Category Archives: Afghanistan

An Afghanistan Veteran Reveals the Truth Behind the Withdrawal of British Troops

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Afghanistan, anti-war

by Joe Glenton

The Independent

Contrary to the spin regarding the capabilities of the Afghan security forces,withdrawal of British troops from the country is being driven solely by insider attacks and opposition at home.

The exit strategy for the ISAF had been getting Afghan security forces to fend for themselves, so that control of the country could be continued by proxy. This task, by all credible accounts, has not been achieved. Rather, the insider attacks have scuppered the training program, and now we are seeing the onset of the “cut and run” that politicians have talked up for so long.

Think what you will of the politics of the resistance, but even if you mischaracterise all, or even most, of the opponents of occupation as Islamist, the strategy of “insider” attacks has an undeniable Tet quality to it. It should also be noted that a resistance on any scale, let alone the scale of the insurgency in Afghanistan, needs support and sanction by the population to go anywhere.

An insurgent relies on the people for support, intelligence, shelter and political approval, even for extra firepower. Attacks on ISAF patrols in Afghanistan in the past have been supported, quite spontaneously at times, by locals coming from miles around to take pot-shots at the intruders, as was reported in David Kilcullen’s excellent book The Accidental Guerrilla.

The long game

Likewise, it’s easy to refute claims by a leading US general that a lack of fighting in Helmand – leading to the boredom of marines – constitutes a sign of progress. To make that argument you would have to ignore, firstly, the seasonal nature of fighting in Afghanistan – did anyone tell the general it is winter? Secondly, you’d have to miss the nature of the war itself; what insurgent would blunder into a province flooded with US Marines? The Afghans have played the long game. It has served them today as it has in previous occupations.

The only way out for ISAF was for the constituent militaries to train their way free, so the whole program had come to rest on this, and the threat of insider killings has made that plan politically untenable. For good measure, even our own side consider the ISAF presence an “occupation”.

The other major factor in this is, of course, the rejection of the war at home. Though not because the public do not grasp Afghanistan’s complexities, as has been suggested in the past – rather, it’s precisely because people do understand. The occupation has become a conversational punch-bag, it seems, everywhere except Westminster; though one suspects that in some quarters it is a grim in-joke there as well. At the same time as people support servicemen on a human level and condemn their betrayal by successive governments, the war has been a waddling tragedy since 2006.

It is an insult to talk of withdrawal in terms of the cost in pounds, as some do, when the cost in mutilation and death is what cuts us the most. I do not count these deaths as lightly as the government; I have seen a number of familiar faces appear on television, accompanied by words like: “Today, another soldier…”

What is clear is that the Afghans, portrayed as feckless and needy each time the occupation needed to be re-justified, are still, as ever, capable of controlling their own territory and their own lives and driving occupiers out of both. Defeat has been a steady drip-drip for the west, but it is defeat nonetheless.

Objection

Like Iraq, Afghanistan has a reasonably pliable government for now, but arguably the greatest collection of military power in history has been ground down by ordinary people with no planes, no armour, no drones and no illusions about why Afghanistan was invaded.

Even very recently in the Kabul Bank saga, it has been clear that capital flows out of the country and I would expect that to increase in the coming months. I also expect to see prominent public figures rushing to catch up with their loot in Dubai and similar sanctuaries.

More conventional attempts at robbery are being employed at home to escape a grim fate in Afghanistan. Only this week Private Stephen Evans, 20, of theRoyal Welsh Regiment was convicted for attempting an armed robbery in order to escape of a third tour of Afghanistan. The judge took into account his“suffering post-traumatic stress disorder following his tour of Afghanistan”.

A bizarre route to take, but not totally inexplicable when you realise the average reading age of a soldier joining the infantry is ten and most other ways to get treatment or air objections are obscured or denied.

This young man may have been expressing a conscientious objection; which soldiers have a legal, contractual right to have recognised. It is a hard road, but it is better than being the last man to die for hubris.

16 Civilians Massacred. Too Bad. They’re Only Afghans

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Afghanistan, war, war crimes

The get-out is already being set up by the US military and its political outriders in Washington. 38-year old Staff Sergeant Robert Bates, alleged to have murdered 16 Afghan civilians – among them 9 children and 3 women – in a group of small villages in the Panjawii district of Kandahar last Sunday, is being transmogrified from mass murderer into victim in a process as cynical as it is racist in its denial of respect for the victims, their families, and their culture. Rather than acting out of the underlying racist and dehumanising attitude that is common in soldiers engaged in colonial occupations towards those being colonised, Bates was ‘traumatised’, ‘tired’, ‘had just witnessed one of his buddy’s legs being blown off the previous day’, ‘was suffering marital problems’, ‘snapped’ (no shit), ‘has an outstanding military record’, and on and on.

The excuses have flowed via the media almost as fast as the aircraft that flew him out of Afghanistan to the safety of Fort Leavenworth in Kansas via a stopover in Kuwait, where according to reports he’s being kept in solitary confinement, whatever that means. It is hard to believe that Robert Bates’ solitary confinement will be anything like solitary confinement as it is understood by Bradley Manning, a US soldier who did not murder 16 innocent civilians in their beds but whose crime in the eyes of the US military and government in revealing classified information is deemed far more grievous, given what we know of his treatment.

The speed with which Staff Sergeant Bates was spirited out of Afghanistan should of course come as no surprise. The very idea that an American soldier would be allowed to be tried by mere Afghans for slaughtering mere Afghans is laughable. After all, why else bother drafting implicitly racist military regulations as the Status of Forces Agreement if it doesn’t allow for the slaughter of women and children of an inferior race and ethnicity when one of our boys ‘snaps’ due to the pressures of spreading democracy and freedom to an ungrateful populace? Questions remain over whether or not Bates acted alone, with Afghan President Hamad Karzai making it known that he believes he did not, doing so after meeting with the villagers and family members of the victims. The circumstantial evidence supporting the accusation that it was the work of more than one soldier is pretty strong. Some of the bodies were burned to try and hide the evidence, and two of the houses involved are located a mile apart.

This is no one-off incident. It continues a pattern of crimes and atrocities that have punctuated the occupation of Afghanistan from the moment US and British troops entered the country over a decade ago. This year alone, just three months in, pictures revealing US Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Afghan resistance fighters in January were followed by the burning of copies of the Koran by US soldiers at Bagram airbase a month later. This latest atrocity brings the tally to three in as many months. The strong inference in light of these must be that the continuing presence in Afghanistan of 90,000 US soldiers and military personnel has gone way past the point of being sustainable, and that the moral degeneration of the troops themselves is self evident.

