Remora
Nick Cohen makes some very nice points in this Guardian article (which I went to by way of this weblog -- abrightcolddayinapril-- some nice bits on it, too)


First graf of Cohen's article:

"The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so isn't to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, as I do, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of 11 September changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood 'side by side with us' in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was 'born out of the defeat of slavery', rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. "

That's a bracing return to reality. I think the bombing must stop pretty soon, too, Cohen is right that there is a crisis looming here. It sounds all too much like Somalia redux. Warlords, famine, troops, terrorism. There is a book by David Halberstam out right now, re Clinton and the generals, War in a Time of Peace, which traces, in that inimitably smarmy Halberstam style, the rise of TAC - tactical air command -- over SAC in the nineties. Halberstam gets the insiders to tell about who conceived the convergence of smart tech and rapid response air power and how it changed the whole mindset in the Pentagon. (for a review of this book, see this Slate exchange.) But TAC has limitations, and we are going to see them, I think, in Afghanistan. The more the military tries to make this a replay of Kosovo, the less bang for the buck, or buck for the bang, we are going to get. Unless you can get the men in the training camps that we are really trying to stop to line up -- say, post some convincing announcement re Calisthenics and anthrax training at 0900 h -- air power is going to have to be subordinate, eventually, to more traditional military strikes. This is the nightmare that Bush, understandably, wants to avoid.

But I am putting Cohen's message in a narrow context. In the larger context of this war, in the way it is being turned, at least for now, in the Arab world into a war where American blood is precious, and our blood is water -- as some Egyptian housewife interviewed by the Times put it, I thought rather snappily -- the bombing has to cease pretty soon, and the attention to famine has to be put first.