How Can This Bloody Failure Be Regarded as a Good War?
The Western Occupation of Afghanistan Has Brought Neither Peace Nor Development - and It Fuels The Terror Threat
Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush’s war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - “the good war” that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there’s no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul.
“We should be thinking in terms of decades,” the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, declared; Brigadier John Lorimer, British commander in Helmand province, thought the military occupation might last more than Northern Ireland’s 38 years; and the defence secretary, Des Browne, last week confirmed that the government had made a “long-term commitment” to stay in Afghanistan to prevent it reverting to a terrorist training ground. Even allowing for the Brown government’s need for political cover if it is indeed to run down its forces in Iraq, that all amounts to a pretty clear policy of indefinite occupation - one on which it has not thought necessary to consult the British people, let alone the Afghans.
All this follows the escalation of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan last year, when Browne’s predecessor, John Reid, sent thousands of extra troops to the south to “help reconstruction”, hoping they would be a able to leave “without firing a single shot”. Two million rounds of ammunition later, what was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission is now an all-out war against a resurgent Taliban that has become an umbrella for Pashtun nationalists, jihadists and all those determined to fight foreign occupation. British casualties have risen sharply - seven have been killed in the past month - along with those of other western forces, while the public at home is increasingly fed a media diet of Kiplingesque deeds of derring-do by “our boys” on the front line. And in a telling echo of the claims that have punctuated each phase of the Iraq disaster, Browne last week said he detected a “turning point” in the British campaign to “bring stability” to Afghanistan.
For Afghans, six years after they were supposed to have been liberated, life is getting worse. As the International Committee of the Red Cross reported two months ago, the humanitarian situation is deteriorating and civilians are suffering “horribly” from growing insecurity and violence in an increasingly dirty war. The fighting in the south has driven 80,000 from their homes, and the civilian casualty rate has doubled over the past year: more than 200 were killed by US and other Nato troops in June alone - far more than are estimated to have been killed in Taliban attacks. The savagery of indiscriminate US aerial bombardments provoked violent demonstrations and is widely seen as having increased support for the Taliban’s armed campaign.
Given the manifest failure of the occupation to bring either peace or development to Afghanistan, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s still considered by some to be a good war - though a majority of Britons, Canadians, Italians and Germans, it should be said, want their troops withdrawn. Partly it must be the fact that the original invasion was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks - which turned out to have been at least partly coordinated from al-Qaida’s Afghan camps - and had some measure of UN acquiescence (even if the relevant resolutions didn’t actually mention Afghanistan). Added to that is the oppressive and obscurantist record of the Taliban regime and the elite fear that military failure will fatally undermine the projection of western power in future.
But by intervening on one side of an ethnically charged civil war to overthrow the Taliban - rather than, say, targeting special forces against al-Qaida - the US and its allies ended up exchanging warlords for theocrats and turning most of the country into a collection of lawless and brutal fiefdoms. Instead of al-Qaida terror networks being rooted out, they were allowed to migrate to the borderlands, Pakistan and Iraq; Osama bin Laden, whose capture was the first aim of the war, escaped; and the limited expansion of women’s and girls’ freedoms in Kabul and a few other urban areas was offset by an eruption of rape and violence against women. Western politicians like to describe the Afghan government as democratically elected, when in fact the elections were marked by large-scale fraud and intimidation in polls that gave regional warlords pride of place, while political parties were not allowed to take part. In real life, occupied Afghanistan is, as the UN warned last year, a failed state, which now produces 90% of the world’s opium and where corruption and insecurity have sunk reconstruction.
Of course there was a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were encouraged to go to school and university in Afghanistan, women accounted for almost half the country’s teachers and civil servants and the government redistributed land to the rural poor. But the US spent billions of dollars to destroy it in a cold war coup de grace and laid the foundations for the jihadist Frankenstein of al-Qaida in the process. Gordon Brown now claims Afghanistan is “the frontline against terrorism”. In reality, the key to the al-Qaida threat lies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the dictatorial regimes the west sponsors there, while its support is fuelled by the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories.
Britain is now fighting its fourth war in Afghanistan in 170 years, and might have learned by now that you cannot impose a government from outside against a people’s will. Earlier this summer the Afghan senate called for a date to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops and negotiations with the Taliban, as did the Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, this month. There will be no peace or stability in Afghanistan while foreign troops remain, and a wider settlement will surely have to include the Taliban and regional powers such as Iran and Pakistan. Unfortunately, politics dictates that a great deal more blood is likely to be shed on both sides before that comes to be accepted.
