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Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 14:35:11 PST
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Subject: [R-G] A hollow victory - The Guardian
The Guardian November 22, 2001
A hollow victory
The Afghan war has increased hunger and banditry but will not reduce
the terror threat; aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing
has
sharply exacerbated what was already a dire situation
By Seumas Milne
Ten days after victory was declared in the Afghan war, real life continues
to make a mockery of such triumphalism in the cruellest way. As American
B-52 bombers pound Taliban diehards around Kandahar and Kunduz, tens of
thousands of refugees are streaming towards the Pakistani border and chaotic
insecurity across the country is hampering attempts to tackle a
fast-deteriorating humanitarian crisis.
Aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing - which even the British
government concedes has killed hundreds of civilians - has sharply
exacerbated what was already a dire situation and Oxfam warned yesterday
they were "operating on a precipice". More than 100,000 people are now
living in tents in the Kandahar area alone and the charity has been asked by
Pakistan to gear up camps across the border to receive similar numbers in
the next few days. After an aid convoy was hijacked by local warlords on the
Kabul-Bamiyan road on Tuesday, Oxfam and and other agencies argue that only
a UN protection force can now prevent widespread starvation outside the main
towns and distribution centres.
But of course the return of lawlessness and competing warlords was an
inevitable and foreseen consequence of Anglo-American support for the
long-discredited Northern Alliance, just as the humanitarian disaster has
been the widely predicted outcome of the attack on Afghanistan. It was
reportedly British advice that led to the decision to rely on the
heroin-financed gangsters of the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban out
of Kabul and the north. If so, it will be a struggle even for Tony Blair to
chalk it up as another feather in the cap of his doctrine of international
community.
The effect of US and British intervention in Afghanistan has been to breathe
new life into the embers of a 20-year-old civil war and hand the country
back to the same bandits who left 50,000 dead in Kabul when they last lorded
it over the capital. What has been hailed in the west as a liberation for
women from the Taliban's grotesque oppression is being treated very
differently by Afghan women's organisations. The widely praised
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, for example,
described the return of the alliance as "dreadful and shocking" and said
many refugees leaving Afghanistan have been even more terrified of their
"raping and looting" than of US bombing.
British and American politicians have gone out of their way to praise the
restraint of their new friends, now absurdly renamed the United Front, even
when its soldiers have been filmed maiming and executing prisoners. But then
by supporting the alliance so decisively, they are indirectly complicit in
what are unquestionably war crimes. That complicity moved a stage further on
Monday, when US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he was
determined to prevent thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters in
Kunduz from escaping as part of any surrender agreement. He hoped, he said,
they would be "killed or taken prisoner", but added that US forces were "not
in a position" to take prisoners. Since Northern Alliance commanders have
repeatedly made clear that they will not take foreign volunteers prisoner -
and are reported already to have killed hundreds they have captured - the
implication of Rumsfeld's remarks was pretty unmistakable.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. The US government appears to be
increasingly impatient with any kind of restraint on its use of naked force.
In the past week or so, it has repeatedly bombed areas known to be free of
Taliban or al-Qaida forces - such as the town of Gardez, where at least
seven civilians were killed in one raid; rocketed the offices of al-Jazeera,
the freest television station in the Middle East; threatened to sink any
ship in the Arabian sea that resists being boarded; and ordered the setting
up of domestic military tribunals, with powers to try secretly and execute
suspected foreign terrorists.
Nor, as Clare Short's complaint about the US almost turning its back on the
rest of the world highlighted, does it seem to have much time for Tony
Blair's plans for troop deployments, peacekeeping and nation building in
poverty-stricken central Asia. But then nobody now in power in Afghanistan -
whether the factions of the Northern Alliance, the southern Pashtun warlords
or the remnants of the Taliban theocrats - wants foreign troops in their
country, as the marines at Bagram air base have discovered.
Only Afghans can create a viable political future for themselves; foreign
interference has been at the heart of Afghanistan's 20-year disintegration.
Perhaps the warlords will come to an accommodation - though it's hard to
believe - and the talks due to be held in Bonn on Monday will start to
cobble together some semblance of a broad-based government to rebuild the
cluster bomb-blasted wreckage of their society. But for the US, this is a
second-order issue. It now smells the blood of its quarry, the man held
responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. If
Bin Laden is captured and killed in the next few days, as the US and British
military seem increasingly confident will happen, the Afghan campaign will
be celebrated as a decisive breakthrough in the war against terror - and the
US will move on, turning its attention to Iraq and elsewhere, after mopping
up a few foreign jihad enthusiasts.
But in reality it is likely to be nothing of the sort. The war against the
Taliban has so dominated the global response to the atrocities of September
11, it is hard to remember that the Kandahar clerics probably had nothing
directly to do with them. And even if Bin Laden and his Afghan-based
acolytes knew of the attacks in advance, it is highly unlikely that they
were involved in the detailed planning, not least because of the intense
surveillance he was under and the logistical problems of communication from
one of the world's most technologically backward countries. Despite the best
endeavours of US investigators to make the link, there seems to be no
reliable evidence that the hijackers even trained in Afghanistan - though
several did in the US. Western governments exaggerate the importance of
state sponsorship to terror campaigns.
The case against the Afghan war was never that the Taliban would turn out to
be a latterday Vietcong - critics predicted they would be defeated - but
primarily that it would lead to large-scale civilian casualties, fail to
stamp out anti-western terrorism, create a political backlash throughout the
Muslim world and actually increase the likelihood of further attacks. In the
absence of any serious effort to address the grievances underlying anti-US
hatred, that argument has been strengthened. It was clear long ago,
certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union, that no state could defeat
the US in a conventional military confrontation and that only the war of the
flea - guerrilla warfare or terrorism - could be effective. The Afghan
debacle has hammered that lesson home.
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