Afghanistan under the knife and hammer posted by lenin

The procedure is quite simple. Choose a country in the world that seems to be suffering, in some way dysfunctional, ripe for 'intervention'. Perform some 'surgical' air strikes and, after a quick and painless stitch-up, auction it off to the highest bidders. Having done that, so the theory goes, you can return home and contemplate your good deeds. But, sticking with the medical metaphor for a second, you are not a doctor and you wouldn't know the hippocratic oath if it was printed in reverse lettering on your forehead. Whatever 'illness' you were supposedly dealing with has metastasized while the body is resisting your implants. In fact, the 'patient' keeps trying to kick your ass every time you come near him. Time to give up? Hell no. While Bush sends more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has insisted that there will be no 'artificial timetable' for British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay, but how about a real timetable?

Take a look at what's happening. The current propaganda, being widely repeated in various fora, is that the occupation - despite all the difficulties and the terrible burdens we must bear - is ameliorating the situation of Afghanistan. Thus, practically every commentator is repeating the incorrect claim, floated by Laura Bush, that infant mortality has declined by 25% since the occupation began. In fact, one study led by the World Bank, which is heading reconstruction and development programmes in Afghanistan, said last year that infant mortality had fallen - not by 25% or 26%, but by 18%. And that study excluded the worst-hit regions of Afghanistan, such as Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Zabul and Nuristan, because of security concerns. That is, it excluded 15% of the population from its scope. On the other hand, mortality among under fives has certainly risen. So, in 2005, 20% of the under-five population perished. In 2006, 25% died. Okay, so infant mortality in the least war-torn regions fell by 18% in five years, while in just one year, the rate of child mortality across the whole country increased by 25%. So, what are we supposed to be celebrating? More children get to live beyond their first 12 months before biting the dust from starvation, treatable diseases and, er, the odd bomb or bullet? As for the 75% who get past the age of five, if they do ever get to be grown-ups, they will at least have some interesting prospects - the torture chamber, rape, starvation, the destruction of their farms at the hands of DynCorp, murder at the hands of a local patriarch flush with dollars and self-regarding pomp, thermobaric bombardment...

There is no Lancet survey for Afghanistan. We have had some estimates of deaths in the first year of the war, the highest of which was supplied by Jonathan Steele of The Guardian, who estimated 49,000 direct and indirect deaths resulting from the war. There are occasional estimates of civilians killed, but the detection rate is likely to be extremely low - to my knowledge, there is no consistent effort to actually trace the number of deaths there. The UN provides figures, estimating the rate of deaths among civilians in the hundreds over the last six months. Frankly, that is just unbelievable (and, actually, I would like to know how they distinguish between a combatant and a civilian - presumably they rely on the occupation authorities for this kind of information). Consider just one facet of the war. In Iraq, between 50 and 100 Iraqis die as a result of air strikes every day. When the secret air war on both Iraq and Afghanistan was confirmed, the figures showed that the biggest spike in bombings was in Afghanistan where the number of major raids reached more than 800 per month. And we're supposed to believe that the death rate resulting from air strikes alone is lower than in Iraq, where the number of mass bombings - though very high - was less? In Iraq, in a period of three years, 78,000 violent deaths were caused by air strikes in Iraq (this was before the big spike in aerial bombardments). In Afghanistan, where the rate of aerial bombardment has always been higher, the figure must be higher. One informal estimate of deaths last year was carried out by Associated Press. It suggested that a total of 5,100 people had died violently in the first 9 months of 2007 (and most were killed by the occupation). Given that such passive surveys tend to massively underestimate the true scale of deaths, we are really talking about tens of thousands of deaths in that period, at least if we want to be realistic. Given the longevity of the war and its increasing brutality, if a Lancet-style survey can ever be carried out in Afghanistan, the total deaths may even be higher than in Iraq.

One index of the rate of destruction is the rate at which the insurgents are able to recruit and expand. Where the occupation is most bloody, the resistance is most concentrated. Until recently, south-west Afghanistan has been what the 'Sunni triangle' was in Iraq. It was where the US was most unpopular, and where attacks generally occurred most frequently. But now, the 'Taliban' - realistically, we know that most insurgents are not actually Talibs, and many of the actual Taliban leaders are on the receiving end of serenades from Hamid Karzai - are controlling more of the country than the US. The rate at which occupying troops are being killed has been rising year on year, peaking in June this year, and surpassing the rate of 'coalition' deaths in Iraq for the first time. The insurgency controls ever larger tracts of the country.

