Ian
Sinclair 13 November 2014
Britian
had nothing to show for 13 years of war in Afghanistan but death, destruction
and defeat. But that isn't how the BBC saw it.
What John
Simpson said
On 27
October 2014 the BBC Today Programme broadcast an interview with John Simpson,
the BBC's World Affairs Editor, about the official end of British combat
operations in Afghanistan. Here is what he said and what he didn't say.
What the
BBC's John Simpson said:
• BBC
‘They haven’t beaten the Taliban but they haven’t been beaten by the Taliban…
it doesn’t look as though the Taliban are coming back’.
In
reality, as Helmandis told the New York Times, ‘the Taliban have never been
stronger in the province.’ The UK military are fully aware of this, with The
Times noting in January 2014 ‘hard-fought territory in southern Afghanistan
will fall to the Taliban after British forces withdraw this year, British
commanders and military experts believe.’ The report goes on to note there is
evidence Afghan soldiers are already patrolling alongside insurgents and quotes
a former Special Air Service commander: ‘I will be very surprised if the future
Governor of Helmand… is not very closely connected to those who we call the
Taliban.’
Looking at
the national picture, in a 2012 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
report titled ‘Waiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan’ Professor Gilles
Dorronsoro noted ‘The Afghan regime will most probably collapse in a few
years.’ According to the report, ‘poised to take power after the Afghan
regime’s likely collapse, only the Taliban can potentially control the Afghan
border and expel transnational jihadists from Afghanistan.’ Time Magazine echos
Dorronsoro’s analysis: ‘Without American troops stationed in Afghanistan, a
real danger exists that the Taliban, which ruled the country until the U.S.
invasion, will return, along with other extremist groups like Al-Qaeda,
Afghanistan watchers suggest.’
• BBC:
‘It’s a stable society’
The
Guardian recently explained ‘There are few senior British politicians, soldiers
or diplomats prepared to make extravagant claims about Afghanistan’s
stability’. So, by stating that Afghanistan is a ‘stable society’ Simpson goes
further than the consensus position in the British government and military.
In
contrast, Foreign Policy reports that the official US reconstruction watchdog
warns Afghanistan ‘remains dangerously unstable’ with insurgent attacks at the
highest level since 2011. During the nine months up to August 2014 there were
15,968 insurgent attacks – 61. In the past year 4,000 Afghan soldiers and
police have been killed in fighting with the insurgency in the past year,
according to the second-in-command for international forces in Afghanistan. The
Associated Press reports that “suicide bombers, roadside bombs and rocket
attacks on the Afghan capital have intensified” in the past month.
Regarding
the British occupation, former military intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge
provides some important context in his 2013 book Investment in Blood: The True
Cost of Britain’s Afghan War: ‘Britain’s efforts have resulted in the
“stabilization” (i.e. the temporary pacification) of 3 of the 14 districts that
make up the province of Helmand – just one of 34 provinces in a country with a
population that is half that of the UK. In terms of overall political
significance, this might be the equivalent of three large market towns in rural
Lincolnshire. Before the British burst onto the scene, Helmand was “stable”, in
the sense there was almost no Taliban presence and little prospect of any.’
• BBC: ‘It
[Afghan society] is working’
According
to Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index Afghanistan
is the joint most corrupt country in the world alongside North Korea and
Somalia. Thomas Ruttig, Co-Director of Afghanistan Anaylsts Network, provides
some detail: ‘Armed strongmen – warlords and commanders… sit in most key
positions and dominate the parliament, the judiciary and the still-partly
factionalised security forces as well as the country’s few functioning business
sectors. Those who received financial means from the US in 2001 to fight the
Taleban often invested in the drug trade and, starting from there, gradually
took over licit sectors of the economy, such as the import-export business,
construction, and the real estate, banking and mining sectors as well as the
contract economy fed by the billions of military, aid and reconstruction money
flowing in from abroad. Early on, they remobilised old or recruited new
fighters with that money and pushed through their bulk integration – i.e., with
the old militia structures – into the ‘new’ armed forces... Their new military
and financial force empowered them to win seats in the parliamentary elections
in 2005.’ This status quo could be called many things but only the most naïve,
blinkered fool could say Afghan society ‘is working’ in the face of these
easily accessible facts.
• BBC:
‘There is more than a million kids in school, that’s something the Taliban have
a great desire to stop, certainly for girls’
The
reality is a little more complicated than Simpson suggests. According to
Steele, after the Taliban attained power in the 1990s, they ‘softened their ban
on girls' education and were turning a blind eye to the expansion of informal
"home schools" in which thousands of girls were being taught in
private flats.’ Today 43 percent of schools in Helmand remain closed, with
provincial officials blaming insecurity in the region, according to Tolo News.
Moreover,
there are indications the Taliban has changed its stance on female education.
