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The war against the Taliban began at night. That was appropriate because the governments of Britain and the United States seem determined to keep their citizens in the dark about what is really happening in Afghanistan since the missile strikes started.
The media can learn little. Unlike the "video game" coverage of the attacks on Bagdad during the Gulf War, this time our screens showed a night sky with meaningless tiny points of light. No Western war correspondents are on the ground where the air strikes have taken place. Hundreds gather across the borders in nearby countries but many are confined to their hotels by local authorities. All they can do is point to plumes of smoke from local riots in the distance.
Journalists in London interview fellow journalists in Pakistan. In London, TV cameras show crowds of journalists ouside 10 Downing Street. Rumours and speculation abound. The truth is that nobody outside government knows anything. We are forced to rely on statements by Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, the Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, a US Air Force spokesman, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef and Arab TV stations. But all of these are parties to the war and have cases to make. History teaches us that we have no reason to trust any of them. Where oh where is the voice of the informed, objective war correspondent?
No doubt the Alliance is delighted that war correspondents so far have had no access to the war because the bombing of Afghanistan was always going to be difficult to "sell" to the British public. No matter how you "spin" it, the spectacle of two of the most powerful, industrialised nations on earth bombing a Third World agricultural country in the middle of a famine can only cause humanitarian concern.
This is why President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have stressed that they have no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan and no quarrel with Islam. Geoff Hoon has insisted that Allied strikes had specifically targeted Taliban military installations, air fields and air defence sites and added that civilian populations had been deliberately avoided. He said: "Neither the Afghan civilian population nor their homes or property have been targeted."
They may not have been targeted, but were any hit? We were told during the Gulf War and the Nato bombing in the Kosovov conflict that the "pinpoint" accuracy of modern bombing and missile strikes ensured minimum civilian casualties--only to learn when the wars were over that this was not so.
Civilians died in large numbers.
The Taliban ambassador in Pakistan already says that there have been civilian casualties. But he refused say how many, where they died and how he knows. Rumours in Pakistan say at least twenty Afghani civilians died but again no one knows for certain. Without any independent verification it is better to disbelieve all figures.
The other tactic of the Alliance to win and keep public support for strikes on Afghanistan is to mix food and medical supplies with the bombs, surely the first time in history something so bizarre has occurred. But both Bush and Blair realise that all it would take to shatter this support would be one image--TV or photograph--of an Afghani woman cradling in her arms a the body of baby killed by an air strike.
For this reason the greater the secrecy surrounding the air war the better as far as the British and American governments are concerned. They are not too happy to allow even something as innocuous as interviews with the bomber pilots, much less invite war correspondents to fly with them as they did in the Second World War.
The one interview with a pilot who took part in the first strike was so tightly-controlled that he was given a code name--"Woodstock"--and revealed only that his mission had "come together like a finely-oiled machine." This reluctance to say anything was no doubt the result of criticism an interview with a young American pilot in northern Italy before he went off to bomb Kosovo: "It's a lot of fun. I love my job. It's like playing a video game and riding a roller coaster at the same time."
Secrecy surrounding any ground war in Afghanistan will be even greater because of the involvement of the SAS and American special forces. The last thing they want is a pack of war correspondents following their every move and filing stories as troublesome as the SAS killings of IRA terrorists on Gibraltar turned out to be.
So both governments have appealed to the media to avoid chasing rumours and reporting speculation on the grounds that this could aid the enemy. It seems highly unlikely then, that we will have any reporting at all from Kabul, no bulletins from the enemy capital, no John Simpson of the BBC or Peter Arnett of CNN on our screens like we did from Bagdad in the Gulf War.
Back in 1970, the late Sir Robin Day, then a BBC commentator, told a seminar of the Royal United Service Institution that he doubted whether a democracy which has uninhibited TV coverage in every home would ever be able to fight a war, however just." The full brutality of war would be too much for the public.
Britain and America have decided that Day was right, so do not expect to learn what really happened in this war until it is over.
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