That’s my basic response to the scenes from Kabul. And it’s the subject of a great editorial today in London’s Daily Telegraph. But the most astonishing news is that late last night, according to the New York Times, “United States intelligence agencies reported … that members of southern tribes opposed to the Taliban were massing near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. In the strategic eastern city of Jalalabad, residents reported that the Taliban had announced they were pulling out and turning the city over to its previous civilian administration.” Could the Afghanistan war be over this quickly?
THE PRESS AND THE WAR II: An addendum. It’s also true, as a correspondent suggests, that the reporters and pundits and editors simply cannot bring themselves to admit they’ve been almost completely wrong about the war so far. First, Bush is an idiot who cannot run anything. (89 percent ratings and a secure grasp on scripted oratory, diplomacy and military strategy). Then, airpower wouldn’t work. (Tell that to the people of Kabul). Then Afghanistan would be a quagmire. (Tell that to the Special Forces). Then winter would destroy us (in fact, it will help us). Then the Northern Alliance is useless. (Until it won.) Wolfowitz is a madman. (He’s the guy behind a strategy that’s actually working). Hard to feel great after all that, so we should perhaps forgive them a little glumness.
TAKE AN ORWELL AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING: During this ordeal, I’ve been bucked up no end by reading Orwell’s only recently published war diaries. (They’re in the massive twenty-volume complete works set published in 1998 by Secker and Warburg.) I was up the other night till 3 am and couldn’t put them down. A few things: it’s clear that in Britain in 1939 and 1940, large swathes of the left-wing intelligentsia were deeply defeatist, just as they are now. Equally, large numbers of far-right upper-class types were willing to cave to Hitler, just as a few crackpot rightists are as well today. The disconnect between ordinary Brits and their elites was just as pronounced. I can just see Orwell being accused of being a fascist by David Talbot – Orwell was throwing around accusations of treachery left, right and center. Here’s one sentence: “The unconscious treacherousness of the British ruling class in what is in effect a class war is too obvious to be worth mentioning. The difficult question is how much deliberate treacherousness exists.” (That’s from his diary on June 27 1940.) Then there’s this wonderful passage in an April 1940 review of Malcolm Muggeridge: “It is all very well to be “advanced” and “enlightened,” to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognize it under strange disguises, and also sympathize with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Agnes Ortiz said her son is not a terrorist. ‘No way, he’s Navajo — Native American — from this country. We were here before all you people,’ she said.” – Washington Post. This is the funniest part of a pretty funny story about some poor schmuck who got arrested by air marshalls when he tried to go to the bathroom 15 minutes before landing. The unfunny part is that the guy, first released, has subsequently been charged with alleged weed possession. I think that’s called insult to injury.
BETTER NEWS FROM FRANCE: Baudrillard, mercifully, is not the only member of the French intelligentsia. In fact, in many ways, intellectuals in France have long abandoned the tortured nihilism that now infects many American campuses. An inspiring essay in today’s “Le Monde” is as clear a defense of this war as one can imagine. The authors compare civilian casualties in Afghanistan with those during the Anglo-American liberation of France in 1944 and 1945. They decry the extreme left position of moral equivalence between the Taliban and the West: “In fact, Bush and Blair are the elected leaders of the two oldest democracies. Their two countries share an unimpeachable commitment to liberty. Neither country was infected with the totalitarian virus, red or brown, which accelerated the decline of the European continent in the twentieth century.” Yes, the world turns.
The Dish 