Sir, - There has been much crowing about the fact that the US bombing campaign has achieved a swift "victory" in Afghanistan. However, for most of us the "victory" of one of the world's richest nations over one of the poorest was never really in doubt.
I believe the US would have claimed a similar "victory" in Vietnam if it hadn't been for the millions of people all over the world who spent years protesting against that war.
The objection to the war in Afghanistan is that it was and is morally wrong, though I, like many women all over the world, celebrate the passing the Taliban regime.
The United States does not prosecute this war for the good of Afghan women or Afghan people as a whole, any more than Russia and Britain acted for the good of Afghanistan when they used that country as part of the "Great Game" in the 19th Century, or the US did when it built up the Afghan guerrilla fighters against the Russians in the 1980s.
This war is prosecuted because policy makers in Washington DC believe it is in the United States' interest to do so. The US wants to guarantee its security from the consequences of its global policies and believes that the so-called "war on terrorism" is the means of doing this.
Those of us who have been critical of the war should not eat some version of humble pie. The fate of the Afghan people has been made secondary to the purported good of people on the other side of the world. Afghans have been used as a means, not an end.
Almost all the world's moral systems, religious and otherwise, hold that each individual should have the same fundamental value as every other.
No individual should be treated simply as an instrument to secure someone else's well-being.
This war was wrong when it started and it is wrong now. Cheap "victories" do not change that fact. - Yours, etc.,
Carole Craig, Member, US Citizens in Ireland for an Alternative to War, 1 Arnott Street, Dublin 8.