By Chris Nineham
'The Afghans have suffered from 38 years of war, mainly
driven by foreign powers, who have invaded, occupied and backed different
groups in their quest for control'
Almost every day there are reports of more killing in
Afghanistan. Incidents like the recent Taliban assault on an air base near
Kandahar and the terrible car bombings in Kabul are testimony to the ongoing
horror of life in the country. They also underline the fact that Afghanistan’s
Western backed government is losing what limited control of the country it has
ever managed.
Worryingly there are reports that, in his first policy
statement on the situation in Afghanistan, Donald Trump is considering a major
increase in US troop deployments to the country. This would be a disaster and
it would display a supreme level of denial about the failure of military
intervention in Afghanistan since 2001. Given Theresa May's willingness to be
seen side-by-side with Trump at every occasion, any troop increase would
inevitably add to the 500 British troops still stationed in the country sixteen
years after invasion. Any serious analysis of the situation in Afghanistan must
conclude in fact that Western intervention has been a major factor in the
crisis besetting the country.
Violence grows
The level of violence in Afghanistan has reached a record
high as part of an almost unbroken decade long trend. In the last six months
1,662 civilians have been killed, a two per cent rise according to the UN. The
headline figures conceal a 9% increase in child casualties, and a 23% increase
in the number of women killed or wounded.
Most mainstream commentary puts all this down to a sharp
spike in attacks, particularly roadside bombings, by the Taliban. The UN report
attributes about two-thirds of casualties to the Taliban and other
anti-government groups such as Islamic State.
But this is far from being the complete picture. A sharp
increase in US and Afghan government airstrikes has boosted civilian victims.
There has been a 43% increase in casualties from aerial bombing. In June, the
US conducted 389 aerial attacks in Afghanistan, putting last month on a par
with June 2013, in the middle of Obama’s surge, when there were nearly 50,000
US soldiers in the country. The number of bombing raids this year is up three
times on the figure for the same period in 2016. Even according to official statistics -
almost certainly underestimates, at least two hundred civilians have been
killed by these attacks.
The figures confirm that after sixteen years of occupation
there is a continuing war in Afghanistan in which the West is playing an
increasing role. And it is a war which the government and their Western backers
are losing. The Taliban control well over half the country, their attacks are
creating deep insecurity in the capital Kabul, and Kandahar, the second city,
is under threat. As a CNN reporter had to admit after a recent tour embedded
with US troops:
‘The country is in
one of the most violent periods of its recent history, and its challenges are
deepening. But the sense of exhaustion, of solutions long having lost their
sparkle, pervades.’
Causes and consequences
The US-led alliance has indeed tried the complete range of
strategies, from blanket bombing, proxy war and targeted counterinsurgency to
the Obama surge and the current phase of training, supplying and directing
Afghan forces against the Taliban. All have failed.
The root causes of this full spectrum failure are not
terribly complicated, but they are rarely considered. The Afghans have suffered
from 38 years of war, mainly driven by foreign powers, who have invaded,
occupied and backed different groups in their quest for control.
The US, for example, backed the Mujahidin fighters against
the Russian occupiers in the 1980s and some Mujahidin militias later morphed
into Taliban brigades. The US’s initial, post 9/11 attack on Afghanistan in
2001 involved backing the Northern League warlords, before turning in to direct
occupation a few years later. The result has been a population that is has not
just suffered almost unimaginably from war but has become deeply cynical and
bitter about foreign intervention and prepared, if necessary. to back any
groups who oppose it.
Partly as a result of this experience, President Ghani’s
Western-backed government has very little legitimacy. It includes people with
known records of atrocities. Ghani has for example brought General Dostum, a former warlord with a history of
accusations of human rights violations and abuse back into politics. This is
just one example among many as documented by Patricia Gossman, senior
researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch.
“When Ghani brought
Dostum onto his ticket in 2014, he repeated the same mistake that has plagued
Afghanistan since 2001: subordinating human rights and governance to political
expediency,”
More generally, the regime the West has appointed has
structurally discriminated against the Pashtun majority. Its top-down, highly
centralised constitution allows for next to no regional representation. So the
views and wishes of the Pashtun population in which the Taliban is primarily
based is ignored by the government in Kabul and excluded from any power.
Overall, the experience of the Western occupation has been
one not just of death and destruction but of decay. On most measures from
literacy to death in child birth and hospital provision, development is well
behind the abysmal average for countries in the ‘low human development group’
and way below the average for countries in South Asia.
Levels of inequality have risen steadily during the
occupation. This is an entirely predictable result of sustained military
intervention. But it is also an outcome of the sheer contempt in which Afghans
are held by Western leaders, famously displayed by our very own Liam Fox who
sneered at the idea of spending money on helping the Afghan people in an
interview with the Times saying,"we are not in Afghanistan for the sake of
the education policy in a broken 13th-century country."
Time for change
The US has spent more than a trillion dollars on Afghanistan
and it continues to spend more on the country than on all of its Middle East
War’s put together. Britain has almost certainly over spent over 40 billion
pounds there – more than in Iraq. The West’s priorities are made starkly clear
by the fact that according to some estimates as much as ninety per cent of
these budgets have been spent on the military.
This is money that has not just been wasted but has
generated misery, instability and hatred in a country that has suffered at the
hands of the West for generations. More
of the same just isn’t an option.
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