Whatever Else You Do, Please Don't Mention The War In Afghanistan
Feb 12, 2003
Source: NNI
You didn't hear United States Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the United Nations Security Council about Afghanistan.
Since the Afghan war is the "successful" role model for America's forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this
savage land and the steady erosion of US forces in Afghanistan the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities
outside Kabul, the warlords and drug trafficking, and steadily increasing toll of murders are unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the
consciousness of Americans, who are now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another "success" story.
This article is written in President George W. Bush's home state of Texas, where the flags fly at half-mast for the Columbia crew, where the dispatch to the
Middle East of further troops of the 108th Air Defence Artillery Brigade from Fort Bliss and the imminent deployment from Holloman Air Force Base in
neighbouring New Mexico of undisclosed numbers of
F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers earned a mere 78-word down-page inside report in the Austin newspaper.
Only in New York and Washington do the neo-conservative pundits suggest, obscenely, that the death of the Columbia space crew may well have heightened
America's resolve and "unity" to support the Bush adventure in Iraq. A few months ago, we would still have been asked to believe that the postwar "success"
in Afghanistan augured well for the postwar success in Iraq.
So let's break through the curtain for a while and peer into the vastness of the land that Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others promised not to
forget.
Hands up those who know that al-Qaeda has a radio station operating inside Afghanistan which calls for a holy war against America? It's true. Hands up again
anyone who can guess how many of the daily weapons caches discovered by US troops in the country have been brought into Afghanistan since America's
"successful" war? Answer: up to 25 per cent.
Have any US troops retreated from their positions along the Afghan-Pakistan border? None, you may say. And you would be wrong. At least five positions,
according to Pakistani sources on the other side of the frontier, only one of which has been admitted by US forces.
On December 11, US troops abandoned their military outpost at Lwara after nightly rocket attacks, which destroyed several American military vehicles. Their
Afghan allies were driven out only days later and al-Qaeda fighters then stormed the US compound and burnt it to the ground.
It's a sign of just how seriously America's mission in Afghanistan is collapsing that the majestically conservative Wall Street Journal normally a beacon of
imperial and Israeli policy in the Middle East and South-West Asia has devoted a long and intriguing article to the American retreat, though of course that's not
what the paper calls it.
"Soldiers still confront an invisible enemy" is the title of Marc Kaufman's first-class investigation, a headline almost identical to one which appeared over a Fisk
story a year or so after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-80.
The soldiers in my dispatch, of course, were Russian. Indeed, just as I recall the Soviet officer, who told us all at Bagram air base that the "mujahideen
remnants" were all that was left of the West's conspiracy against peace-loving (and communist) Afghans, so I observed the American spokesmen yes, at the
very same Bagram air base who today cheerfully assert that al-Qaeda "remnants" are all that are left of Osama bin Laden's legions.
Training camps have been set up inside Afghanistan again, not - as the Americans think - by the recalcitrant forces of Gulbadin Hekmatyar's anti-American
Afghans, but by Arabs. The latest battle between US forces and enemy "remnants" near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province involved further Arab fighters, as
has already been reported. Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami forces have been "forging ties" with al-Qaeda and the Taliban; which is exactly what the mujaheddin
"terrorist remnants" did among themselves in the winter of 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion.
There have been several other reports of violence, including an American killed by a newly placed landmine in Khost, 16 civilians blown up by another newly
placed mine outside Kandahar and grenades tossed at Americans or international troops in Kabul. There have also been further reports of rape and the
burning of classrooms (where girls are taught) in the north of Afghanistan. All these events are now acquiring the stale status of yesterday's war.
So be sure that Colin Powell is not boasting to the Security Council of America's success in the intelligence war in Afghanistan. It's one thing to claim that
satellite pictures show chemicals being transported around Iraq, or that telephone intercepts prove Iraqi scientists are still at their dirty work, but it quite another
to explain how all the "communications-chatter" intercepts, which the US supposedly picked up in Afghanistan, proved nothing.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, you can quote Basil Fawlty: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war". |