The verities of Afghanistan are poorly gauged, as I have indicated, but so far as we can tell what is happening, we know that the occupiers no longer command the support of most Afghans. The patience and forebearance of Afghans was and is enormous, despite the abuses, despite the torture chambers, despite the indiscriminate killings, the bombing raids resulting in massacres, and despite the obscene 'Green Zone' style luxury for occupiers and their auxiliaries in Kabul while much of the population is actually starving. Despite the obvious unpopularity of the Taliban, most people appear to want to negotiate a deal with them rather than prosecute a long and bloody war. Even the puppet administration of Hamid Karzai and the very meek and gentle General Rashid Dostum would like to cut some sort of a deal. Of course, there are those for whom the war is working out just swell. The warlords whom the US pays off to keep order are seeing their private armies expand greatly as they reap greater profits from the opium crop. Power is increasingly localised, and Hamid Karzai doesn't have a finger of real influence beyond Kabul. Contractors such as DynCorp are making out as well, because their role is to destroy the opium farms (those belonging to the poor farmers, not the big local rulers who are effectively under Nato protection). Curiously, DynCorp never seem to succeed in reducing drugs production wherever they are despatched to do so, yet they continually get the contracts. And as for Washington? The last thing they want is to get out. Both Democrats and Republicans are intent on increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, if necessary by scaling back the war in Iraq. They know they are in danger of losing the whole situation. Not only is the war in Afghanistan turning the population against the occupiers. In Pakistan, where the government is assaulting 'Taliban strongholds' with great ferocity, local populations are actually becoming more and not less supportive of the Talibs. The US is increasingly projecting its force across the border, and sabre-rattling against the Pakistani government (even Karzai is getting in on that act). The danger of a regional war is escalating in that "global Balkans" - as Brezinski, Obama's foreign policy advisor, dubs the region - and the United States government is raising the stakes.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, pakistan, taliban, US imperialism

An Uncontroversial Point posted by lenin

These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers:

Labels: 'al qaeda', afghanistan, mujahideen, taliban

Big up the Taliban posted by lenin

Labels: eurotrash, prince harry, royal scum, taliban

Afghanistan: 54% Taliban coverage, and the Nato+ solution posted by lenin

The pro-occupation think-tank, the Senlis Council, has another report [pdf] out about Afghanistan. It reports that the Taliban has a presence covering at least 54% of the land mass in Afghanistan, and is closing in on Kabul. Missed by polls and media coverage, the report suggests that the Taliban are rapidly winning political credibility among those who hated them six years ago. The international combatants of 'Al Qaeda' are said to be bolstering the insurgency, but ordinary people are increasingly being won over. Part of the problem, the report says, is that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding despite massive cashflows into the country, with conditions worse than in the worst parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This is a map describing Taliban presence in parts of Afghanistan:



However, what's most intriguing is the Council's support for a very hawkish policy of the kind being pushed by the bipartisan imperialists in the US Houses of Congress. The proposal is simple: given that there is no intention of withdrawing, a huge boost in troop commitment has to be demanded of all NATO members, and the war has to be expanded into Pakistan. The Taliban is known to operate across borders, and the Pakistani army is reluctant to engage in battle with them for a variety of reasons. Clearly, part of the US pressure on Musharraf is aimed at his inability to be a reliable puppet, while Benazir Bhutto's rhetoric about 'extremists' is clearly intended to capture that vital Washington constituency. There have already been cross-border attacks, but would Bhutto or any future Pakistani government permit the US to operate extensively in Pakistan? Would such actions hinder or boost the popular movement resisting Musharraf's dictatorship? The report doesn't ponder on such questions, or the obvious answers.