© 2007 The Guardian
We abandon people to the Pakistani backed Taliban if we pull out. Afghans want the Pakistanis out of their country. The threat does lie with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Mr. Milne is correct about that. However, abandoning Afghans to the very people who oppressed them to begin with is wrong.
See the article below. Then only way the Taliban would be able to obtain the technology to do this would be to cooperate with Pakistan’s ISI.
Taliban hackers phone UK soldiers’ families
news.com.au
August 22, 2007
TALIBAN extremists are reportedly phoning the families of troops fighting in Afghanistan and telling them their loved ones are dead.
Afghan insurgents have been using mobile phone-hacking technology to extract phone numbers to target the families of British troops, The Sun newspaper reported today.
According to The Sun, a Taliban fanatic called the wife of an Royal Air Force officer and told her: “You’ll never see your husband alive again – we have just killed him.”
After calling the RAF, she was told that her husband was safe and well.
As a result of opposition forces using advanced technology to monitor calls made on mobile phones, British servicemen have been banned from using their phones.
“We assume these days that every conversation over mobile phones is being heard by our enemies,” a senior officer said.
“They have some pretty powerful friends and allies, who are giving them some very sophisticated help. They will use that information in any way they can to damage us, whether it is physically or mentally.”
The Ministry of Defence said families of troops in Iraq had also suffered from “nuisance calls” in the past year.
The key to stability in Afghanistan lies in breaking down the stranglehold of the military and ISI in Pakistani politics. Pakistan is the real failed state. The Pakistani military and ISI aided and abetted by the U.S. is the single largest threat in the region, even more so than the Taliban (which was created and encouraged by Pakistan and used effectively by the U.S. till not too long ago).
Weve created this frankenstein and its our responsibility to destroy it and not leave the people of Afghanistan to deal with our mistakes. We need to ensure the creation of a democratic system of government in Pakistan which does not meddle in the affairs of an independant Afghanistan. We cannot simply abandon them. Our troops have died for less worthy causes (capitalism, corporate profits,etc) !!!!
We need to clearly and unambiguously support a democratic movement in Pakistan by unhitching U.S. policy of supporting dicktators like Musharraf or some other pliant general. we need to ensure our aid to Pakistan actually helps in this process. There is not too much support for jihadist political parties in Pakistan despite western media hyperbole.
“The Pakistani military and ISI aided and abetted by the U.S. is the single largest threat in the region, even more so than the Taliban”
I disagree. The U.S. is the single largest threat anywhere. Pakistan and ISI stand no chance on their own. Do not mistake the puppet for the actions of the puppet master!
It takes two to tango ! Please do not attempt to absolve the Pakistani military and ISI in this disaster. The dependency between these two insidious entities (Pakistan and the U.S.) is mutually beneficial. Pakistan attempts to gain strategic advantage in the region over India and Iran while the U.S. uses Pakistan as its condom to gain strategic advantage in South Asia. And of course millions in between suffer the fucking consequences.
dcbeltway - Do you realize that the Sun is Rupert Murdoch journalism at its basest? It resembles a right wing version of the National Enquirer. You may as well quote Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
Gavingourley I am married to an Afghan. We know Pakistan is the problem. Left wing newspapers have also reported about the ISI and Pakistan’s support of the Taliban.
Human Rights Watch obviously a liberal progressive org wrote this report below:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghan2/Afghan0701-02.htm
By the way we are both very progressive in our views.
Hash you raise an interesting point as the US did fund the Pakistanis 8 billion dollars to curb terror in the region. Of course they turned around used that money to keep funding the Taliban.
There is a bright side, though: if you’re an heroin addict, product has never been more readily available.
Considering heroin and cocaine always seem to end up affecting rich white kids, i see it as less of a problem than the oppression the Afghan people have to endure at the hands of the Taliban. Lindsay Lohan can get treatment whereas 8 year old Saeeda would pobably get thrown into a burka by the time she is 10 and then propmtly married off to a Talib.
The article seems to paint the 80’s as a bright time in Afghanistan. Far from it. The brutal Soviet occupation deliberatly targeted the civilian population, killing over 1 million Afghans, destroying the centuries old irrigation system,killed over 40% of the livestock,ect. The author doesn’t mention them at all.
