:: Farrukh Dhondy

The real battles are faulty arguments

Farrukh Dhondy

"You see her there across a room,

You couldn’t say what you intended

You swallow wine but not your pride

The night is cold, the party ended…"

From The Eclipse by

Bachchoo

Augest.22 : Two hundred and one British soldiers have given their lives in Afghanistan since 2001. Britain is beginning to ask if it’s worth it. It’s a valid question but one that the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, foreign secretary David Miliband and defence secretary Bob Ainsworth refuse to face. The continuing haemorrhage is part of the sacrifice they have determined to make to the God of American foreign policy.

If it were true that a continued or even escalated presence of British troops and fighting forces in Afghanistan would achieve what that foreign policy has ostensibly set out to do, then the British public would, as it has with most military adventures its governments undertake, give it their support.

The public’s scepticism has been fuelled over this week by the death of Private Richard Hunt, 21, who was brought back wounded from Afghanistan to Birmingham and died there last weekend. His mother Hazel Hunt called for politicians to go to the frontline themselves. She wasn’t defying them to fight the Taliban themselves, simply asking them to go and see the conditions under which the British soldiers they send out are dying. Some military experts have supported her in her claim that the soldiers deployed there, all from a volunteer not a conscript army, are under-equipped and traverse the hard and hostile terrain of Helmand in vehicles which cannot protect them from even home-made Taliban land mines.

And still Mr Ainsworth insists that the war is winnable.

He is talking in the same terms as the United States President Barack Obama who reaffirmed his country’s determination to withdraw from Iraq by 2011 and to increase the US’ military commitment to Afghanistan. His foreign policy, an escalation of that of George W. Bush’s, has two vaunted aims. The first is to ensure, or pretend to believe, that the presidential elections that were held in Afghanistan on August 20 will deliver a difficult, flawed but continuing "democracy" to Afghanistan and thereby secure the second objective, which is deprive Al Qaeda of an operational base.

In order to achieve these objectives the allied troops have to defeat the "Taliban" which is the generic name given to all the armed insurrectionaries opposed to the American, British and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) presence in Afghanistan.

The insurrectionaries are supplied and supported by the generic enemies of the US, by a pan-national collection of countries sympathetic to Islamism and by powerful elements within other countries such as factions of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. They command some support from local people and even some warlords who want to shake off central government. The sale of heroin to the US and the West in the main provides the insurrectionary elements with the money to buy arms and to hold down pockets of the country.

Combating the desire of the British population to cut and run from Afghanistan and waste no more of the lives of their young, Mr Miliband repeatedly assures Parliament and the country that Britain is in there to save lives not to sacrifice them. These are British lives that are being saved as Al Qaeda will, as guests of the Talibs, use Afghanistan as a base to repeat the atrocity of 9/11, an imminent prospect according to sources he cannot reveal.

On evidence, his argument is absurd, but before examining its absurdities we ought to acknowledge that Mr Miliband has convinced himself that this is the reason British troops are in that hostile, unconquered land. I don’t believe that he is secretly in favour of or duped by the consideration that a war and the expenditure on the military machine and on the manufacture of armaments will keep capitalism going and the British economy healthy. His government, at this juncture in world capitalism’s liquidity crisis, would much rather not spend on armour in Afghanistan. This is not to say that the British arms trade is not thriving. It is; but this is not owing to the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, rather to the sale of aircraft and weapons to various countries in the world who are not (yet?) embroiled in the Iran or Afghan conflicts.

Neither is there much evidence in favour of the bloggots (blogging idiots) who contend that Afghanistan is strategically important because someone somewhere wants to lay a pipeline through it to send petrol or gas to someone else and earn zillions of dollars thereby. Look at a contour map of Afghanistan (and get a life)!

What the Americans mean by "winnable" is that, as in Iraq, the insurgents will be contained if not defeated and the native armies will be equipped and trained to take on the task of suppressing them.

The premises of these arguments are faulty. Afghanistan hasn’t yet got the basic civil society that can sustain a Westminster style parliamentary democracy. That requires a Constitution which the population or a vast majority of it supports; an Army that swears allegiance to such a Constitution and means what it swears; a free press which may be divided in its opinion but is fearless in its expression; an educated or at the least literate middle class which can, in the traditions of democracy, hold the elected representatives of the people accountable; and an economy whose running does not necessitate a change of regime with each upheaval.

Afghanistan has and will progress to such a state in which it can support a flourishing democracy — but not in the short time that its invaders tell their own voters it will take.

And what of the shelter-for-Al-Qaeda argument? Has Osama been captured and brought to book? Isn’t Al Qaeda a hydra that will grow a new head and find a new lair when the last one is cut off or sealed? Al Qaeda doesn’t need the tunnels of Tora Bora in which to convene and plot destruction. That can be done from a basement in Antwerp, Brisbane, Kolkata, Dublin and right through the alphabet till we get to Zywiec.

Are the terror attacks on the world really being planned from Tora Bora or some Taliban redoubt? Or is the real battle against those who have turned unstable Pakistan into the actual base for international terror, the refuge for dissidents from anywhere in the world to congregate, despite the Pakistani government’s newfound determination to eradicate the menace and regain its reputation, and train for murder?