For $10bn, America has bought a small victory
foreign editor's briefing by bronwen maddox
DISAPPOINTING, with a few bright patches, after a lot of luck. That is the bottom line of the audit of the Afghan War six months after the bombing started. But then the Soviet Union had a respectable first six months, too, before they pulled out a decade later.
So far, the war has done better on liberating and reviving Afghanistan than on destroying al-Qaeda, for all the wrangling about whether or not the United States is engaged in nation-building. Yet on both fronts, the next few months are crucial.
If there is comfort amid the setbacks, it is the relatively small scale of the war, clear in every line of an "audit". It began as the spectacle of the world's most powerful country bombarding one of the poorest, and it still looks like that.
As a military exercise, it is dwarfed both by the 1991 Gulf War and by possible US action in Iraq, which is so complex that it could take more than a year to prepare. For all the worries, Afghanistan still looks like a far easier problem for the US to handle than its relations with Israel or Saudi Arabia, the twin pillars of its policy in the region, now looking neglected and under great strain.
The past month's bloodshed in the Middle East is a reminder that the Afghan campaign could be a dangerous distraction for the US. The risk is that the seductive narrative of military action - the 19th- century enterprise of hunting bandits through a mountain desert - will take Washington's attention from muddier, older, harder questions of its policy in the region, which are almost certainly more important to its long-term security.
But first, the bald figures of the campaign. The military attack, which began on the night of Sunday, October 7, had dropped 18,000 bombs and missiles by the end of the first week of February .
Now, forces are beginning a new phase of the war: hunting al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters through the southern and southeastern mountains. More than half of the 1,700 Royal Marines Britain has committed are in place; they give warning that the "set-piece" battles have finished and they will now turn to tracking small groups and picking them off.
The war has not come cheap. Pentagon officials reckoned in February that the war was costing $1.8 billion (£1.25 billion) a month, but that includes money spent in the US. According to figures provided by the Pentagon to Congress, the Afghan operations had cost $4.4 billion up to mid-February; the Defence Department spent $3.5 billion at home in the same period.
For this year, the costs should be $10.2 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
All the same, it is a fraction of the scale of the 1991 Gulf War, when allied aircraft flew 110,000 missions, dropping 88,500 tons of high explosive on Iraq or Iraqi troops in Kuwait, more than all the bombs dropped on Berlin in the Second World War, with more than twice the destructive power of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.
What has the Afghan campaign achieved for this effort ? The greatest successes came early on. Kabul fell to Northern Alliance forces after only three weeks of air strikes. Kandahar, the Taleban Government's headquarters, fell on Friday, December 7, marking the effective end of the Government.
A new interim Government was thrown together out of a gathering of leaders in Bonn that could easily have ended in stormy failure. Hamid Karzai, the interim leader, has presided over the new six-month Government and, if nothing else, has helped Afghanistan to attract $4.5 billion in pledges of foreign aid from 30 countries in Tokyo in January.
We could also, if nervously, count among the successes the absence of any further terrorist attack on mainland United States - barring the anthrax attacks of still mysterious origin. But it is unclear whether this is because of the assault on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Since January, it has been tougher. Operation Anaconda, the largest reported American ground action in the Afghan War, was launched on Friday, March 1; while reports conflict about what exactly went wrong, it is clear it largely failed. More than 1,000 US troops, along with at least that number of Afghan locals and 200 coalition forces (Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway) were involved. But most Taleban and al-Qaeda forces escaped, it seems. The operation also brought the largest number of American military casualties, with eight killed during the 12-day battle.
This can be regarded as a normal setback of war. The main lesson of Anaconda was the danger of relying on local fighters, who may have had mixed loyalties and may have tipped off their apparent targets, with the added bonus of not having to fight.
But the disappointment of Anaconda simply rams home the most striking failure of the entire campaign: the two main targets, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taleban leader, have not been captured or killed, nor are their whereabouts known. Bin Laden is now airbrushed out of the Administration's account of the aims of the War on Terror. American claims to have destroyed al-Qaeda's structure must be regarded with scepticism because so few of its senior commanders have been caught.
In particular, the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are a severe embarrassment for the US. Not because of their treatment and possible sentence - that row has largely quietened down, in the absence of the much-threatened military tribunals, carrying a possible penalty of death. But that points to the greater failure: no one has been charged.
It seems that almost all of the 300-odd prisoners still under interrogation at the camp are small fry, if that. Pakistan's wild tribal lands abound with stories about how some of the prisoners were turned over to Pakistani authorities, and hence to the military, with the proud boast that at least the tribesmen fed them first.
Three months after the US courted international fury with the pictures of the blindfolded and bound prisoners kneeling in rows at the camp, it has been able to turn its prosecutory fire on only two targets - the so-called "twentieth hijacker", Zacarias Moussaoui, and its own citizen, John Walker Lindh, an apparently naive and confused young Californian.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan is hardly at peace. The US and Karzai preside over the more or less serene city-state of Kabul, bolstered by international peacekeepers. The rest of the country is in the hands of warlords. In the south and southeast, the warlords have absorbed the Taleban seamlessly and bloodlessly into their ranks. In Nangahar Province, the US faces the dilemma of whether to crack down on poppy production and enrage the population, which claims to have supported the US only to get rid of the Taleban's ban on the crop.
In terms of capturing al-Qaeda, this tally is very disappointing. With a lot of provisions, we can be a fraction more encouraging about Afghanistan itself. If a new, broader-based Government can be formed in June, if it can assemble some kind of military to keep peace in the country at large, if the poppy harvest does not seed a new, richer crop of warlords, if aid starts flowing and gets to the intended destination, then there might be hope for the country. There is no doubt, warlords aside, that most of the 24 million Afghans are bitterly sick of 20 years of war and famine and recognise that this is a rare chance to grab the world's attention and cash.
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