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AFGHANISTAN - THE OTHER WAR THE WEST CAN'T WIN

Why? Six years on from the invasion of Afghanistan

As another British soldier is killed in Afghanistan, Patrick Cockburn asks what is the point of the mission
Published: 06 October 2007

Six years after a war was launched to overthrow the Taliban, British solders are still being killed in bloody skirmishing in a conflict in which no final victory is possible. Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Britain and allies, an operation codenamed Enduring Freedom. But six years on, Britain is once again, as in Iraq, the most junior of partners, spending the lives of its soldiers with little real influence over the war.

The outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan will be decided in Washington and Islamabad. There is no chance of defeating the Taliban so long as they can retreat, retrain and recoup in the mountain fastnesses of Pakistan.

Yesterday, we learned of the death of another British soldier. Although his identity has not been released, it is believed that the dead man acted as a mentor to Prince William. Two others were injured when their vehicle was caught by an explosion west of Kandahar, bringing the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 82 since 2001.

The drip-drip of British losses underlines how little has been achieved in the past six years, and how quickly any gains can be lost. Most of southern Afghanistan was safer in the spring of 2002 than it is now and at no moment during the years that have elapsed is there any evidence from the speeches of successive British ministers that they have much idea what we are doing there and what we hope to achieve.

This week, the Conservative leader David Cameron told supporters that he would restore Afghanistan to the "number one priority in foreign policy" . The remark highlighted how this conflict has all but slipped from the political agenda.

Yet, Afghanistan is filled with the bones of British soldiers who died in futile campaigns in the 19th century and beyond. The lesson of these long forgotten wars is that military success on the ground in Afghanistan is always elusive and, even when achieved, seldom turns into lasting political success.

The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan through Pakistani support and it was when this support was withdrawn in 2001 that the Taliban abandoned Kabul and Kandahar in the days and weeks after 7 October without a fight. But six years later, the Taliban are back.

The violence shows no sign of ending. Suicide bombings, gun battles, airstrikes and roadside bombs have killed 5,100 people in the first nine months of this year, a 55 per cent increase over the same period in 2006.

I went to Afghanistan in September 2001 a few days after 9/11 when it became obvious the US was going to retaliate by overthrowing the Taliban because they had been the hosts of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

It was a very peculiar war that followed, distinguished, above all, by a lack of real fighting. When Pakistani support and Saudi money were withdrawn, the Taliban's regime unravelled at extraordinary speed. By early 2002, I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar without feeling that I was taking my life in my hands.

But, for all the talk of progress and democracy and the presence of thousands of British, American and other Nato troops on the ground, it is impossible to undertake such journeys across the country safely.

Yet, back in 2001, from the moment I saw the first American bombs falling on Kabul and the sparks of light from the feeble Taliban anti-aircraft guns, it was obvious the two sides were completely mismatched.

Taliban fighters who expected to be targeted, simply fled before they were annihilated. The victory came too easily. The Taliban never made a last stand even in their bastions of support in the Pashtun heartlands in south. It was a very Afghan affair in keeping with the traditions of the previous 25 years when sudden betrayals and changes of alliance, not battles, had decided the winner.

Driving from Kabul towards Kandahar in the footsteps of the Taliban, I visited the fortress city of Ghazni on the roads south where the Taliban had suddenly dematerialised and received a de facto amnesty in return for giving up power without a fight.

Qari Baba, the ponderous looking governor of Ghazni province, who had been appointed the day before, said: "I don't see any Taliban here", which was surprising since the courtyard in front of his office was crowded with tough-looking men in black turbans carrying sub machine-guns.

"Every one of them was Taliban until 24 hours ago," whispered a Northern Alliance officer.

One fact that should have made the presence of British, American and other foreign troops easier in Afghanistan was that the Taliban were deeply hated for their cruelty, mindless religious fanaticism (leading to the banning of chess and kite flying) and the belief that they are puppets of Pakistani military intelligence. And unlike Iraq, the foreign presence in Afghanistan has had majority support, though that is slipping.

Drawing parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan is misleading because Saddam Hussein had sought to run a highly centralised state. In Afghanistan power had always been fragmented. But Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were mired in poverty. One reason why both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein went down so quickly is that Afghans, like the Iraqis, hoped for a better life.

They did not get it. Lack of jobs and services like electricity, clean water, hospitals and food continued or got worse.

Iraq is potentially a rich country because of its oil wealth. In Afghanistan the only equivalent to oil money is the money from the poppy fields on which impoverished farmers increasingly depend. One of the reasons the Taliban lost the support of Pashtun farmers in 2001 – though this was hardly highlighted by the victors – is that they enforced a ban on poppy growing which was highly effective. If the US adopts a policy of killing the poppy plants by spraying them with chemicals from the air, then they will also be engulfed by the same wave of unpopularity. The opium trade is fuelling lawlessness, warlordism and an unstable state.

