INTRODUCING THE VON HOFFMAN AWARD: "The war in Afghanistan, the one [Bush] should never have declared, has run into trouble. Just a few weeks into it and it's obvious that the United States is fighting blind. The enemy is unknown, and the enemy's country is terra incognita. We have virtually no one we can trust who can speak the languages of the people involved. With all our firepower and our technical assets and our spy satellites, it looks like we don't know if we're coming or going ... We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers, and-duh!-guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don't need to speak Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does ... Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause-and who, we've been hinting, will take part in a postwar government." - Nicholas von Hoffman, New York Observer, November 14! Readers are hereby invited to search the web to find the most prophetically challenged pieces of media war-wisdom so far. Please put Von Hoffman in the subject line. - 11/14/2001 04:04:34 PM

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2001

Answers

andrewsullivan.com

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: "'If you can't be like bin Laden,' one Army critic told me, 'you're in trouble.' Another critic said the Rangers are a sledgehammer when a dagger is needed. Shortcomings in Afghanistan cannot be laid at the feet of one general. Hostility to special operations has deepened over 20 years. Expertise in unconventional warfare has not been the track to rapid promotion. The nation's senior general officers were unprepared on Sept. 11 to fight the Taliban, and there is no sign that they are ready today." - Robert Novak, "Unprepared for Afghanistan," November 12. - 11/14/2001 05:21:42 PM

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE III: "Key Afghan opposition commanders are on the verge of abandoning the fight against the Taliban because their confidence in US military strategy has collapsed. Insurgents are no longer willing to infiltrate eastern Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because they believe American blunders are destroying the opportunity to spread revolt against the Islamist regime." - "Opposition leaders ready to quit battle against Taliban. US blunders leave key fighters disillusioned" - by Rory Carroll, the Guardian, November 9, the day Mazar-e-Sharif fell. - 11/14/2001 05:37:19 PM

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: "The first body bags are now on their way home to the US, adding to the number of American families stricken by grief and loss. Once again - for what? Predictably, relentlessly, this conflict shows every sign of becoming the Vietnam of our generation - the graveyard of strategic interests and ideals, as well as lives." - Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, October 22.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: "Right now we are using beards as beards, trying to prop up the Northern Alliance and hoping that somehow a Southern Alliance will materialize like a genie from Aladdin's lamp. But the stories about the lame rebel force with its wooden saddles and line of old Russian tanks get sillier and sillier, like scenes out of the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen's "Bananas." TV footage shows troops practicing taking hills, and confused about whether they are supposed to advance or retreat after they win a battle with the Taliban." - Maureen Dowd, New York Times, November 7.

E-mail address for submissions is at andrewsullivan.com

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2001

God, I love it!!

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2001

The first body bags are now on their way home to the US, adding to the number of American families stricken by grief and loss. Once again - for what? -Madaline 'something'

Is she really this stupid?

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001

She might have bene referring to the two soldiers killed in non-war-related accidents. Or, yes, she could be that stupid, lol.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001

Hmm. No shortage of nominees, lol.

V-H NOMINEE: "Kandahar, the spiritual and administrative heart of the Taliban, was quiet. I sat in a small office down a narrow lane not far from Mullah Omar's house with the young assistant of a senior Taliban official and talked - of Islam, of the West, of Afghanistan and of the blasts that, 10 days earlier, had demolished two American embassies in East Africa killing 224 people and injuring 4,500. The young Talib asked me if I thought the Americans would attack Afghanistan. After all, he said, Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect, was known to be hiding there. 'No,' I said, 'they wouldn't be so stupid.'" ... When I think about the huddled masses of the refugees, about the small, stone-covered graves that are appearing outside every village, about Mohammed Ghaffar, the white-bearded waiter at Kabul's battered Intercontinental hotel who grimly counted off the regimes that have successively run and ruined his country on his fingers, I know we have to halt the escalation before it is too late. But when I listen to Rumsfeld and Bush and Blair and Straw and their macho, ignorant and fatally flawed rhetoric it is hard to be optimistic." - Jason Burke, an "Afghanistan expert," from an essay called "Why This War Won't Work," The Observer, October 21. - 11/15/2001 02:16:31 AM

