There is no victory in Afghanistan’s tribal war, only the exchange
of one group of killers for another. The difference is that President
Bush calls the latest occupiers of Kabul “our friends”.
However welcome the scenes of people playing music and shaving off
their beards, this so-called Northern Alliance are no bringers of
freedom. They are the same people welcomed by similar scenes of
jubilation in 1992, who then killed an estimated 50,000 in four years of
internecine feuding.
The new heroes so far have tortured and executed at least 100
prisoners of war, and countless others, as well as looted food supplies
and re-established their monopoly on the heroin trade.
This week, Amnesty International made an unusually blunt statement
that was buried in the news. It ought to be emblazoned across every
front page and television screen. “By failing to appreciate the gravity
of the human rights concerns in relation to Northern Alliance leaders,”
said Amnesty, “UK ministers at best perpetuate a culture of impunity for
past crimes; at worst they risk being complicit in human rights abuse.”
The truth is that the latest crop of criminals to “liberate” Kabul
have been given a second chance by the most powerful country on earth
pounding into dust one of the poorest, where people’s life expectancy is
just over 40.
And for what?
Not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has yet to be caught or killed.
Osama bin Laden and his network have almost certainly slipped into
the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan. Will Pakistan
now be bombed? And Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where Islamic extremism and
its military network took root? Of course not.
The Saudi sheikhs, many of them as extreme as the Taliban, control
America’s greatest source of oil. The Egyptian regime, bribed with
billions of US dollars, is an important American proxy. No daisy cutters
for them.
There was, and still is, no “war on terrorism”. Instead, we have
watched a variation of the great imperial game of swapping “bad”
terrorists for “good” terrorists, while untold numbers of innocent
people have paid with their lives: most of one village, whole families, a
hospital, as well as teenage conscripts suitably dehumanised by the
word “Taliban”.
It is perfectly understandable that those in the West who supported
this latest American tenor from the air, or hedged their bets, should
now seek to cover the blood on their reputations with absurd claims that
“bombing works”. Tell that to grieving parents at fresh graves in
impoverished places of whom the sofa bomb-aimers know nothing.
The contortion of intellect and morality that this triumphalism
requires is not a new phenomenon. Putting aside the terminally naive, it
mostly comes from those who like to play at war: who have seen nothing
of bombing, as I have experienced it: cluster bombs, daisy cutters: the
lot.
How appropriate that the last American missile to hit Kabul before
the “liberators” arrived should destroy the satellite transmitter of the
Al-Jazeera television station, virtually the only reliable source of
news in the region.
For weeks, American officials have been pressuring the government of
Qatar, the Gulf state where Al-Jazeera is based, to silence its
broadcasters, who have given a view of the “war against terrorism” other
than that based on the false premises of the Bush and Blair “crusade”.
The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary.
The “smoking gun” of this entire episode is evidence of the British
Government’s lies about the basis for the war.
According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden’s extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing.
Yet in late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan’s two
Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand
trial for the September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held
under house arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and
the Daily Telegraph), this had both bin Laden’s approval and that of
Mullah Omah, the Taliban leader.
The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which
would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way,
he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be
seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf
who said he “could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety”.
But who really killed the deal?
The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal
and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said
that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse
of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin Laden was
captured”.
And yet the US and British governments insisted there was no
alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had “refused” to
hand over Osama bin Laden. What the Afghani people got instead was
“American justice” – imposed by a president who, as well as denouncing
international agreements on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture
and global warming, has refused to sign up for an international court
to try war criminals: the one place where bin Laden might be put on
trial.
When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he was correct.
Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic audience then
to accelerate American influence in a vital region where there has been a
power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence
of China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to surpass even those
of the US. That is why control of Central Asia and the Caspian basin
oilfields is important as exploration gets under way.
There was, until the cluster bombing of innocents, a broad-based
recognition that there had to be international action to combat the kind
of terrorism that took thousands of lives in New York.
But these humane responses to September 11 were appropriated by an
American administration, whose subsequent actions ought to have left all
but the complicit and the politically blind in no doubt that it
intended to reinforce its post-cold war assertion of global supremacy –
an assertion that has a long, documented history.
The “war on terrorism” gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress
into pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American
justice and democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism
laws of the very kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the
Irish war.
In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and
Britain, mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America
invites ludicrous accusations of “treachery.”
Above all, what this false victory has demonstrated is that, to those
in power in Washington and London and those who speak for them, certain
human lives have greater worth than others and that the killing of only
one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that, we beckon the
repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again.