Colonialism and colonial military operations exist on a foundation of racism and the dehumanization of the people being colonized. If it had been an Afghan who’d slaughtered 16 US soldiers in one fell swoop, much less civilians, he would already be suffering, if not dead. There would be no comfortable pre-trial detention, no media campaign to mitigate the incident, and no army of lawyers and psychologists deployed in his defence. He’d be toast.

The troops soldiers serving in Afghanistan, US and British, are the product of the ignorance and racism imbibed not just from military indoctrination but also social conditioning when it comes to the prevailing nationalism and exceptionalism that describes Western cultural values. There can be no doubt that the strain, fear, pressure and stresses suffered by soldiers serving in places where they are not welcome and subject to the constant threat of being killed or maimed takes a massive toll. But the common thread when it comes to the atrocities that result is that the victims are only accorded a minor role in the ensuing fall out, as if their lives and deaths are of less importance than the priority of defending the reputation of the troops and military forces involved.

Thus we’ve been regaled this past week with the sight of Barack Obama and David Cameron engaged in a public effusion of mutual admiration, attending basketball games and eating hamburgers together like a couple of rich pen pals from school meeting up for the first time. “The men and women of our armed forces are doing a great job and we salute their courage” is the public message from both leaders. “We are determined to stay the course until the mission is completed. Our condolences go the families of those killed recently.” It’s the same old bullshit spoken in the same old voice of insincerity and indifference to the lives of those forced to bear the brunt of policies dreamt up and initiated in the comfort of state rooms by those cocooned from the consequences.

The history of atrocities committed in a series of colonial and imperialist wars undertaken since the end of World War II is proof of the depravity of the West in its determination to maintain its hegemonic relationship with the developing world and those cultures deemed inferior. The charge sheet is irrefutable: My Lai, Bloody Sunday, Sabra and Chatila, Haditha, Gaza, and now Panjawii in Afghanistan.

If this is Western civilization, what does barbarism look like?

 

 

 

Futility Beyond Words

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Afghanistan, anti-cuts, Galloway, Respect

I thought it was worth re-posting this excellent article from the Morning Star, by George Galloway. George is standing as a candidate in the Bradford West by-election for Respect.

What a mournful milestone we passed this week with the deaths of six British soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing the total killed in this senseless war above 400 – to 404 at the time of writing.

These young men were from Yorkshire, Cheshire and Lancashire. And young they were – the youngest was Private Christopher Kershaw, 19, from Bradford.

Huddersfield, Bradford and the Lancashire former mill towns are a universe away from the gilded Etonian millionaires who are running our country into the ground – when not taking to horse, on steeds loaned, if you will, from the Metropolitan Police at our expense.

Yet David Cameron, William Hague and the rest are determined to throw more of our young men and women into the maw of war, in Afghanistan and – so leaks from the Ministry of Defence confirm – into catastrophic conflagration in the Persian Gulf should Israel, with the US in tow, launch an attack upon Iran.

We are four years into an economic crisis more devastating than any for three generations.

We are over a decade into a cycle of war that those who govern us show no sign of halting, despite the public reaction this week to the grim news from the killing fields of Helmand.

It is redolent with the complacency and criminal neglect that blighted the 1930s.

Then, as mass unemployment soared, the political class retreated to the gentlemen’s clubs and society gatherings in the smart areas of London.

They pulled down the shutters on the distress that was engulfing the country.

They muttered instead their admiration for the business elite that profited even from the misery, turned their minds to maintaining an empire in decline and imported the methods of divide and rule from the colonies back into Britain with vicious tirades against the immigrant, the poor, the struggling mother and the disabled.

So great was the otherworldliness of polite society that when the great leader of the struggle against unemployment Wal Hannington toured the land and wrote The Problem Of The Distressed Areas, bringing to attention the scale of social devastation, it was treated as a rude shock by the editors and political class in London.

You sense a similar incomprehension when today’s campaigners against unemployment are met with bemusement by politicians and pundits merely for pointing out that there is an alternative to Tory slave labour schemes – real jobs, a decent minimum wage and investment in the things we desperately need not self-defeating cuts to the gains of 60 years of the welfare state.

One aspect of the distressed times we live in today is worse even than the 1930s – the enervation and prostration of the party of labour in the face of a rampage by the richest 1 per cent against the 99 per cent at home and abroad.

It was bad enough 80 years ago. Faced with bankers’ demands to flay the unemployed and working people, the Labour Party split – with what you might today call Blairites going the whole hog and joining with the Tories and Liberals to impose years of austerity.

But despite that historic betrayal, there were still voices in Parliament – the rump of Labour and firebrand MPs from the Independent Labour Party – who refused to join the grim and deadly orthodoxy.

It’s true that they could not muster a majority in the House of Commons and were even ridiculed as lone voices.

The corruption of our parliamentary democracy had sunk deep even then.

But they were able to speak from Westminster over the heads of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ brigade and their collaborators who had left the ranks of real Labour.

And that voice was heard in the distressed areas – from east London to Inverclyde, Yorkshire and the Rhondda.

In turn, the cries of pain and of resistance flooded back and were channelled by figures of stature such as James Maxton and Fenner Brockway.

They lent weight to every decent cause – from the successful battle to stop the British Hitler, Mosley, through support for democracy in Spain to the heroic agitation against unemployment and the economics of war against the poor.

There are all too few such voices today. Next Wednesday, the leaders of the government and opposition in Parliament will exchange hollow condolences for the families of those whose loved ones were killed this week in Afghanistan.

But both of them are committed to yet more blood sacrifice. And for what?

The very same Taliban that phoned the BBC to claim responsibility for the deaths has now opened an office in Qatar in the Persian Gulf – not far from the home of the US Central Command headquarters from where the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were launched.

We are sending young people, often from areas of high unemployment and little hope, to kill and be killed while negotiations are taking place with the very people we were told it was impossible to have any dialogue with – hence the need for 10 years of war.

Perhaps the Tory and Labour front benches could convince themselves about the tragic necessity of the first British casualties or the first few thousand of the uncounted Afghan dead.

Perhaps. Though everything those of us who opposed the war from the beginning said then is now even more telling a decade on.

I remember when the then defence secretary John Reid told the House of Commons that the extra troops he was sending to Helmand would be back by Christmas without “firing a single shot in anger.”

I rose and responded that they would not be back that Christmas or in 10 Christmases.

How the poodles with pagers in Parliament laughed at that. That was 10 years ago.

But whatever they said or believed then – and for them the two are usually not the same thing – what can they say now?

How can they explain to those who are about to be sent to Afghanistan that they face death not for some just victory – they long since stopped talking of victory – but to save the faces of their masters who are busy negotiating over how to get out with the very people who are planting the roadside IEDs?

