Keeping objective in U.S.-led attack

Stefan Kornelius, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Washington

The murder of Abdul Haq, the Afghan opposition and Pashtun leader, was a painful reminder that eliminating the Taliban regime will not be done quickly.

Haq was a great hope, the key figure in the anti-Taliban opposition. His mission was to persuade tribal leaders to set up an internal Afghan coalition to disempower the Taliban.

His death shows how quickly the balance of power can be shifted in the conflict. Gen. Massoud's death has been followed by that of Abdul Haq. The Taliban are striking with cold precision to avert their fate.

That was precisely what U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld meant when he said, how difficult it would be to find Osama bin Laden. But he later added that it was not just bin Laden but the Taliban and their entire terrorist environment.

That is all now commonplace. It may take years. Bin Laden may never be caught. But Afghanistan still needs a new system.

Even so, Western public opinion is showing growing impatience with the United States. Every report of a setback is seen as evidence that the entire U.S. strategy is ineffective.

Critics say how the war should not be waged. That none but military targets must be hit and the fighting must end when Ramadhan begins in mid-November (although that did not stop Egypt and Syria from fighting the Yom Kippur War during the Muslim fasting month). They say that war can breed yet more terror and that the West's economic system and alliance policy in the Arab world is to blame for injustice.

Yet they fail to come up with a convincing answer to the question of how to deal with the immediate problem of a terrorist threat emanating from the Taliban's surroundings.

Their line of argument is short-termist, assuming that the chaos wrought in 20 years of war might be changed overnight into a system of order. It is also too general -- it urges swift solutions to global problems while progress will initially only be measurable on a small scale.

Above all, this criticism is dishonest because it fails to offer an alternative. In murdering Abdul Haq the Taliban have demonstrated yet again what political and military categories guide their thinking.

Honesty in this conflict must include not keeping silent about the problems of warfare and not losing sight of the objective.