The New Collateral Damage
A barroom brawl.

November 14, 2001 5:15 p.m.

s the Taliban cuts and runs for the mountains, there will be less collateral damage from the U.S. bombing campaign — which means that critics have to find some other way to complain about the war.

And they have already settled on it — Northern Alliance "atrocities."

I put quote marks around atrocities not because I think prisoners of war should be shot. Nor do I doubt that the Northern Alliance has already acted brutally and will in the future. But against the background of recent Afghan history what seems to be occurring on the ground so far in Kabul and elsewhere is the equivalent of a barroom brawl.

Remember: When the Taliban took Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, they drove up and down the streets for two days and shot everyone and everything in sight. Pulling someone from a ditch in front of a New York Times photographer and shooting him in the chest — as Northern Alliance troops did the other day — is certainly awful, but barely registers as an Afghan atrocity.

Nonetheless, Maureen Dowd today — reflecting, as usual, the laziest bottom line of liberal conventional wisdom — writes, "We give the Northern Alliance an air force and they embarrass us with savage force."

Well, maybe I'm hopelessly retrograde, but I'm not embarrassed.

Just as we did everything possible to limit collateral damage from our air strikes, we have done everything we can to try to convince the Northern Alliance not to kill innocents, including going to the extraordinary (and ridiculous) length of asking them not to occupy Kabul.

Any nastiness on the ground is a product of the corruption of Afghan culture, a reflection of the fact that Afghanis haven't yet grasped the rules of civilized warfare. We are no more ultimately responsible for this nastiness than we are for bombs accidentally going astray in a war that was foisted upon us by our enemies.

Besides which, retribution is not unusual when a people has been crushed under foreign occupation for years, as has essentially been the case in Afghanistan, thanks to bin Laden and his "Arabs." When the German occupation of France ended, surely some collaborators got rough treatment, but the allied armies didn't seem too embarrassed by it.

The only way to try to prevent any retaliation against the Taliban whatsoever would be for the United States to have invaded ourselves. Given the logistical difficulties and the time it would have taken to deploy, this wasn't a realistic option, at least in the short term. But reality doesn't seem to intrude here.

Indeed, it is a trick of soft anti-Americanism to hold the U.S. up to impossible moral standards. To wit: We have waged an excruciatingly precise and calibrated bombing campaign to avoid civilian casualties, have repeatedly urged the Northern Alliance to restrain themselves, but a captured Taliban soldier got shot on Tuesday. For shame!

This logic, followed to its conclusion, means that we simply can't act in the world, because something might go wrong or we might have to forge an alliance with a nasty country or army. And then our enemies win, although New York Times photographers may not be there to capture all the consequences.