U.S. War Effort Faltering

<strong>Whispers of Vietnam haunt U.S. anti-terror 'war'</strong><br>
By Jim Lobe<br><br>
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WASHINGTON (IPS) -- President George W. Bush's "war" against terrorism is just weeks old, bit it appears to be foundering on multiple fronts.
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CNN still carries the slogan "America Strikes Back" on its Headline News Channel, but Washington now seems much more preoccupied with biological warfare at home than it is with the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
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The war is not going particularly well, according to virtually all accounts. While the head of the U.S. armed forces bragged recently a week of bombing had "eviscerated" the combat capacity of the Taliban, his operations director admitted later that the military was "surprised" at their tenacity.
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Others, including Afghanistan experts and leaders of the Northern Alliance, which is allied with Washington, say that if anything, the regime probably has gained confidence since U.S. warplanes launched their campaign three weeks ago.
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Even before the bombing began, senior U.S. officials predicted that Taliban commanders would defect once they were exposed to Washington's military might as well as U.S. intelligence agents bearing promises of power and money.
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This was to have led to the regime's collapse, if not by the end of October, then by the onset of Ramadan in mid-November.
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"The more these attacks continue, the more you'll find people siding with the Taliban to defend the country," said Barnet Rubin, an Afghanistan scholar at New York University.
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The U.S. effort already seems to be losing the battle for hearts and minds as more bombs go astray, hitting residential areas and twice bombing the same Red Cross warehouse. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a top military officer appeared before the press shortly after the Red Cross bombings. When they were asked about it, each of them just stared at the other dumbfounded, in a long moment of silence. The press snickered, and the two had no specific answer for why this happened.
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Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported Oct. 26 that at least 23 civilians, most of them young children, were killed when U.S. bombs hit the village of Thori, near a Taliban military base.
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Amnesty International called on Washington to stop using cluster bombs. As a result of U.S. bombing, the searing images of the destruction of the World Trade Center, in which some 5,000 people died Sept. 11, rapidly are giving way to new pictures of daily bombing runs, devastated villages, and grieving parents.
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"How much longer does the bombing continue?" Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden asked this week.
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"Because we're going to pay every single hour, every single day it continues. We're going to pay an escalating price in the Muslim world."
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Like Afghanistan, Vietnam was primarily agrarian, dirt-poor, highly decentralized, and anything but a "target-rich environment", as the Pentagon' calls it.
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Nevertheless, as some politicians already have begun complaining, the situation is like Vietnam in that the military is constrained by a political need: to first construct a broad-based post-Taliban coalition capable of restoring stability.
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But how to construct such a coalition if you bomb all the vital structures of government?
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If Washington continues bombing much longer, said Biden, it risks being perceived in the region and the world as "this high-tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do."
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An even more damaging factor that carries a whiff of old battles is the speed with which a "credibility gap" also is growing up around this war.
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The early assertions about credible threats to Air Force One; the unprecedented secrecy surrounding military deployments, let alone operations; the initial denials of civilian deaths; conflicting official statements about the anthrax scare; the abrupt disappearance of government websites without notice or explanation; and the contrast between the early confidence and the lack of any tangible progress all recall an earlier time when the public's trust in the competence and honesty of the government eroded steadily.
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-- (c)2001 Global Information Network, distributed by HYPE, http://www.afrikan.net/hype