Despite my belief that military intervention should always be the last resort in any conflict, I found it heartening to read Friday's news reports that Green Berets and Navy Seals had been operating in Afghanistan sporadically for nearly two weeks.
This came on the heels of a Sept. 24 report circulated through the Times of London and the BBC that Britain's elite Special Air Service was fighting alongside the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
I found these reports heartening because I have resolved myself to the fact that some level of military intervention is necessary, and these actions leave glimmers of hope that we have acknowledged that 'surgical strikes,' 'tactical bombing' and all other euphemisms for blowing people and things up from afar are ineffectual.
President Bush has said as much from the beginning, expressing distaste for the type of assaults President Clinton sponsored against Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombings. Those attacks, which resulted in the destruction of a civilian pharmaceutical company and a mosque, among other things, were blatant war crimes; that didn't bother Clinton and his brood.
Less heartening is that Clinton also tried to use the tactic we are employing now.
Sunday, The New York Times reported that we have been trying to kill Osama bin Laden covertly for years, both through the CIA and anti-Taliban forces such as the Northern Alliance.
In addition, Sept. 25, the Times of India (that nation's most widely circulated English-language newspaper) reported that in 1999 the United States attempted to organize a joint mission with the Pakistani secret service to apprehend bin Laden. In exchange for $25 million in funding, Pakistan agreed to set up a unit for the mission and to give American troops access to a military base for training. Pakistani newspapers, however, reported the appearance of Americans doing training exercises and the mission was put under wraps, later to be completely abandoned after General Pervez Musharraf led a coup to remove then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Now we call Musharraf 'president' because that is what the dictator decided to call himself last June, and, quite frankly, we want him on our side.
But this alliance illuminates blatant contradictions. Do we assault terrorism in Afghanistan while ignoring Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir? The greater evil is certainly al Queda, but what do we do if we break that network up? Do we wink at Musharraf's heavy-handed leadership in Pakistan and the goings-on in Kashmir?
However, the more immediate question is: Will Musharraf continue to support us openly? This is unlikely unless we publicly support his goals in Kashmir. For the reason, look no further than Malakand, a division of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, whose politics are influenced in large part by the Movement for the Enforcement of the Law of Muhammad, which is ideologically similar to the Taliban.
While Musharraf has succeeded in appeasing the group and other strands of fanaticism under the guise of Islam in his country thus far, Pakistan's allegiance to us could prompt a civil war not even the presidential dictator's iron fist could suppress. Instability in Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons and 148 million people, would shatter our coalition against terrorism in a heartbeat.
So look for the price of our buying off Pakistan to be the same as Musharraf's price to buy off the fanatics in his country'acquiescence on our part with respect to Kashmir.
And what do we do if we are successful in dismissing the Taliban?
Despite earlier proclamations that this is about getting bin Laden and eradicating al Queda, not deposing the Taliban, Bush has approved aid to and is attempting to forge a coalition between anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan-including the Northern Alliance, 86-year-old former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah, who last ruled in 1973, and a collection of rebel factions located in southern Afghanistan.
Taking the lead thus far has been our new patron saint, the Northern Alliance, suddenly a media and political darling. The alliance, however, is not an angelic entity fighting the devil, but rather a loose coalition of warlords, mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks who have little connection to the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan. This alliance may indeed succeed in finding the devil for our bemusement, but we are sorely mistaken if we believe that supporting the Northern Alliance in its fight against bin Laden and the Taliban will eradicate the seeds of terrorism. Thus, the sudden infatuation with a king who ruled more than a quarter-century ago and with anyone else who would support the removal of the Taliban.
Bush has correctly warned against the egomania of those believing they can magically perform 'state-building' miracles in third-world countries.
The same, unfortunately, goes for pandering to the shifting alliances of a war-torn land.
