Disquiet On The Western Front

British foreign minister Jack Straw calls it the “three-week wobble” — that disturbing sense some now have that the bombing campaign in Afghanistan may not be entirely the right thing.

Straw figures he has seen it before, at a similar juncture in the U.S.-led NATO bombing effort over Serbia and Kosovo in 1999. “Many of the commentators who are now saying this is a mistake were saying Kosovo was a mistake,” he says. That campaign lasted a nail-biting 78 days, but it led to a change of regime in Serbia and put former President Slobodan Milosevic in the dock at the Hague on charges of war crimes. This one is sure to take a lot longer than that, but the lesson is the same: to win you must stay the course.

The wobble doesn’t look like the beginning of a derailment of the coalition supporting the American campaign to drive out the Taliban and chase down bin Laden. But whether it’s the drumming fingers of impatience or the knocking knees of appeasement, something is getting louder in Europe. Four weeks on, the U.S. bombing has yielded meager tangible results. What it has produced are photographs of dead women and children and disparaging quotes from Northern Alliance fighters about the minimal effect of the campaign on Taliban front lines.

An escalation of the bombing late last week may allay the Northern Alliance’s complaints, but it is unlikely to bolster public support in Europe. According to an ICM poll published last week, support among Britons for the war has fallen from 74% the week it began to 62% two weeks later. A majority — 54% — now back a bombing pause, though the question did put it quite emotively: “to allow aid convoys to go into Afghanistan.” Among Germans questioned last week for Die Woche, 69% favored a pause in the bombing and 60% were against sending German troops to Afghanistan.

In France the approval rating of President Jacques Chirac went from 57% to 74% after he became the first foreign leader to visit the U.S. after Sept. 11, and has since dropped back to 63%. The popularity of his presumed rival in next year’s elections, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, has had similar if smaller bounces up and down. As support for the war falters, particularly on the left, France is actually gearing up, last week tossing Mirage-IV reconnaissance planes, a Transall-Gabriel spy plane and a listening ship into the war effort.

Many Europeans never liked George Bush’s with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, but they are trapped by it nonetheless. At a meeting of E.U. foreign ministers in Luxembourg last week, France’s Hubert Védrine acknowledged that the U.S. military campaign “still isn’t working” but stopped short of publicly criticizing it. How could he? After all, he admitted, “the Europeans are not in a position to propose a different policy.”

Hoping, perhaps, to promote the same kind of white-vs-black optic George Bush had in announcing his war on terrorism, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been pushing a “pro-U.S.A.” rally in Rome this Saturday. But the center-left opposition, which last week called for a pause in the bombing, argues that Berlusconi’s rally is hardly a fair litmus test for Italian solidarity against terrorism. Rome’s Left Democratic mayor, Walter Veltroni, told Milan’s Corriere della Sera, “We must be solidly behind the United States, and you can love it as I do . . . without ignoring its limitations and without becoming politically and culturally subordinate.” He will be going neither to Berlusconi’s rally nor to another one called for the same time by peace activitists. Fearing violence, he wishes both sides would call off their rallies.

The nature of the bombing campaign lets doubters ground their concerns not just in idealistic terms, but also in practical ones. After a visit to Pakistan, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Development Minister, said last week she favored a break in air strikes at the start of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, citing Pakistani concerns about “the danger of weakening the antiterrorist coalition.” Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse criticized the U.S. use of cluster bombs: “I cannot see this is an effective deployment against the perpetrators of violence.” What hasn’t happened, against the expectation of many, is an implosion of the Greens, a pacifist party now in the government coalition with the spd. Party leaders Claudia Roth and Kerstin Müller have called for a bombing pause but have been countered by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a fellow Green. “If you want to end this misery,” says Fischer, “you have to bring about different political circumstances.” But the hard fact for Fischer and other European leaders is that it is up to the U.S. to secure a tangible military success and in that way keep the “three-week wobble” from becoming a winter of discontent.