New York Times
After three weeks of American bombing runs, the limits of air power are evident in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden remains in hiding and the Taliban have not crumbled. In a costly mistake yesterday, a Red Cross warehouse was accidentally bombed again. Word also came that an important opposition leader whom Washington had looked to as a potential rallying point for dissident Pashtuns had been captured and executed by Taliban forces.
The absence of easy victories should come as no surprise. Airstrikes alone are rarely decisive in waging war. When bombs and missiles have prevailed, as they did in Yugoslavia a few years ago, it usually takes many months of bombardment. Dislodging the Taliban and disabling the bin Laden network in Afghanistan are going to require sustained force and extensive ground operations.
Predictably, the patience of some of America's coalition partners is already diminishing. The longer the bombing goes on, the more it produces political strains in Islamic countries, especially with the monthlong Muslim holiday of Ramadan less than three weeks away. For that reason, Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is urging an early end to the air war. Unfortunately, that is not a realistic possibility. Air and ground combat will have to continue for months.
Despite steady pounding from American planes, the Taliban's front lines have held outside of Kabul and the strategic northern town of Mazar-i- Sharif. Defections of Taliban leaders have been fewer than expected, which makes this week's capture and execution of the opposition leader, Abdul Haq, particularly damaging. As an ethnic Pashtun, like most of the Taliban and the inhabitants of southern Afghanistan, he might have drawn support from southerners uneasy over the absence of Pashtun leadership in the main opposition fighting force, the Northern Alliance.
The Taliban are not invincible. They have, however, proved to be tenacious and resourceful. To shield themselves from airstrikes, Taliban fighters have moved into civilian population centers that Washington is reluctant to hit. Some have used United Nations vehicles to camouflage their movements. Dislodging the Taliban from strongholds like Kandahar and Kabul will require some combination of ground troops, including Afghan guerrillas and American and British special forces.
Osama bin Laden's terrorist network will be even harder to defeat from the air. Barring an extremely lucky bomb or missile strike, rousting Al Qaeda leaders from their caves will take time and the infiltration of ground commandos. Winter weather will not make that any easier. After the horrific events of Sept. 11, Americans must be prepared for a lengthy military conflict with terrorism and its Taliban protectors. No early victory should be expected.
Baltimore Sun
Hated as the Taliban are by many Afghans, the ruling group enjoys a powerful asset: the disunity of all others.
The United States must be ready to help install an interim regime acceptable to most Afghans the moment the Taliban falls.
Holding the broad base together as an alternative is an incredible problem. Holding coalition countries together in support of it will be harder.
Most rulers of Afghanistan have come from the dominant Pashtun people, who live on both sides of the border with Pakistan. A regime devoid of Pashtuns would lack credibility.
The Northern Alliance, the collection of rebel military units in the field, consists of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. Its political front man, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was the last pre-Taliban president and holds the United Nations seat, but alienated most of the nation.
Pakistan, whose help is essential to the U.S. military campaign, opposes him and the Northern Alliance. Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan support the Northern Alliance, whose commanders once fought them.
They would regard a purely Pashtun regime as hostile and a puppet of Pakistan. Their aid is also essential.
Everyone's scenario is for a council of all factions anointed by the former King Zahir Shah to convene a traditional Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, which would create a regime.
A 600-member Association for Peace and National Unity did meet in Peshawar, Pakistan, Wednesday and Thursday. It called for a Loya Jirga to be convened there, with Zahir Shah playing a major role. But it met without a representative of either the king or the Northern Alliance. It denounced foreigners in Afghanistan, meaning al-Qaida, but also the U.S. military campaign - without which no one is supplanting the Taliban.
Jealousies and distrust were not overcome.
Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani, an Islamic party leader, emerged as unity spokesman, with others suggesting he was only amassing personal power.
The United States can neither pull all the strings nor stand aloof. A successor regime must be broad-based, majority Pashtun, Islamic, more humane than the Taliban and unthreatening to Pakistan and former Soviet republics alike.
