The bitter logic of "staying the course"

More than 200 (British) soldiers dead in Afghanistan, and now Gordon Brown advises us that "the best way to honour their memory is to see the course through". I don't know which particular "course" Gordon has in mind – protecting democracy, training the Afghan army, defeating the Taliban, talking to the Taliban, or just fighting them so they don't turn up on British shores – but this is straight out of the George W Bush tear bucket.

Not so long ago, I seem to remember, Bush was telling us that we would be betraying the American dead in Iraq if we gave up the fight. We owed it to the dead to go on killing more Iraqis. And now we owe it to the dead to go on killing more Afghans. Who, of course, will go on killing us. Is there no end to this madness?

(Robert Fisk: "Why These Deaths hit home as hard as the Somme" The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-these-deaths-hit-home-as-hard-as-the-somme-1773468.html

Democracy and freedom

Robert Fisk in a recent column in the Independent argued that "Democracy will not bring freedom" in Afghanistan. The reporting of what is going on in Afghanistan in the Australian media seems to take no account of the power of ethnic identity and the sociology of communities in Afghanistan. The political debate about Australian involvement takes no account of these issues either.

So they voted. But for what? Democracy? Certainly not "Jeffersonian" democracy, as President Obama reminded us. Yes, the Afghans wanted to vote. They showed great courage in the face of the Taliban's threats. But there's a problem.

It's not just the stitched-up Karzai administration that will almost certainly return, nor the war criminals he employs (Abdul Rashid Dostum should be in the dock at The Hague for war crimes, not in Kabul), nor the corruption and the hideous human rights abuses, but the unassailable fact that ethnically-divided societies vote on ethnic lines.

I doubt if anyone in Afghanistan voted yesterday because of the policies of their favourite candidate. They voted for whoever their ethnic leaders told them to vote for. Hence Karzai asked Dostum to deliver him the Uzbek vote. Abdullah Abdullah relies on the Tajik vote, Karzai on the Pashtuns.

It's always the same. In Iraq, the Shia voted in a Shia government. And in Lebanon, Sunni Muslims and a large section of the Christian community voted to keep the Shia out of power. This is not confined to the Muslim world. How many Northern Ireland Protestants vote for Sinn Fein?

But our problem in Afghanistan goes further than this. We still think we can offer Afghans the fruits of our all-so-perfect Western society. We still believe in the Age of Enlightenment and that all we have to do is fiddle with Afghan laws and leave behind us a democratic, gender-equal, human rights-filled society.

True, there are brave souls who fight for this in Afghanistan – and pay for their struggle with their lives – but if you walk into a remote village in, say, Nangarhar province, you can no more persuade its tribal elders of the benefits of women's education than you could persuade Henry VIII of the benefits of parliamentary democracy. Thus the benefits we wish to bestow upon the people of Afghanistan are either cherry-picked (the money comes in handy for the government's corrupt coffers and the election reinforces tribal loyalties) or ignored. In the meantime, Nato soldiers go on dying for the pitiful illusion that we can clean the place up. We can't. We are not going to.

In the end, the people of these foreign fields must decide their own future and develop their societies as and when they wish. Back in 2001, things were different. Had we hoovered up every gun in the land, we might have done some good. Instead, the Americans sloshed millions of dollars at the mass murderers who had originally helped to destroy the place so that they would fight on our side.

Then we wandered off to Iraq and now we are back to fight in Afghanistan for hopelessly unachievable aims. Yes, I like to see people – women and men – voting. I think the Afghans wanted to vote. So, too, the Iraqis. But they also want freedom. Which is not necessarily the same as democracy.

Why Gaza should not have been a surprise

With the extensive heat wave recently I have been sitting up late reading while waiting for the house to cool down. Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation is probably not ideal reading late at night. Its appalling first hand accounts of the carnage in Lebanon through the mid 1970s and 1980s makes for disturbing reading. Few of the political leaders, whether inside or outside Lebanon, emerge with any credibility from the maelstrom.

Fisk is concerned to put faces and names, to personalise the victims and to seek the truth as to what happened in a variety of massacres.

The relevance of the dynamics of Israeli engagement in Lebanon for the situation in Gaza became clear as I read the account of war between the Palestinians and Israel in Beirut in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Acquaintenance with what happened in Lebanon during the 1970's and 1980's should have prepared us for what happened in Gaza.

The dynamics of guerilla provocation by the Palestinians of the Israelis, followed by responses that had nothing to do with either proportion or had any clearly thought through political aim, followed by massacres for which Israeli military forces were directly responsible, or at least accountable for, that were then denied or ignored by the Israeli Government.

Civilians and the truth about what had happened both suffereed immense collateral damage in Lebanon.

