From liberation to warlordism, the west's plan for Afghanistan

The headline of Max Hastings' article in today's Guardian reads 'Afghanistan's best hope is for controlled warlordism'. What an admission of defeat compared to the supposedly high ideals which accompanied the bombing and occupation of the country seven years ago. Then it was promises of democracy, modernisation and women's liberation. Now it's hanging on to what remains of the shambles the western intervention has become.

The problem is there already is a government of warlords, put in place and backed by the west. Corruption is rife in Afghanistan and goes right to the top of the Karzai government. This, and the increasing dependence on the opium crop, and the refugee problem, and the continued appalling situation of women, were all tolerated just as long as the Nato forces looked like they were on top.

Now they don't and there has been a change in western opinion. Already diplomats and top military have admitted the war can't be won and they must talk to the Taliban. Now the Financial Times editorial has joined the assessment. It's clear that everyone has given up on Karzai but no one knows what to put in his government's place, apart from a 'benevolent' dictator. And the economic crisis now hitting the world must raise questions about bankrolling failed wars and occupations when governments are having to bankroll the banks.

So more misery for Afghans, and Pakistanis. And that has a knock on here. Stop the War in Scotland are holding a protest to complain at the treatment of Afghan and Pakistani travellers going through Glasgow airport. They are often held 2-3 hours there, then asked to go for further questioning by Special Branch. Questions range from 'do you know where Osama bin Laden is ' to 'do you pray' to 'which mosque do you go to'.

It seems a bit unfair on Afghans travelling home for weddings or family visits to be asked the whereabouts of bin Laden, a question to which the world's biggest surveillance systems and agencies cannot find an answer. But hey. Tens of thousands have died, hundreds of thousands are refugees following the war over an issue which had nothing to do with ordinary Afghans. Why break the habit?

Losing the war in Afghanistan

Gordon brown called it ‘the most noble cause of the 21^st century.’ But today the commander of UK troops in Afghanistan has presented a rather different assessment. According to Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith ‘we’re not going to win this war’ and that talks with the Taliban are the way forward.

His remarks follow on from leaked remarks attributed to the British ambassador in Kabul, the exotically named Sherard Cowper-Coles, that foreign troops were part of the problem and that what was needed was an ‘acceptable dictator.’

It’s seven years tomorrow since the British government, along with the US and its other allies launched the war on Afghanistan _ the first war in the war on terror. An estimated 10,000 died during that war, but since then things have gone even further downhill. Many thousands more have died, there is a mass refugee problem, there has been virtually no reconstruction, despite the extravagant promises of Tony Blair seven years ago that ‘we will not walk away.’

No wonder dictatorship is the favoured British option. The Karzai government is corrupt and holds little sway in the country. Free elections would not produce a pro western government. So what’s needed is someone who runs the country on behalf of the occupiers.

What a lesson in humanitarian intervention Afghanistan is. No women’s liberation…no reconstruction..no peace….no democracy…dependence on the opium crop. It’s like a Brecht play except there’s no interval and no end.

The blame game

When the going gets tough, blame Iran. Defence Minister Des Browne told the Guardian that he had 'no doubt' that the Taliban was getting weapons from Iran. George Bush is poised to announce that the US is to treat Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a 'global terrorist' organisation. Deaths in Iraq are now routinely blamed on Iranian weapons, expertise and general interference in the region.

You wouldn't think that it was the US which has lost nearly 200,000 weapons, including lorry loads of AK47s, in Iraq. Nor would it be diplomatic to point out that blame for the siting of weapons in Afghanistan or Iraq can be more justly be laid at the door of the US or Britain than pinned on Iran, which cooperated with the US in 2001 over the launch of the war on terror and played no role in the Coalition of the Willing back in 2003.

But being wrong has never stopped Browne and his ilk from continuing merrily on regardless of facts which contradict them at every turn. His predecessor, John Reid, did after all predict not more than 18 months ago that British soldiers might well leave from their present tour in Helmand without a shot being fired in anger. Some prediction. Seven soldiers have been killed there in the past ten days.

Exit strategies are daily put forward for Iraq but none of them comes to very much. There are still troops in Basra palace, the central base in the city which is under attack constantly _ 300 rockets have been fired at it over the past two months_ despite predictions that all 5000 British troops would by now be at the airport base on the edge of the city.

Despite the very strong impression given by the British media that most violent attacks are between different groups of Iraqis, in Basra 90 percent of attacks are against British troops.

As Iraq proves intractable so Afghanistan is moving up the political and military agenda. There are now more troops there than in Iraq and the rate of deaths is increasing with over 70 in total dead. There is growing Afghan disquiet about civilian casualties, mainly caused by US airstrikes.