And how can those who brought us the mendacities about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq tell us that the same soiled fabulations should be believed this time over Iran and the threat of an even more dangerous, crazed conflict?

They cannot with any credibility do so. Hence they rely on the absence of official opposition and the subservience of a media still dominated by the phone hackers and bribers of public officials from the stable of arch tax-avoider Rupert Murdoch.

When not complicit, the response of Labour’s leadership is woeful.

Why is it left to the young unemployed to bring to heel the corporate giants who seek to profit from joblessness by using unpaid labour press-ganged by the Tories?

To pensioners to expose the blatant privatisation of our NHS more effectively than massed ranks of backsides on green benches in the Commons?

To grieving mothers to make the case for withdrawal from Afghanistan, for peace and not war?

To union leaders representing the low paid to argue for public investment not cuts coupled with handouts to private parasites?

In many British cities last summer we saw what happens when the voices of the distressed areas are not heard as they cry out against social devastation, the darkening of hopes and the daily humiliations of bigotry, racism and Tory snobbery.

One way or another, the people will be heard. It is better that that is done democratically, together, the stronger standing with the weaker, and effectively – forcing a change in priorities.

It’s as a contribution to that that I will be standing as the Respect Party candidate in the by-election at the end of this month in the Bradford West constituency.

Bradford is a city like so many others that have been taken for granted for so long. It is one of the places that Cameron and his pals cannot bear to look at, even from a distance and atop a horse provided courtesy of the London taxpayer.

It is a place, like east London, where I and my colleagues managed to spook the horses seven years ago, rich in the real labour values which in my experience so many working people continue to hold dear.

It is where in 1893 the Independent Labour Party was founded, following the victory of Keir Hardie in east London the year before.

Their argument was as clear then as it is relevant today.

The 1 per cent at the top had two parties – Tory and Liberal – to represent them. The 99 per cent had none.

Now we have those two parties in a criminal coalition and a third that is a feeble opposition, a pale reflection of the hopes of Labour a century ago.

That cannot be overturned in total overnight, of course. But it has to be challenged – and a victory against the complacent orthodoxy would send shockwaves throughout the political class, making it harder for anyone to take the working people and the soldiers’ families for granted any longer.

These voices are crying out across our country and they need to be heard – especially in the Parliament that is meant to represent us.

And that is what I intend to do throughout this campaign and beyond, alongside all those who stand for the principles that led those pioneers to take that historic step in Bradford over a century ago.

Private Christopher Kershaw Was 9 Years Old on 9/11. Now He’s Dead

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Afghanistan

British troops have now been in Afghanistan longer than both world wars put together. The six most recent deaths brings the tally of British soldiers killed to 404, while the number of injured and maimed comes to many more times that. Afghan deaths after 11 years of war and occupation is unknown, their deaths are not counted, but is thought to be somewhere between 30-40,000, mostly civilians.

This is an unwinnable war in which the lives of Afghans and young British soldiers – the youngest of the six most recent British casualties, Private Christopher Kershaw from Bradford, was just 19 years old – are being sacrificed to prop up a corrupt western puppet Afghan government, led by Hamid Karzai.

It is clear by now that continuing with a military presence in the country until 2014 will achieve no more than what has already been achieved after 11 years. It is also clear that the focus on the part of the political establishment intent on keeping British troops in Afghanistan for another two years is saving face. In that age old British colonial tradition – India, Palestine, Iraq, etc. – defeat will be hailed as victory when the last British soldier finally departs.

Neither Britain nor the US has the resources to establish a resounding military victory against a determined opposition which enjoys the support of a large section of a population increasingly alienated by a mounting toll of civilian casualties.

The idea that the US and its allies could bomb a poor and undeveloped country into becoming a liberal democracy was absurd from the start. Afghanistan’s history is littered with failed attempts to colonise it by the Great Powers. It is now a country and society unrecognisable from the one of the 1960s and seventies, when it boasted significant progressive advances in terms of education, women’s rights, economic development, and so on. But it was then and remains now a society polarised between town and country, with little or no bridge between either.

That bridge will not be built using force or foreign military intervention. Rather than alleviate or help the Afghan people, the presence of foreign troops in the country has done the opposite. Kharzai’s government has no writ in the country beyond Kabul. The North remains the fiefdom of assorted warlords, whose brutality and corruption is a matter of record.

Meanwhile, back home, the crime is compounded by hypocrisy. Political leaders who outdo themselves in lavishing praise on the troops in truth hold both them and the low income communities they come from in scant regard.

Christopher Kershaw was just nine on 9/11. Now he’s dead. His name, along with those of the other five, will be read out at the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons and swiftly forgotten. The playing fields of Eton have much to answer for.

Afgantsy

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Afghanistan, Afghanistan USSR

afghanistan-war-memorial-ukraine.jpg

The tragedy that is the history of Afghanistan was lost in the wake of 9/11. From that moment on in the eyes of a West baying for revenge, it was a country reduced to nothing more than a terrorist base run with the blessing of a regime that gave new meaning to the word evil.

Emanating from Pakistan, the Taliban had by 1996 prosecuted a successful campaign to oust a western backed and armed mujahedeen from Kabul, which previously had succeeded in forcing the departure of Soviet troops from the country after a brutal conflict lasting nine years, followed later by the removal of the leftist government led by Mohammad Najibullah.

The corruption, chaos and internecine warfare which soon followed the mujahedeen’s assumption of power plunged the country into an abyss despair and suffering, with warlordism and barbarism turning Afghanistan into what western bureaucrats with their talent for understatement soon described as a failed state.

Yet before 9/11 those same warlords, men whose acts of wanton violence and cruelty were worthy of the word medieval, had won the paternal affection of government apparatchiks in Washington as a band of courageous liberation fighters who’d successfully forced the Soviet Union to abandon a country it had invaded in a brutal act of aggression – at least according to Reagan and the coterie of right wing zealots who formed his administration back then.

To understand why Afghanistan was and remains so important to US strategic interests is to understand the role the country has played throughout its history in the global struggle for empire and hegemony waged by the great powers. Occupying a strategic location along the ancient silk route between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, has been the subject of fierce rivalry between global empires since the 19th century, when the then British and Russian Empires vied for control of the lucrative spoils to be found in the subcontinent of India and in Central Asia in what came to be known as the ‘Great Game.’