Its visible presence, however difficult to achieve, would hasten the success of the U.S.-led effort to depose the Taliban.
Boston Globe
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and other ministers received emphatic advice from the Bush administration when they visited Washington this week: Begin withdrawing troops from Palestinian-administered towns, resume CIA-brokered security cooperation with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and implement a cease-fire. This advice should be heeded not only because it suits US interests and would be welcomed by Palestinians, but also because it offers the government of Ariel Sharon a way out of a blind alley.
Wisely, Sharon's security Cabinet decided Thursday night to begin withdrawing troops from Palestinian towns in what is known as Area A - sectors under Arafat's control. Friday, the CIA provided a van that transported senior Palestinian security officers to a meeting in Tel Aviv with Israeli counterparts. According to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, at the meeting the two sides worked out arrangements for Palestinian authorities to maintain security in the towns from which Israeli troops will withdraw starting this weekend.
More than 40 Palestinians were killed and 42 arrested during recent Israeli raids on West Bank towns. The operation was condemned as a form of collective punishment, and thus a violation of international law, by the Israeli Human Rights group, B'Tselem. The raids were launched in mid-October in response to the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister, which in turn was a retaliation for the Israeli killing of a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine whom Israeli authorities accused of terrorism. Even if many of those killed in the Israeli raids were gunmen, the punitive attacks likely did more to exacerbate Palestinian anger and despair than to resolve Israel's true security problems.
In purely military terms, Israel is withdrawing its troops from urban areas just as Palestinian snipers, having learned that firing at Israeli armor is futile, are beginning to target individual soldiers who become exposed. Thanks to the Bush administration's unusual gesture of signing onto a UN Security Council statement calling for Israel to withdraw immediately from Palestinian-governed areas, Sharon may now present withdrawal as a necessary accommodation to the needs of the United States as well as the culmination of a successfully completed security operation.
Peres and the other Israeli envoys were told that US backing for Israel is as faithful as ever, that Israel stands to benefit greatly from American success in the war against terrorism, but that Sharon must not precipitate a destabilizing escalation of Mideast warfare. Above all, Sharon has been warned not to seek the elimination of the Palestinian Authority or of Arafat.
Israel would serve its own interests best now by demonstrating solidarity with its embattled American ally.
Daily Oklahoman
America's drive to bring together a worldwide coalition against state-supported terrorism overshadowed other vital issues during the recent summit of Asian trade partners. At that gathering in the People's Republic of China, President Bush muted criticisms of the mainland regime.
For now, that is understandable. Still, the administration must remain vigilant about continued, systemic and often horrific abuses of human rights by the communist government. A congressional hearing last week brought new examples to light, by no means exhausting the available evidence.
The Population Research Institute (PRI), a pro-life group, unveiled highly credible evidence that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has been a partner in mainland China's notorious coercive population control programs, despite years of denials. The U.N. refused to send anyone to testify before the House International Relations Committee.
Josephine Guy, testifying for PRI, told the House panel specific stories about Chinese women forced to report to hospitals for abortions while carrying a second child. Steven Mosher, president of PRI, said evidence contradicts claims that the U.N.'s population controllers only go to regions where the communists' "one- child" policy has been suspended and where coercive "family planning" has ended. Mosher documents close collaboration between the U.N. agency and the Red Chinese "Office of Family Planning."
According to a news summary from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which monitors and critiques pro-abortion activism at the U.N., U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., says the UNFPA has been guilty of "white- washing" Chinese atrocities committed in the name of family planning. Smith reacted to the testimony by saying that UNFPA "should be tried at The Hague along with the Chinese dictators."
U.N. officials still defend their activities. In a letter to Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., UNFPA officials declared the agency "has not, does not and will not ever condone coercive activities in China or anywhere else." UNFPA claimed "The fund is a global leader in working to eliminate the use of coercive family planning practices."
