Hold the applause. (Comment).

Though the war on terror is anything but over, the United States has declared victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. The country has a new interim government. The Taliban has been chased from power. Many Al Qaeda members have been routed and captured.

"Collateral damage" has been kept to a minimum.

So goes the story from Washington.

We thought, at this juncture between Phase One of the War on Terrorism and Phase Two, which George W. Bush has warned us will be much more "dangerous," that it was an apt time for a humanitarian reckoning.

Here, as far as we have been able to measure, is the balance sheet.

On the plus side is the apparent gain made by Afghan women. The images of girls going to school and women showing their faces, walking the streets, gathering in a public stream to wash clothes, working, and joining in planning meetings for the new government have been some of the most heartening of recent months. (Other advances in personal freedoms have occured. Kids can fly kites again. The cinemas are reopening. People can own TVs.)

On November 20, hundreds of Afghan women--some of whom had expressed rebellion by wearing makeup and high heels under their burqas--took to the street and demanded their rights. It was the first such gathering in five years.

For advocates, the hope that Afghan women will soon receive the rights of full human beings is spilling into jubilation. "I think women are ecstatic," said Nasrine Gross, an Afghan American feminist, when she appeared on National Public Radio on November 24. "I think that they're very hopeful that very soon they will return back to normal with all their rights respected. They could become completely active members of society just the way they were before."

We are certainly hoping for that outcome, but two months after the demonstration, the future of women is still not clear, despite the presence of two women (out of thirty) members of the new Cabinet.

One vivid reminder of this uncertainty was pointed out by the Los Angeles Times on January 8. As the paper noted, many women who hate the burqa still wear it. "For those most damaged by five years of fanatic Taliban rule, the burqa remains a safe refuge from which to wait and see whether the outside world is truly changing."

One young woman told the paper, "I'll take it off when everyone else does.... No one has told us yet that it's permitted to go without it." The reporter concluded: "How much better women will fare in newly pacified Afghanistan remains an open question."

Though women officially now make up 6 percent of the new cabinet, the remaining 94 percent is dominated by male members of the Northern Alliance. Our allies have a bloody history. Under the rule of the Northern Alliance, rape was rampant. As a result of their violent rule, the people of Afghanistan welcomed the Taliban with open arms in 1996.

"Right now," Sippi Azerbaijani-Moghadam told Newsweek, "everyone is whitewashing past abuses by the Northern Alliance." But, said Azerbaijani-Moghadam, who works as an Afghanistan specialist with the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, "the atrocities will only continue unless these people are held accountable for what they did."

Afghan law does not currently give women a great deal of power: "Children legally belong to their fathers, who retain them after a divorce," pointed out the Los Angeles Times. "Children are also passed down the male line of a family in the event of the father's death, meaning a widow cannot take her children from her husband's extended family if she remarries." And, notes the article, "For now, the only work available for most Afghan women is that which men won't do. Tending kitchen gardens, baking bread, and midwifery are about the only pursuits that allow Afghanistan's many widows to feed their children."

Nevertheless, the vicious oppression of women the Taliban imposed has eased. That is a good thing.

There are those who will say this war is surely justified, given the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban. But we fear that the American "Daisy-Cutters" and cluster bombs have not ended their agony. We side with Afghan women who opposed the war because of the violence it would cause and who now warn about the unsavory resumes of the Northern Alliance. Nor are we fooled by the rhetoric of the Laura Bushes of this world. This war was not a war for women's liberation; it was a war of revenge. And it was the utmost hypocrisy for George and Laura to shed tears over the oppression of women in Afghanistan when women are treated essentially as badly in Saudi Arabia, and the First Family doesn't say a word about that. What's more, it was the United States that supported the Taliban when it came to power, knowing full well their savage treatment of women.

