[Peace-discuss] US, UK out of Afghanistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

["In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross 
Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your 
hands" --Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.  But the 
US is preparing to send 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan -- bringing US 
troops to 30,000 (plus how many Blackwater-style mercenaries?)-- while 
the US Defense Secretary complains that NATO troops aren't fighting hard 
enough.  The leading Democrat presidential candidates, of course, are 
avid to "redeploy" more troops to this "good war." --CGE]

	January 10, 2008
	The 'Good War' Is a Bad War
	by John Pilger

"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is 
being played out a game for dominion of the world." --Lord Curzon, 
viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898

I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the 
Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. 
She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, 
had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through 
contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like 
earthquake victims awaiting rescue.

Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which 
since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in 
that country. There is no organization on earth like it. It is the high 
bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa 
agents have traveled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at 
clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalized 
women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. 
They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was 
barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly 
courting the mullahs so that the oil company UNOCAL could build a 
pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.

Indeed, Rawa's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western 
governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now 
reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a 
"good war." When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. 
Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, 
only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the 
Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they 
persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the 
silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed 
warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorize, yet 
they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were 
more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and 
feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands."

The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 
2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 
9/11." The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 
December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, [we 
have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and 
al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan 
and work towards the realization of their economic, political and 
strategic interests in the region."

The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence 
that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable 
response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months 
prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not 
the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the 
Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin 
factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to 
fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. 
Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a 
creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used 
to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, 
during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline." Or, 
as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most 
capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history."

The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the 
mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. 
However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further 
and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, 
were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an 
important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship 
that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's 
aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer 
had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did," with 
a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law," which 
meant the legalized persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)

By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was 
souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid 
of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic 
parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar. A 
tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide 
whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not 
this would have happened, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan. 
According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US 
diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense 
with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs."

Acclaimed as the first "victory" in the "war on terror," the attack on 
Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of 
thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to 
western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 
October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul 
had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked 
outside to chat to a neighbor. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra, 
his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister 
and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, 
then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in 
this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was 
his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. "Most of the people killed in this 
war are not Taliban; they are innocents," Gulam Rasul told me. "Was the 
killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes 
and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and 
they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt."

There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of 
Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By 
all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and 
singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about 
three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing 
lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 
children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had 
desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not 
uncommon, and these days the dead are described as "Taliban"; or, if 
they are children, they are said to be "partly to blame for being at a 
site used by militants" – according to the BBC, speaking to a US 
military spokesman.

The British military have played an important part in this violence, 
having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they 
took over command of NATO forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This 
translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a 
contrived news event was the "fall" of a "Taliban stronghold," Musa 
Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to 
"liberate" rubble left by American B-52s.

What justifies this? Various fables have been spun – "building 
democracy" is one. "The war on drugs" is the most perverse. When the 
Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they had one striking success. 
They brought to an abrupt end a historic ban on opium production that 
the Taliban regime had achieved. A UN official in Kabul described the 
ban to me as "a modern miracle." The miracle was quickly rescinded. As a 
reward for supporting the Karzai "democracy," the Americans allowed 
Northern Alliance warlords to replant the country's entire opium crop in 
2002. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces instantly went under 
cultivation. Today, 90 per cent of world trade in opium originates in 
Afghanistan. In 2005, a British government report estimated that 35,000 
children in this country were using heroin. While the British taxpayer 
pays for a £1bn military super-base in Helmand Province and the 
second-biggest British embassy in the world, in Kabul, peanuts are spent 
on drug rehabilitation at home.

Tony Blair once said memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this 
commitment. We will not walk away . . . [We will offer] some way out of 
the poverty that is your miserable existence." I thought about this as I 
watched children play in a destroyed cinema. They were illiterate and so 
could not read the poster warning that unexploded cluster bombs lay in 
the debris.

"After five years of engagement," reported James Fergusson in the London 
Independent on 16 December, "the [UK] Department for International 
Development had spent just £390m on Afghan projects." Unusually, 
Fergusson has had meetings with Taliban who are fighting the British. 
"They remained charming and courteous throughout," he wrote of one visit 
in February. "This is the beauty of malmastia, the Pashtun tradition of 
hospitality towards strangers. So long as he comes unarmed, even a 
mortal enemy can rely on a kind reception. The opportunity for dialogue 
that malmastia affords is unique."

This "opportunity for dialogue" is a far cry from the surrender-or-else 
offers made by the government of Gordon Brown. What Brown and his 
Foreign Office advisers willfully fail to understand is that the 
tactical victory in Afghanistan in 2001, achieved with bombs, has become 
a strategic disaster in south Asia. Exacerbated by the assassination of 
Benazir Bhutto, the current turmoil in Pakistan has its contemporary 
roots in a Washington-contrived war in neighboring Afghanistan that has 
alienated the Pashtuns who inhabit much of the long border area between 
the two countries. This is also true of most Pakistanis, who, according 
to opinion polls, want their government to negotiate a regional peace, 
rather than play a prescribed part in a rerun of Lord Curzon's Great Game.

Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=12182