Bligh very true and the BBC and Reuters recently reported how mass graves of political dissenters were found in Afghanistan from the Soviet era!
http://tinyurl.com/tx83s
Afghans will tell you the best days of Afghanistan were during the Zahir Shah Era.
dcbeltway,
I realize that you are coming at this from an on the ground perspective but I have one question. Do you really believe that the current occupation and military dollars that are being spent by both the US and GB are in any way assisting the Afghan public? I will admit an amount of ignorance on my part but I do agree with the writer of this story that Afghanistan would be better off with out the occupation than the current approach. If we can agree that the current approach is totally off base then I am willing to say that there may be a place for more guns and fighting if directed in a format that actually protects the public in a defensive format rather than an offensive, “shoot em all and let God sort them out” mentality. Seems to me from my limited knowledge of the subject that justice for the people of Afghanistan has never been part of the goal.
All wars at all times are failures, although not all participants are always at fault. In any modern war the vast majority of those who suffer and die are innocents and bystanders.
The occupation is wrong and wrongheaded. Terrorism is an evil best fought by justice and fairness backed by vigilant police work.
The innocents killed and wounded create many more terrorists than can be killed in military reprisals.
sambagis reconstruction could go a hell of a lot better I am 100% in agreement there. Reconstruction funds were siphoned off to fight the Iraq war and the usual beltway bandits in DC made off with millions with little oversight. That being said some aspects of reconstruction are going well and we as progressives should urge our gov’t to do the job properly and hold the beltway bandits accountable for their work.
I cannot emphasize enough that the Taliban movement is not an Afghan indigenous residence movement and is not supported by the majority of Afghans especially the minority groups like the Hazaras whom the Taliban committed genocide against! I would also like to remind everyone the other minority groups the Tajiks and Uzbeks fought a fierce resistance to the Taliban under the leadership of Ahmed Shah Masoud who was killed by a Saudi backed Al Qaeda suicide bomber September 10, 2001. The Taliban are backed by radicals within the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments. From a human rights perspective we are forced to choose betwen the lesser of two evils an occupation by the US Nato vs Talibanization occupation by the Saudis and the Pakistanis. I know what the Afghan women, children and minorities would choose and its not the Talban.
If we pull out we leave a power vaccum very similar to the power vaccum the CIA left when they pulled out of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. What happened after that a civil war where 50,000 people died in Kabul and out of the ashes arose the Taliban. We cannot make the same mistake twice. Its immoral to abandon the Afghan people again to the wolves and believe me they are surrounded by them.
Sambagis justice was never the goal of the war to begin with. I’m not naive as Bush is not altruistic. It was for the trans-Afghan pipeline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline
It’s clear that Bush’s (to quote Gore Vidal’s apropos phrase) “Eurasian adventure” should be interpreted through the long lens of history. We can’t look back 1-2 centuries to Bush because we’re still in the midst of it — but we can look back 1-2 centuries ago.
It’s clear that the Age of Colonialism never fully ended. That America, one of the former colonies, eventually made a post-1776 truce with its former despotic overlord (England) and indeed had the torched passed to it, becoming the strongarm of the former British Empire.
People here have cited the opium production in Afghanistan, they should check out the history around the Opium Wars in a bygone era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars.
I’ve long wondered that if we’re led to believe that we’re winning the war on terror — and might (for instance) be able to stop a shipment of uranium, but many tons of opium are clearly passing the borders, then something’s not quite kosher with the overall picture. That is, it would almost seem that the US enjoys a monopoly on both the Latin American cocaine trade (we provide a lot of support to the narco-state of Columbia) as well as the heroin trade (probably mainly to Europe).
Is this totally offbase?
Afghan women have suffered more than anyone else in this destructive endless war which seems to have no end in sight. Theyve been screwed over by the Soviets, Jihadis, Talibs, U.S., Pakistan and just about everyone else. A few brave organizations like RAWA ( http://www.rawa.org/wom-view.htm ) have done amazing work these last couple of decades.
I do not believe the U.S. or NATO can help stabilize Afghanistan. They can temporarily ease the pain. The U.S. can really turn the screws on Pakistan so as to weed out the Taliban and end the Pakistani state support to these insiduous ultra-fundamentalist vermin. Any politically convenient power-sharing agreement (Jirga !) with the Taliban is counter-productive as in the long run they will definitely overwhelm the local Afghan people/politicians.
The Taliban needs to be destroyed convincingly. To do this we need to support a democratic government in Pakistan and make sure they dont meddle in Afghan politics and also make sure they clamp down hard on the fundamentalists. We also need to make sure we help the economic upliftment of the Pashtuns on both sides of the border as they find the Taliban a convenient way out of their misery. The so called ’support’ the Taliban has is from men since women dont count !!
