WASHINGTON — The liberation of most of Afghanistan’s cities throws the door open on the Taliban’s reign of terror and misogyny. There is no shame in the fact that American bombs and commandos helped free Kabul from these bearded fanatics. We now know it should have come long before.
The world is learning in grim detail what happens when it turns its back on a powerless people taken captive by irrational tyrants who crave weapons of mass destruction and harbor global terrorists. The lessons must not be buried in a flurry of phony peacemaking intended to camouflage jockeying for position by Afghanistan’s neighbors and patrons.
Paradoxically this is a moment of grave risk for the U.S. campaign. Despite the initial Northern Alliance successes, the Taliban is counting on Pakistan for sanctuary and help in regrouping as a potent guerrilla force. America’s essential aims can be quickly submerged and lost sight of in the fog of would-be peace in Afghanistan.
President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have rightly emphasized to the American people that this campaign is not solely about one man, one organization or one country. They add it will take a long time to complete.
The only chance to get Osama bin Laden always was by forcing the Taliban to betray al Qaeda in order to survive itself. For Americans, this continues to be a hunt for the killers of Sept. 11 and for those now at work on similar attempts at revenge on U.S. targets.
In plain language, that means Iraq, which has also been abandoned by the world to fester in the hands of a band of criminal psychopaths pretending to be a government. Anyone seeking links between the Taliban’s Mohammad Omar and Saddam Hussein need look only at how each has brutalized his own people and then openly boasted he will use similar techniques to bring about "the destruction of America," as Omar said on Wednesday. These two regimes stand apart from all others in the malignancy of both their ambitions and their exercise of power.
The lifting of the Afghan curtain of horrors should concentrate the mind of the international community on the consequences of neglect — of consigning these two nations to the "too hard" category. The shame of Afghanistan lies not in collateral damage from U.S. bombs or the spurious idea that Bush somehow cheated by including the Taliban in his sights. It lies in the world’s refusal to see and combat evil that rises to the level of national hostage-taking.
An important distinction must be kept in mind: The U.S. campaign was not conceived as a humanitarian intervention to ease Afghan suffering, in the manner of Kosovo or East Timor. Americans should be proud that it seems to bring a better day to Afghanistan (which must still survive the machinations of Afghan warlords, international diplomats and regional politicians). But the U.S. national interests at stake must remain clear and dominant.
The mandate that creates an international peacekeeping force for Afghanistan — and/or an interim political arrangement for Kabul — cannot be allowed to circumscribe the U.S. military hunt for bin Laden terrorists, whether on Afghan soil, next door in the tribal lands of Pakistan or elsewhere. Nor can immunity be granted pre-emptively to Iraq’s terrorist regime, as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw seems to favor.
The United States risks further retaliation against its citizens by waging this war, which was forced on it by a day of mass murder. It is not an attempt to create a Pax Americana or a new world order or to settle old scores. It is an attempt to protect Americans from being targeted from safe havens that the rest of the world has complacently tolerated.
That essential U.S. aim is narrow and incapable of being compromised for the sake of superficial multilateralism or of saving the skin of another Pakistani dictator or even of a Saudi royal family. Stopping short now will simply give America’s self-declared enemies greater opportunities to carry out the retaliation they have already settled on.
Listen carefully to those tales now emerging of children who have never flown kites, of women whose careers and dignity were trampled on, of men in Bamiyan slaughtered for their religious beliefs — while the world looked away.
The evil-doers were in a box, that is, killing only their own people, we were reassured first by the Clinton White House, then by the Powell State Department and now by Jack Straw. On Sept. 11, the terrorists fashioned a box of their own — a coffin — for 4,000 and more Americans.
The antiterror operation is called Enduring Freedom. What that must mean is: Never Again.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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