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,