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Immediately after the attacks in NYC and DC, the pessimists predicted that the US would lash out violently, unthinkingly, and cause a revengeful blood bath irrespective of who the victims were; that someone was going to die in response even if they had nothing to do with it. Of course, that didn't happen; the US spent nearly a month planning and investigating and started a very carefully targeted campaign at al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But then it was going to be a "quagmire" and we were going to be carpetbombing cities causing tens of thousands of civilian dead as we burned the house down to get rid of the rats -- and that didn't happen either, as Americn pin-point bombing was applied with a degree of precision never before seen in war. Of course, there was going to be a huge commitment of US ground forces who would die in droves -- not, as it turned out, careful application of special forces who did a superb job. Then we were told that the bombing was doing no good; nothing was actually going to happen; it was just pointless brutality, here at last was the mindless slaughter they'd warned us about. That rhetoric subsided starting on November 9 when the great Taliban collapse began with the fall of Mazar-e Sharif. And, of course, there was not the predicted rioting in the streets of the Arab world, when unrest subsided with the fall of Mazar-e Sharif and the breathtaking collapse of the Taliban. There was also the claim that the war would stop the flow of supplies and cause millions of starvation deaths (one prediction was 7.5 million, about a third of the nation) -- but with the collapse of the Taliban, supplies have started flowing and indeed given the corruption of the Taliban it's very likely that things for the starving will actually be much better now than before. There's going to be famine but not as much as predicted and not because of the bombing. OK, well, yeah, the war is going pretty well, but you're going to lose the peace! The next warning was that the Northern Alliance was little better than the Taliban and that the nation was going to collapse into a bunch of rival tribes battling each other and being just as brutal to the people as the Taliban were. This despite consistent news reports of men shaving and women exposing their faces and kids flying kites and little girls attending school and the streets of freed Afghanistan suddenly being filled with music for the first time in years -- and many, many pictures of smiling faces (including women's faces) coming out of the liberated areas. As to that anticipated chaos, that's the latest prediction which now looks to be incorrect. While no-one can know the future for certain, the meeting in Bonn has now turned out to be just as successful in its own way as the war was. A new interim government has been planned and while many problems remain, it's yet another great step along the way to making things much better in Afghanistan. What is ironic about all this is that those who oppose the war do so wearing the cloak of humanitarianism. They oppose the war, they claim, because of their sympathy for the Afghan people and their fear of the horrors that the war will bring to them. They accused those who favored the war of being brutal monsters interested only in revenge, motivated only by bloodlust. And yet the clear result has been that the war is the best thing to happen in Afghanistan in the last ten years, and that the lot of the people there will be immeasurably improved by it. If there is anything which is clear now it's that the war must continue and that the Taliban must be dislodged from their last remaining stronghold in Kandahar, and then annihilated in the hills. That's not to say that there will not be reverses in future; it's virtually certain that there will be. But there's clear reason now to believe that the finish is within reach, and the military problem which remains is much smaller than that which faced us two months ago when the bombing began. There are political problems remaining and there will be military setbacks (large or small). The rebuilding problem is immense. Getting the new government actually working is going to be a bitch. But no problem can be solved if you're convinced ahead of time that you'll fail, and the problems remaining appear to be soluble. The "voices of caution" in this case have devolved into voices of hysterical fear who have contributed nothing relevant to the debate, except, ironically, to convince the majority that action and war are probably the right course. The voices opposing the war have been wrong so often and so consistently now that they're coming to be viewed as a reliable negative indicator of what to do next. And now they oppose attacking Iraq? Obviously that's the next step. (discuss) | |||