PROTECTION OF HUMANITY - Afghanistan
US planes have been bombing the Tora Bora complex
Friday, 7 December, 2001 BBC
US planes have been bombing the Tora Bora complex
Anti-Taleban forces are reported to have seized
the main base of Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora area of eastern
Afghanistan during intensive fighting overnight.
A spokesman for the Northern Alliance, Mohammed
Habeel, told the Reuters news agency that troops led by commander Hazrat
Ali were now in control of most of the main caves in the complex.
Several hundred members of Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network were thought to have been based there.
Mr Habeel said Arabs, including women, had been
captured, along with weapons and vehicles, but that they had not found
Bin Laden himself.
"Osama was not in Tora Bora during the past
days of fighting and if he had been, he has probably slipped into
Pakistan," Mr Habeel said.
The BBC's Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar says
two local anti-Taleban commanders seem to be competing as to who will
either capture or kill Bin Laden and claim a reward offered by the US
Government.
There are reports that many of Bin Laden's Arab
fighters have moved up the hills from where they would easily be able to
escape to other parts of Afghanistan, or into Pakistan.
The cave complex, about 56 kilometres (35 miles)
south-west of Jalalabad, was used by mujahideen forces fighting Soviet
troops during the 1979-89 war.
The underground base was built with covert
assistance from Washington.
Civilian casualties
B-52 bombers have been pounding the Tora Bora
cave complex with 110- and 225-kg bombs, setting off orange flashes and
plumes of smoke in the mountains.
The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported
that the bombing had started a forest fire near the complex.
According to one international humanitarian
group, scores of civilians have been killed by US bombs in the area.
French aid group Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF)
reports that more than 80 Afghan civilians have been killed and 50
wounded in US air strikes around Tora Bora in recent days.
MSF had itself recovered the bodies.
The Pentagon insists that all its strikes in the
Tora Bora region have successfully hit their targets.
Spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the bombardment
was focused on the Tora Bora cave region because al-Qaeda members were
believed to be sheltering there.
She said that "some al-Qaeda
leadership" may have been hit, but could not confirm "names or
positions".
The Pentagon launched an investigation following
a bomb strike in the south of Afghanistan on Wednesday morning which
accidentally killed three US soldiers and five anti-Taleban fighters.
Other News
It is not yet clear whether the 900-kilogram
(2,000-pound) "smart bomb's" satellite guidance system failed,
or whether it was given the wrong co-ordinates.
In the 1970s, a prominent Chilean dissident
called Orlando Letelier was murdered by a car bomb in Washington DC, by
an agent of the Chilean secret service, Dina.
Letelier had been a member of the
democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende, which
was deposed by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973.
Letelier's murder was part of a plan called
Operation Condor, carried out by the secret services of six South
American countries, all with right-wing dictatorships, all with growing
left-wing insurgencies at home.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew
about Operation Condor - though there is no evidence that they knew in
advance about the Letelier assassination - and lent it logistical and
communications support.
Switching allegiances
In the 1980s, the United States armed and funded
the Afghan mujahideen when it was fighting the Soviet forces who had
invaded the country in 1979.
The mujahideen (of which Osama Bin Laden was a
part) used acts of terror then against civilian targets - blowing up
schools and torturing and murdering captured Russian soldiers they had
captured.
Was Osama Bin Laden a terrorist at that time? Or
a freedom fighter?
The danger in this is clear. If the war against
terrorism is to be genuinely global - if it is to unite the world - it
must surely be credible to the world outside the North Atlantic bubble
of the United States and Western Europe.
For if it appears to be a war against a certain
kind of terrorism only - the kind that attacks America and its friends -
then it will look less and less like a war against terrorism and more
and more like a war for American self-defence.
Now that is no less legitimate a war, for
manifestly the United States was attacked and has the right to self-defence,
but it is not the same thing as a war against terrorism.
And we must not be surprised if much of the world
- particularly parts of it that have experience of terror inflicted by
America's friends - view it with suspicion and resentment.
Dual argument
Terrorism must be fought in the short and medium
terms.
It must be possible to denounce what happened on
11 September, to back military action to try to ensure that those who
perpetrated it are brought to justice, and to try to prevent it ever
occurring again, while at the same time arguing a bigger point: that in
the longer term, a world in which so many people feel so dispossessed,
so powerless, is not a safe world.
For security is so intimately interwoven with justice, that in a world in which so many legitimate grievances are left unresolved, we will never be delivered from the threat - and the fear - of terror.
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