Misbegotten Afghan adventure

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 17 September

NEARLY five years after the U.S.-led coalition dispatched the Taliban and proclaimed a new dawn for Afghanistan, foreign troops are waging a full-scale war against insurgents said to control as much as half the country. Meanwhile, millions of Afghans face starvation, and the development and democracy promised by Western leaders has yet to materialise.

According to senior commanders, British troops are currently engaged in their most prolonged period of intense combat since the Korean War. In Helmand province, they are consuming ammunition faster than at any time since the Second World War.

In mid-2005, there were 25 insurgent attacks per month. A year later, that number has quadrupled. The fatality rate among NATO forces now averages five a week, only slightly lower than the rate suffered by the Soviets 20 years ago. Between August 1 and September 10, 28 British soldiers were killed. As is customary in the “war on terror”, no count is kept of deaths on the other side, but reports indicate that the number of Afghans killed – insurgents and civilians – is at least forty times as great.

Because of the unanticipated strength of the insurgency, and the support it clearly enjoys among local people, British forces have found it impossible to operate on the ground without extensive air support. The Daily Telegraph reports that during the month of August, the town of Musa Qalah, to take but one example, was bombed by U.S. Air Force B-1s, A-10s and RAF Harriers on an almost daily basis. The result, inevitably, is an increase in civilian casualties and a corresponding rise in popular hostility to foreign troops.

Had there been some compensation in the form of economic development and poverty relief, feelings might be different. But despite the high-profile aid pledges, the past five years have seen no measurable improvements. Afghanistan remains one of the poorest societies on earth. More than seven million people are chronically hungry, according to the U.N., and 53 per cent live on less than a dollar a day. One in four children do not survive beyond the age of five. The life expectancy of 45 is 20 years lower than in neighbouring countries. In some provinces, the maternal mortality rates are the worst ever recorded, anywhere.

Seventy per cent of the population suffers severe malnutrition. Less than a quarter has access to safe drinking water, only 12 per cent to adequate sanitation and 10 per cent to electricity. According to Christian Aid, millions face starvation in the coming months – the result of drought, war, corruption and profoundly mistaken Western priorities.

The U.S. and its allies have spent ten times as much on their military efforts in Afghanistan as on aid and development. According to the 2006 WHO World Health Report, there are 4,104 physicians in Afghanistan, approximately one per 7,066 Afghans. In contrast, there are more than 23,000 U.S. and 18,500 NATO troops, one foreign soldier per 742 Afghans.

The priority for the U.S. and Britain has been poppy eradication. According to a report recently issued by the policy research group, the Senlis Council, “In many cases, the only time Afghans have seen anyone from the Government or the international community has been when crop eradication has taken place… Militarised counter-narcotics strategies have corroded confidence in the Afghan Government and international community, and the Taliban is sweeping into power on the back of rural communities’ frustration and disappointment.”

The anti-poppy policy has been dictated, not by the Afghan people or the Karzai Government in Kabul, but by domestic political agendas in the U.S. and Britain. Not surprisingly, in those circumstances, and in the absence of alternative livelihoods and the infrastructure needed to sustain them, it has been a failure. Poppy cultivation is now twice as extensive as it was five years ago.

As Afghans are aware, the international military force seeking to subdue their country is not answerable to the Afghan Government – indeed, the reverse is the case. The soldiers on the ground are accountable to their masters in Washington and London. It’s the requirements of the “war on terror”, not the welfare of Afghans, that shape their operations.

The Al Qaeda and Arab fighters who were the original targets of the U.S.-British intervention have mostly departed the scene. Today’s insurgents are Afghans, referred to as Taliban or neo-Taliban, but principally motivated by opposition to foreign domination. Complaints by U.S. and British officials that the insurgents are “hiding” themselves among the populace, using civilians as “human shields”, betray the dangerous logic characteristic of military interventions of this type. You end up with the U.S. general in Vietnam who declared that his troops had “destroyed the village in order to save it.” A few thousand more troops, as called for by NATO leaders, will only re-enforce this tragic dynamic.

Many of those who opposed the attack on Iraq supported and continue to support the Afghan war, which was authorised by the U.N. However, significant as that distinction may be, the underlying similarities between the two ventures have already proved decisive in shaping their equally desperate outcomes. There has been a failure to deliver on the promises made to Afghans because the premises of the invasion of their country were, from the outset, profoundly flawed.

The military action begun in October 2001 was justified on the grounds that the then Afghan regime was “harbouring” people responsible for the terrorist atrocities of September 11. On the same grounds, Britain could have bombed Boston or New York in the 1970s and 80s (these cities certainly “harboured” and helped finance IRA terrorists), Cuba could attack Florida now, and at various times India could have claimed justification for an all-out assault on Pakistan and Pakistan likewise on Saudi Arabia.

International opinion would be appalled at any of these scenarios, but in the wake of 9/11 it granted the U.S. a license denied to others. It endorsed a “war on terror” whose aims were frighteningly open-ended, whose methods were in essence lawless and disproportionate, and whose targets were to be defined at the convenience of the world’s most powerful nation.

The return of a Taliban regime would be a disaster for Afghans, and especially for Afghan women. Far from preventing such a calamity, however, current U.S. and British policy makes it more likely. As in Iraq, an attempt by a foreign power to control the destiny of a distant land by force of arms has given legitimacy to reactionary groups that their ideas alone never would have earned them.

An Afghan Government army commander in Kandahar province told the Senlis researcher: “The foreigners came here and said they would help the poor people and improve the economic situation and they only spend money on their military operations. The poor people are poorer now than when the Taliban were the government. We don’t trust them anymore. We would be fools to continue to believe their lies.”