That conclusion is under assault from the UNFPA's many critics. Moves are afoot both in the Congress and in Great Britain's House of Lords to end taxpayer support from the two countries for the UNFPA's activities.
We have considerable sympathy for such efforts. The mainland's unconscionable anti-life policies are scandalous.
Detroit Free Press
Those familiar orange boxes will have a dedicated purpose this Halloween: helping the children fleeing the Taliban and U.S. artillery in Afghanistan.
War will make the coming winter especially tough on Afghan kids. It adds an urgency to the collection of spare change by trick or treaters for UNICEF this Halloween.
Children in Afghanistan don't have any idea what they -- or their country -- did to deserve the bombing, to end up in refugee camps, to be so hungry all the time. Children in the United States don't know what they can do about the frightened young faces they see on TV. UNICEF provides an avenue for action.
For more than 53 years, the United Nations agency has helped hungry and homeless children around the world. Conditions in Afghanistan were bleak even before Operation Enduring Freedom. One in four children there dies before turning 5. Chronic malnutrition afflicts half. Clean drinking water flows to only 13 percent of the country. UNICEF estimates 7.5 million Afghans are in need of aid and about 70 percent of them are women and children.
Even without knowing the extent of that plight, American kids have already been generous, sending 181,000 envelopes to Washington in the week after President George W. Bush asked them to donate $1 to the children's aid. They can do even more when they go out on Halloween -- and the folks passing out treats can help by filling those UNICEF boxes as fast as the candy sacks.
For more information or to download a collection kit, go to www.unicef.org and click on the Trick or Treat box in the upper right corner.
Houston Chronicle
FBI and Justice Department investigators have held and interrogated four men since they were rounded up in the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States with no success so far in squeezing out information about their suspected association with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. Frustratingly, all their offers for reduced sentences and witness protection thus far have been refused.
"We are known for humanitarian treatment, so basically we are stuck," said one FBI agent involved in the investigation. "Usually, there is some incentive, some angle to play, what you can do for them. But it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure ... where we won't have a choice, and we are probably getting there."
This sounds distressingly like the FBI flirting with the use of torture on suspects in its custody. This is a trial balloon that the America public should burst without flinching.
In the wake of the shocking attacks on U.S. soil last month, Americans understandably are eager, even desperate to know who is responsible and how to find bin Laden in order to bring him to justice and dismantle his wretched gang. But if the government is asking for the public blessing to use physical torture to wring information and confessions out of even a suspected international terrorist, the public must withhold it.
It is only the fact that the United States practices the human rights message it preaches around the world that this country can take the high ground in chastising other nations that abuse foreign residents and their own citizens. What standing would this country have to rebuke the world's Slobodan Milosevics, Pol Pots, Saddam Husseins and even bin Ladens if it also tramps on the human rights of its own prisoners?
Besides, if high-running emotions over the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon cause the United States to compromise its principals on human rights for suspected terrorists today, tomorrow it will be easier to justify torture to extract evidence from any suspected criminal.
That is a slippery slope down which this country should best not begin.
Los Angeles Times
The 18th century writer J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in his "Letters From an American Farmer," described the people of a young country being shaped into a new breed by the melting pot that would one day transform the world. Today, Americans of every ethnicity and religion are reckoning with what they stand for. At the core of being "American" are choices large and small.
Most American Muslims have reacted to the atrocities of Sept. 11 with the same horror and outrage as their fellow countrymen. But some junior high students at an Islamic religious school in Washington, D.C., recently said that being an American means nothing more than being born here and that they don't believe Osama bin Laden is such a bad guy--views the school reportedly had encouraged. That even a few young people in today's melting pot hold such shocking notions, and feel no particular allegiance to the nation that lets them freely express those views, should spur others to rethink what it means to live in this country.