Perhaps most importantly, the report states that 'foreign fighters' from across what Brzezinski calls the "global Balkans" including Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, are acting as force-multipliers for the Taliban insurgency. How much of this is real information and how much is 'intelligence' obtained through torture, or straightforward propaganda? Unlike other parts of the report, which comprises some independent research, much of this appears to be distilled from pro-imperialist think-tanks and Western newspapers. At any rate, though the report strikes a technocratic note, the context makes clear that the "Nato+" solution would constitute an aggressive strike to bring south Asia under US hegemony. When both Obama and Clinton make noises about potential aggression in Pakistan, we have to take it as a warning sign. This war may send the whole region up in flames.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, taliban, US imperialism

Come Back, Taliban: all is forgiven. posted by lenin

The UK has supported plans to bring senior Taliban into the Afghan government, according to The Guardian:

As British troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, the military presence in southern Afghanistan is to be bolstered in the next few months by the deployment of the Parachute Regiment and new Eurofighter/Typhoon fighter-bombers.

At the same time, however, British officials have concluded that the Taliban is too deep-rooted to be eradicated by military means. Following a wide-ranging policy review accompanying Gordon Brown's arrival in Downing Street, a decision was taken to put a much greater focus on courting "moderate" Taliban leaders as well as "tier two" footsoldiers, who fight more for money and out of a sense of tribal obligation than for the Taliban's ideology.

Such a shift has put Britain and the Karzai government at odds with hawks in Washington, who are wary of Whitehall's enthusiasm for talks with what they see as a monolithic terrorist group. But a British official said: "Some Americans are coming around to our way of seeing this."

I'm afraid I don't believe that Washington 'hawks' think that the Taliban are a "monolithic terrorist group", because they have the same information that the British government has, but then that's the kind of uninteresting shibboleth you have to revert to when you don't have any proper analysis of their strategy. Suppose Washington is unconvinced that bringing Taliban leaders into the government will have any substantial impact on the resistance they're facing? Suppose they're concerned that bringing 'moderate' Taliban into the government will both legitimise the military opposition and undermine the puppet government's supposed crucial advantage, which is that however murderous and venal it is, it is not the Taliban? Suppose they're worried it will undermine the evangelising moralism with which they sounded the launch of the invasion? Suppose their warlord friends are opposed to it? Suppose they don't feel the need to negotiate, since they can easily escalate the bombing?

As for the UK, what is guiding its strategy? Jason Burke's interesting report discusses the contours of this multi-layered war, as it unfolds in an increasingly autonomous network of warlord-controlled territories that could comprise a state in itself, an area that the occupiers are committed to placing under the firm control of a client regime which they think they will require a few decades to effect. He relates a widespread recognition by the occupiers that the Taliban have fought them to a standstill. Given this, the attempt to incorporate leading Taliban - who, after all, were allies not all that long ago - is only logical. It would only be puzzling if you thought that the occupiers wanted Afghanistan to be a Human Rights Protectorate, the global hub of women's liberation, or even a free and independent state. However, if the last six years weren't enough to disabuse you of that notion, then your delusions will undoubtedly survive any incursion of reality, however traumatic. Taliban leaders, for their part, have demands, which include control of most of the south and the withdrawal of the occupation. A national unity government, then, in which the one-eyed man could again be king? I doubt it. More likely is that a segment of the Taliban will be wooed, but the guerilla war will continue on the basis of grass-roots opposition to the current regime.

***

Meanwhile, you may be interested to know that despite the overwhelming opposition of Germans, the Grand Ruling Class Coalition has voted to remain in occupation for at least another year - and, as many predicted, the Green Party dismissed the vote against continued occupation at their recent national conference and voted to prolong the committment to ISAF. Josckha Fischer has, predictably enough, attacked his own party for slipping toward its pacifist roots. The only party now representing German people on this, as on so many key issues, is the Left Party. It is telling that the mildest efforts by the right-wing SPD leader Kurt Beck to shift party policy slightly to the left of Merkel's agenda of welfare cuts has faced a savage rebuke from the former party chairman and vice-chancellor. The SPD has been in straight decline for several months and it now polls less than 30% of the popular vote, but any alternative to the neoliberal agenda is apparently a threat to electoral credibility.

Labels: afghanistan, germany, NATO, occupation, taliban

Afghanistan: suicide attacks increase; Taliban may enter the government. posted by lenin

Why do we know so little about the occupation of Afghanistan and the resistance to it? After all, we get regular detailed reviews of the security situation in Iraq, discussing reconstruction, attacks, operations, public opinion, etc etc. All of this from the US Department of Defense, provided in ideological camouflage, sure, but still quite useful because the ruling class requires accurate information. Nothing of the kind, so far as I can tell, about Afghanistan. I have seen detailed studies of provinces from the Senlis Council [pdf]. Every now and again an NGO discusses human rights abuses, insurgent violence, reconstruction problems. The UN provides us with breathless accounts of (ho ho) 'Peace Day' [pdf]. But there is no detailed, authoritative study of the kind we get about Iraq - none that is made public at any rate.

Well, there are two recent studies, one by the UN and one by the Associated Press, reported here and here. The UN estimates in the Secretary-General's report that suicide attacks in Afghanistan have increased by 30% in the last year, and states that 75% are directed at occupying forces and Afghan security forces. Recently it was suggested by the UN, quoting a Taliban commander, that over half of the suicide attacks are international combatants rather than people from Afghanistan. However, this seems to conflict with a study carried out by the same body which showed that suicide attackers are Afghans "motivated by a variety of grievances such as foreign occupation, anger over civilian casualties and humiliation rather than a 'martyrdom culture'". This confirms what General Dannatt said about the resistance as a whole. The UN explains that they are "duped" into carrying out the attacks, or coerced, but they know perfectly well that it is never that simple. On the other hand, though most of the focus on violent deaths is on that caused by the insurgents, most of the deaths appear to be caused by the occupiers. Associated Press estimates that the total deaths from all violence in Afghanistan in the last 9 months is approximately 5,100, most of them "militants" killed by the occupiers. That's almost certainly a vast underestimate of the actual deaths, and there's always the problem of the 'mere haji rule'. (Anyway, since when were AP in the business of doing body counts?).

Curiously, the US is signalling a possible rapprochement with the Taliban, cautiously endorsing Hamid Karzai's plans for a meeting with Mullah Omar. Hold on a minute. Go back over that a minute. Mullah Omar? Isn't he evil? Didn't America have to invade in order to get the evil-doer? Apparently, the empire is all-forgiving. Karzai has said he will offer Taliban leaders posts in exchange for giving up violence, and he has for a long time supported the idea of including the Taliban in the government. The Taliban are for the first time seriously considering his offer. This isn't because by bringing the Talibs into the government they can stop the war: the root cause of the war is not the Taliban. The Taliban is a heavily armed force that taps into popular discontent rather than a popular movement itself, and the puppet regime has always felt it's better to have such a force inside the tent pissing out. With the Taliban on the side of the government, they could help enforce the crackdown on small farmers by the ruling elite of landowners and rentiers rather than arming the small farmers as they presently do.

Labels: afghanistan, karzai, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Who are the insurgents in Afghanistan? posted by lenin

The one-word answer supplied in most news reports to this question is, of course, "Taliban". It would be astonishing if this was all there was to it, so occasionally we get the admission that it includes other elements. For example, a UNAMA spokesperson says:

"The Taliban are not the only component of Afghanistan's insurgency. There is factional fighting in parts of the country, insecurity caused by drug traffickers and those fighting because they have been intimidated or paid to do so ... They all form important elements of this insurgency.

There is, of course, a way to put this that saves the basic underlying claim that anyone resisting the occupiers, in military or other ways, must have obscure and disreputable motives. The occupiers are innocent, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. USA Today put it thus last year: "The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics." Pro-occupation think-tanks like the Senlis Council and the International Crisis Group advise the occupiers to meet the grievances of the local population, who can thus be won away from supporting the insurgency. The Senlis Council's report, focusing on Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, describes a number of reasons why local populations are increasingly turning toward support for the insurgency, and thus putting local politicians under pressure to support it as well, and the main one is Dyncorp's destruction of the opium farms of the poor (those belonging to the wealthy warlords are left well alone). Senlis has advocated legalising opium production for medicinal purposes There is a misperception that opium production is especially controlled by the Taliban. It is true that the biggest increase in product lately has been in Helmand - taking it to almost 70,000 hectares. But across the country, according to the UNODC, total production last year was 165,000 hectares. In those areas controlled by US-allied warlords, and for Afghanistan's wealthy landlords more generally, opium production is a vital component of their continued control. Various commentators have suggested legalising opium production rather than destroying livelihoods, but this sort of misses the point: keeping it illegal makes it an excellent source of funds for covert action, and right now it is providing America's allies in Afghanistan with enormous leverage over the country. In other words, the current war to secure a successful client regime relies on extirpating production that could generate revenue for the opposition, while leaving the resources of the ruling elite well alone. Indeed, billions of US dollars have been ploughed through the channels of a patrimonial state into the hands of the pro-American rentier elite. The "war on drugs" is what it has always been: a free-form, wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign; meanwhile, the insurgency has, as a result of this, an element of class warfare, since what is now fuelling it, in part, is the misery of poor farmers being deprived of their means of livelihood, with massive starvation and misery, while the rich prosper.

So, then, perhaps we should also ask a question about who exactly the Taliban are. For, although we assume we know, Najib Manalai, an Afghan government adviser, insists that the Taliban are a very different kind of movement today:

the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students -- Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan -- they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests -- foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. "The Taliban" is a composite of these components.

There is a great deal of euphemism in that. Afghanistan's current polity is a sectarian one, which largely excludes Pashtuns (Karzai is in this respect a useful token). Recall that the initial success against the Taliban involved the ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Pashtuns. But this sectarian dynamic is in part a result of the failure of the US to win Pashtun allies prior to the war beginning. They had tried with Abdul Haq, the anti-Taliban 'moderate' who had broken with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb e-Islami before fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the CIA-funded Yunus Khalis. But he wouldn't follow orders and publicly criticised the bombing of the country. It was his aim to mobilise a domestic insurgency independently of the CIA and the ISI. One or the other of these two agencies leaked his plans to the Taliban during the bombing and ensured his death. At any rate, the US was only interested in pro-American Pashtun leaders, and could find precious few. As such they had to rely on the Northern Alliance with whom they started making a secret alliance in 1999. So, those who "can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies" are those who are being specifically excluded. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime was in fact more representative of the different ethnic groups than the current one. Aside from the various groups in the south, there is a growing insurgency in the north-west of the country, due to conflict with the warlords in government such as Ismail Khan, and the ridiculously brutal spate of Nato bombardment (apparently these recent massacres are the result of a deliberate policy shift).

Aside from the growing armed insurgency, there is of course an unarmed political opposition developing. The Taliban era was a desperate one, but this regime is hardly more progressive. Aside from the fairly serious matter of occupying troops rampaging through cities, airplanes lobbing bombs at villages, secret prisons, torture cells, kidnappings and so on, there is the small problem that the state built and the groups empowered by the occupiers are client despots. They murder and torture their enemies with impunity, and their police chiefs rape and extort. They steal taxes, bulldoze houses, steal land. Northern Alliance rulers kidnap people and ransom them back to their families with the pretense that they were Taliban arrestees. There is nothing the attorney general likes more than to lock up media workers who displease him. Critics like Malalai Joya are unwelcome (she has recently been suspended for the remainder of her term). The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice continues to operate. Reports last year that it would 'return' after a resolution passed by Karzai's cabinet last year were misleading: the department, although now synonymous with Taliban terror, had actually originated under the US-recognised Rabbani regime, and continued under Karzai's regime in various forms. The Vice and Virtue squads continued to operate in Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan imposed the old regime, and Karzai's 'Accountability Department' took over many of the roles of the department. In this respect, it is worth noting that, as NGO workers Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie point out in their widely praised Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, that the Taliban have been demonised out of all proportion. This isn't simply an artefact of war propaganda, but in part a result of NGO misconceptions. Their repression, as brutal as it was, should not have been understood as simply an emanation of their own peculiar, reactionary ideology. It was rooted in the common social practises of the most conservative elements of society in Afghanistan, which fused with the conditions of war, and then civil war, to produce a militant war on 'sin' and 'vice' (with well-known, and savage punishments such as stonings and amputations). If you go back and have a look at the scholarly studies of Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, this is a frequent theme raised by the regime in justification for some of its worst policies (excluding girls from education for example). Nasreen Ghufran noted in Asian Survey in May 2001 that the regime's claim was that it needed time to develop the correct environment for girls and women to be educated and work: it saw its model, ironically, as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, women's struggles were able to exert some effects. As Jeanette O'Malley wrote in 2000: "In early June, supreme leader Mullah Omar issued an edict allowing for the expansion of mosque schools for young boys and girls. The mosque schools are apparently little more than a substitute acceptable to clerics and hard-line officials for state-run schools, as they offer the same curriculum." NGO groups who worked in Afghanistan were able to set up schooling for girls by simply telling local Taliban officials that it was a mosque. The point is that the assumption that hardline religious and social conservatism was something that could be pinned exclusively on the Taliban has been at best a misguided one. Today, of course, the imposition of the burqa is still enforced even if not by edict. Women must now struggle against empowered warlords, who are given to raping women (and children) they like the look of. A recent study found that most women in Afghanistan suffer mental and physical abuse. So-called 'honour killings' continue, as do slavery and stonings.

Now, whatever the prevailing barbarism in Afghanistan, the insurgency doesn't command significant support anywhere beyond the southern provinces at the moment. If the only dynamic involved here were the insurgency, which is widely understood as a Taliban affair and whose tactics are becoming increasingly brutal, then this state of affairs would remain permanent. However, it is not. The attempt by the United States to impose and maintain a pro-US regime is developing several oppositional currents. Its barbaric air campaign is galvanising communities of resistance in surprising places, while also driving people into the arms of the Talibs and their allies. This is why British military leaders are worried that they may lose Afghanistan. They couldn't possibly lose militarily to a rag-tag collection of militants: it is the political nature of the war they are fighting, the fact that is for US domination, that is producing this resistance, and that will ensure - if we don't force our governments to end the occupation - that a prolonged and vicious war is afoot. This may also take the form of a civil war at some point. Unfortunately, the resources for a left or even secular nationalist movement in Afghanistan are extremely limited. Military resistance to the this brutal occupation is obviously legitimate, and no occupation force has a right to complain if it is tormented by its enemies ("awe, shucks, the insurgents are holding up all our good work"). However, if there is hope for Afghanistan it lies in a broader, more grassroots and less fissiparous movement than the austere and brutal Talibs or Hekmatyarists could ever deliver. How much chance is there of that happening? After almost thirty years of devastating war in which the most reactionary elements have been promoted and defended by imperial interlopers, in which rival imperial powers have tortured the people of Afghanistan for decades, it is easy to be pessimistic. After all, neither the CIA or the ISI will ever leave Afghanistan alone, and even if they did it would be a long struggle to unite a sufficient coalition of women and the poor to displace the conservative elites. A great deal depends on external factors such as what happens to the US in Iraq, whether we can force our states to withdraw their troops, whether Musharraf survives in Pakistan and who replaces him, etc. But, the more the insurgency becomes an armed movement of the poor, the more political independence they will have to develop, and the greater chance they will have to confront the landlord class. And groups like RAWA and fiercely independent figures like Malalai Joya are still fighting.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Bullshit story posted by lenin

This is bullshit and I claim my five pounds. Do not, guys and gals, get me wrong. I am fully aware that insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan have engaged in some grizzly, grotesque spectacles. However, this story is caked in shit and is currently drawing more flies than a carcas in the sun. This one AP story has been repeated in at least 260, count em, 260 news items. On the calculation that at least half of you are too lazy to click on the link, it says that the Taliban tried to trick a young boy who doesn't appear to know his own age into becoming a suicide bomber, but he escaped into the arms of the Afghan troops. Oh, it's the usual: poor detail, no corroboration, lots and lots of emotionalism (a bunch of war-hardened men, some of whom have dropped cluster bombs on ickle children, well up and touch their eyes and sniffle and castigate the evil menace that would do such a thing). There is lots of the giveaway "colour": irrelevant but evocative details about the child's appearance, mannerisms, hobbies, background - and the allegedly besotted reactions of those who are in fact parading the child. And then they all have a whip round and give the kid $60. You would think that if Afghan troops defused a vest on the kid that they would be able to confirm the story, but apparently not. Now get this - this is a classic line:

Thomas said the case would force soldiers to think twice before assuming children are safe.

"This is one incident. We hope it doesn't repeat itself. But it gives us reason to pause, to be extra careful," he said. "We want to publicize this as much as we can to the Afghan people so that they can protect their children from these killers."

Oh yeah, you certainly want to publicise it. So, Major Thomas, what are you going to do if you see a child in a dirty coat running toward you? To be on the safe side, I mean? Hamstring him? Pepper him with plastic bullets? Destroy the brain instantly, utterly?

In other news, claims that the US army have used an impoverished child to legitimise the killing of other impoverished children left the editor of Lenin's Tomb incensed. "I kicked in the television screen and wept. How can anyone use a child in this way," he mourned, wiping away horrible tears. "This is an evil, cowardly act. Relating to these kids as someone who has not as yet impregnated anyone, I think, well golly, what if I did have children and someone tried to do that to them? I'd have to take the $60 off them."

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, propaganda, taliban, US imperialism

Well, duh. posted by lenin

Occupiers have killed more civilians this year than the 'Taliban'. That doesn't include the civilians they killed in Pakistan. But it does include this latest massacre. Now, as usual, the occupiers say that it was the 'Taliban' what made them do it. When shall we hear solemn press-releases, solemnly recounted by newspapers, in which the 'Taliban' explain that they meant to hit only occupying troops with their latest suicide attack, but that the occupiers forced them to strike in civilian areas by hiding in humvees and helicopters and Bradley tanks, driving through densely populated areas and thus using the surrounding people as human shields like the cowards they are?

Labels: afghanistan, massacre, occupation, taliban

"The Afghans are sick of our armies killing their people" posted by lenin

You might want to have a look at this article by Leo Docherty, who served in the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan before resigning. (He's got another one here). It's not an anti-imperialist piece, but it is a story of disillusionment and of Docherty's encounter with the massive displacement and killings resulting from occupation violence. At least some of the deaths are being caused by a secret air war, rather similar to the one being inflicted on Iraq. Until a Lancet-style cluster survey is taken of deaths in Afghanistan, we will - of course - have only gross underestimations of the deaths. Yet, given a similar number of air strikes in the two countries, here is what we know. In Iraq, between 50 and 100 Iraqis die as a result of air strikes every day. Every airstrike kills, on average, one Iraqi, and wounds three more. If the same logic applies in Afghanistan, then the death rate is much greater than the occasional reports of clustered deaths in the dozens would give us to believe.

Interestingly, among the many barmy things Blair has cooed in his swan song, this has to be the most pathetic: "The mistake was not understanding the fundamentally rooted nature of this global movement that we face and that actually in a situation – whether Iraq or Afghanistan – where you are trying to bring about a different form of government, these people will try to stop us". This is a predictable ruse in many ways, and Blair has to acknowledge the reality that Afghanistan is going the same way as Iraq. Yet it's also so miserable, so abject in its refusal of responsibility, that it makes the phrase "a new low" seem entirely inadequate. Here is a man who had the moxy to start these wars, who must have heard some decent advice about the structure of those societies, and who surely heard a little bit about the history of occupations. He has probably been handed innumerable intelligence reports advising him of the reality that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis and Afghans are queuing up to take shots at occupying soldiers or assist someone else in doing so. He certainly knows about the human cost of the war in Iraq, because the MoD's top experts will have apprised him. And he relies on this conspiracy theory, this cheap yellow press tat about Al Qaeda manipulating everything. All because he can't take responsibility for the predictable results of his decisions. What a wretched figure he finally cuts.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, air war, taliban

The massacres piling up in Afghanistan. posted by lenin

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a rolling wave of US massacres of civilians, in the double figures. The latest report speaks of thirteen killed in a bombing raid. A few days ago it was fifty one civilians murdered in a village where the US was combatting 'Taliban' fighters. A couple of weeks ago, it was forty civilians, killed or wounded by troops who claimed to have come under fire, but hadn't. There are a couple of separate things going on here, then: on the one hand, the aspect of 'risk-transfer war' that involves bombing from a great height to ensure that the risk of death is transferred to civilians rather than US troops; on the other, the aspect of 'degenerative' war, in which population centres increasingly become a target if a) traditional military targets don't avail themselves, and b) the population appears to provide some support to the opposition. But there's a third aspect, which is the ideological matrix through which this violence is understood and wielded. Chris Floyd writes about it here.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, massacre, taliban, US imperialism, us troops