[Peace-discuss] Afghanistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The British press is more honest and candid than ours on the US war against the 
Mideast, focusing of course on British participation. But the prognosis seems 
right, as far as it goes: "...the role [of the 'new Taliban'] in governing a 
future Afghanistan is beyond dispute ... Frankness continues to be the greatest 
casualty of these wars ... The essence of moral judgment is universality. Eager 
inquirers should now be turning their gaze to the dusty heights of Kabul ... 
[Our] duty is precisely to reason why."  And even this article does not make 
clear why the US, if not Britain, will continue to suborn murder from Gaza to 
the Khyber Pass: the unchanging policy that the US must control Mideast energy, 
at least in the sense of being able to deny it to its rivals. Control of 
Afghanistan is a geopolitical necessity for that. (The same paper wrote six 
months ago, "Nato's secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings 
Institution in February this year [noted] the opportunity to site military 
facilities, and potentially nuclear missiles, in a country that borders China, 
Iran and Central Asia" -- a matter not discussed in the US press.) There is 
little chance that the blood-soaked US leadership will alter this policy in 
2009. --CGE]


  Rosy rewriting of the Iraq debacle
  will fuel worse disaster in Afghanistan
  Simon Jenkins
  The Guardian, Friday 19 December 2008

Now they want to bolt the stable door. With British troops at last due to leave 
Iraq next spring, everyone is for a public inquiry. That is fine. But what about 
an inquiry into where they are going, straight from the frying pan into the 
fire, from Iraq to Afghanistan? In Basra the British army had at least a 
tattered remnant of a war plan. In Helmand the only plan is to be target 
practice for the Taliban.

The Iraq inquest can be written on a postcard. A British force was sent on the 
false claim by Tony Blair that Iraq was a threat to Britain. How this made sense 
was never explained, despite the efforts of Alastair Campbell [Blair's chief 
propagandist --CGE] and his colleagues. It has since emerged that Blair simply 
could not bring himself to desert the American president, George Bush. That in a 
nutshell is why 178 British servicemen and women have died in Iraq.

The conduct of the war saw British troops at their professional best. They did 
not bomb villages, wear lavish armour, or smash their way into women's bedrooms 
as did the Americans. They were good at hearts and minds. But as months 
stretched into years, they proved unable to build local leadership and were 
handicapped by the incompetence and corruption of the Pentagon's provisional 
executive in Baghdad.

By 2005 they had all but lost control of Basra to local militias. When these 
started feuding, the British retreated to the airport, leaving Iraqi units (with 
American help) to achieve an exhausted peace. After five years, Britain has not 
reconstructed Basra or given it prosperity and stable government as promised. As 
for finding Blair's weapons of mass destruction, forget it.

The British army commander, General Sir Mike Jackson, said two years ago that 
the army's best hope in Basra was "withdrawal with honour". That realistic 
assessment has just about been realised, but it was refreshing yesterday to hear 
the Archbishop of Canterbury apply one simple word to the Iraq war: "wrong".

The greatest honour Britain could pay the dead of Iraq is to inquire into why 
any more should die in Afghanistan. Why wait for the same number of soldiers to 
be killed (already 134)? Why wait for the same multiple of civilian deaths, the 
same villages bombed, the same infrastructure destroyed? Why wait for the same 
bombast to die down and truth-telling and realism to gain the upper hand? Why 
tip another billion pounds into this craziness, billions that we can ill afford?

British diplomats and military experts returning from Kabul have three 
performance modes. In public they declare Afghanistan to be tough but winnable. 
In private they admit it is getting worse not better, but might turn round in a 
decade if only the Afghans were less corrupt. In totally secret mode, their eyes 
turn to the sky and they declare the whole business a "total effing disaster".

Which mode is ever communicated to Gordon Brown? He has recently returned from 
Helmand, where he won plaudits for bravely standing without body armour in a 
British fort. Nobody asked why it should be brave to stand where Britain has 
supposedly won hearts and minds for two years - if not seven - and why he could 
not go anywhere by road. Brown is to be commended for supporting the 
professionalism and courage of British soldiers, but he owes them more than 
words. He owes them brutal honesty in reviewing the political and strategic 
purpose that is now so costly of that courage.

Unless he is enveloped in sycophants, Brown must be hearing the same 
intelligence as the rest of us hear and read. Hapless spin doctors can point to 
schools built here, poppies eradicated there, soldiers "trained" somewhere else. 
But Kabul is ever more insecure and journeys out of the capital are confined to 
armoured cars or helicopters.

Monday's remarkable report from inside the Taliban by the Guardian's Ghaith 
Abdul-Ahad showed his hosts clearly able to roam free through 70% of populated 
Afghanistan, collecting tribute and dispensing favours and rough justice. 
Taliban units appear to control the Khyber Pass, forcing all supplies into 
costly convoys. It can only be a matter of time before they acquire the 
ground-to-air missiles that enabled them to drive out the Russians in the 1980s. 
British soldiers dying by the week within miles of their Helmand base indicate 
the failure of a military campaign launched with such bravado two years ago.

Brown's repeated thesis that the occupation of Helmand is vital "to keep terror 
from the streets of Britain" is nonsense. It fuels an insurgency that sucks 
guns, money and recruits into this benighted region. Arrested terrorists in 
Britain may be lying when they invariably cite the war as their rallying cry, 
but cite it they do. Brown cannot plausibly cite the antithesis, that they are 
being deterred by the war in Helmand.

As for blaming Pakistan, its regime has been thoroughly corrupted by American 
aid for a decade and its border with Afghanistan is beyond policing. Earlier 
this week, Brown registered his "disgust and horror" at the Taliban insurgency 
using suicide bombers against British troops. This outrage is hardly novel. 
Child bombers have been used by insurgents since the Vietcong in Vietnam.

What Brown failed to acknowledge, and what is used by Britain's enemies in 
Pakistan and elsewhere, is Nato's use of cluster bombs and aerial missiles, 
knowing that they kill civilians, including children, "collaterally". The 
coalition has almost certainly killed more children in Afghanistan by its 
reckless use of tactical air strikes than have died at the hands of the Taliban. 
War is no place for such hypocrisy.

Nato forces in Kabul are now devoid of strategy. The Afghan president, Hamid 
Karzai, is proving adept at the old Afghan game of shuffling warlords and 
druglords. It is common knowledge that lines of contact are opening on every 
front with commanders of the "new Taliban", whose role in governing a future 
Afghanistan is beyond dispute. This leaves Nato's leaders - other than America 
and Britain - justifiably refusing to throw good troops after dead ones. 
Afghanistan is proving a classic of sunk cost fallacy, with commanders unwilling 
to change policy for fear of admitting that the existing one has been a colossal 
failure.

Frankness continues to be the greatest casualty of these wars. Those who cheered 
on Iraq and Afghanistan - from left as well as right - dare not admit they might 
have been wrong. Now a rewriting of the Iraq epilogue as a mission well 
accomplished is acting as a lethal magnet, drawing British policy to similar 
disaster and British troops to their deaths in Helmand.

The essence of moral judgment is universality. Eager inquirers should now be 
turning their gaze to the dusty heights of Kabul. Brown may be relying on the 
army's spirit of "their's not to reason why; their's but to do or die". That is 
a soldier's duty, but it is not the duty of a democrat. His duty is precisely to 
reason why.

simon.jenkins at guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008