Fund for Reconciliation and Development
John McAuliff*, executive director
"As I watch the news shows and read the NY Times, the deja vu factor escalates. Certainly there is a major difference between the motive of US military intervention in Indochina and in Afghanistan, but our political leadership class seems as ignorant of history and culture now as they were in 1945 and 1956.
Several points appear not to have been taken seriously:
1) The most common reaction in a civilian population to bombardment is to blame the bomber and to rally to the regime, despite any previous disagreements. (This seems even to be the case in the sermons by the Mullahs at the funerals of Northern Alliance people killed accidentally by US bombing.)
2) Hatred and distrust between ethnic, linguistic and tribal groups is trumped by their shared hatred of any foreign invader.
3) Changing sides with the inducement of bribes may not be so unusual if the dispute is a domestic power struggle. Taking money from a country which is invading by air or land is treason to the nation.
4) It is one thing to give military support to an ethnic minority which is a large majority in its own space (e.g. Kosovo); quite different to support ethnic minorities which seek to defeat the majority in a commonly claimed nation space.
5) Within a faith, partisans can rationalize using religious holidays for fighting (e.g. George Washington crossing the Delaware to ruin the Brit's Christmas). But outsiders who do the same confirm their disrespect for the faith and lack of moral virtue and therefore lose the propaganda battle with other believers.
The crucial wrong turn increasingly looks like the Administration's decision to make bin Laden and the Taleban moral equivilants and one in the same as strategic targets, compounded by insisting on a unilateralist approach to coalition building and military action.
Frustration over the limited success of the air war seems to lead to either insisting it is doing as expected with unavoidable "collateral damage" among civilians, the John McCain prescription of massive US ground troops, or a wider war with Iraq, especially if some linkage can be found or created with the higher grade anthrax. Iraq is a deserving target for smarter international sanctions but expanding the battleground will further put at risk Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries with significant Muslim populations.
My despair comes from not seeing a face-saving and politically credible path to de-escalate rather than escalate the conflict. In the lead editorial on Saturday, "The War Has Just Begun", the NY Times concluded "No early victory should be expected." Any day now I expect to read or hear that US credibility is at stake if it stops the bombing, even for Ramadan.
If you want to get some international perspective, scan through www.newspaperlinks.com or go directly to www.frontierpost.pk for a Pakistani perspective.
* John McAuliff, a long-time activist and NGO leader whose work has focused on Indochina, is Executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development"