Relief after fall of Mazar

By Gwynne Dyer YOU COULD practically hear the sigh of relief in Washington when the Taleban-held city of Mazar-i-Sharif fell to America's Afghan allies last Friday. It means that the US will not have to send in its own ground troops at least until after the New Year, and maybe not at all. Until now, nobody really had confidence that the Northern Alliance’s troops, soundly whipped by the Taleban army five years ago and outnumbered by more than two-to-one, would be able to win a major battle even with the help of American bombs. It is still doubtful that the Northern Alliance can advance south into the Pashtun-speaking Taleban heartland — and even undesirable that it should — but the fall of Mazar nevertheless takes a huge amount of pressure off the Bush administration. The only way for Washington to avoid a long and potentially disastrous campaign in Afghanistan, short of just walking away from the war, is to win a quick military victory over the Taleban on the ground. This could involve lots of casualties on the anti-Taleban side — and wouldn’t it be much nicer if those casualties were Afghans, not Americans? Thus the persistent attempts by the US government and the Pentagon to persuade themselves that the Northern Alliance, suitably built up by American aid, could win the war on the ground without a big US troop commitment. The problem was that the Alliance troops had won no major victories for over three years. Many doubted that they ever could again. But the fall of Mazar at least lets Washington postpone any serious examination of the deeply unpopular option of sending American troops in until well past the arrival of 2002. It also opens up some interesting possibilities for political and diplomatic moves that might allow the United States to avoid that option altogether. Since bombing Taleban front-line positions facing the Northern Alliance yields much higher returns than attacking urban areas in an attempt to destroy what the Pentagon hilariously calls the Taleban's “command and control systems”, the US can now ease off the bombing during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan without any loss of face. It could, for example, go on bombing Taleban front-line positions in lightly populated countryside, while avoiding the roads in Taleban-held areas along which trucks bearing food aid must pass if millions of Afghans are not to starve this winter. That would allow the Northern Alliance forces to finish clearing the Taleban out of the northern half of Afghanistan, while reducing the risks of an outright famine in the south. Meanwhile, Washington could also work to create a decent and competent local government in Mazar-i-Sharif, the first major city to fall back under Northern Alliance control. If that local government started feeding local people, looking after their health, and educating their children, the implicit promise that the same benefits would arrive in other areas that abandon the Taleban would have an immense impact. Indeed, the victory at Mazar has so drastically altered the outlook in Afghanistan that by Saturday US Secretary of State Colin Powell was trying to restrain the Northern Alliance from an early attack on Kabul itself. “To be frank, there would probably be a high level of tension in the city if the Northern Alliance were to move in in force...,” said Powell, “so it might be a better course of action to let it become an ‘open city’ and then bring in others to set up a new Afghan government..." For the first time since the bombing began, there seems a chance that the United States might be able to exit the war in Afghanistan without a political disaster and without committing large numbers of its own troops to combat. How ironic that at the very same time the arguments of the Washington faction that wants to attack Iraq too, led by deputy defence secretary Frank (‘Two Wars For the Price of One’) Wolfowitz, seem to be making major inroads in official circles at last. Last Thursday, speaking in Kuwait, Powell dropped his former insistence that there were “no plans” for an attack on Iraq. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist