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.
"There
is not one of you who would dare write his honest opinion. The business of
Journalism is now to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilify, fall at the feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread.
We are tools, vessels of rich men behind the scenes, we are jumping jacks.
They pull the strings; we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our
lives are the properties of these men. We are intellectual
prostitutes."
John
Swainton, of the New York Times at his retirement party in September 2000
![[independent media
centre]](../local/images/imclogo-heb4.gif)
