A Northern Alliance soldier sat and stared moodily at the hills. "Once, some of us in this army fought against the Russians, and some fought with them," he said. "Now we are together against the Taliban. And I think that soon we will be together with them," he gestured towards the Taliban positions, "fighting against..." he hesitated "...some one". Did he mean the Americans? "The Americans are imperialists," he said.

Justin Huggler, The Independent: 'Taliban are shaken but defiant as bombing fails to instill terror'

President Bush gave an important speech yesterday, outlining the grave threat represented by nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.

"They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," he said. "Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation; and, eventually, to civilisation itself. So, we're determined to fight this evil and fight until we are rid of it. We will not wait for more innocent deaths."

The dangers of nuclear proliferation are undeniable, which is why the policies articulated by this administration have been somewhat confusing. It's widely acknowledged that the most likely scenario for nuclear materials and expertise being acquired by terrorists is the continuing meltdown of Russia's scientific and military organizations. Indeed, there's already a thriving black market in the former Soviet Union for pilfered nuclear materials.

So it would presumably be in our interests to ensure that Russia safeguards and disposes of its weapons and waste. Yet last May the Bush administration announced it would scale back Clinton-era 'programmes in Russia aimed at securing nuclear stockpiles against theft, decommissioning weapons-grade uranium and plutonium or converting it for civilian use, and retraining and paying Russian nuclear scientists in order to discourage them from taking their expertise elsewhere.' In place of these initiatives, the Bushies proposed paying the Kremlin to take America's waste off its hands, presumably reasoning that 'since Russia is already a nuclear toilet, who would notice a little more hot crud?'

But we keep hearing that 'everything has changed' since September 11th. Surely the new world order forged in the wake of the attacks has forced the administration to reconsider its arrogant, short-sighted, and unilateralist policies.

There has been speculation that the attacks on New York and Washington will revive US interest in security regimes and multilateralism. They have shown that there is no safety in isolationism and that terrorism can only be fought cooperatively.

So far, there is little evidence to support this speculation. Besides waging war, the priorities in US security policy are becoming evident and none suggests an increasing appetite in Washington for arms control. One is to build home defence, but that includes missile defence and a probable withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Another is to sharpen deterrent threats, but that implies freedom from political and technological restraint. Another is to enhance detection, but mainly by giving more resources and powers to intelligence agencies.

Instead, the signals coming from the Bush administration are that the approach to arms control will henceforth be strictly a la carte. The US government will support measures such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which restrain others and directly serve US national security interests. But it will reject measures that restrict America's freedom of action or that do not bring immediate benefits.

Naive idealists find it difficult to grasp how the best defense against suitcase bombs and the nuclear black market is a missile defense system and cluster-bombing, but that's why we leave foreign policy to the experts. We're clearly in capable hands.

::Matthew Engel, The Guardian: 'Nuclear threat is real - Bush'
::Amelia Gentleman and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian (July 25, 2001): 'Weapons-grade uranium seized'
::Ian Traynor, The Guardian (May 7, 2001): 'Bush threatens to slash spending on nuclear safety aid to Russia'
::Gregory Palast, The Guardian (July 29, 2001): 'To Russia with love and $15bn'
::William Walker, The Guardian: 'Weapons of mass destruction'

U.S. military strategists had hoped the air attacks and the resulting destruction would generate public anger at the Taliban, forcing them to surrender bin Laden and members of his al Qaeda network. But Afghan refugees said just the opposite has occurred.

It might not have worked out exactly as planned, but the reasoning was sound. Consider the American public anger at the Bush administration generated by the 9/11 attacks, forcing it to embrace a more humane foreign policy. Victims instinctively empathise with their bombers, it's kind of like the Stockholm syndrome...

:: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post: 'Support Deepens For the Taliban, Refugees Report'

Military target:

"In case the dam and/or the three tunnels (with regulators) leading the water out of the dam also has been damaged it may result in a disaster of tremendous proportions," says an internal report prepared by the regional co-ordinator in the Pakistani city of Quetta and made available to The Independent. "If the dam collapses the whole Helmand valley would be flooded, risking the life of tens of thousands of people in addition to destroying the lands benefiting around 500,000 people (and feeding around 1,000,000 people) ... It is crucial to have the situation at the Kajaki dam/power plant assessed."

::Richard Lloyd Parry, The Independent: 'UN fears 'disaster' over strikes near huge dam'

Reading Seymour Hersh's article about the botched Delta Force raid of October 20th raises questions about what exactly happened in Somalia all those years ago...

PBS Frontline hosts an outstanding multimedia site documenting the bloody 1993 special forces battle in Mogadishu that left 18 dead and 84 wounded, in a debacle that continues to haunt US planners as they map their strategy in Afghanistan.

::PBS Frontline: 'Ambush in Mogadishu' (Thanks James)

Question: Why does a great, freedom loving country like America pay people to conceive of and then develop things like cluster bombs?

That's a good one. Read some pertinent responses from the Federation of American Scientists and the Mennonite Central Committee.

(A grateful and proud Mennonite salute to Booknotes for the links.)

Count on the Guardian to be disgustingly competent:

::Guardian Interactive: BLU-82 'daisy cutter' (interactive)

I've gotten a bit of mail asking me why I slam the American bombing, and do nothing to counter specious Taliban claims. Frankly, why bother?

The Taliban displayed the remains of what it claimed was a crashed American helicopter yesterday, as police in Pakistan investigated reports that another had been shot down by the Taliban in the remote south-west of the country.

"Their attack here will soon share the fate of this aircraft," a Taliban soldier declaimed through a megaphone, as a truck drove through the streets of Kabul, bearing pieces of metal and a two tyres. "Don't worry: we will defeat the Americans and their Allies."

Residents came into the street to see the metal parts and two tyres, mounted on the back of a vehicle.

We should expect that the best and brightest of western democracy can assemble more compelling propaganda than this, if only as a matter of pride...

:: Richard Lloyd Parry, The Independent: 'Regime shows 'crash remains' '

The Guardian leads with its own story on the botched Special Forces mission of October 20th, confirming Seymour Hersh's account, emphasizing the discordance between Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, and adding its own gruesome touches:

According to an authoritative and independent source in constant touch with Kandahar, Delta Force commandos, the most secretive and elite in the US army, searched Mullah Omar's compound but found it had been stripped of anything that might provide useful intelligence. As they emerged they came under intense fire, forcing them to retreat. The Taliban later retrieved "an American foot" from the scene, still in its boot.

"There was a lot of blood," the source said. "The Taliban had expected an attack and had taken everything of value out of the compound. They were ready and waiting. They were only too delighted when the Americans arrived. It was not as if Mullah Omar was going to leave a note inside saying: 'Osama is hiding here'."

During the raid one of the Chinook helicopters was badly damaged. The Taliban later showed off a section of its landing gear and said they had shot the helicopter down.

The account provided to the Guardian was consistent with [Hersh's] article published yesterday in the New Yorker magazine.

::Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian: 'Revealed: how bungled US raid came close to disaster'

These's been a lot of buzz about Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article reporting the tough fight US Special Forces encountered during missions on October 20th. What was supposed to be a turkey shoot, with one of the two raids apparently staged for sexy television footage, instead turned into a "total goat fuck"—military slang meaning that everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The Delta team stormed [Mullah Omar's] complex, and found little of value: no Mullah and no significant documents.

"As they came out of the house, the shit hit the fan," one senior officer recounted. "It was like an ambush. The Taliban were firing light arms and either R.P.G.s"—rocket-propelled grenades—"or mortars." The chaos was terrifying. A high-ranking officer who has had access to debriefing reports told me that the Taliban forces were firing grenades, and that they seemed to have an unlimited supply. Delta Force, he added, found itself in "a tactical firefight, and the Taliban had the advantage." The team immediately began taking casualties, and evacuated. The soldiers broke into separate units—one or more groups of four to six men each and a main force that retreated to the waiting helicopters.

