I did not say that the bombing would fail; I do say that it will end in tears

MATTHEW PARR IS

From those of us who opposed the bombing in Afghanistan, a few words do now seem to be required. The bombing seems to have worked. A new year begins in Kabul in circumstances less apparently bleak than readers who took any notice of columns like mine might have feared. We doves should acknowledge that at the very least we should explain ourselves.

Of course we shall be damned if we do and damned if we don't. Whoever penned those ignorant 'useful idiots' leading articles in the Daily Telegraph will have contingency plans ready for us: 'Why don't they speak up?' if we lie low, and 'Why don't they shut up?' if we try to justify ourselves.

No matter. I'll opt for the 'Why don't they shut up?' because I don't intend to. If you have repeated noisily, as I have, that a certain course of action will end in tears, and if after some months it seems to be ending in cheers, then silence looks like a retreat. I am not ready to retreat.

So how come the Taleban surrendered, shortly after I wrote that the war against them was counterproductive and should be suspended?

The world has a habit of deciding for itself what a writer meant, and thereafter ignoring the archive. Thus I find myself categorised (by Stephen Glover in this magazine, for instance) as one who declared that the American bombing would fail; and lumped by others among those who thought the United States had no moral right to react as she did. Having placed a writer in a category, the world then becomes irritated by what it sees as his tiresome insistence on the small print of what he wrote.

But it matters. I never said the bombing of Afghanistan would fail. Similarly, three years earlier, I never doubted the Serbs could be bombed into retreat from Kosovo. What in both cases I doubted was whether this form of intervention would help bring peace.

Quite explicitly in the Times I wrote as the bombing started that the Americans could bomb themselves to something it was possible to call victory in Afghanistan. I agreed with Polly Toynbee in finding the allies' fairweather journalistic friends feeble for wobbling as soon as a few bombs hit the wrong side. Bombs will always hit the wrong people from time to time, but bombing still works — must work, wherever it is possible to target your enemy in a rough-and-ready way, and wherever, by 'work', you mean smash him to bits. I never doubted this.

I never said the United States had no moral right to react as she has. The enormity of what had been perpetrated on New York and the repellent nature of the Taleban doom any claim that might be made in justice for any party which did not at once and without reservation renounce alQa'eda and all its works. What I questioned was not the justice of a 'war against terror', but its likely effectiveness.

Repeatedly from the start my scepticism (and sometimes indignation) has taken shape in two questions. First, will this strategy, this 'war against terror', cure the ills for which it claims to be the remedy? Is this war making — or will it make — our world a safer place?

Second, I have been trying without much success to pose a different question, but have found that such is the unconsciously imperial outlook of a post-imperial nation that I can persuade few of my countrymen even to see it as a question: why should we British be pitching ourselves with such violent commitment into this war?

This second question is unashamedly selfish. Assuming that the Americans are likely to go ahead with their strategy anyway, and given that they are plainly capable of doing it without any help from us — and whether that strategy is right or wrong — why risk British blood and British treasure in an international venture over whose command we not only lack any veto, but any serious influence at all? Our eagerness not to be left out of whatever the Americans do strikes me as humiliating, making enemies we didn't need to make without purchasing much tangible benefit in any supposed American debt of gratitude.

But British eyes glaze over when one suggests that the Americans are uninterested in whether we do or do not put our heads above parapets alongside them. So I'll set that argument aside, still hoping that if the Israelis go completely mad, we do not — to no purpose — squander what respect we enjoy in the Arab and non-aligned world by looking like stooges to Washington; and that we stop short of imperilling — to no purpose — our

ancient friendship with democratic India, just because America's new friend is the military dictatorship next door. Let me leave it at that.

And return to the main question. As we begin 2002, is the world getting safer because of the allies' response to Osama bin Laden?

The answer is that it is far too early to say. Having set out reasons to doubt its likelihood, I shall not recant but watch, wait, and continue to hope I was wrong.

About two things I have, mercifully, been proved wrong already. Though I never committed this to print, I did expect military victory in Afghanistan, if or when it came, to be a very protracted, bloody and messy business. It was not. And after that victory I expected the imposition of an apparently viable government there to be difficult to achieve and likely to fall apart quickly. It was not very difficult, and so far has not fallen apart. Thus, stages one and two of the allied plan have been completed faster and more cleanly than I thought likely.

Indeed, so fast and so cleanly that my major thesis is likely to be put to earlier tests than I thought. This I tried to express in the Times just a few days after the 11 September disaster. Playing the world's policeman would not prove the solution to the problems like this, I wrote: playing the world's policeman was part of their cause.

At the time I thought it possible, even likely, that America would react (after lashing out in righteous anger) by drawing in her horns. I hoped she would. But of that there can now be little chance: intervention is going too well. Without seriously risking the lives of her own troops she has captured an entire country. Other delinquent or inadequate governments — Somalia, Sudan, Yemen — have taken fright and are trying to put their own houses in order without the firing of a single American gun.

All this must be proving a tremendous boost to the confidence of interventionists in Washington. I think we may be looking at one of those real shifts in the balance and exercise of world power. A new boss-nation is finding her feet, one to which our own country is more than willing to play sidekick.

I said this hegemony would end in tears. I still say that. Nobody can know. All that is certain is that neither my voice nor ten thousand others can stop it now.

Matthew Panic is a political columnist of the Times.