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[Doug Millison]

Genocide or Peace 
By George Monbiot

Peace has been declared before the war has begun.
Those who advocated
the obliteration of Kabul and Baghdad have retreated
in the face of
insuperable complexity. Many of those who argued
against aggression have
relaxed as the threat of carpet bombing or nuclear
strikes has lifted.
Most people now appear to agree that attacking a few
military targets
and deploying special forces will do no great harm. 

Our government, like many others, has promised
humanitarian aid. The
government of Pakistan has begun to withdraw support
from the Taliban
and to push forward other leaders in the hope of
engineering a noiseless
coup. Instead of the terrifying carnage promised by a
wounded nation,
the response to the attack on New York is beginning to
look magnanimous.
The needs of both the western nations seeking to
control terrorism and
the Afghan people seeking to escape starvation can,
almost everyone
believes, be met calmly and sequentially. 

But the new consensus has missed something. It's a
consideration which
is well-understood in peacetime, but often, and
disastrously, ignored in
war. It's the factor which defeated Napoleon and
possibly Hitler. It's
the item which brings all humanitarian operations to a
halt. It is, of
course, the winter. And the Afghan winter, like the
Russian one, is
absolute. Aid workers with long experience of
Afghanistan report that
after the first week of November, there is nothing you
can do. This is
the detail that changes everything, the 's' which
makes the difference
between laughter and slaughter.

One person requires 18kg of food per month to survive.
If the UN's
projections are correct, and some 1.5 million manage
to leave the
country, around 6.1m starving people will be left
behind. In five weeks,
in other words, Afghanistan requires 580,000 tonnes of
food to see its
people through the winter, as well as tarpaulins, warm
clothes,
medicines and water supply and sanitation equipment.
The food alone
would fill 21,000 trucks or 19,000 Hercules transport
planes. The convoy
which reached Kabul to such acclaim yesterday has met
barely a three
thousandth of the country's needs. 

Even without the threat of war, an operation of this
size presses at the
margins of possibility. But as Afghanistan prepares
for invasion, it is
simply impossible. The 19-day suspension of aid which
came to an end
yesterday may have killed thousands already. Now the
convoys' resumption
is, the United Nations says, "experimental": if battle
begins, the
trucks will stop. Civilian aircraft, in the fog of
war, are likely to be
shot down. The aid agencies' hesitation, while
understandable, is lethal
to the Afghans. The waiting is killing them. 

Distribution has now become just as difficult as
supply. The UN predicts
that some 2.2 million will be displaced from their
homes within
Afghanistan, as they flee the cities for fear of the
Taliban's press
gangs and America's bombs, and flee the villages for
fear of the
escalating civil war. This scattering is doubly
calamitous: not only are
the people unreachable, but they are also unable to
sow the winter wheat
which would keep them alive next year. 

For military reasons, the United States appears to
have told all
Afghanistan's neighbours to shut their borders. Many
of those who were
not at imminent risk of starvation sold all their
possessions to reach
the frontier, only to be turned back by its illegal
closure. Now they
too are dying of hunger. If the US bombs Afghanistan's
roads and
airports to contain the Taliban, almost all
distribution will grind to a
halt. 

It may be possible to mount a successful military
campaign between now
and November 7th. It may be possible to mount a
successful humanitarian
campaign between now and November 7th. It is simply
impossible to do
both. Unless the west withdraws its armies and
announces an immediate
cessation, we could be responsible for something
approaching genocide in
Afghanistan. 

Last week on these pages, I suggested that the United
States could meet
its strategic objectives in Afghanistan through peace,
rather than war.
The Taliban, I argued, thrive on the fear of
outsiders: they invoke a
hostile world in the hope that people will cling to
them for fear of
something worse. A vast humanitarian operation could
threaten their
gainful isolationism and turn the population against
its tormentors. The
delightful messages I'd been receiving over the
previous two weeks,
comparing me to Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Chamberlain,
and Beelzebub,
were immediately supplemented by a new acclamation:
prince of darkness I
may be, but I am also hopelessly naïve and idealistic.
Perhaps I should
have taken a little more care to explain myself. 

No strategy in Afghanistan is assured of success, but
there is no notion
as naïve as that which supposes that you can destroy a
tactic (such as
terrorism) or an idea (such as fundamentalism) by
means of bombs or
missile strikes or special forces. Indeed, even the
Pentagon now lists
its military choices under the heading AOS: All
Options Stink. If
military intervention succeeded in delivering up Bin
Laden and
destroying the Taliban, it's hard to see how this
could fail to
encourage retaliatory strikes all over the world. 

Nor is it entirely clear that attacking Afghanistan
would bring down the
beserkers who govern it. Britain and the United States
have been bombing
Iraq for the past ten years, only to strengthen
Saddam's grip. There are
many in Washington who privately acknowledge that
Castro's tenure has
been sustained by US hostilities and embargos. Had the
United States
withdrawn its forces from Guantanamo Bay, opened its
markets and
invested in Cuba, it would have achieved with
generosity what it has
never achieved with antagonism. There is plenty of
evidence to suggest
that if Afghanistan is attacked, the Afghans will side
with the lesser
Satan at home against the Great Satan overseas.

Conversely, the Conservative government responded to
the riots of the
1980s by regenerating the estates they mauled, until
other cities
complained that only way to win money was to run amok.
But the
government understood that while rioters may be
encouraged by the
residents of depressed and decaying estates, they are
fiercely resisted
by people whose prospects are brightening. 

Some might argue that showering Afghanistan with food
rather than bombs
would create an incentive for further acts of terror.
But Osama Bin
Laden, if he was indeed linked to the attack on New
York, has no
interest in the welfare of the Afghan people. Like the
Taliban, the
social weapons he deploys are misery and insecurity.
He seeks not peace,
but war. While western aggression will drive Afghans
into the arms of
the Taliban and their guests, western aid will divide
the people from
the predators. 

Pakistan can continue to withdraw support from the
Afghan regime and
seek to engineer a bloodless coup. The US can raise
the bounty on Bin
Laden's capture and surrender for trial at an
international tribunal.
But if we seek to bludgeon Afghanistan into
submission, we will lose the
war on terrorism, while inadvertently slaughtering
some millions of its
inhabitants. We can choose, in other words, between
futile genocide and
productive peace. It shouldn't be too hard a choice to
make. 

--distributed by Znet.

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