The US poured $10 billion to Islamic fundamentalists through Pakistan in order to oust the Soviet backed government of Afghanistan. The Saudis agreed to match that spending, so that is $20 billion.
Now, however dcbeltway may say that the support for the Taliban is coming only from Pakistan, it cannot be coming in to the tune of billions of dollars. The Taliban have somehow fought the almighty US to a standstill in Afghanistan. And it just couldnt be done without the support of the locals. Or is it that the US has somehow made the locals hate them. Would carpet bombing villages with DU have had something to do with that.
The truth is that the US is not being welcomed with flowers by the Afghanis and if the Taliban enjoyed even a fraction of the money and the technology that the US does to that equalised the Taliban, then the US and their coalition sycophants would have been blown away long ago.
The US has no more right to be there than they had to fund the Taliban in the first place. They should leave immediately.
Why are we there?
The truth is that we aren’t there to find “Bin Laden” and America doesn’t give a damn about the Afghan people.
The truth is that Afghanistan has huge natural gas reserves and is a key area to pipe out Capian Sea oil.
See http://www.newhumanist.com/oil.html
Every attack, every objective, and every plan made by this administration is linked to oil or energy reserves.
The bottom line in the story is we can not force democracy on people who do not want it. I see Afghanistan as being much like Iraq. The people of the region have no idea what democracy is and could care less about it. It’s an American and western concept these people aren’t used to. Which in all reality means we could be mired in the region for decades trying to bring something to people they don’t want! I will admit it isn’t right to just leave them high and dry. But, the truth is this is just another George Bush mistake. He had no intentions of ever freeing these people of the Taliban! Bush doesn’t have a clue what the word Democracy means he is to fascist. It was merely an side-attraction on his way to take out Saddam Hussein. So what are all of you saying? We should wind up mired in another war for years? Because I don’t see them being any different from Iraq! I don’t see it as being any more winnable than Iraq is. It’s hard to force feed people an idea when they don’t want it. Most people’s in this region are to used to their Tribal Lords, religion and Poppies for democracy to ever take root and grow! I don’t condemn them for that. I just think it’s time we learn to respect other people’s culture and belief’s!
There is no evidence indicating that the 9/11 conspiracy originated in Afghanistan, only the hysterical ravings of high-ranking people in the US. All evidence indicates that the plot was hatched in Washington and Florida by these very same high-ranking people. If the world’s armies are to be assembled to confront terrorism, they should converge on downtown Washington, not Kabul.
This ‘good’ war has always been about the oil pipe line. If Bush and Cheney had been really interested in catching OBL, they wouldn’t have given him three months to flee and prepare.
Joke.
Paul Bramscher Great question! Check out Catherine Austin Fitts on the Narcodollar/ tapeworm economy on her site www.solari.com as well as others like Mike Ruppert’s excellent site www.fromthewilderness.com (mirror site www.copvcia.com) for concise, cogent answers to those questions. Once you grasp the magnitude of your question, keep reading Austin Fitts to keep fostering the intestinal fortitude you will need to keep functioning.
As Victor Frankl once charged us, consciencious people will derive meaning from the tragedies we face.
braith …
“and if the Taliban enjoyed even a fraction of the money and the technology that the US does to that equalised the Taliban, then the US and their coalition sycophants would have been blown away long ago.
”
This is incorrect cause the U.S. depends on Pakistan to clean up the Taliban as they are currently operating out of there. This is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. The Pakistan govt in turn signed a peace deal with the Taliban allowing them to continue doing what they do as it aligns with Pakistani interests. Taliban controlling Afghanistan is a Pakistani wetdream as it ensures their so called dominance in that region.
“an American and western concept these people aren’t used to”
As for peacemaker … keep this racist shit down a peg. Democracy is not an american concept unless ofcourse you are american and have your head stuck deep in your own butt. The biggest fallacy here is that somehow we are interested in bringing democracy to Afghanistan. We are not. Its a lie. Its all about our strategic interests and energy resources and democracy actually gets in the way !!
One thing this conflict as others before it demonstrates is the ultimate price and thus futility of war. To the extent one condition acts as blowback for another, apart from insured profits to the military-industrial complex of any epoch, no one else for the most part benefits. War profiteers should be tried for treason, but that cannot prove an effective strategy until a nation understands the ways and means by which its psychology is manipulated into a pro-war stance. Good analysis of those undercurrents runs through other CD threads.