Both Afghanistan and Iraq are notoriously difficult countries to conquer. They have for centuries, been frontier zones where powerful neighbours have fought each other by proxy.

Victory in Afghanistan six years after the start of the war to overthrow the Taliban is not likely. Even massively expanding troop levels would just mean more targets, and more losses. Armies of occupation, or perceived occupation, always provoke a reaction.

Ultimately what happens in Afghanistan will be far more determined not by skirmishes in Helmand province, but by developments in Pakistan, the Taliban's great supporter, which are wholly beyond British control. And the agenda in both the Afghan and Iraqi wars is ultimately determined by US domestic political needs Successes in faraway wars have to be manufactured or exaggerated. Necessary compromises are ruled out, leaving Iraqis and Afghans alike with the dismal outlook of war without end.

Six years in Afghanistan

* October, 2001 – British-backed US-led air strikes against Taliban strongholds. Taliban leader Mullah Omar flees to Pakistan border as his forces forced to withdraw.

* December, 2001 – The Bonn deal on the future of Afghanistan sees the creation of an interim government, headed by the US-backed President Hamid Karzai. .

* January, 2002 – Nato peacekeepers arrive with a year-long mandate.

* June, 2002 – The "grand assembly" selects Hamid Karzai as interim president.

* July, 2002 – Attacks increase throughout country and a vice-president, Haji Abdul Qadir, is shot dead with his son-in-law in Kabul.

* September, 2002 – Assassination attempt on President Karzai.

* January, 2004 – The Assembly backs a new national constitution

paving way for elections.

* September, 2004 – Another attempt on life of Karzai who is confirmed as President with 55 per cent of vote in elections - first for a generation.

* Spring/summer, 2006 – Taliban regroup in the south and carry out a series of fierce attacks there and elsewhere.

* July-October, 2006 – Nato peacekeeping forces, 18,500 and rising, take over full control.

* Spring, 2007 – Renewed efforts made by British-led coalition troops to force Taliban out of south.

* October, 2007 – Violent incidents, especially suicide bombings, are up 30 per cent on last year, with an average of 550 a month.
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'War on terror' has been a 'disaster': British think tank
Oct 7 08:32 PM US/Eastern
The US-led "war on terror" has been a "disaster" and Washington and its allies must change their policy in Iraq and Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda, an independent global security think tank said Monday.

The Oxford Research Group (ORG) said in a report that Western strategy since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States had failed to extinguish the threat from Islamist extremism and even fuelled it.

"Every aspect of the war on terror has been counterproductive in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the loss of civilian life through mass detentions without trial. In short, it has been a disaster," report author Paul Rogers said.

"Western countries simply have to face up to the dangerous mistakes of the past six years and recognise the need for new policies."

Rogers, professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford, northern England, also warned that any military action against Iran over the Islamic republic's disputed nuclear programme would further aggravate the situation.

"Going to war with Iran will make matters far worse, playing directly into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence across the region," he added.

"Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs -- the mistakes already made will be completely overshadowed by the consequences of a war with Iran."

Chief among the report's criticisms is that the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a "grievous mistake", which had created a combat training zone for extremist elements linked to or inspired by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda.

The report, "Towards Sustainable Security: Alternative Approaches to the War on Terror", said the situation was comparable to the rise of the mujahedin that rose against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

On Afghanistan, the ORG said ousting the hardline Taliban from power in late 2001 had been of "direct value" to Al-Qaeda and militia sympathetic to its violent Islamist ideology were now re-invigorated, it added.

In addition, mass detentions of suspected extremists, torture, prisoner abuse and the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects for questioning in third countries outside US legal jurisdiction was a useful propaganda weapon.

Rogers said the United States and its allies needed to better understand the roots of the Al-Qaeda movement and its support base and systematically undercut it through policy changes at every level.

But he said even if that were successful, it would still take at least a decade to make up for mistakes so far.

Among the ORG's recommendations are the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and an increase in diplomacy, including with Syria and Iran; greater civil aid to Afghanistan, a scaling down of military action and talks with militia.

"Extraordinary rendition", detention without trial and prisoner abuse should stop immediately; countries should commit to advancing the stalled Middle East peace process, because of its central role in anti-Western sentiment, it said.
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Who Made Hillary Queen?
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B01

Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there's nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?

She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can't win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?

We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.

At a time when Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that there are almost no political dynasties left in British politics, at least on the Tory side. Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labor Party cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush.

