New York Times
Wars in Afghanistan don't begin and end with clockwork precision, but the American-led campaign to overthrow the Taliban has succeeded. Though skirmishes may continue in the days ahead, Afghanistan's people can now look forward to a new and more hopeful era.
Imposing challenges lie ahead, like finding Osama bin Laden and top Taliban leaders like Mullah Muhammmad Omar, securing the power of the new coalition government and feeding millions of refugees displaced by years of conflict. Americans must understand that despite the Taliban's rapid collapse, Washington's military and humanitarian responsibilities in Afghanistan are far from over.
Wisely, Afghanistan's new provisional leader, Hamid Karzai, has dropped talk of a possible amnesty for Mullah Omar. Not only was the mullah the main architect of the Taliban's alliance with Osama bin Laden, he is also responsible for the terrible crimes committed against the Afghan people during the years of Taliban rule, including public executions by stoning for alleged religious offenses.
Once captured, Mullah Omar and his leading Taliban associates should be tried in Afghanistan. That would fortify the new government's judicial authority and promote the kind of national accounting and truth telling that have brought healing to other societies ravaged by war and dictatorship.
Afghanistan's other leading fugitive, Osama bin Laden, is believed to be hiding in the eastern mountains near Tora Bora, close to the Pakistani border. Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, must make sure that Pakistani security forces do whatever they can to prevent Mr. bin Laden's escape across the largely uninhabited frontier.
When Washington first launched air strikes against the Taliban two months ago, there was concern that Afghans might see them as one more foreign affront against their sovereignty, and that Muslims elsewhere would vent their rage against America. That underestimated the anger of Afghanistan's people at the Taliban's harsh and obscurantist rule, meddling moral police and destructive alliance with Osama bin Laden. With Afghans celebrating the Taliban's downfall, the world came to see this war for what it is, a battle against international terrorism and its extremist protectors.
Honolulu Star Bulletin
Within minutes after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, commentators made comparisons with the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago today. Both were surprise attacks that revealed American vulnerability and propelled the country into military action abroad. The embrace of survivors of the two events this week at the Arizona Memorial was a poignant gesture noting the similarity.
The difference, however, is that the looming attack on Pearl Harbor was specific and imminent, subject to historical analysis and debate. The more recent warning of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, while retrospectively jarring in its accuracy, was relatively vague -- predicted sometime within the next 25 years -- and subject to speculation about whether even rapid preparation realistically could have prevented it.
Both attacks came by surprise, but in different degrees. War had begun in Asia in 1937 and in Europe in 1939 and U.S. military commanders in 1941 had every reason to expect a Japanese attack on American military installations. ...
America was caught flat-footed three months ago despite a warning by a presidential commission headed by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. The Commission on National Security/21st Century predicted in January that "the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack." ...
Hart told a Senate committee in April that the need was "urgent." However, the commission's report used less imperative language: "A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter century." That is hardly strong enough to try to affix blame.
Boston Herald
The ``fight to the death'' by Taliban forces in their last remaining stronghold of Kandahar turned out to be far less than that. But then, the man who ordered that fight to the death, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, was nowhere to be found. (Apparently for the Taliban when the going gets tough, the tough who started it all heads for the nearest cave.)
Any effort to negotiate some sort of amnesty for Omar was surely dashed when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in his usual unabashed fashion, ``If you're asking, would an arrangement with Omar, where he could, quote, `live in dignity' in the Kandahar area or some place in Afghanistan, be consistent with what I have said, the answer is no.''
There must be no escape for Omar, any more than there could be for his most famous guest, terror chieftain Osama bin Laden himself. That the United States has in place leaders who mean what they say and say it clearly is appreciated more with every passing day.
``The Taliban is finished. As of today they are no longer a part of Afghanistan,'' the country's new interim leader Hamid Karzai said Friday.
That appears to be - for the most part - true.
Those Taliban fighters who somehow thought that ``surrender'' meant being able to walk away from Kandahar with their weapons in hand, met up with U.S. forces on the ground and in the air who spent much of the day disabusing them of that notion and showing them the real meaning of surrender.
Those who have found a convenient cave will likely not be able to hide out for long. The future stability of Afghanistan depends on rooting out all of those not committed to that future.
This is, as President Bush, has said from the start, a new kind of war. It is a war where victory can be elusive. But surely the Taliban defeat in Kandahar is an important step on the road to that victory.
Chicago Tribune
After 22 years of war, anarchy and fratricide, persuading Afghans to agree on an interim government representing all major rival ethnic tribes--and women-- seemed a tall order, if not an impossible mission.
