Afghan air war loses sight of real enemy

It has been a bad week for those who still believe that Afghanistan constitutes the altruistic and winnable battlefront of the 'war on terror'.

On Friday, within days of a Taliban ambush that killed 10 French soldiers, 90 civilians died in a US bombing raid near Herat, 60 of them children. This attack followed last month's bombing of a wedding party, which killed 47 guests as well as the bride.

President Karzai wants to renegotiate terms under which US and Nato troops operate in Afghanistan. These bombings form part of a disturbing pattern. In the past 12 months, US & Nato bombings in Afghanistan have more than doubled as the Taliban-centred insurgency has grown more powerful. Taliban insurgents have also killed large numbers of civilians, but the increasing reliance on high-tech counter-insurgency tactics has resulted in a steady increase in 'collateral damage'.  All this has fatally tarnished the coalition's attempts to present itself as the liberators of the Afghan people.

This discrepancy between rhetoric and reality is not new. From Napoleon's invasion of Egypt to Operation Iraqi Freedom, imperial interventions have been presented as disinterested and generous acts of liberation. When foreign armies are given unlimited and unchecked power over people of a different race, religion or nationality who they regard as backward and inferior, such powers are easily abused, particularly when the population refuses to accept its deliverance.

In wars against guerrilla enemies, such chauvinism is often matched by an inability to differentiate between armed combatants and their real or imagined supporters.

This distinction is always more blurred when such wars are fought from the air. In Algeria, French soldiers routinely napalmed suspect villages while their government claimed to be fighting international communism and the 'empire of Islam'. In Vietnam, US bombers killed tens of thousands of civilians. In Iraq, after World War I, Britain relied heavily on RAF bombings to suppress an anti-British insurgency.

One of the participants in this campaign was Arthur 'Bomber' Harris. In 1924, the future architect of strategic bombing in Germany enthusiastically described the psychological impact of one RAF attack on Arab and Kurdish insurgents who "now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target."

Ironically, one of the first battlegrounds where Harris acquired his expertise was Afghanistan, where bombing brought a British victory in the Third Afghan War in 1919.

Now the same dismal process is unfolding in the era of surgical strikes, pinpoint technology and legal consultations on targeting guidelines. Though carpet-bombing drove the Taliban from power, such methods are unlikely to win the unconventional warfare at which Afghans have traditionally been so adept and are more likely to be counter-productive. In his visit to Afghanistan last week, Gordon Brown claimed that British soldiers were preventing terror attacks in the UK. Such vacuous drivel can't hide what George Orwell called 'inconvenient facts'.

Not only are the US and Nato failing to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans; they support a corrupt and unviable government and are committed to a war that they cannot win on the ground, let alone from 20,000ft.   

All this, as the baseball player Yogi Berra once said, is like deja vu all over again. Once again, the 'white man's burden' begins with talk of nation-building, morality and civilisation, and ends with bombs raining down on wedding parties. The more bombs are dropped, the more likely it is that civilians will die. And no matter how often these deaths are denied or explained away with weasel expressions of 'regret', they will continue to erode the lofty ideals of Nato's 'civilising mission' in Afghanistan  - in the eyes of Afghans if not the West.

"If we don't drop a bomb they [the Taliban] win," declared the Nato glove puppet Mark Laity last month. The history of guerrilla warfare suggests that armies that think like this are already losing. ·