In 2011 the Afghan Education Minister claimed the Taliban's leadership was
prepared to drop its ban on girls' schools. In 2012 Anatol Lieven, a professor
in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, met with leading
figures close to the Taliban, who told him ‘there can be no return to pure
“government of mullahs” as before September 11 and that any Afghan government
would have to… allow modern education (albeit with women and men strictly
separated.).’
What John
Simpson didn’t say
Nowhere in
Simpson’s “reckoning” is there any mention of:
• The
effect of the UK’s occupation on Afghan civilians
According
to General David Richards, the former Chief of Defence Staff, in the early
stage of the British deployment to Helmand ‘we ended up killing a lot of
people, destroying lots of bazaars and mosques. We absolutely knew it was not
what we were there to do, and would not be helpful.’ Similarly, a British Army
officer told Ledwidge that ‘We killed a lot of people… many of them might have
been the wrong people.’
Citing
credible sources Ledwidge calculates British forces killed 542 Afghan
civilians, though he admits this is likely a huge underestimate. His hunch is
backed up by testimony like that of journalist Ben Anderson, who was embedded
with British soldiers in 2007: ‘I saw at least a dozen compounds [that is,
houses] flattened and no one was checking for civilians before they dropped
bombs.’
Furthermore,
Ledwidge believes ‘we can be certain that many thousands of Helmandis… have
been rendered disabled by NATO action.’ UK military operations displaced tens
of thousands of Afghan civilians.
•
Insurgents killed and wounded by British forces
The number
of Afghan insurgents killed by UK forces – likely thousands – is rarely
mentioned at all by the media. ‘Ninety per cent of the people we are fighting
couldn’t find Britain on a map’, Rory Stewart MP, who has walked across
Afghanistan and lived in Kabul, explained in 2010. ‘They are semi-literate,
tribal, conservative village communities… This is not a trivial issue.’ Adam
Holloway MP, a former soldier and member of the Defence Select Committee, has a
similar analysis of the composition of the Taliban insurgency. ‘What we call
the Taliban are, in fact, hundreds of groups, most of whom are no more than
traditional Afghan Muslims, the sons of local farmers… they are united not by
Islam but by the presence of foreign troops on their soil, and a hatred of
external governments… Approximately 80 per cent of those we call the enemy die
within 20 miles of where they live: does that tell you something about who we
are really fighting?’
• UK armed
forces killed and wounded during the UK occupation
453
British servicemen and women have died in Afghanistan. According to Ledwidge,
by early 2013, 2,600 British soldiers had been wounded, and many thousands will
suffer psychological problems connected to their time in Afghanistan in the
years to come.
• The
effect of the UK occupation on the terror threat to the UK
Despite
Labour and Conservative-Liberal Democrat government claims that British
soldiers were fighting in Afghanistan to make British streets safer, the
opposite seems more likely, especially if you take into consideration the UK’s
broader policy in the region which includes support for US foreign policy.
Lieven: ‘What we can surely say is that UK policy has been an absolute disaster
in the perception of the Muslim population and has produced a significantly
increased terror threat.’ Adam Holloway MP agrees: ‘Put starkly, our current
situation is working against the West's security interest and is making attacks
on the streets of Britain more, not less, likely.’
Unfortunately,
these warnings were confirmed by the murder of off-duty British soldier Lee
Rigby in London in 2013, which the attacker argued was in response to British
actions in Afghanistan.
• The
financial cost of the UK occupation of Afghanistan
Ledwidge
has estimated the total cost of the UK war in Afghanistan to be £37 billion.
This shouldn’t be seen as an abstract number but one with important negative
ramifications for domestic UK spending. As President Dwight Eisenhower said in
1953: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.’
The BBC’s
tactical analysis of Afghanistan
By
downplaying the negative consequences of the war in Afghanistan and omitting
key information Simpson is whitewashing the UK invasion and occupation of
Afghanistan. In this key respect, Simpson’s analysis fits in with the BBC’s
broader coverage of Afghanistan and UK foreign policy.
As the
state broadcaster, the BBC plays an important role in framing the popularly
understood narrative of the UK war in Afghanistan. This ranges from stuffing
the 2009 Question Time Afghanistan Special full of pro-war panellists to Webb
and Simpson defining the discussion as one of tactical analysis – was the UK
successful in achieving its self-defined objectives? – rather than about the
morality or legality of invading and occupying another nation.
By working
within this narrow framework of tactical analysis, John Simpson predictably
repeats a common argument made by the armed forces and the mainstream media –
that the British army never had a sufficient number of troops to achieve its
mission. This framing fails to engage with the most basic truism about occupying
another nation.
‘Our
policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the
Pashtun areas [in Afghanistan] is the problem’, explained three former CIA
experts of the region in 2009. ‘The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition.
We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we
increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are
correct.’
Rory
Stewart concurs. ‘The basic problem is very, very simple. Why don’t these
interventions work? Because we are foreigners’, the Conservative MP notes. ‘If
things are going wrong in a country, it’s not usually that we don’t have enough
foreigners. It’s usually that we have too many.’
No comments:
Post a Comment