Dr Farrukh Saleem

The writer is an Islamabad-based

freelance columnist

farrukh15@hotmail.com

On October 7, General Tommy Franks, the Commander-in-Chief of US Central Command (CINC), was given the job of resurrecting American ego so badly bruised a month earlier by the crumbling of the World Trade Centre. The general is Bush's top conscript with orders to transform Afghanistan's dense rubble into finer debris. Lt Gen Charles F Wald is General Franks' air commander. Wald commands a sophisticated air operations centre at Prince Sultan Air Base in Riyadh where he generates the daily list of targets.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary Defence, Gen Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both in Washington and Gen Franks from his HQ at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa (Florida) routinely hold a conference call in the morning and one at day-end. They assess the "campaign's progress, plotting its next moves and deciding on targets. "

President Bush continues to insist that "we are a peace-loving people". Arundhati Roy, the acclaimed author of 'The God of Small Things', rebukes "Love is hate, north is south, peace is war."

Then there is Bush's 10-member war cabinet: Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul O'Neil, George Tenet, Lewis Libby, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, Andrew Card Jr and Condoleezza Rice. All of those heads put together have failed to define America's war objective(s). Is getting Osama the definition of success? Destroying the al-Qaeda network, installing a new government or getting Mulla Omar? The war cabinet, however, has successfully implanted a concentrated wave of war hysteria throughout the continental United States (anyone who even debates the war is now an automatic traitor).

To be certain, Lt General Wald has the easiest of jobs. All he does is: First, mark down images from the multi-billion dollar spysat satellites - Lacrosse 2, Lacrosse 3, USA 86, USA 116 and USA 129 - of all the $10 tents in Kandahar, Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz. Second, fire off Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles procured at the cost of $1.4 million each.

My guess is that on the first night the satellites had picked no more than fifty tents in all the six Afghan cities put together. A total of fifty Tomahawks, therefore, left the $4.5 billion USS Enterprise Battle Group. On Day 2, Americans were told that their forces had hit the 'command and control centre' in Kandahar. The reality is that the Taliban have a couple of walkie-talkies one of which is 'command' and the other 'control'. On Day 3, the US launched its first daylight strikes. The claim being that some 20-dozen Hornets, Tomcats, F-15 supersonic tactical fighters, F-16 multi-role fighters, B-1B long-range heavy bombers and B2 stealth bombers had finally achieved "air supremacy" over 2-dozen fixed-wing, largely cannibalised, 1955 vintage MiG-21s (the oldest aircraft on the Vinson is F/A-18 "Alpha" model, the first generation Hornet some 15 years old).

Right after the first attack, Mohammad Khan, who stepped on a mine last year and lost a leg, spent his life savings of Afghanis 100,000 (about $3) buying up an old battery and putting up light bulbs on top of a cliff nearby. On Day 2, American bombers knocked off all power sources in and around south-eastern Afghanistan. The next morning Mohammad Khan and his five teenage sons gathered up all the scrap just around where the bulb was on their donkeys, destined for Chaman (the border Pakistani town). The scrap was sold for Rs25,000. The Khan family accumulated a jackpot of Afghanis 12 million ($400). They were rich beyond their wildest imagination (Afghanistan's per capita annual income stands at under Afghanis 3 million).

On Day 4, Behram Shah discovered a dead goat and an unexploded Tomahawk next to it. In Herat, where Behram lives with his four daughters and two sons, the Shah family sold the Tomahawk and bought two 50-lb healthy goats with the proceeds. The daughters then began supplying the additional milk to patients in the Herat Hospital.

The euphoria for the Khans was short-lived. On the evening of October 21, at about 7:30 pm, a dozen laser-guided smart bombs missed their targets by several miles and fell on Thori village. According to the Human Rights Watch, "at least twenty-three civilians, the majority of them young children, were killed...." Among the killed were Mohammad Khan's two sons and his wife who were all cremated alive right in front of him.

The Shahs celebrated there new-found wealth but for a mere 13 days. On October 23, 100 people were killed when US and British war planes bombed a hospital in the western city of Herat. Among them were Behram Shah's three daughters and a son. On Oct 24, UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker reported that "US bombs struck a mosque and a nearby village during raids on the western city of Herat." The Shah family could not have taken any more losses; they have already had more than their fair share of grief.

Herat has also been at the receiving end of the extremely controversial cluster bombs. According to the UN Mine Action Program Afghanistan (MAPA), clusters have a "notorious history.... When the bomb explodes, the steel splits so you get hundreds of high-velocity steel fragments travelling at the speed of a rifle bullet. They can kill or injure people from over 100 meters from the point of detonation.

They are a bright yellow colour and look quite innocuous so they are very attractive for children. But they are so sensitive that just picking them up could cause them to detonate (during the Kosovo conflict NATO forces dropped 220,000 cluster bombs in one month, leaving more than 15,000 faulty ones on the ground)."

General Franks has now learned that Afghans cannot be bombed to submission. He further stands educated - what most Iraqis, Sudanese and Yugoslavs have known for the past several years - that smart bombs are not smart after all. For future wars, America needs to develop new inexpensive, perhaps dumb bombs as most of its enemies happen to be pathetically poor living in regions where life is cheap.

On September 11, Middle Eastern terrorists took 5,766 innocent lives. Between October 7 and November 4, all that American terror attacks have achieved is raising the tally of innocent lives lost by at least a thousand. Would the bombing stop once Afghan casualties also reach 5,766?

Over the past four weeks, the legendary Afghan hospitality has hosted more than half a million tons worth of bombs and that converts to 20 kilos for every man, woman and child in the country. That's more than what any human being deserves. Afghanistan's dense rubble spread throughout its 647,500 sq km of rugged terrain has already been turned into finer debris. American ego must have been resurrected by now. General Franks' job is done. Now stop the bombing, please.