It must be slowly dawning on Des Browne, let alone the more perceptive Cabinet members, that not only are all options in Iraq fraught with difficulties but that their troubles will not end there.
Despite talk of a turning point and attempts to blame Iran or Pakistan for the problems, this looks like a war which will get worse before it gets better. It has all the makings of a long, colonial war with increasing casualties, loss of support from the local population and a growing sense domestically that it is unwinnable.


In Germany next month there is a major demo against the Afghan war, and there is political discontent in countries as far apart as South Korea, Canada and the Netherlands. Washington's response is typical: dragoon as many countries as possible to fight there, blame the Iraqis for not being able to run their own country, and step up the rhetoric against Iran.


Meanwhile Des Browne tells us that any 'drawdown' of troops in Iraq depends on agreement with the US. No change there then.

One out, all out

Even the Daily Telegraph is saying Prince Harry shouldn't go to Iraq. It is too dangerous for the third in line to the throne to risk capture at the hands of the Iraqis. But surely if it's too dangerous for Prince Harry, it's too dangerous for the rest of the British army as well.

Testimony from British troops returning from Iraq paints a very gloomy picture. Private Paul Barton, who returned from his second tour of duty this week, spoke out almost immediately on his return, telling his local Tamworth newspaper: 'Basra is lost. They are in control now. It's a full-scale riot and the government are just trying to save face.' Barton was one of the soldiers based in the Shatt al-Arab hotel, now handed over to the Iraqi army. The Ministry of Defence quietly announced some months ago that the hotel and another base in central Basra were two of the three most dangerous bases in Iraq.

Barton confirms that: 'of 40 tents in the base only five were left at the end of his tour of duty. 'We were just sitting ducks...Towards the end of January to March, it was like a siege mentality. We were getting mortared every hour of the day. We were constantly being fired at. We basically didn't sleep for six months. You couldn't rest. Psychologically, it wore you down.' His conclusion is 'We have overstayed our welcome now....We should pull out and call it quits.'

Incredibly, this information - which tallies with much information from Iraqis over recent months- did not appear in the British press until Barton went public. Yet British journalists and politicians have visited Basra in recent months. The media, which cheered this war to the echo and the politicians who voted for the war, are remarkably quiet.

Instead, they throw up their hands and say, we must stay because to go will make things worse. But the presence of the troops is making things worse. Many of the assassinations and killings taking place in Iraq today are carried out by government backed death squads - that's the government supported by George Bush and Tony Blair and propped up by the occupation troops. The US is cementing sectarian division - quite literally with the building of a wall in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Adhamiya.

The wall and others like it are described as 'gated communities' for all the world as though they were properties on an Islington estate agent's books. They have more in common with the 'apartheid wall' erected in the Occupied Territories to keep the Palestinians penned in, and have the same purpose - to isolate areas of resistance.

They are part of George Bush's 'surge' which - as with every other part of his strategy in Iraq - is not going to plan. The US and British military death toll is rising, with nearly 100 soldiers being killed in the first three weeks of April. The Iraqi death toll is rising much faster, with more than 160 killed with a single car bomb last week.

In the US, the Democrats have passed a bill in Congress called for withdrawal to begin this October. They know that the war is lost and is deeply unpopular with the majority in the US. George Bush is threatening to veto the bill. Meanwhile in Britain little stirs. Parliament says nothing on this central issue, and MPs drift towards the election of a new prime minister
seemingly in a trance.

Time for Harry to stay home but time too for a surge for peace which brings all the troops home.

The missing figures

How can there be such a great discrepancy between the estimates of organisers of demonstrations and those of the police? Last weekend it happened again: the police put out a figure of 4-5,000, which they graciously upped to 10,000 by the end of the march. The organisers estimated 80-100,000.

You might say, you pay your money and take your choice. Except much of the coverage simply took the police figure ( and often the early figure) and didn't print the organisers' estimate. When that happens it begins to look like deliberate skewing of the figures to minimise the impact of the anti war movement. After all, if you really thought only 5,000 people turned out to oppose Trident and call for troops out of Iraq, then you would conclude the movement had declined so dramatically that it wasn't worth doing anything.

Whereas, back in the real world, most people on the march thought it was the largest for some time. Stop the War, CND and BMI gave out something like 5000 placards between them. Probably there were several thousand more placards from a variety of points of view on the march. Look at the pictures. The large majority of marchers were not carrying placards, hence the march was many times bigger than the 10,000 supposedly on it. Add to that a 20,000 capacity for Trafalgar Square (and it was full for 2 and a half hours with many people leaving or never getting to the square), the large number of coaches, the people still stuck in Hyde Park two hours after the front of the march left.

You figure it out. Even the police have admitted today that their estimate is now 20,000, which makes you wonder how they do it and why it takes so long. With all these revisions upwards, perhaps in a few days they'll agree with our figure.