And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton's r¿sum¿ even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It's true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fern¿ndez de Kirchner may succeed President N¿stor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines -- and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. Such things also happened (apart from the assassination) in the early days of women's entry into British politics. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Lady Astor, by birth Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Va., who inherited her husband's seat in 1919 when he inherited his peerage, but we haven't seen a case like that for many years.

In one democracy after another, women have been enfranchised, entered politics and risen to the top. The United States lags far behind in every way. A record number of women now serve in Congress, which only makes the figures -- 71 of 435 House members and 16 of 100 senators -- all the more unimpressive. Compare those statistics with Norway's, where 37 percent of lawmakers are women. In Sweden, it's 45 percent.

More to the point, women who make political careers in other democracies do it their way, which usually means the hard way. Not many people had fewer advantages in life -- by birth or marriage or anything else -- than Golda Meir, born in poverty in Russia and taken to the United States as a girl before she settled in Palestine. She was one of only two women among the 24 people who signed Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. After serving under David Ben-Gurion as foreign minister, she became prime minister in 1969 -- stepping into a man's shoes, it's true, but those of her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, who died unexpectedly in office.

Four years later, Meir showed that a woman could lead her country in war as well as peace, an example that Margaret Thatcher would follow. Thatcher made her way from a lower-middle-class home to Oxford at a time when there were few women there from any background. She then had not one but two careers, as a barrister and as an industrial chemist. (One of the gravest charges against her is that she helped invent a noxious concoction called "Mr. Whippy" squirtable ice cream.) After the traditional blooding of British politics -- fighting and losing a parliamentary election -- she entered Parliament in 1959 and served there for more than 30 years, working her way up as a Conservative backbencher, junior minister and then cabinet minister, speaking, debating, listening (yes, even Thatcher sometimes listened), pounding the streets at election time and attending dreary meetings in her constituency.

She not only had no advantages, but she was at a disadvantage in what was still very much a chaps' party -- dominated by men who had attended the same schools, served in the same regiments and belonged to the same clubs. But she ignored all that. In 1975, she was the only Tory with the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the party leadership, and in 1979 she led her party to victory in the first of three general elections.

To be sure, some women in politics have been less successful than others. France's first female prime minister was ¿dith Cresson, who lasted less than a year in office, and the first Canadian was poor Kim Campbell, who held the job for less than six months before leading her party to catastrophic electoral defeat. But Helen Clark in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany have fought the political fight on equal terms, neither expecting nor receiving any favors because of their sex.

What a contrast Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn't seem to have impinged on Americans.

Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband's health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.

No doubt she has been a diligent senator, even if the cutting words of the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier about "the most plodding and expedient politician in America" ring painfully true, and no doubt her main Democratic rivals have only quite modest experience themselves: Obama's stint in the Illinois state legislature before entering the U.S. Senate in 2005, John Edwards's one term in the Senate. But both men are unquestionably self-made, and no one can say that they are where they are because of any kin or spouse.

Predictably enough, Sen. Clinton's husband has tried to defend her with his quicksilver tongue, speaking recently on BBC Radio here, where he's plugging his new book, and on television back home. Dynasties mean the kings of France, Bill Clinton told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," whereas Hillary has had "a totally different career path" from his, "from a different political base" to a different "set of expertise areas."

"And I think the real question here is not whether she's establishing a dynasty," he went on. "I don't like it whenever anybody gets something they're not entitled to just because of their families. But in this case, I honestly believe . . . she's the best suited, best qualified nonincumbent I've had a chance to vote for." (Really? Better qualified, in terms of experience, than Hubert Humphrey or Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis?) "So I just don't want to see her eliminated because she's my wife," the former president added. The gentleman doth protest too much on behalf of his lady, methinks: This is the best Clintonian evasive style. No one for a second thinks Sen. Clinton's marital status should be held against her. The question is whether she has any other serious claim to high office.

By way of what English barristers call a bad point, the former president mentioned that, after Robert F. Kennedy had served as his brother's attorney general, Congress made it illegal for a president's family member to be in the Cabinet. "I actually agree with that," Clinton said. "I think it would be a mistake for Hillary to give me a line policy-making job." So was it a mistake for him to have given her the health-care job?

All in all, "Democracy in America," not to mention equality or feminism in America, can sometimes look very odd from the outside. We've seen Jean Kennedy Smith made ambassador to Dublin (and a disastrous one) because she was famous for being a sister, then Pamela Digby Harriman made ambassador to Paris (and rather a good one) because she was famous for being a socialite.

Now Hillary Rodham Clinton has become a potential president because she is famous for being a wife (and a wronged wife at that). Europe has long since accepted the great 19th-century liberal principle of "the career open to the talents." In the 21st century, isn't it time that the republic founded on the proposition that all men are created equal -- and women, too, one hopes -- also caught up with it?
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