CKNW Editorial
for October 30, 2001

First off,. A Question to David Gibbons, QC. Back when you took on the Glen Clark case you declared that Mr Clark had paid all the bills Mr Pilarinos had presented him. You threatened to sue the pants off anyone who said otherwise. Well, I said otherwise and opined that he did not pay for the labour. I was not sued despite having repeated that claim many, many times.

Now you say that Mr Clark proffered a cheque to Pilarinos in full payment of the labour raising this question and that Mr Pilarinos tore it up – why didn’t you say so at the time when this was so clearly in issue? If the presentation of the cheque is a full defence, making the rest of the case a trifling matter, why didn’t you say so at the time, saving Mr Clark and his family a couple of years of torment and the long suffering public God only knows how much in legal costs, much of which is going into your fat wallet

"War," said Sherman, "is hell." It was hell in Sherman’s day when the good guys wore blue, the bad guys wore grey and you could measure your success by the amount of territory you controlled. So it was with all previous wars including the Gulf War. You could see what you wanted and determine when you got it.

The war against terrorism, from the outset, was going to be difficult to wage and impossible to gauge.

One of the main problems was the enormity of the crime that started this war. There is usually a revenge factor built into wars but the calamity of September 11 was Pearl Harbour 100 times over. There was, and remains, an enormous national feeling in the States that something must be done … something very big must be done. The American armed forces must be seen by the public as administering a very large and very fatal blow to the enemy. Much worse than Sherman’s war or any of the more modern wars, this one is on television with CNN becoming the conduit through which Americans watch events. As time passes and the American public doesn’t see progress, amongst other things the popularity of President Bush and his government will deteriorate. Voices of enthusiastic past support will become silent. Criticism will become louder.

The trouble is there are no moving armies – the Gulf War at least had that. The targets for aircraft are vague, ill-defined and results hard to corroborate. The opposition within the country to the Taliban, whom everyone assumes must be the enemy, is not much better than the Taliban themselves and it’s difficult to know what this Northern Alliance stands for other than it wants power. It rather reminds one of an ongoing war in the Congo where each guerilla group has as its only war aim replacing the other. It gets worse as we go along. Even if the Northern Alliance were the repository of democratic ideals, and they’re scarcely that, how do you help them? They are not representative of the majority tribe in the country. Moreover, because of the terrain, it’s most unlikely that American troops can, except in commando type raids, be of much use to them. And the Northern Alliance have a nasty problem – they keep losing their leaders to Taliban assassinations.,

The Americans have got themselves into a much bigger pickle than in Kosovo if only because in Kosovo it was possible, though perhaps not terribly fair, to make sinners of the Serbs and sinned against of the Kosovars. Moreover, Kosovo – however difficult the terrain, is not Afghanistan and it does not have a 2500 year history of armed tribesman scrapping amongst themselves except when they were repelling every invader from Alexander the Great through the British Empire to the Soviet Union.

But the real problem the Americans face is that there is no goal line to cross. What is the objective? To free Afghans from the tyranny of the Taliban? Considering the past support of the Taliban by the United States at a time when the Soviet Union was the enemy getting rid of this ghastly group might seem, amongst other things, a bit hypocritical as a war aim. Especially, as I say, when you can’t offer an alternative that’s much better.

Is it to "get" Osama bin Laden? Laudable though that objective certainly is, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeldt, the hawk of hawks, has public stated his doubts on this score. And if you did get rid of him, would that end terrorism?

Highly unlikely.

So what is the end game here? And how long will the American people go on supporting a war without achievable aims much less achieved ones?

If the American Administration can’t come up with achievable aims nor achieved ones, how does it slide out of the commitment to end terrorism they have made? After all, this was the declared aim of the Bush regime – we will get rid of terrorism and make America safe.

I don’t criticize the Americans for getting into this pickle. I can’t imagine any powerful nation, now or in the past, permitting large scale destruction of their major city without lashing back at the best candidate for enemy – and bin Laden and the Taliban certainly qualify as that.

What to do?

Perhaps you have to declare that the object was to contain terrorism and that has now been done. Thereafter you confine yourselves to three things:- preventing terrorism in every way possible (and you will have many failures) becoming adept at rooting out the heart of terrorism and dealing with it, and retaliating effectively when it occurs.

When you think about it, these three things require a huge update in surveillance and undercover work. But even Israel’s superb Mossad can only be judged on the basis of how much worse it would have been without them.

The bottom line is, I think, very easy to see but hard to accept. We will tighten up immigration and refugee claims and we will be ever more vigilant in areas where terrorism can most easily strike. But this fact must be faced - terrorism on the North American continent is here to stay and like the citizens of Belfast, Tel Aviv and London, we’re just going to have to get used to it.