But that is precisely what delegates to a nine-day conference in Germany accomplished. They put together a 30-member, post-Taliban council to take power Dec. 22 and move the war-ravaged nation toward democracy, stability and reconstruction. It's a remarkable leap of faith for Afghans: a governing council with an array of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Shiites and a Nuristani.
Now comes an even harder part: governing. There is already dissent from warlords in the anti-Taliban alliance and disagreement over what to do with Taliban leaders and combatants. A crisis looms in law and order, and there is no international peacekeeping force yet in place. Thus, humanitarian aid is stymied.
The U.S. interest is clear. A stable government means Afghanistan will not be used as a launchpad for terror again. While winning the war, America should be careful not to lose the peace. ...
Then there is the problem of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. There can be no amnesty, no safe passage for Omar, as Taliban negotiators requested. He stole the dignity from millions of Afghans and must be held accountable for harboring Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
The Bush administration has made it clear that the senior Taliban leadership must be punished. Anything else is not an option. Karzai seems to have heard that message, and says Omar should stand trial. As long as Karzai cooperates, the American military focus and the promise of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid should be used to coax allegience to him. America's main mission remains toppling the Taliban, wiping out Al Qaeda and preventing Afghanistan's future use as a sanctuary for terror.
Karzai is a moderate nationalist who spent the last 10 years trying to find a democratic path for his country. He is the most prominent Pashtun leader, a unifying force. He will need all his negotiating skills to unite support of rival Pashtun tribes, northern warlords and other restive ethnic groups behind his provisional government. But for once, most of the people of Afghanistan are demanding it.
Washington Times
Good news, sort of, for Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Having persisted in telling tales at cross-purposes to explain why the Clinton administration did nothing about Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network for all those Clinton years, these two erstwhile office-holders may now read from the same page -- literally -- and discover in the January issue of Vanity Fair what went wrong on their watch.
In "The Osama Files" by David Rose, the former president and former secretary of state get a second chance to see the letters and secret memoranda that they, along with their top aides, once ignored or failed to act upon. The rest of us, meanwhile, get a look at an eye-popping paper trail that documents futile efforts by Sudan to alert the United States to the workings, the identities and the movements of the al Qaeda network, including, of course, bin Laden.
Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Albright may not only reconsider the entreaties of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to then-President Clinton (the Sudanese leader asked to open his country to the CIA and the FBI so the United States could investigate for itself whether Sudan trained or sheltered terrorists), but also the many invitations Sudan made to share terrorism information with U.S. intelligence agencies. In political retirement, they may reflect on whether it was such a brilliant idea, for example, for the State Department to have nixed FBI interest in meeting with Sudanese intelligence. As former Bush White House official and lobbyist Janet McElligott said when urging the government to examine Sudan's dossiers, "You do realize bin Laden lived there [Sudan] and they have files on his main people?"
Vanity Fair reports that Sudan's efforts to open its books on bin Laden began in February 1996, well in advance of the terrorist attacks that would make the Saudi-born terrorist infamous. That means that for more than four years the Clinton administration refused to consider intelligence that might have prevented the bombing of the Khobar Towers (June 1996), the destruction of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (August 1998), the attack on the USS Cole (October 2000) and, of course, September 11. Why was such potentially vital information not only ignored but never even evaluated?
"The simple answer is that the Clinton administration had accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism, and refused to believe that anything it did to prove its bona fides could be genuine," the magazine reports. No doubt. But there is probably more to this scandalous failure than the "politicization" of intelligence.
Just ask a simple question. What mattered more to Clintonites in June 1996: the news on June 25 that a truck bomb had exploded at Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, or the Supreme Court decision on June 24 to hear Jones vs. Clinton after the 1996 re-election campaign? Or compare another strange confluence of events. What more likely preoccupied Mr. Clinton and his advisers in August 1998: the embassy bombings in Africa on Aug. 7, or Mr. Clinton's upcoming appearance before a grand jury in connection with the Lewinsky matter on Aug. 17?
Given the permanent reconfiguration of the Clinton White House into a scandal-busting spin machine, the answers to such questions are obvious and distasteful. They may make it easier to explain, for example, why Sudan's offer to extradite two suspected bombers and al Qaeda members, made in the days between the embassy bombings and Mr. Clinton's grand jury appearance, was met with silence -- except, of course, for the sound of American bombs falling on a Khartoum medicine factory. They don't, however, make it any more conscionable.
The fact is, the scandal-riddled Clinton administration simply and disastrously failed to function -- and that, surely, is the biggest scandal of them all.
(Compiled by United Press International)