Although accounts of the botched raid appeared in the British press the following week, the story has not been reported by any of the major American media outlets until now. Hersh reports that the Pentagon could not tell the American people the details of what really happened at Kandahar, in the angry words of one senior military officer, "because it doesn't want to appear that it doesn't know what it's doing."

Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense is denying the story.

::Seymour Hersh, New Yorker: 'Escape and Evasion'
::General Richard B. Myers , DoD News: 'Gen. Myers Interview with Meet the Press, NBC TV via Cursor
::Charles Cutshaw, Jane’s World Armies: 'Special forces and the reality of military operations in Afghanistan'

As a bombing campaign it's something like another Rolling Stones stadium tour. Big, loud, lots of smoke and explosions, it triggers flashbacks to the late-sixties/early seventies, is exorbitantly expensive, and receives adulatory, wildly inaccurate saturation media coverage.

But, the new Rolling Thunder Revue knows how to kick out the jams on the evil-doers, right?

The Taliban leaders, and the thousands of foreign volunteers, also know that there is nowhere to run. If they lose this war, they will either be killed by the Alliance warlords, or else sent home to face probable execution.

And the Taliban remain a formidable military force. Unnoticed under the weight of bombs last week, there was just one tiny adjustment to the front lines down on this plain - and it went in the Taliban's favour.

Several hundred metres were taken from the fighters of the Northern Alliance. Not bad for a force that is being hammered day and night by the United States Air Force.

Gulbahar bazaar, a stone's throw from the airstrip, reveals something else about conditions on the Taliban side of the line: this market is packed with food, rice, cooking oil, Iranian Pepsi and boxes of biscuits. And all of it comes over, via donkey, from Taliban territory.

The Taliban, far from being short of food, have so much of it that they allow it to be exported to their enemies - charging each smuggler, known locally as Donkey Men, $10 a time. It is this trade that keeps much of the Northern Alliance, now cut off from road links with aid depots to the north, from starvation.

Traders here report that conditions are indeed desperate for the poor on the other side of the line - but they also say the Taliban themselves are fit, well fed and ready for war.

Just like the Stones when they're on tour, there are reports of backstage ego-clashes amongst the leaders:

It is the commander of US forces in the Middle East, General Tommy Franks, who is deciding the targets to hit each day, and which ones not to hit. Lawrence Kaplan, a well-connected international commentator for New Republic magazine, says Franks has shown a "marked aversion to risk", which has led to arguments with Rumsfeld about the vigour of the campaign.

Rumsfeld is bouncing off the walls, says Kaplan, caught between General Franks and a White House insistent on leaving the war to the military.

"Cheney's laying low, Condi [Rice, the National Security Adviser] is in over her head, [Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley is cautious, [Rumsfeld] isn't close to the President, and the President trusts the military," an Administration official told Kaplan. "That's just the way it is."

Yet like reunion tours, blundering bombing campaigns don't look to be going away any time soon. Peter Preston lays the blame (for the bombing, at least) on the intelligence community:

He was already America's (and thus Britain's) most wanted man, vainly searched for over the years. He had warned floridly of a big coup coming. Yet nobody was ready, nobody had a clue. Intelligence sat stunned at the back of the class.

And since the twin towers imploded, things have grown worse, not better. Outside America, in the hills of southern Afghanistan, Bin Laden sits unscathed with his video camera. Why don't the "crack" special forces teams go in and root him out? Because they have no idea where he is. Because information on the ground (about almost anything useful) is chronically deficient. Because the rising of the Pashtun tribes against the Taliban that CIA analysts predicted simply hasn't happened. Because the Taliban are tougher nuts than those fabled experts in their cosy offices supposed.

The carpet bombing that is turning off the Arab world was never, of course, a part of the plan. The weeks of collateral damage and friendly fire were never strategic imperatives. They are there, continuing, because nobody has a brighter idea or better information. Thud and blunder replacing intelligence.