The British desired to control Afghanistan as a buffer against Russian influence in Persia (Iran) in order protect its own interests in India, at that time the jewel in the crown of an empire that covered a full third of the globe. Two Anglo-Afghan wars were fought during this period. The first saw the complete annihilation of a 16,000-strong British army in 1842, the second resulted in the withdrawal of British forces in 1880, though the British retained nominal control over Afghanistan’s foreign affairs. This control lasted through to 1919, when after a third Anglo-Afghan war the British signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, heralding the beginning of complete Afghan independence from
Britain.

In terms of economic development, Afghanistan remained untouched by the industrialisation that swept through the subcontinent as the British mercantile class set about the wholesale plunder and exploitation of India’s human and natural resources. By contrast, Afghanistan’s value to both the British and Russian Empires was solely strategic, combining with a paucity of natural resources and rough, mountainous terrain to retard the country’s economic development. A primitive agrarian economy predominated, supporting a feudal system of social relations that has continued in the countryside in one form or another to the present day, with self-styled warlords wielding power of life and death over those who live under their control.

The Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was formed in 1965 in opposition to the autocratic rule of the country’s then King Zahir Shar. They helped to overthrow the regime in 1973 in a coup led by Mohammed Daud, the king’s cousin. In the years following Daud sought to distance himself from the PDPA and from the Soviet Union, which was Afghanistan’s biggest trading partner and source of aid throughout the 1970s. In 1978, when Daud’s intention to purge the army of its communist officers and cadre became known, he himself fell victim to a coup staged by the PDPA with support from the Afghan army.

The coup enjoyed popular support in the towns and cities, evidenced in reports carried in US newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, no friend of revolutionary movements, reported at the time that “150,000 persons marched to honour the new flag and the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.” The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.”

Upon taking power the new government introduced a programme of reforms designed to abolish feudalism in the countryside, institute freedom of religion, along with equal rights for women and minorities. Thousands of prisoners under the old regime were set free and police files burned in a gesture designed to emphasize an end to repression. In the poorest parts of Afghanistan, where life expectancy was 35 years, and where infant mortality was one in three, free medical care was provided. In addition a mass literacy campaign was undertaken, desperately needed in a society in which ninety percent of the population could neither read nor write.

The resulting rate of progress was staggering. By the late 1980s half of all university students in Afghanistan were women, and women made up 40 percent of the country’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers, and 30 percent of its civil servants.

However, the Afghan government’s attempt to impose its reforms on the countryside by force proved deeply unpopular and opened the door to US covert support and funding of opposition tribal groups. This covert support began under the Carter administration with an initial $500 million allocated to arm and train the insurgents in camps set up specifically for the task in Pakistan.

The PDPA with its crude application of communist nostrums in the countryside, where a conservative interpretation of Islam remained the lynchpin of a social structure that hadn’t changed in generations, had long proved a thorn in the side of the Soviet bureaucracy. The overriding priority of the Soviet Union was regional stability and to keep US influence out of Central Asia. Both of these objectives were threatened by the crude methods of its Afghan ally. The party was comprised of two wings, Parcham (banner) and Khalq (masses). Parcham drew the bulk of its members and supporters from urban intellectuals in the cities, while Khalq was popular among the Pushtun tribes in the south of the country. It was a factional split which mirrored the deep division between town and countryside, long a problem in terms of fomenting national unity in the country. Both factions sought theoretical and political influence, a struggle most starkly played out within the Afghan military, within which both had support. Regardless of factional differences, however, both wings eventually agreed to unite, doing so under pressure from the Soviets. This was concretised at a meeting in Jalalabad in 1977, where a new Central Committee was elected comprising representatives of each wing.

Contrary to claims made by western ideologues then and now, when Daud was removed and the PDPA took control of the country in 1978 it did so without the knowledge or backing of the Soviets. This is described by Rodric Braithwaite’s in his excellent Afgantsy (Profile Books, 2011), which provides a forensic account of the history of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

“The coup came like a bolt from the blue to Soviet officials in Kabul, including the KGB representative. The PDPA leaders had neither informed nor consulted them, since they believed their plans would not be approved by Moscow”.

As the Soviets feared, the PDPA in power, while enjoying popular support in the towns and cities, quickly alienated the countryside with their cack-handed attempt to implement reforms, laudable though they were. The result was the emergence of an insurgency which soon gained traction and opened the door to US influence in the region.

The Soviet leadership was dismayed at events taking place across its southern border, recognising from the outset the perils of being drawn into what had rapidly become a civil war. As Braithwaite writes:

“As for the Afghans’ demand for Soviet troops, the more the Soviet leaders thought about it, the less they liked it. No one had entirely ruled it out. But when they put the arguments to Brezhnev, he made it clear that he was opposed to intervention, remarking sourly that the Afghans expected the Soviets to fight their war for them”.

Initially, Moscow hoped that sending military specialists to help bolster the efforts of the Afghan army, along with increasing aid to the country along with other economic measures would suffice.

They were wrong. With a resumption of the factional struggle within the PDPA, leading to tit for tat assassinations and instability within the Afghan government, along with atrocities being carried out by the Afghan army in the countryside increasing support for the insurgency, Soviet military intervention was inevitable.

It began in December 1979 and ended nine years later when the last Soviet troops left the country in February 1989. It was a huge military effort, with an estimated 620,000 troops serving in Afghanistan over the course of the Soviet presence. Of those 14,453 were killed, while over 53,000 were injured, many permanently. Estimates of Afghan casualties vary between 1-2 million, with another 5-10 million leaving the country. In addition the country’s infrastructure was destroyed and its people plunged into poverty.

After the Soviets left US interest in the country ceased. Pakistan proceeded to fill the power vacuum left behind. As the major sponsor of the insurgency Pakistan went on to forge trade deals with the Afghan warlords who emerged from the ranks of the mujahedin. Later, when the warlords proved incapable of running the country, the Pakistanis backed the Taliban and forged favourable economic and political relations with them too. These relations have continued to this day, though now on a covert basis, and have been a cause of acrimony between the Pakistan government and Washington since 9/11.

Ultimately, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, despite its intent of shoring up a progressive government, proved a disaster both for Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, which never recovered economically and fell apart two years after the last of its forces departed the country in 1989.

In the epilogue to his book, Braithwaite recounts conversations he had whilst visiting the country in 2008.

“I was told by almost every Afghan I met that things were better under the Russians.

“The Russians, I was told, had built the elements of industry, whereas now the aid money simply ended up in the wrong pockets in the wrong countries. In the Russian time everyone had had work; now things were getting steadily worse. The last Communist president, Najibullah, had been one of the best of Afghanistan’s recent rulers”.

Braithwaite spoke to a former mujahedin commander in Herat named Sher Ahmad Maladani, who had fought both the Russians and the Taliban. Maladani told him that

“if Najibullah instead of Karmal had taken over in 1979, the country would not be in its present mess”.