War rarely is the elixir it is made out to be. A case in point: Afghan law appears resistant to dramatic change. In a late December announcement reported by Agence France Press and noted in Alexander Cockburn's syndicated column, the new Justice Minister, Abdul Rahim Karimi, said the interim government would continue to impose Sharia Islamic law on all Afghans, but would do so with less force. "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time: say, fifteen minutes," said Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif, a member of Kabul's high court. As for using sports arenas for public executions, that is now in the past, said Zarif. "The stadium is for sports," he said. "We will find a new place for public executions." Public stonings would also continue, said the judge, "but we will use only small stones."

Highest of all on the debit side is the number of Afghan civilians the U.S. government killed in the war.

If the Bush Administration had its way, members of the public wouldn't be troubled by such details. A December article in The Wall Street Journal described the typical press-briefing scenario: "Pentagon officials tick off the number and type of aircraft that fly each day over Afghanistan and the targets the airplanes attack. They often begin briefings with gun-camera images of precision-guided bombs gliding into Taliban tanks and convoys. What they don't talk about is who died that day."

When reporters are brazen enough to ask about casualties, the Bush Administration either denies they happened or, if cornered, shuns responsibility. "No nation in human history has done more to avoid civilian casualties than the United States has in this conflict," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in late October. "So let there be no doubt: Responsibility for every single casualty in this war, be they innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of [the] Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Marc W. Herold has tallied up the bodies. A professor of economics and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire, Herold published "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting."

The report, released in early December, is a careful study of worldwide press reports and survivor testimony on civilian deaths that have resulted from the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Herold estimates the number of civilian casualties in the first nine weeks of the war at 3,767.

Then there is the toll of starvation. In early January, the U.S. government said the threat of mass starvation had passed. A few days later, the Associated Press published an article with this headline: "Afghan Village Forced to Eat Grass." Many people were dying of starvation in the region of Abdullah Gan, a remote area in the mountains not easily accessible to relief workers, the article said. At the same time, "Thousands of bags of wheat flour meant to save the people of Abdullah Gan sit stacked in a compound in the small town of Zari, four-and-a-half hours away by donkey along mountain trails and the nearest outpost accessible by road." The roads to and from the towns that need the food are dangerous and controlled by different warlords, say aid workers.

"The whole military effort since 11 September is what has disrupted humanitarian relief," the group Christian Aid told the London Independent on December 9. "We have been working successfully with the Taliban for four or five years. While they didn't make things very easy, we did get the job done.... Since 12 November (when the Northern Alliance seized control of large sections of Afghanistan), aid getting in has dropped back again to less than half of what they need."

The final death toll from starvation resulting from the war on terrorism will be a long time in coming, though people are already dying.

"I still expect preventable deaths to be very high," said James Jennings, president of the humanitarian aid organization Conscience International. "I don't think the higher numbers will be reached this winter, but even the lowest previous estimate of up to one million deaths is bad enough. What we are likely to see over time is a continuum, a slow ticking of the clock extending far beyond May, with death for many of the most vulnerable, especially children, as a result. Severe malnutrition already exists among a significant percentage of the population."

The war on Afghanistan, waged in the memory of the more than 3,000 civilians who died on September 11, has claimed thousands of innocent lives and threatens to claim still more. It is accomplishing this destruction more slowly than the terrorist attack. But it is carrying out extensive, calculated killing nonetheless.

This heaping of death upon death has led to a huge mound of bodies, which is no cause for celebration.

"Rukia, who lost her family of five children on December 3rd when a U.S. bomb was dropped upon her neighborhood in Kandahar, tells a typical story. She fled Kandahar before she could bury her children, as she was wounding.... She was nearly bombed again on the Kandahar-to-Spin Boldak highway, as a relative was driving her to a hospital in Quetta."

--Professor Marc W. Herold, in his study of civilian Afghan deaths

A U.S. bombing in eastern Pakita province killed as many as 100 civilians. "Amid the destruction were scraps of flesh, pools of blood, and clumps of what appeared to be human hair."

--Reuters

"I brought my family here for safety, and now there are nineteen dead, including my wife, my two children, my brother, sister, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, my uncle."

--Mehmood, an Afghan civilian, quoted in The New York Times.