var articleheadline = "Robert Fisk's World: Why does the US think it
can win in Afghanistan? ";
Robert Fisk's World: Why does the US think it can win in Afghanistan?
The Taliban are better trained, and sad to say increasingly tolerated by
the local civilian population
Saturday, 20 September 2008
Poor old Algerians. They are being served the same old pap from their cruel
government. In 1997, the Pouvoir announced a "final victory" over their vicious
Islamist enemies. On at least three occasions, I reported not, of course,
without appropriate cynicism that the Algerian authorities believed their
enemies were finally beaten because the "terrorists" were so desperate that
they were beheading every man, woman and child in the villages they captured in
the mountains around Algiers and Oran.
And now they're at it again. After a ferocious resurgence of car bombing by
their newly merged "al-Qa'ida in the Maghreb" antagonists, the decrepit old FLN
government in Algiers has announced the "terminal phase" in its battle against
armed Islamists. As the Algerian journalist Hocine Belaffoufi said with
consummate wit the other day, "According to this political discourse ... the
increase in attacks represents undeniable proof of the defeat of terrorism. The
more terrorism collapsed, the more the attacks increased ... so the stronger
(terrorism) becomes, the fewer attacks there will be."
We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in
south-west Asia. First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by
overthrowing the Taliban. Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq. Now
with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually
antagonistic sectarian enclaves we have won the war in Iraq and are heading
back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced
by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy
by recapturing half the country.
It seems an age since Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld declared,"A government
has been put in place (in Afghanistan), and the Islamists are no more the law
in Kabul. Of course, from time to time a hand grenade, a mortar explodes but
in New York and in San Francisco, victims also fall. As for me, I'm full of
hope." Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet
general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan yes, the very same Bagram
airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped
the earlier Russian massacres. Only "terrorist remnants" remained in the Afghan
mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the
limited Soviet "intervention" forces, were restoring peace to democratic
Afghanistan.
And now? After the "unimaginable" progress in Iraq I am quoting the fantasist
who still occupies the White House the Americans are going to hip-hop 8,000
soldiers out of Mesopotamia and dump another 4,700 into the hellfire of
Afghanistan. Too few, too late, too slow, as one of my French colleagues
commented acidly. It would need at least another 10,000 troops to hope to put
an end to these Taliban devils who are now equipped with more sophisticated
weapons, better trained and increasingly sad to say tolerated by the local
civilian population. For Afghanistan, read Irakistan.
Back in the late 19th century, the Taliban yes, the British actually called
their black-turbaned enemies "Talibs" would cut the throats of captured
British soldiers. Now this unhappy tradition is repeated and we are
surprised! Two of the American soldiers seized when the Taliban stormed into
their mountain base on 13 July this year were executed by their captors.
And now it turns out that four of the 10 French troops killed in Afghanistan on
18 August surrendered to the Taliban, and were almost immediately executed.
Their interpreter had apparently disappeared shortly before their mission began
no prizes for what this might mean and the two French helicopters which
might have helped to save the day were too busy guarding the hopeless and
impotent Afghan President Hamid Karzai to intervene on behalf of their own
troops. A French soldier described the Taliban with brutal frankness. "They are
good soldiers but pitiless enemies."
The Soviet general at Bagram now has his amanuensis in General David McKiernan,
the senior US officer in Afghanistan, who proudly announced last month that US
forces had killed "between 30 and 35 Taliban" in a raid on Azizabad near Herat.
"In the light of emerging evidence pertaining (sic) to civilian casualties in
the ... counter-insurgency operation," the luckless general now says, he feels
it "prudent" another big sic here to review his original investigation. The
evidence "pertaining", of course, is that the Americans probably killed 90
people in Azizabad, most of them women and children. We let us be frank and
own up to our role in the hapless Nato alliance in Afghanistan have now
slaughtered more than 500 Afghan civilians this year alone. These include a
Nato missile attack on a wedding party in July when we splattered 47 of the
guests all over the village of Deh Bala.
And Obama and McCain really think they're going to win in Afghanistan before,
I suppose, rushing their soldiers back to Iraq when the Baghdad government
collapses. What the British couldn't do in the 19th century and what the
Russians couldn't do at the end of the 20th century, we're going to achieve at
the start of the 21 century, taking our terrible war into nuclear-armed
Pakistan just for good measure. Fantasy again.
Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would
surely have made something of this. Yes, we have lost after we won in
Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again. Stuff happens.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-why-does-the-us-think-it-can-win-in-afghanistan-936185.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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