Najibullah’s government survived another three years after the Soviets left. This was due to the continuing aid which Moscow provided to Kabul, comprising massive quantities of food, fuel, and military equipment. In 1990 the value of this aid came to $3 billion. The Afghan army and air force were entirely dependent on it and fought well while it was available, Indeed they were able to go on the offensive. But at the beginning of 1992 the new post-Soviet Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin cancelled the aid and the die was cast.

The mujahedin soon overran the country, taking Kabul in April of the same year. Najibullah sought sanctuary in the city’s UN compound. There he remained until the Taliban took power in 1996, whereupon they forced their way into the compound, removed the former president and butchered him.

Afghanistan: What They Said 10 Years Ago

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Afghanistan

These are just some of the claims made by British politicians in 2001 justifying the invasion of Afghanistan, pretending it was a humanitarian intervention. Given that the British government would surely have known that the US invasion only succeeded due to the alliances forged with warlords just as bad as the Taliban, and that the US government had no intention of undergoing a “nation building” project in Afghanistan, then these statements can only be regarded as deliberate deception.

Let us remind ourselves that the current Taliban insurgency did not really start until 2005, but in the four years previous, the NATO governments did almost nothing to make good these promises when they still could have done.

14 October 2001 – John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that Britain was determined to “win the peace” in Afghanistan through a massive aid effort and the creation of a democratic, post-Taliban government. Mr Prescott, who was in Moscow for talks on terrorism and the environment, called for the international coalition to be turned into a wider campaign against global poverty once the conflict was over.

05 October 2001 – Jack Straw sent a direct message to the people of Afghanistan promising help from the outside world once the Taliban were overthrown and Osama bin Laden faced justice. In a text broadcast on the BBC World Service, the Foreign Secretary promised generous assistance to provide schools, clinics, roads and secure livelihoods in the future. He said: “Our commitment to the Afghan people is simple and sincere. You have been ill-served by those who made your country a haven for terrorists across the world. … As soon as this stops, the world will work with you to build a better future for you and for your children.”

Peter Hain – 06 October 2001 “Let’s use this great coalition to fight world poverty. The solidarity shown to the US could promote an end to unilateralism and isolationism. The international community must work together to minimise the suffering of the Afghan people and to ensure them a peaceful, stable and free future in their country. That means helping to rebuild Afghanistan after its terrorist bases have been eliminated, not just with food aid but with development assistance for infrastructure, jobs, hospitals, schools and homes.”

Tony Blair 02 October 2001
“With every bit as much thought and planning, we will assemble a humanitarian coalition alongside the military coalition “

Afghanistan: the War Was Never About Womens’ Rights

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Afghanistan, women

I rarely see eye to eye with Peter Tatchell, but his recent Guardian CiF article does legitimately raise a very uncomfortable issue.

Afghan advocates of women’s equality oppose a swift troop pull-out. They fear it could result in a Taliban takeover, which would suppress women for decades. Despite Nato’s failings, 72% of Afghan women say their lives are better than 10 years ago.

Afghan female MP, Fawzia Koofi, this week urged Britain “not to abandon us,” arguing that without western help Afghanistan’s precarious attempt at democracy “won’t survive”.

Women’s rights campaigner and Kabul MP, Shinkai Karokhail, stresses: “In the current situation of terrorism, we cannot say troops should be withdrawn … the international troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety.”

The renowned Feminist web-site, the F-word, reports

ActionAid polled 1000 women across Afghanistan to obtain their opinions about living through the last 10 years of war and the current reconciliation process. Here are some key findings from the survey:

  • 66 per cent of women said they feel safer now than they did 10 years ago.
  • Nine out of ten women in Afghanistan are worried about the Taliban returning to government believing it would risk the gains made for women in the past ten years.
  • Of those who fear a return of the Taliban, one in five cited their daughter’s education as the main concern.
  • 72 per cent of Afghan women believe their lives are better now than they were 10 years ago, while 37 per cent think Afghanistan will become a worse place if international troops leave. .. …

The full report, A Just Peace? The legacy of war for the women of Afghanistan, may be downloaded as a 20-page PDF directly from here.

Sarah AB at Harrys Place agrees, and quotes other Feminists cautioning against any peace that abandons Afghan women.

For different feminist perspectives on Afghanistan see, for example, these pieces by Samira Ahmed, No Women: No Peace, and Sella Oneko.

But the heart-breaking truth is that even though the issue womens’ rights was used as one of the propaganda excuses for the invasion, and despite the optimism of Action Aid’s report, other experts attest that far too little has changed for women in the country over the last ten years. This is especially true outside Kabul.

As Madeleine Bunting writes:

The biggest achievement has been in education, with 2.4 million girls in school, although there is still a high drop-out rate and the numbers going on to secondary school are small. But the fact is that the conservative nature of rural Afghanistan has not changed fundamentally. Over the past 10 years a colossal $57 bn has been spent in aid in Afghanistan, but it has not had any impact on the entrenched attitudes shaping women’s lives.

The security situation has become increasingly dangerous in the past few years. A recent attack on local staff employed by Oxfam, which led to three deaths, is believed to have been caused partly by the practice of employing women. Attacks on girls’ schools and women teachers continue.

“Those who work outside the house risk their lives every day,” says Zarghuna Kargar, an Afghan author and journalist, who presented the Afghan Woman’s Hour on the BBC World Service. “They face risks from their neighbours, their colleagues and strangers in the street. I don’t see any evidence of a cultural shift over the last 10 years. There are still strong roots to the traditions.”

Kargar added that one of the country’s few female police officers had been killed, as was a young woman working for a foreign NGO. For a woman, going out to work can get her killed.

“I know it will take time to change these things. We have been trained for patience in Afghanistan, but we are losing hope after 10 years and fear that it will become a forgotten state, and it will go back to how it was,” said Kargar.

Foreign pressure ensured that the constitution and the country’s legal system enshrined women’s rights, but the reality is very different. There are only a handful of female judges and even when women do have the courage to take a case to the police, they face entrenched discrimination.

NGOs report that initiatives which have succeeded in other countries, have failed in Afghanistan, this has partly been the way the US army has blurred the line between military activity and developmental aid; which has queered the pitch for third sector organisations to work in, as Madelaine Bunting explains:

 Perhaps one of the most complex aspects of the conflict has been the blurring of boundaries between development and military occupation. The coalition’s provincial reconstruction teams have been involved in building schools and clinics, reducing the neutral humanitarian “space” in which NGOs can work.