The media's reporting of Lebanon contained language that dehumanised and distances for Western readers the Palestinians and Lebanese while interpreting Israeli military activity in terms that enabled Western readers to remain comfortable with their perspective.

Fisk reflects on the use of language,the way cliches can remove our ability to make critical judgements about what is happening. His discussion of the use of the temr terrorism when the book was originally published in 1990 was prescient given the events of 2001 and subsequent public debate. (See pages 435 -442 where he unravels the complexity of the issue.

Fisks' reporting is confronting we are not allowed to escape its stench and devastation, nor of the moral corruption that seems to have influenced almost every military force that became engaged in Lebanon over the period covered by the book.

Afghanistan - what future?

A recent article by Robert Fisk raises severe doubts about the optimistic accounts on future developments in Afghanistan emerging from recent interviews with Australian military officers.

Robert Fisk it should be noted has extensive acquaintance with the country going back to the time of the Russian invasion in the late 1970's. His account of his time there as a war correspondent in the The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East makes for engaging but ultimately highly sobering reading. His background understanding means that his comments should not be dismissed lightly.

In an article dated 27 November entitled 'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government' Fisk nails the dilemma for the international community:

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai's government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape – one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul's death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, "gender-sensitive" Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban's ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

...

Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have "democracy"? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai's own government? And – most important of all – is development really about "securing the country"? The tired old American adage that "where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins" is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the "key" – of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same "key" which the Russians tried – and it did not fit the lock.

"We" are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of America's principal targets in this wretched war – you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn't want to talk to Mr Karzai.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nobody-supports-the-taliban-but-people-hate-the-government-1036905.html

The spiral of violence

Political realism sometimes isn't as realistic as it seems. Underlying its apparent "toughness" lies a faith in the power of military force to provide security in the face of a threatening enemy that is often not supported by evidence of history.

The current situation in Gaza is a case in point. Robert Fisk's acerbic commentary in The Independent makes the point pretty clearly.

The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel.
...
Quite a lot of the dead this weekend appear to have been Hamas members, but what is it supposed to solve? Is Hamas going to say: "Wow, this blitz is awesome – we'd better recognise the state of Israel, fall in line with the Palestinian Authority, lay down our weapons and pray we are taken prisoner and locked up indefinitely and support a new American 'peace process' in the Middle East!" Is that what the Israelis and the Americans and Gordon Brown think Hamas is going to do?

Yes, let's remember Hamas's cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel's need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges. (Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored Monday, 29 December 2008)

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-leaders-lie-civilians-die-and-lessons-of-history-are-ignored-1215045.html

Israel, however – always swift to announce its imminent destruction of "terrorism" – has never won a war in a built-up city, be it Beirut or Gaza, since its capture of Jerusalem in 1967. And it's important to remember that the Israeli army, famous in song and legend for its supposed "purity of arms" and "elite" units, has proved itself to be a pretty third-rate army over recent years. Not since the 1973 Middle East conflict – 35 years ago – has it won a war. Its 1978 invasion of Lebanon was a failure, its 1982 invasion ended in disaster, propelling Arafat from Beirut but allowing its vicious Phalangist allies into the Sabra and Chatila camps where they committed mass murder. In neither the 1993 bombardment of Lebanon nor the 1996 bombardment of Lebanon – which fizzled out after the massacre of refugees at Qana – nor the 2006 war was its performance anything more than amateur. Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact Arab armies are even more of a rabble than the Israelis, the Israeli state would be genuinely under threat from its neighbours.

One common feature of Middle East wars is the ability of all the antagonists to suffer from massive self-delusion. Israel's promise to "root out terror" – be it of the PLO, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iranian or any other kind – has always turned out to be false. "War to the bitter end," the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, has promised in Gaza. Nonsense. Just like the PLO's boast – and Hamas' boast and Hizbollah's boast – to "liberate" Jerusalem. Eyewash. But the Israelis have usually shown a dangerous propensity to believe their own propaganda. Calling up more than 6,000 reservists and sitting them round the Gaza fence is one thing; sending them into the hovels of Gaza will be quite another. In 2006, Israel claimed it was sending 30,000 troops into Lebanon. In reality, it sent about 3,000 – and the moment they crossed the border, they were faced down by the Hizbollah. In some cases, Israeli soldiers actually ran back to their own frontier. (The self delusion that plagues both sides in this bloody conflict: Israel has never won a war in a built-up city, that's why threats of 'war to the bitter end' are nonsense, Wednesday, 31 December 2008)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-self-delusion-that-plagues-both-sides-in-this-bloody-conflict-1218224.html

The realism of conversing with enemies, with bitter histories behind them, lies behind the resolution of conflicts, many with deep historical roots - South Africa, Northern Ireland come to mind.

Meanwhile - the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is appalling - Sara Roy in the London Review of Books summarises the situation in horrifying detail.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html