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban's dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban's rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success - now that Milosevic has been defeated - of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies." - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrong yet again, the Independent, November 2.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "General Van Tien Dung, 84, lead strategist of the victory of North Vietnamese forces against the Saigon and U.S. regimes, also expressed his doubts about a U.S. victory over Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. "I'm certain that they will fail," declared the ex-defense minister, who brought the North Vietnamese troops to a lightning-fast victory during the Ho Chi Minh campaign that ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War. "War doesn't end the hate. It just adds more gasoline to the fire, provoking more hate and a harder vengeance, above all on the part of those who have sworn to die for their religion," added General Van Tien Dung. "How will the United States put an end to this war? How will it get out of it? Its soldiers will find themselves with geographical difficulties that the Soviets could not surpass before," the general concluded." - [Gen. Van Tien Dung] Agence France-Presse, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one. The United States is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it. Soon, a new credibility gap will emerge as the Pentagon attempts to massage the news." - Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: ""I don't know how long this was supposed to take but it's certainly going a lot worse than expected. We have leading opposition figure captured and executed ... defections from the Taleban not happening on any large scale .. Afghan support for the Taleban appears to be on the increase and, if anything more was needed to dim the support of our allies for this whole adventure here we have another Red Cross warehouse has been bombed because of what is called human error. This is a war in trouble." - Daniel Schorr, NPR Weekend Edition.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "You can spend so much time defending the moral legitimacy of bombing Afghanistan and damning Noam Chomsky to hell that you never need to get around, really, to the question of what the real-world consequences of this war are likely to be. Five and a half million Afghans starving, as predicted by Oxfam, if the military campaign prevents delivery of humanitarian relief? Thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American suicide missions? A protracted war with a determined, hardy foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later?" - Katha "Your Stammering Is Eloquent" Pollitt, The Nation.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad...A week ago, the Pentagon said the military capacity of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan had been "eviscerated" by allied bombing raids; now ranking officials describe those leaders as "tough characters" who remain full of fight... The Northern Alliance, whose generals bragged for weeks that it was about to capture the pivotal city of Mazar-i-Sharif, has failed to do so. Nor have its tanks made any progress toward Kabul." - R.W. Apple, New York Times, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Many of the Afghan women who have been warning us about the Taliban for years say that bombing would be the surest way to unite most Afghanis around them." - Gloria Steinem, Village Voice.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "It now looks, with 20/20 hindsight, as though we should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar baby that is Afghanistan. We're running out of time for three reasons: winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death." Molly Ivins, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Having found refuge in places that America cannot or will not bomb, it appears the Taliban will rule Afghanistan through the winter, thereby handing the United States a humiliating and gratuitous defeat ... Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be the least prepared to attain America's battlefield objectives... [The Alliance] remains far weaker than its adversary, it boasts far fewer troops, and lacks the determination of its foe ... Its forces lack fuel and ammunition, remain pathetically divided, and seem in no rush to march to an American timetable." - The New Republic, November 8. - 11/15/2001 12:36:51 AM

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001

More:

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "No strategy in Afghanistan is assured of success, but there is no notion as naive as that which supposes that you can destroy a tactic (such as terrorism) or an idea (such as fundamentalism) by means of bombs or missile strikes or special forces ... There is plenty of evidence to suggest that if Afghanistan is attacked, the Afghans will side with the lesser Satan at home against the Great Satan overseas ... But if we seek to bludgeon Afghanistan into submission, we will lose the war on terrorism, while inadvertently slaughtering some millions of its inhabitants. We can choose, in other words, between futile genocide and productive peace. It shouldn't be too hard a choice to make." - George Monbiot, the Guardian, October 2. - 11/15/2001 12:33:49 PM

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "For Mr Blair knows better than most how ill-timed was the capture of Kabul by the Northern Alliance. Far from this being the "VK Day" event claimed by some of the more excitable commentators, it has happened at a pace that makes it a serious setback to hopes of securing a lasting political settlement in Afghanistan. Put at its simplest, the Northern Alliance is simply too powerful for comfort, with little sign of the Pashtun population, the largest single ethnic group, joining what Mr Blair called the "uprising against the Taliban." - The Independent today! Meanwhile Pashtun revolt in the South seems to be growing. Do these people ever ever learn?

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Huge earth-shaking explosions, horizons filled with flame and smoke, doomsday clamour and an indiscriminate devastation: these are the familiar, unnerving symptoms of a bankrupt policy, of plans lacking or gone awry, of exponential escalation and dread futility. Familiar because the world has seen the Americans go this way before, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and in Iraq, with no good result. Unnerving because the impression strengthens that President George Bush has no clear idea how proportionately to attain his ends or even what those ends may ultimately be. Futile because carpet-bombing, whatever its immediate consequences, looks to all but an implacable American public like an act of desperation prompted by a failure of imagination. Every towering column of dust and ash obscures ever more completely the twin towers whose appalling downfall was the root of it all. With every unguided bomb that drops, with every pinpoint missile gone astray, with every child maimed and with every redoubled cry of Taliban defiance, the military assault on Afghanistan becomes more of an obstacle to justice in its broadest sense, less a legitimate part of the solution." The Guardian, November 2.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: "Perhaps Britons have simply decided that bombing is not an effective way to defeat al-Qaida. Maybe some of them accept that aerial assault can only boost Osama bin Laden's standing in the Muslim world, spectacularly confirming his claim that this is a clash of the west against Islam - pitting the richest country in the world against the poorest. Perhaps they now accept that killing Bin Laden would merely make a martyr of him, and that his chosen hideaway was the worst possible place to pick a fight. Maybe they have heard the Afghan national epigram: "When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan." - Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian, October 31. - 11/15/2001 12:07:49 PM

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001