B52 bombers have been used for the first time near the capital, Kabul. The giant bombers are capable of much more destructive bombing runs than those used up until now, which could only drop one or two bombs.
This new wave of greatly intensified bombing has pushed the total air-strike sorties against Afghanistan to more than 1600 by early November, sorties which collectively dropped at least 6000 bombs.
US spokespeople have said they don't know how many civilians this mountain of bombs has killed — but have insisted that casualty numbers released by the Taliban are exaggerated. The Taliban's figure was 1500 as of November 2, a figure which largely matches the tally compiled by anti-war groups based outside Afghanistan.
In further attacks on civilians, on October 31, 13 more civilians in or near a medical dispensary in Kandahar, including children, were killed when it was hit by US bombs.
Two days later, on November 2, the Pentagon was again confronted with evidence of civilian casualties, when CNN quizzed one of its spokespeople about the October 22 bombing of the village of Chowkar-Karez, 60 kilometres north of Kandahar, in which Human Rights Watch estimates at least 25 civilians were killed.
The spokesperson dismissed the village as a "Taliban encampment" and therefore "a legitimate target", arrogantly stating, "The people there are dead because we wanted them dead".
Pentagon officials have even taken issue with media references to "civilians", claiming that members of the Taliban and al Qaeda often do not wear uniforms.
Hawks
What was once an apologetic tone about civilian casualties has changed, a turn coinciding with what appears to be a victory of foreign-policy "hawks" within the Bush administration.
The conflict between the hawks, who have been ferociously pressing for an escalation and extension of the war, and their opponents — led by Secretary of State Colin Powell — surfaced even before the bombing started.
Two nights before the first strike, prominent hawk Richard Perle, chairperson of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, accused Powell of working against Bush's policies on CNN. He has hammered that line vigorously on several occasions since then, synchronising with deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a determined campaigner for taking the war to Iraq and possibly Syria and Lebanon as well.
Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld has also sided with the hawks, as have conservative media outlets such as the New Republic, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and a host of conservative politicians.
The hawks have accused Powell and his State Department of wrongly prioritising the recruitment of war allies and the lining up of a post-Taliban coalition government at the expense of a quick knockout blow against the Taliban.
Trumpeting the hawks' victory in the Weekly Standard's November 12 edition, Robert Kagan and William Kristol revealed, "Only in the last few days has the Pentagon begun to wrest control of the war in Afghanistan from the hands of Powell and his top policy advisor, Richard Haass".
"Better late than never", they continued. "But the price of the State Department control of strategy for the first weeks of the war has been high.
"The State Department's strategy ... was to slow down the pace of the war and delay victory over the Taliban ... [They] wanted to prevent a rapid advance of the Northern Alliance on Kabul until Haass could put together a broader coalition of Afghan political forces that could in turn agree on the shape of a post-Taliban government", the two said.
"Meanwhile", Kagan and Kristol continued, "the Pakistan government, a longtime supporter of the Taliban, was insisting that some members of the Taliban must be included in the 'post-Taliban' government. And so eager were Powell and his team to keep the Pakistanis happy that the secretary of state even seemed willing to go along with the idea of preserving 'moderate' Taliban influence in Afghanistan.
"The result of all this? The political efforts to build an anti-Taliban coalition have gone nowhere ... it is certainly impossible to achieve a consensus on what a post-Taliban government is going to look like before we actually began defeating the Taliban."
Dominated by ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, the Northern Alliance has difficulty embracing the Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group from which comes the bulk of Taliban membership. A section of Pakistan's population are also Pashtun, many of whom will have problems seeing an Afghanistan ruled by non-Pashtun.
"Thanks to the go-slow strategy", argue Kagan and Kristol, "the Taliban until last week had suffered no serious military setbacks... [but was] scoring victories against the Northern Alliance ... Happy talk from military officials about the Taliban being 'eviscerated' turned to grudging admiration for the Taliban's tenacity.
"The good news is that the administration appears now to be pivoting away from the State Department's flawed approach toward Rumsfeld's more aggressive military strategy ... senior administration officials admit, on background, that they made a mistake and are now 'giving wider latitude to the Defense Department to accelerate the US battle plans'."
Painting a similar picture, columnist EJ Dionne in the November 6 Washington Post revealed that, while the attacks on this "go slow" approach "have been all over the conservative press", the sharpest criticism came from the hawks, many of whom were usually "the president's allies", adding "they have had little good to say about" Colin Powell.
"The adminstration has now abandoned the semi-tough approach for an escalation of bombing", Dionne continued.
Christian Caryl and John Barry, in the November 12 edition of Newsweek, also hailed the new strategy but reiterated a concern about the Northern Alliance.
Northern Alliance 'hodgepodge'
Their "commanders are a hodgepodge of warlords with a long history of infighting, corruption and incompetence", they said, stressing "nobody really wanted to back [them] because Pakistan deeply opposes" them and they are seen as "unreliable and unable to provide a stable alternative to Taliban".
But this doesn't seem to be Bush's concern now — the much-escalated bombing around Kabul and the strategic northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif is clearly designed to help the Northern Alliance take control, a development the Powell strategy was said to be trying to delay.
According to Caryl and Barry, the State Department and Pentagon have also "begun fighting over whether to bring more NATO allies into the war (the Pentagon doesn't want them)" — an argument linked to another hot US domestic debate about whether a significant number of US ground troops should be deployed.
The pressure on Washington to avoid ground troops had been high since the Vietnam War, when US casualties seriously eroded domestic support for the war. This "Vietnam syndrome" has cast a shadow which Bush is still operating in.
Only a handful of the highly specialised elite troops have been sent to Afghanistan so far, with — contrary to the official story — reportedly near-disastrous achievements.
While mass anger about the September 11 attacks has been exploited by Bush, he hasn't got a blank cheque and he knows that. By claiming more than 60 countries were potential enemies, Bush was trying to seek legitimacy for a much wider war, but he hasn't got public approval for that yet either.
Although a November 2-4 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll registered a high 86% support for the current US military action in Afghanistan, this dropped to 66% when the question was whether to send large numbers of ground troops.
A Washington Post-ABC poll, released on November 8, also shows waning, though still strong, support for Bush. About half — 49% — strongly approved of the job Bush is doing, down 17 points from early October.
While that poll shows 70% support for sending significant numbers of US troops to Afghanistan, that dropped to 52% if it means a long war with many US troops dead and wounded.
The actual step of putting significant troops onto the battle field is still considered to be politically dangerous. The protests in the US against Bush's war, even before bombing started and certainly since, will help to maintain that caution, as will the extensive mobilisations across the world.
From Green Left Weekly, November 14, 2001.
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