Sept. 11 and its aftermath have plunged all of us into self-definition and reflection. In our jittery state, we are rediscovering a few things about ourselves as a nation. Among them should be that we are no mere assemblage of peoples who happen to be born here or cast here by lot, as the youngsters said, but rather, as Crevecoeur discerned, a people with its own identity. And once we become Americans by birth or naturalization, we also have choices about what we do with that status. Just days after the bombing of the World Trade Center, traders in New York who had been blasted out of their offices were up and running. They told television's "60 Minutes" that they had made a conscious decision to carry on because they understood what it was to be Americans and to have their way of life attacked. Contrast this "choice" with citizenship misused. A federal prosecutor in the same city last week described one of four men sentenced in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa--a naturalized citizen from Lebanon--as someone who had abused the choice and opportunity to "help himself, his family, his country" that the United States had given him.
Being American is a matter of individual understanding, of asking questions we all answer for ourselves. Every generation must discover for itself the responsibilities of citizenship, just as those who pulled the country through the extreme tests of national character did during three previous centuries.
One special lesson of this particular moment--when some are nervous about flying or the ordinary act of opening the mail--is that living up to one's obligations demands recognizing that being an American is much more than a notation on a birth certificate. Schools that fail to inculcate a sense of commitment to this country do students a potentially crippling disservice. Under the United States' 1st Amendment rights and religious pluralism, they of course are free to do just that. As a consequence, institutions and individuals need to work harder to communicate the meaning of being American, so that today's young people and future generations can carry forward the great experiment in democratic life.
Sacramento Bee
It's probably too early to draw any definitive conclusions about how the U.S. war against terrorism is going, either at home or on the battlefront in Afghanistan. But after 20 days of bombing, and with no sign yet that the Taliban regime is starting to crumble, it seems fair to ask whether the Bush administration has a vision of how the basic objective in Afghanistan -- driving the Taliban from power and eliminating terrorist groups' safe haven there -- can be achieved.
A major problem in developing a long-term strategy is the lack of U.S. control over other interested parties, some of whose respective agendas are conflicting.
An example is the apparent U.S. reluctance to give maximum support to the Northern Alliance.
The reluctance is understandable. The Northern Alliance is an opposition force whose military capability remains dubious. Its dismal record of human rights abuses is troubling, to put it mildly. And its participation in a new Afghan regime is bitterly opposed by most other factions and, critically, by the regime in Pakistan.
Has the administration decided to set aside its distrust of the alliance in the interest of pursuing a military victory without resorting to the use of U.S. ground troops? If not, how does it expect to drive the Taliban from power without the alliance as a full partner?
Similarly, Washington must contend with an assemblage of Afghan elders who could form the basis of a new government. But Thursday the elders called on all parties -- including the United States -- to end hostilities and made no mention of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, whose presence in Afghanistan provoked the U.S. air war.
At the same time, some U.S. allies, among them Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, want U.S. forces to quickly finish the air war, an understandable demand given fears among Arab leaders of mounting popular opposition to the U.S. bombing as civilian casualties on the ground increase while Americans suffer no casualties.
Presumably, President Bush, having chosen the military option, intends to see it through. But what does that mean if, as many believe, the air campaign, plus the Northern Alliance's efforts on the ground, cannot dislodge the Taliban, whose commanders scoff at what they regard as an ineffectual enemy?
For obvious reasons of security, the administration should not telegraph its next move. But what it must do is give the American people reason to believe that it has a plan, is determined to pursue it and, if necessary, to step up U.S. involvement to the extent possible within the constraints inherent in a makeshift anti-terror coalition.
Given the unprecedented nature of this war, that is no small task. So far the public has shown patience and a willingness to tolerate some constraints on civil liberties. But in an open and often contentious society, government must continually re-earn the public's confidence even -- especially -- in times of crisis. To do that, our leaders must first have a clear idea of their objectives and of what risks they're willing to take to succeed. That in turn requires leaders to have confidence that the public will understand and support the painful choices ahead as they unfold -- and to share those choices as fully as possible with the public.
(Compiled by United Press International)
