Taliban and the bogey of terrorism

By Charles Ferndale

August 28, 2009

On Newsnight (Aug 20) while being interviewed by Gaven Esler, the US general incharge of the Afghan war, David Petraeus, said that the war was "not a war of choice". He was echoing President Obama, Gordon Brown, British military officials and others. We in Britain are told constantly that NATO forces have to be there to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a training ground for terrorist attacks on our own soil. The implication is that we are killing Afghans (in their tens of thousands) to stop Britons at home from being killed (in their tens, or, at worst, in their hundreds). The claim that we are in Afghanistan to keep terrorists off our streets is false; our presence there increases the threat of terrorism here. But its falsity is not news; no thoughtful person believes that the NATO forces are there for that reason. But what no one in the NATO countries asks publically is the question they should ask: even if the claim that we are in Afghanistan to prevent terrorism on our soil were true, would such a policy be justifiable on any coherent moral grounds? Is it right to kill thousands of people in their own homes to stave off a threat to just a fraction of that number in our own homes? Even if it worked, would it be a morally justifiable policy? We the British don't ask this question, but I am quite sure Afghans do.

Afghanistan has not been an important planning area for any attacks on western countries and the Taliban have shown no inclination to conduct war against NATO countries outside Afghanistan (so far, but we seem to be doing our best to change their practices). They are freedom-fighters who want us out of their country. Would we be killing them if there were no oil and gas around the Caspian sea?

General Petraeus said that the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 were planned in Afghanistan. This remark is disingenuous. Osama bin Laden may have been in Afghanistan at the time of the attacks, but had he been in Washington, New York, London, Paris or Hamburg, his whereabouts would have made no difference to the outcome. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks resided in Germany, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and were trained (in part) in flying schools set up (some allege, for this very purpose) by the CIA in Florida, US.

Gordon Brown said two days ago that 75 per cent of the terrorist attacks planned against Britain so far have been planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Another dishonest statement. Mr Brown has no idea what terrorist attacks on Britain have been planned so he cannot know what percentage were planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The most he can ever claim to know is what percent of the terrorist attacks planned, and known to our intelligence services, originated from one of those two countries. How many such plans does he know about? Is it 75 per cent of one, two, three, or four plans? How many were there? We are not told and we don't ask. Why are our journalists so lazy as to allow these fraudulent justifications for the war in Afghanistan to go unchallenged?

And what about the convenient disjunction in the claims of our officials -- that the terrorist plots were planned in Afghanistan or in Pakistan? Well, which country was it? Does Brown think we don't care? If none were planned in Afghanistan, then what relevance have those plans to our presence there? For the existence of any such plans to afford us grounds for killing thousands of Afghans in their own country, it would have to be shown (minimally) that such plots could never be hatched elsewhere. Clearly that cannot be shown. So, even if such plans might have exited, or might occur in future, their existence, or possible existence, offer no grounds for our belligerent presence in Afghanistan; any more than their known past occurrence in Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and America would justify the mass killing of the nationals of those countries by anyone's armed forces. Would the Taliban be justified in bombing London just because our politicians are aggressive, dishonest, opportunists?

Over the last few days, two honest British journalists have at last mentioned that during the eight years of our presence in Afghanistan, there has been no improvement whatever in the appalling conditions under which most Afghans live. Perhaps that was news to them, but it is not news to any Afghan, nor to anyone who knows the region well. Despite the billions of dollars that have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 (which has promptly poured straight out again), no help has been given to the poor there. Actually the condition of the poor has got much worse since 2001, which is why, contrary to yet more dishonest statements by our officials, a great many Afghans support the Taliban. The only reliable experience Afghans have had of most NATO powers is that they break their promises (under Mullah Omar, the Taliban did not break their promises). So why should the NATO powers ever be trusted? And the plight of poor Afghan women (outside of the privileged families located mainly in Kabul) has also got worse since the Taliban were overthrown (hard as this may be for us liberals to believe). But did we not invade to liberate them? John Simpson, two days ago, was honest enough to say that had the money spent on the Afghan war been spent on the poor, there would be no war there. At last we see a glimmer of truth in the self-serving, meticulously disseminated, 'fog' of war. The fog exists in Europe and America, not in Afghanistan. The Afghans have a perfectly clear, close-up, view of what we are up to: and what they see is not pretty. They must think foreigners are all fools or liars.

When challenged on the failure of the NATO powers to do anything to help ordinary Afghans, the usual response from officials in the NATO countries is that the Taliban always prevent developmental projects from being implemented. They call it 'the security situation'. But the claim is another lie. There are huge areas of Afghanistan suffering the agonies, deformities, diseases and deaths caused by poverty, but those areas are untroubled by the Taliban. Nevertheless, they have not seen a dime since 2001. These areas are free from the troublesome Taliban, so anyone could visit them safely and confirm the truth of what I have just said, and so prove that what British and American officials are saying is false; but few do.

Western officials talk little of the fact that when the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001 opium production in Helmand was eliminated completely. Newspapers allege, repeatedly, that the Taliban are financing themselves with sales of heroin. The western media's favourite estimate of the profit made by the Taliban from heroin sales is $100 million a year. First question: how do they know? Second question: which Taliban make this money? The so-called Taliban no longer have a unified command (we saw to that). There are at least fourteen different groups being called 'Taliban'. Is the dope trade run like a welfare state, with fair shares for all? NATO officials are probably the source of most claims about the drug trade in Afghanistan. Can they be trusted? I don't think so. Simultaneously with claims that the drug trade is run by the 'Taliban', we are told that it is run by Karzai's 'war lords'. But Karzai is America's man. So could it be that the drug trade is financing America's men (as it did during the Vietnam war and during the illegal, American-run, Contra war against the elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua)? In any case, can these commentators have it both ways? Is the drug trade financing both sides? Maybe, maybe not. None of these obvious and reasonable questions is ever asked in public in Britain. Why not? Is the British public content to be told highly improbable stories?

Oh, how tiresome it is to be misinformed routinely by the country's supposed leaders and by lazy journalists. And what hope is there for countries in which the electorate tolerate, as their leaders, people who only ever seem to lie.