In reality, the war aim of promoting the interests of Afghan’s women was abandoned ten years ago, when the US occupation forces chose to make alliances with warlords, and to entrench them in power.

Kathy Gannon is the special Afghan correspondent for  Associated Press, and she was  the only Western journalist allowed into Kabul by the Taliban during the American invasion in 2001. She describes in Forbes magazine how even from day one the conditions for a progressive central government in Kabul were undermined. 

The U.S. had been reassured by its allies, known as the Northern Alliance, that their heavily armed ethnic militias would not storm Kabul when the Taliban left. So I called Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, a powerful Afghan warlord, to ask where his men would go instead.

He laughed at the naivete of the Americans. “We will all be there,” he said. “No one can keep us out.”

And indeed, within hours after the Taliban left, Kabul was swarming with militia. They took over houses, rampaged through the streets looking for Taliban and killed a few stragglers, throwing their bodies into a park.

It was the beginning of a pattern of deception and misunderstanding that plagued Operation Enduring Freedom, which has endured longer than virtually anyone in the U.S. had feared.

In its eagerness to oust the Taliban and get out of Afghanistan fast, the U.S. turned for help to the ethnic militias who had long jockeyed for power in Afghanistan. Once unleashed, the warlords stoked ethnic fighting, corruption and lawlessness, while the U.S. turned away. By the time the U.S. and its NATO allies looked back, it was too late.

“There was never any long-term strategy for Afghanistan,” said Seema Samar, chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Association, who was stripped of an earlier job as women’s affairs minister after criticizing the warlords’ dominance in government in 2002. “Because of the quick collapse of the Taliban, the international community was so full of themselves, their success story. They went to Iraq and handed it (Afghanistan) over to a bunch of warlords.”

Once the Taliban were defeated, Karzai’s government in Kabul were provided with almost no material assistance, as Ahmed Rashid describes in his brilliant work “Descent into Chaos”. Instead, literally millions of dollars in cash, and arms were passed by the Pentagon to the warlords. Max Hastings reported following a visit to Helmand province in 2008:

Afghan gratitude for the creation of a few schools and hospitals is outweighed by the simple fact that, in a [British] diplomat’s words: “Seven years ago most of the population felt safe. Now they don’t.”

The warlords prevented a strong Afghan government with a monopoly of armed force being created at the outset, which is why the Kabul government’s authority still has little writ in most of the country, as Kathy Gannon reports:

The Northern Alliance signed an international accord stating that the militias would leave Kabul before the international soldiers came. It meant nothing. Thousands of armed militiamen were still in Kabul when 5,000 soldiers from the newly formed International Security Assistance Force arrived in December.

The warlords deny the allegations of corruption and wholesale violence. They insist that they deserve a place of honor as mujahedeen, or holy soldiers, because they freed Afghanistan from the decade-long Soviet occupation in 1989.

But from the outset, they weakened President Hamid Karzai and sent some of his fellow ethnic Pashtuns fleeing back to the Taliban. Karzai was the only leader without a militia, which left Pashtuns unprotected and vulnerable to the new minority ethnic rulers.

A deputy police chief from southern Zabul province told me that in 2002, he sent 2,000 young Pashtuns to Kabul to join the Afghan national army and police. But they were humiliated and harassed by militiamen, and all but four joined the Taliban instead.

We mustn’t overlook the fact that the West’s allies today in Afghanistan have a record on human rights no better than the Taliban’s. Kathy Gannon again:

I remember [Northern Alliance leader, and key US ally] Sayyaf and his men all too well. One day in 1993, after a particularly brutal bout of shelling in the Afghan capital, I went to an area Sayyaf’s men had just left.

An old man grabbed my sleeve and threw down a shawl full of bloodied hair on my feet. Then he dragged me into a foul-smelling room to show me the bodies of five women Sayyaf’s men had raped and scalped because they were of a different ethnicity, the Hazaras.

It was their hair that lay on my feet.

In its 1995 report on terrorism, the U.S. listed Sayyaf, not Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, as a terrorist threat. It was Sayyaf and Hajji Qadir, a minister in President Hamid Karzai’s first government, who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. I heard accounts of the visit from Afghans who drove bin Laden from the airport and attended a lunch in his honor.

.. .. .. Sayyaf is now a member of parliament in Afghanistan, where he has pressed legislation to bar war crimes trials for militia leaders.

Warlords have also threatened female colleagues who have sought their expulsion from the government. I remember chasing one female member of Parliament who went into hiding after being threatened by Fahim. She fled in the middle of the night, just minutes before half a dozen of his bodyguards showed up at her front door.

Despite their undoubted good intentions, the feminist apologists for NATO military involvement in Afghanistan are indulging in myth creation. The evidence available to them in clear sight, not from “leftists” or “anti-imperialists” whom they might distrust, but evidence from seasoned experts on Afghanistan, some of whom supported the 2001 invasion, is that NATO is not now, and has never been, fighting a war for women’s liberation.

Indeed former members of the Taliban are already in the government, as courageous Afghan woman and ex-MP, Malalai Joya explains

that the current Afghan government “is not only a photocopy of the Taliban, but some of the prominent figures from that former regime have been recycled and repackaged and now hold positions of power.”

Following his 2008 trip to Afghanistan, Max Hastings opined:

The highest aspiration must be for controlled warlordism, not conventional democracy. A civil war may prove an essential preliminary before some crude equilibrium between factions can be achieved. If this sounds a wretched prognosis, it is hard to find informed westerners with higher expectations.

Yet these Afghan warlords, NATO’s current allies, have a record of misogyny and violence against women equal to the Taliban. Indeed we can perhaps best understand the modern Taliban as a largely Pushtun militia fighting against NATO in the south of the country, but otherwise pretty indistinguishable from some of the warlord militias on NATO’s side.

As NATO are clearly losing the war, it is hard to know exactly what the Feminist apologists for the war want to happen next. The Western powers do not seem to be in a position to dictate the terms of their withdrawal, and if they are not to withdraw, then to stay they either need to commit to a decades long war of attrition just to maintain an enclave around Kabul; or alternatively to vastly increase the level of their military commitment. Given the failure of Obama’s “surge” of an extra 200000 troops, are the pro-war lobbyists advocating an even larger involvement? Perhaps a million troops?

The supporters of NATO’s current role in Afghanistan choose to ignore and overlook the very clear evidence that it is NATO actually sustaining the warlords, and it is therefore NATO that has prevented the Kabul government from establishing the national authority which would be a necessary pre-condition for ensuring womens’ rights. In June 2010 a US Congressional report, based upon a six month study conducted by staff from the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, revealled that:

“The HNT contractors and their trucking subcontractors in Afghanistan pay tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for ‘protection’ for HNT supply convoys to support U.S. troops,” wrote the investigators in the 79-page report.

