[R-G] Afghanistan: How Can This Bloody Failure Be Regarded as a Good War?

[Anthony Fenton]

  Published on Thursday, August 23, 2007 by The Guardian/UK
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
by Seumas Milne

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.

s.milne at guardian.co.uk