Not because it's safe, but because it's dangerous

Lord Hurd (originally plain Douglas Hurd, old Etonian and one time Tory cabinet minister) wants an inquiry into what went wrong when we decided to go to war in Iraq. Doesn't he know? It really isn't very difficult. Two million people in Britain got it at the time, when they marched through London demanding don't attack Iraq. They joined more than 100,000 others in Scotland and elsewhere.

Add to that 3 million in Spain, 2 million in Italy, 1 million in New York and millions more round the world. That's plenty of people who saw the war would make things worse, more unstable, more prone to terrorism.

The people who didn't get it sat in Westminster, the majority of MPs of both main parties who accepted lies, spin, false information and nods and winks about the 'intelligence' on weapons of mass destruction. The only inquiry should be into why the people we elect and pay handsomely to represent our interests were so wilfully incapable of doing so.

They're still at it. Last month, the futile debate on Iraq in parliament wasn't even graced with Tony Blair's presence and the front bench prevented any vote being taken. The LibDem policy for a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq this year was met with derision. One newspaper sketch writer described their view as 'unpopular' by which he meant 'unpopular in the House of Commons' which isn't quite the same thing.

Now Tony Blair has announced substantial troop withdrawal. Now the MPs line up to support him, repeating a lie which matches some of the great lies that took us to war. They say the troops are going because Basra is safe. Mark Urban on the BBC's Newsnight gave the game away on that: two of the three most attacked bases in Iraq are, according to the Ministry of Defence, British bases in the centre of Basra.

So we're not going because its safe, but because it's dangerous.

The danger is, of course, not Tony Blair's fault, as he told us at length on the morning's Today programme (it is almost flattering that all his arguments are aimed at countering those of the anti war movement, until you remember that he faces so very little opposition in parliament).

So whose fault is it exactly? Perhaps Lord Hurd and his friends in parliament will find an answer. Or perhaps the same people who brought us disaster in Iraq will vote for the sequel disaster in Iran?

The demonstration this Saturday will probably be the last while Blair is in office, the last before a vote on the Trident nuclear submarine replacement, and the last before a possible attack on Iran.

Remember, the Italians marched in Vicenza last Saturday to stop the extension of a US base, and this week the government fell over its policy of sending troops to Afghanistan. So marches do make a difference.

Wild men of the right

Fed up with wars committed in the name of freedom? Read an interesting article in today's Financial Times by Anatol Lieven. He points out that US President Roosevelt's 1941 speech calling for war against Germany and Japan famously lists 'four freedoms'. These are freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear (by which he meant abolition of aggressive war).

Missing from the list, Lieven points out, is the freedom to vote. He suggests this is for two reasons: that the Nazis were in fact elected, and their success stemmed in large part from the failure of the parliamentary system in Germany to deal with effects of inflation, unemployment and the onset of economic slump.

How differently the question of freedom is dealt with today. 'US official and semi-official rhetoric has too often reduced Freedom with a capital "F" chiefly to the right to vote. Even freedom of expression is usually taken to mean little more than unrestricted private media ownership.'

The recent Freedom House report, partly US government funded, treats, as Lieven says, the US 'as the embodiment of democracy and support for America as a key index of virtue.'

Roosevelt had his own reasons for putting forward his particular four freedoms. But they are still wanting today: freedom from want is a freedom lacked by millions, as is freedom from fear. Freedom of worship is denied or made extremely difficult in a number of countries. Freedom of speech and expression...in Saudi Arabia? in Egypt? even in the US, where dissent is all too often clamped down on?

If some one time liberal commentators had their way, there would be even more clamping down on dissent. Sent crazy by the failure of the imperial project on which they pinned all their hopes, Hitchens, Amis and Cohen sketch wilder and wilder plans for how to save the world. Hitchens 'Facing the Islamist Menace' (winter 2007 City Journal)ends with a ten point plan which looks to me a lengthy but infallible recipe for more wars, terrorism etc which Hitchens will then declare need even stronger remedies to defeat.

His plan includes an open alliance with India on all fronts against 'Muslim fascism', energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran, and comes out with this gem: 'We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous _Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind_that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon or Iraq without bearing this in mind.'

He quotes Martin Amis at length from a Times interview. Martin (isn't he so like his father?) says he has an urge to say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. His suggestions for suffering: 'not letting them travel. Deportation _further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan'.

At least we wouldn't have all that hold up at airports _or perhaps we would as they would be full of people being strip searched or deported.

Martin doesn't bat an eyelid at these tactics which would be familiar to anyone who lived under a dictatorship or even fascism. Which brings me to the third Musketeer, Nick Cohen. Cohen has out a new book on the left and the war. Apparently, he equates opposition to the Iraq war with support for Hitler. Is this arrested development (he came from a Communist family but clearly hasn't caught up with Communist opposition to war and imperialism)? Or has he just boiled his brain?