Within the HNT contractor community, many believe that the highway warlords who provide security in turn make protection payments to insurgents to coordinate safe passage.”

Memos show that occasionally the contractors even worked with the insurgents to shake down the U.S. military for more money.

Currently NATO is fighting the Taliban in one part of Afghanistan, but is paying money to, or is in active alliance with, warlords in most respects indistinguishable from the Taliban in other parts of the country. The opportunity to disarm the warlords was missed ten years ago, and the reason that step was not taken, is that notwithstanding the liberal bleeting and self-deception in the West, womens’ rights were never a war aim, and NATO has been prepared to compromise the position of women at every single point in pursuit of their own short term military objectives.

Afghan War: Ten Years of Futility

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Afghanistan

Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, has been the most tenacious critic of Britain’s war in Afghanistan. For the occasion of the tenth anniversary, he wrote a summary of British army ”incidents” against Afghan civilians, which you can read here , and here you can read his caustic questioning of why the government did not mark the anniversary of the start of a war that has now left 382 British service personnel dead, and over 1000 maimed for life.

But the following article which I reproduce from Paul’s blog, is a short but brilliant account of how the British government are contemplating an end-game as ignominious as the conduct of the war has been incompetent and futile.

By Paul Flynn

Black Watch soldiers in Afghanistan

For once Karzai has told the truth with his comment, ‘There’s no terrorism in Afghanistan’. There has not been any there since 2002. But there’s plenty in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, The Yemen, Bradford and Somalia. Defeating a non-existent terrorist threat has been the main excuse for our presence in Afghanistan. It’s untrue that terrorism is deterred here by Nato’s presence in a small area of Afghanistan.

But the big lie has cost us 382 British lives and £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.
In order for David Cameron to keep his promise not to lose his nerve on Afghanistan, others must lose their lives.The Government’s strategy is self-serving and unachievable. No stable Afghan government can be built on the crumbling foundations of an election-rigging president, a ­mercenary, drug-ridden army and a corrupt, depraved police force.

Meanwhile Cameron is in denial. He failed to mention in reports to the Commons  that neither he nor the Foreign Secretary could visit Nato units on their trips because of the growing strength of the Taliban.

He ignores the doubling of the numbers of IEDs that the Taliban have used against our troops. I had to raised an urgent Commons Question to have the debate the Government did not want on the escape of 500 Taliban prisoners. They had been captured at great cost in British blood and treasure. They escaped with the collusion of Afghanis who claim to be on our side. 

The UK is lamely following the disillusionment of Canada and Netherlands. They have withdrawn their fighting troops. Ours will be out by 2015. The situation is the same as in 1917 during the First World War when it was said: “This war is being prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”

Politicians are planning a deal with Karzai, the warlords and the Taliban that can be spun as a victory. It will not be pretty but it is inevitable. We are in the end game.

Expectations of victory have gone. The possibility of a stable Afghanistan has disappeaered. Now the highest ambition is a “stable enough” country.

The Government will lie and invent a stability that is not there. We will scurry out leaving this blighted land in a similar state of civil war that existed in 2001 when we arrived. The ultimate result is that we will have replaced one rotten government with another rotten government.

In the meantime, our brave troops will carry on dying while politicians carry on lying.

It is easier to repeat an old lie than reveal a new truth. Politicians of both main parties have their mouths bandaged by their own guilt.

To change tactics now is to admit to failures of policy that have resulted in the deaths of 382 courageous soldiers.

Our incursion into Helmand province in 2006 was a grave error. Then, only seven soldiers had died – five in accidents. Our soldiers have paid the price of Helmand with the loss of another 365 lives. It is time for politicians to admit that our war aims are impossible.

The sooner a peace strategy is devised the better. Some gains made by the Nato presence can be protected. If we delay, outraged public opinion may demand a panic withdrawal as damaging as America’s exit from Saigon.

US politicians said then what our UK politicians are saying now: “We cannot afford to lose.” The fear back then was the domino effect. If Vietnam went communist, so would all other countries in South East Asia. It was a lie, of course.

Public opinion is increasingly rejecting the notion that British lives should be lost for a corrupt Karzai regime.

Vietnam veteran and US Senator John Kerry asked at the end of the Vietnam war in 1971: “How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?”

British politicians should be haunted by the same nightmare.

Afghanistan: Nato Doomed to Fail

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Afghanistan

Rarely in military history has a protracted campaign been so ill-conceived at the outset, and so incompetantly implemented. Only the overwhelming military and economic advantage of NATO has spared it from the ignomy of obvious defeat. And when armies are losing, then atrocities often follow, such as the execution of handcuffed children exposed by Jerome Starkey.

As the Guardian reports on the 10th anniversary of the war starting.

One of America’s most celebrated generals has issued a harsh indictment of his country’s campaign in Afghanistan on the 10th anniversary of the invasion to topple the Taliban.

The US began the war with a “frighteningly simplistic” view of Afghanistan, the retired general Stanley McChrystal said, and even now the military lacks sufficient local knowledge to bring the conflict to an end.

The US and Nato are only “50% of the way” towards achieving their goals in Afghanistan, he told the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough. Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

The Guardian accurately summarises current US thinking:

The American plan is to hand power to the shaky Karzai-led government, which is plagued by corruption and enjoys diminishing credibility. McChrystal said that building a legitimate government that ordinary Afghans believed in, and which could serve as a counterweight to the Taliban, was among the greatest challenges facing US forces.

Efforts are under way to bolster the government’s authority. Nato says it will have trained 325,000 Afghan soldiers by January 2015, and the US is likely to continue financial support, although exact levels have yet to be decided.

What is completely lacking is any appreciation that strengthening the military capability of the central Afghan state is futile if the Afghan government does not exercise sovereignty over its own territory; and the biggest challenge to the authority of the state is not the Taliban insurgency, but the spectre of warlordism.

Antonio Giustozzi has explained the political economy of warlordism, in his book “Empires of Mud”, as a military polity that has not achieved the institutionalism, bureaucratic infrastructure and rationalisation of a state. In the modern superstructure of international relations and global economy it is impossible for a warlord polity to become legitimised as a new state; whereas the evolution from warlordism to feudalism, for example, was a defining process of state formation in Mediaeval Europe.

As such, warlords are parasitic upon the productive economy, they provide an enormous counterbalance to the authority of the central state; they thwart the state from exercising a monopoly of armed force; and they prevent the development of a culture of law. In the specific context of Afghanistan, the warlords also provide a mechanism where the Pakistani ISI, and other foreign actors, can seek to exercise influence by proxy. The patronage culture of warlordism also requires constant warfare, even if at a low level.

