There has been a failure of both analysis and reporting on the war in Afghanistan
STEPHEN GLOVER
The war party is in full cry, and the Sun is at the head of it. Those who opposed the war, and those who simply expressed misgivings, are branded as traitors. This group includes the Sun's rival, the Mirror, whose coverage is described in an hysterical Sun leader as 'disgusting, obscene and treacherous rubbish'. On its front page the Sun shows a Northern Alliance tank riding into Kabul, its gun barrel garlanded with flowers. The Mirror, like the Daily Mail, makes a different point, carrying on its front page a picture of a helpless and prostrate Taleban fighter being murdered by Northern Alliance soldiers. The ironic headline is, 'Our -friends" take over'.
I wonder whether the Sun will be so cocka-hoop in six months' time. We will see. In the meantime, I want to consider this question: how is it that the entire media, pro-war and anti-war, so underestimated the Northern Alliance's capacity and so overestimated the Taleban's? Whether we are talking about foreign correspondents on the spot, armchair generals such as myself, real generals or politicians — all of us were flabbergasted by the triumphant speed of the Northern Alliance's assault. Even the Sun, if it is honest, got it wrong. For all its gung-ho support of the war, it never foresaw that the Taleban would collapse like a pack of cards. There has been a failure of analysis on the Right and the Left, and there may have been a failure of reporting too.
Let's deal with reporting first. Of course, reporters have had a very difficult time of it. Few of them were allowed into Talebanheld Afghanistan, and those who tried were taking great risks. So it was almost impossible to make an assessment of how strong the Taleban were, and what damage they had suffered from the bombing. Those journalists accompanying Northern Alliance soldiers tended to assume that they were inferior to the Taleban, which last time they fought was certainly the case. Many reports emphasised the shortcomings of the Northern Alliance. As recently as 8 November, Anthony Loyd of the Times wrote about the Northern Alliance's shortage of ammunition and other supplies, and quoted one of its commanders predicting that the capture of Mazar-i-Sharif would probably take a considerable time, On 4 November Tom Walker of the Sunday Times wrote about the Northern Alliance's 'ragtag collection of troops and bickering commanders [who]
seemed ill-prepared for any advance'. I do not mention these reports in any spirit of reproach: they are perfectly standard. On Monday of this week, Andrew Gilligan was telling listeners to Radio Four's Today programme that claims by the Northern Alliance that they held 40 per cent of Afghanistan were widely exaggerated.
If reporters on the spot were in the dark, it is hardly surprising that we armchair generals have been peering through the fog. Some fell back on the old argument that bombing almost never works. Among their number were Simon Jenkins of the Times and, unless I have got him wrong, our own cherished Matthew Parris. Among dissenting politicians were Tam Dalyell and Denis Healey, the latter of whom argued on 7 November that 'the bombing hasn't got any chance whatever of killing bin Laden or destroying his al-Qa'eda movement'. He might still be right about this, though I wouldn't bet on it. At all events, it is surely now beyond dispute that the bombing considerably weakened the Taleban, and enabled the Northern Alliance to mount its devastating attack.
Others delved deep into a visceral antiAmericanism which assumes that any cause the United States embraces is bound to be wrong. In this group were such figures as John Pilger of the Mirror, Paul Foot of the Guardian. several others on that paper, and, of course, Robert Fisk of the Independent. They placed as much emphasis on the immorality as on the futility of bombing, and argued that allied action in Afghanistan might create a hundred bin Ladens, which I suppose it still might. The most extreme, who were given an airing on the Guardian's editorial pages, implied that on 11 September America got what was coming to it.
But it would be wrong to say that it was only journalists who misread the situation. Academics and so-called experts almost without exception exaggerated the difficulties of dislodging the Taleban. In the Independent the historian and former Kennedy aide, Arthur Schlesinger, recalled the lessons of Vietnam, and argued that 'bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised. undeveloped rural societies'. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at Chicago University, argued in the International Herald Tribune that the bombing was futile and the Northern Alliance incompetent and unpopular. 'Victory would probably require at least 500,000 troops.' Such predictions were not limited to anti-war academics. As recently as this Monday, the pro-war Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London, foresaw a tough battle for Kabul in his Independent column. And in the Wall Street Journal Mackubin Thomas Owens, a hawkish American professor of strategy and fellow of a right-wing think-tank, argued on 2 November that 'the Taleban are proving to be more resilient than expected by US planners'. His remedy was the deployment of large numbers of American troops.
Let me emphasise the point again: the pro-war party underestimated the Northern Alliance, and overestimated the Taleban, every bit as much as the anti-war party, and were no less shocked by the turn of events. The expectation of a protracted war was shared by many in the American and British governments. According to a report by Michael Smith in the Daily Telegraph of 5 November, British and American planners had limited confidence in the Northern Alliance, and were 'now admitting that if the Taleban are not dislodged, and bin Laden captured or killed by the spring, they see no option but to mount a ground invasion — and risk being dragged into a new Vietnam'.
My concern here is with the media, and why we (no doubt there are one or two exceptions I have missed) almost all got it wrong. I have mentioned one extenuating circumstance: reporters were not free to roam around Taleban-held Afghanistan. But that provides only a partial explanation. My feeling is that almost all of us — reporters, pundits, academics and politicians — know much less about Afghanistan than we think we do, and perhaps less than we give the impression of doing. Let us be frank: most of us had never heard of Mazar-i-Sharif until a few weeks ago, and yet we have been pontificating about its strategic significance as though we were familiar since childhood with the curve of its hills. In the absence of detailed knowledge, we have fallen back on theories and fragments of history about the Northern Alliance recycled by journalists who probably do not know what they are talking about. In short, we have been peering through a glass pretty darkly. The lesson I will draw from the rout of the Taleban is that none of us has much idea what is going to happen, and that the Sun's celebrations may therefore possibly be premature.
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