Lest I be tarred with the dread brush of defeatism, allow me to pass on cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's reasons for patriotic optimism.


::Chris Stephen and Tim Judah, The Guardian: 'Hawks push unfamiliar allies into a belligerent embrace '
::Gay Alcorn, Sydney Morning Herald: 'Embattled on all fronts, the US badly needs a victory somewhere, anywhere'
::Peter Preston, The Guardian: 'Sack the intelligence chiefs who have failed us so badly'
::Tom Tomorrow, This Modern World, Salon: Patriotic Optimism!

This is war! We've all got to suck it in, acquiesce to regrettable but necessary force in Afghanistan, unprecedented but needed rollbacks of certain civil luxuries -- er, liberties, and tough it out through the churn of media panic and official malfunction. Oh yeah, lots of us will lose our jobs, too. But thankfully, we can count on the beneficence of corporations, those rapid-responsive, 24-7, transcendentally transnational, and inherently ultra-efficient organizations that have rendered the nation-state obsolete. Let's hear it for the selfless leadership of the corporate elite!

Richard Sylla, professor of business history at New York University's Stern School of Business, said corporate lobbying for tax breaks during a crisis is a relatively new behavior. "Taxes went up in World War II and nobody seemed to object," he said. "There was more of a spirit of cooperation. It was more `What's in the national interest?' than `Can you do something for us?' "

One egregious me-first move now gaining traction is repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax, created in 1986 to keep profitable companies from using loopholes to eliminate taxes. Even worse, the House plan would return all the A.M.T. ever paid by these corporations. That would send billions in rebates to I.B.M. and Ford Motor and hundreds of millions to General Motors, General Electric, Texas Utilities and DaimlerChrysler.

If corporate America were groaning under the weight of onerous tax rates, repealing the alternative minimum tax might be acceptable. But while the presumed corporate tax rate is 35 percent, loopholes bring the effective average tax rate for big companies way down. Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal advocacy group in Washington, calculated the effective corporate tax rate at 20.1 percent in 1998, on average, down from 26.5 percent in 1988.

Bill Moyers presents a similar argument, widening the scope of the indictment:

It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say "This was their finest hour"? That's easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies. And open the Alaska wilderness to drilling--that's something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue waves at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave--why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule of law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these mercenaries sacrifice is for suckers. So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was they who declared class war twenty years ago, and it was they who won. They're on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if ever they were going to practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the moment. To hide now behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis fatally separates them from the common course of American life.

It's been endlessly repeated and accepted that September 11th knocked out the anti-corporate movement as a political force. Without a doubt, tremendous organizational energy has flowed away from economic activism into anti-war activism, and the present climate makes it hard to imagine Genoa-type street battles being pitched anywhere in the foreseeable future. But the explosions have rocked the corporate world as well, and the utter nothingness at the core of global turbocapitalism is increasingly obvious:

The CIA warned pre September 11, "that the global economy will create many winners but... behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability and cultural alienation" that "will foster political, ethnic, ideological and religious extremism along with the violence which often accompanies it". Even Henry Kissinger warns of how "ideological radicalism" breeds in "a two-tiered system of globalised elites living behind security gates... while the populations at large are tempted by nationalism, ethnicity and a variety of movements to free themselves".

This is the silver lining for the anti-corporate movement. The tragic events of September 11 have underlined the urgency of its critique of globalisation. It shattered the traditional notion that security depended on the individual state's superior military technology. Now, security requires unprecedented transnational cooperation on a huge agenda ranging from intelligence to poverty eradication. Old obstacles are tumbling like ninepins; most strikingly, if financial controls can be put in place to cut off terrorist financing, why can't mechanisms be developed to exact the Tobin tax, which - a New Economics Foundation report out today shows -would pay for all the 2015 development targets?

::Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times: 'Hands Out, Even in a Time of Crisis' (Thanks Mia)
::Bill Moyers, The Nation: 'Which America Will We Be Now?'
::Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian: 'No retreat in Doha'