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Up close and personal

PAST wars - especially past wars which have been won - breed misconceptions. Nato's victory in Kosovo two years ago comforted those who, unlike the Prime Minister, had argued that such crises could be resolved by aerial bombardment alone.

The Gulf conflict, won in days by mass invasion, encouraged the delusion that modern infantry wars are necessarily settled quickly. The battle on the ground in Afghanistan, which began on Friday night, is of a very different character, and must be approached accordingly.

This phase of the war on terrorism is unlikely to be quick or easy. The incursions into Taliban-controlled territory will be not be made by swarms of infantrymen but by special forces, with highly specific and meticulously selected goals. As The Sunday Telegraph reveals today, America has requested the involvement of the entire SAS. There could be no clearer indication of what lies ahead: not a 21st century D-Day announced with great fanfare, but a series of special operations many of which will not be disclosed. The Western media will need to discover new reserves of patience if the conflict is not to be misrepresented.

Hitherto, the war has been "asymmetric", the West's technological and numerical advantage pitted against al-Qaeda's primitive fanaticism and elusiveness. Some of this advantage has been surrendered with the deployment of ground troops. Our special forces are better equipped and trained than their Afghan adversaries. But in many ways the killing field will soon become more level than it has been during the bombing raids which began two weeks ago. In 1999, the citizens of Belgrade were simply incapable of withstanding the onslaught which Nato unleashed upon them; the Iraqi conscripts in the Gulf War were pathetically unable to match the massed professional soldiers of the West. But the Afghan people have been almost uniquely brutalised by centuries of invasion. They are not supermen but they are an enemy to be taken seriously. We must embark on this new phase with realism as well as resolve.

It cannot be stated often enough that the reason the West is in Afghanistan is to root out Osama bin Laden and destroy the al-Qaeda network. If the overthrow of the Taliban regime is necessary to achieve that goal - which seems inevitable - then so be it. But we must accept in advance that any successor regime in Afghanistan will not correspond to Western standards of democracy and civility. "Nation-building", to use a phrase hitherto reviled by the Bush administration, may be part of the "war on terrorism", but only inasmuch as it protects the West's interests. Our task is not to build a new society in this wretched country but to complete an act of self-defence - which at this stage amounts to the hunting down of bin Laden and his men.

The simplicity of this goal has been obscured in some of the complex diplomacy which has followed the atrocities of September 11. The Prime Minister seems convinced that a settlement in the Middle East must now be pursued with greater urgency than ever. He is an instinctive believer in momentum. But momentum can easily rebound on he who tries to ride it. Yasser Arafat's visit to Downing Street last week sent precisely the wrong signal: that Western leaders have swallowed bin Laden's great lie that he represents the Palestinian cause and that appeasement of the Palestinians will help to end the terrorism he has perpetrated. In fact, bin Laden's goal is to destroy America, not to create a Palestinian state. It suits the leader of al-Qaeda for the current bloodshed in Israel and the Occupied Territories to be seen as a microcosm of his own demented struggle. But it is no such thing.

The relevance of the Middle East to the new land war is not that a settlement must be achieved before al-Qaeda can be destroyed, but that the Israeli experience over the past 30 years has many lessons for those fighting terrorism today. After the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the terrorists responsible were eventually freed; after months of painstaking detective work, Israeli secret agents, led by the future Prime Minister, Ehud Barak (who was dressed as a woman and carrying a purse full of explosives) tracked down the ringleaders and assassinated them. This, more than the Gulf War, is a model for the task which awaits the West's special forces in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The sheer scale of the attacks on September 11 has inevitably nurtured an expectation of a sudden blitz which will bring instant justice for a hideous crime which cost thousands of lives. But at this stage of the war, the only way we can be sure that we are winning is by capturing or, in all probability, assassinating bin Laden. No blitz could possibly achieve such a goal which is as complex to achieve as it is simple to state. In this war, the West will not enjoy the luxury of speedy resolution. The greatest duty we owe to those now fighting on the ground on our behalf is to show the same patience and a fraction of the resolve which will undoubtedly be required of them.

-- Anonymous, October 20, 2001