At the point where Afghanistan was invaded in 2001, the cycle of warlordism had almost exhausted itself, and the Taliban (however brutal they were) had extended the authority of the state over most of the country. Denied military victories, the system of patronage and the prestige of the remaining warlords was diminished.

However, as Ahmed Rashid explains in his book “Descent in Chaos”, the US invasion revived the warlords from the dead. This was necessary for the USA as they lacked the capacity for a conventional war in Afghanistan. Arms, and millions of dollars flowed to the warlords, who were also feted by Dick Cheney, and the Pentagon; this was even allowed to compromise military objectives, and had US troops instead of warlord mercenaries been used at Bora Bora, Bin Laden would possibly have been seized.

Meanwhile, the official government in Kabul was starved of resources, and was unable to function much beyond a parish council.

Rashid himself supported the original US invasion, but is scathing of the failure of the Americans to consolidate basic nation building, and after a few months the Americans turned their attantion to Iraq, while leaving the unsolved problems of Afghanistan to fester.

Most significantly, the process of the Loya Jirga and the subsequent Afghan elections offered a route to legitimisation to the warlords; but it did not require them to disarm, or to submit to the authority of the central state.

The USA ignored both the positive aspect of their own flawed experience of de-Nazification in Germany, where rehabilitation came at the price of renunciation of the past, and required a stable economy and society to incentivise people to want to be incorporated in that future; and it also ignores the relatively successful lesson of Najibullah’s process of incorporation of the warlords by legitimising them into the armed forces of the Afghan state, at the price of accepting his authority. This promising experiment was sadly curtailed once Najibullah’s own Soviet sponsor itself collapsed; which then saw units of the Afghan army themselves mutinying to become warlord polities: this was the origin of the Uzbek warlord, General Dostum, an army general orphaned from a collapsing state.

The NATO occupation, despite a decade of presence in Afghanistan, has only perpetuated the warlord problem, as was revealed by a report for the US Congress, entitled “Warlord, Inc. Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan”

The six-month investigation was conducted by the staff of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, which is chaired by John Tierney, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

“The HNT contractors and their trucking subcontractors in Afghanistan pay tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for ‘protection’ for HNT supply convoys to support U.S. troops,” wrote the investigators in the 79-page report.

“Within the HNT contractor community, many believe that the highway warlords who provide security in turn make protection payments to insurgents to coordinate safe passage.”

Memos show that occasionally the contractors even worked with the insurgents to shake down the U.S. military for more money.

“U.S. taxpayer dollars are feeding a protection racket in Afghanistan that would make Tony Soprano proud,” Tierney said in a prepared statement, making reference to the fictional mafia boss of a popular TV series. “This arrangement has fueled a vast protection racket run by shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.”

The report comes on the heels of a two-day hearing in the U.S. Congress by the Commission on Wartime Contracting into abuses – including multiple charges of killings of civilians – by private security contractors hired by the State Department and the Pentagon in Iraq.

Brigadier General John Nicholson, the director of the Pakistan/Afghanistan Coordination Cell for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, admitted collusion with warlords, becasue as far as his department was concerned the most important issue was making sure that supplies got to the troops; so worries about warlords were subordinated to the sole objective: “Was the product delivered on time?”

Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, has pointedly asked: “Where is the tipping point when we say that that the funding of a parallel authority structure should become unacceptable? … “There seems to be very little indication the Department of Defence is doing anything,” Flake concluded.

So the strategic objective of preparing the conditions where it is possible for NATO to leave Afghanistan are constantly undermined by the short term tactical interests of the US military.

NATO must leave Afghanistan, it seems institutionally incapable of dealing with the warlord problem, and is in denial that the issue even exists. Indeed, the longer NATO stay, the stronger the warlords become.

NATO needs to recognise that the obstacle to withdrawal is not just the technical, military one of the Afghan Police and Army; but rather the political one of creating a sufficiently robust government infrastructure for the Kabul government that they can prevail against the warlords. Given that NATO sees the warlords as its allies in many parts of the country, NATO is part of the problem not part of the solution.

Tuc Calls for British Withdrawal from Afghanistan

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Afghanistan, anti-war

The Stop the War Coalition welcomed today’s call by the TUC for the rapid withdrawal of British forces from Afghanistan.

A wide-ranging motion on peace in the Middle East/South Asia at Congress 2011 was easily carried. It stated that the “war on terror” has failed, that the attack on Libya has been misjudged and that there can be no peace in the Middle East without justice for the Palestinians. This is the first time the TUC has publicly opposed the disastrous war in Afghanistan and is one more proof of the depth of anti-war sentiment in Britain.

Stop the War urges all trade unionists who agree that Britain should withdraw from Afghanistan to join the Mass Assembly in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 8th October to mark ten years since the invasion of the country.

The Mass Assembly has been called by Stop the War, CND, and the British Muslim Initiative, and is supported by national organisations such as Unite the Union, the Public and Commercial Services Union and War on Want. See http://www.antiwarassembly.org  for more details.

Usa Denies Entry Visa to Malalai Joya

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Afghanistan, USA, women

from Afghan Womens’ Mission

The United States has denied a travel visa to Malalai Joya, an acclaimed women’s rights activist and former member of Afghanistan’s parliament. Ms. Joya, who was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, was set to begin a three-week US tour to promote an updated edition of her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Joya’s publisher at Scribner, Alexis Gargagliano, said, “We had the privilege to publish Ms. Joya, and her earlier 2009 book tour met with wide acclaim. The right of authors to travel and promote their work is central to freedom of expression and the full exchange of ideas.” Joya’s memoir has been translated into over a dozen languages, and she has toured widely including Australia, the UK, Canada, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands in support of the book over the past two years.

Colleagues of Ms. Joya’s report that when she presented herself as scheduled at the U.S. embassy, she was told she was being denied because she was “unemployed” and “lives underground.” Then 27, Joya was the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005. Because of her harsh criticism of warlords and fundamentalists in Afghanistan, she has been the target of at least five assassination attempts. “The reason Joya lives underground is because she faces the constant threat of death for having had the courage to speak up for women’s rights – it’s obscene that the U.S. government would deny her entry,” said Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S. based organization that has hosted Joya for speaking tours in the past and is a sponsor of this year’s national tour.

Joya has also become an internationally known critic of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan. Organizers argue that the denial of Joya’s visa appears to be a case of what the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.

Events featuring Malalai Joya are planned, from March 20 until April 10, in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and California. Organizers of her speaking tour are encouraging people to contact the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Joya’s visa immediately.