Does US Humiliation In Afghanistan Spell Curtains On Forever Wars?

Does US Humiliation In Afghanistan Spell Curtains On Forever Wars?

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

The horrific terrorist attacks outside Kabul airport will boost chaos sky high. It will take focus away from the only frame in which the epochal events of the past few days should be seen. Did the US withdrawal, however messy, bring an end to the “forever wars”? Is that outcome to be welcomed? Or is this the time to analyze the “incompetence” of the Taleban? A people who defeated a superpower in battle should be given a little more than a fortnight to find their feet.

Or, is there an urge in wounded hearts for some rearguard action in order to pick up shreds of prestige blown to smithereens? A military response to the residual imperialist yearning, pulsating beneath the ashes, may well provide Afghans with an opportunity to measure upto Vietnam’s record. Vietnam defeated three permanent members of the Security Council in the battlefield: France at Dien Bien Phu, the US at Saigon, and China in Lang Son. Mujahideen Taleban have two scalps in their bag already – Soviet Union and the US. Another trophy for the Afghans, anybody?

It is ironical that Tony Blair’s has been the loudest yelp. “Imbecilic” to withdraw, he screamed. How thick a human skin can be? Just the other day Sir John Chilcot in his historic report grilled the illustrious British Prime Minister for dissembling facts leading Britain into a bogus Iraq war. “I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you will ever imagine” he wept.

Donald Trump asked Jimmy Carter, “What should we do, China is going ahead of us?” Carter’s reply was pithy: “China has not been at war since 1978; we have never stopped being at war.” Does this withdrawal spell an end to Imperial overreach?

Is there something akin to racism in the way TV images of Taleban in Kabul send shivers down our spine? How did we ever persuade ourselves that they are a ghastly lot? Who knows, they may well be but who has drilled this image so indelibly into our consciousness? Not our media, surely. Our “atmnirbhar”, or self-sufficient media take “foreign” news from Western agencies to a point of saturation. This shapes our mind and, to some extent, South Block’s too. Ofcourse our ambassador file reams of copy, but spring a surprise on them at work: they are all watching the same channels.

When Nick Robertson of the CNN froths in the mouth about the “thugs” which means Taleban in his book, the froth is sprayed all over our “atmnirbhar” channels. Christiane Amanpour grills former Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel on his support for Biden’s decision. “Are we giving up on terrorism? Is our project of democracy, human rights being abandoned?” in acute anxiety she rolls her eyeballs virtually out of their sockets.

Not just unfiltered information but even these attitudes are passed onto our TV viewers. A truly independent current affairs show is NDTV Hindi’s Prime Time, anchored by Ravish Kumar. But no sooner does this telecast end, than Ravish’s “atmnirbharta” is replaced by an Indian anchor in mini dress hosting a thoroughbred BBC episode. In other words NDTV has made available its platform to the BBC. The network where the elegant anchor gets her salary cheque from has a view of Taleban as “thugs”. She must therefore be expected to project a frightful Taleban even when her show is on Indian channel.

Painting Muslims in lurid colours has been a practice at least since the 70s when Muslim states surrounding Israel vigorously supported the Palestinian cause. Palestinian Professor at Columbia University, Edward Said’s “Covering Islam” has a jacket which is a collector’s item. It is a metaphor for the way Muslims are portrayed in the media. An Afghan militant, headgear et all, is crouching and taking aim with his Klashnikov. In the very frame is a western cameraman, resting a knee on the ground, clicking the gun-toting Afghan. This is how the image of a “militant Islamist” is manufactured.

It was prescient of Edward Said to have spotted the beginnings of manufactured Islamic militancy. This industry was to grow after the Soviet collapse and burgeon after 9/11. In terrorism the Military Industrial Complex found a durable replacement for the Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.

Oh, the excuses that are being made for the debacle: we made the mistake of training the Afghan army in “our image”, like the US military. Really! Where the hell have all the soldiers gone, however wrongly trained, armed to the teeth? What were all those “Green on Blue” attacks when trainees turned upon their trainers, killing many. Did such attacks just end by divine intervention or embarrassing episodes just go away because the obedient media switches off its cameras?

Thumb through the files of the Guardian and locate the headline “US marines charged over urinating on bodies of dead Taleban.” Trump appointed Gina Haspel as the CIA chief specifically for her record in torture and rendition. He said on TV “torture works; torture works.” Afghans even the supine ones making money hand over fist with US contractors and even more with Ghani’s corrupt minions – would they fall in love with the Americans who built torture chambers, multiple Abu Ghraibs, crashing down doors and stripping families, humiliating them.

Even as I write Ben Roberts-Smith, of Australia’s Special Air Services regiment, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for duty in Afghanistan, was, until the other day, fighting with his back to the wall in an Australian court facing charges of atrocities on Afghan civilians. An internal investigation last year found Special Forces men “unlawfully killed” 39 Afghan civilians and prisoners. At least in Australia some limited processes were set into motion, but as for the US, let me quote George Bush the senior. “United States can do what the hell it wants.” If Biden’s withdrawal puts an end to actions which do not become America, history will judge him fairly. Dealing with Taleban is a separate matter.

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From Beginning US Authored Events Leading To Humiliation In Kabul

From Beginning US Authored Events Leading To Humiliation In Kabul

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

Imperialism, which finally died in Afghanistan last week, had actually begun to hiccup in the mid 70s. Of this hiccupping, Vietnam was the most serious convulsion. In the wake of decolonization such eruptions had become commonplace, in Africa for instance, where the withdrawal of Portugal led to the direct ascent to power by communist parties in Angola and Mozambique. Then Mengistu appeared in Ethiopia; a little later Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Such an outcome had to be forestalled in Iran, South Asia region.

Ironically the Saur revolution, or the April coup of 1978 brought Afghan communists, Khalq and Parcham, to power. This epoch making event was a consequence of a botched up adventure instigated by US intelligence. The Shah of Iran’s notorious Savak took the operational lead. I was in Kabul for the first press conference by Noor Mohammad Taraki, the communist Prime Minister. My investigations on the Afghan coup appeared on the edit page of the Indian Express which had sent me to Kabul.

Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was embarked on securing a global order in which “regional influentials” would play a key role. The Shah, arch regional power in Brzezinski’s book, allowed Savak to clean up the stables in nearby Kabul where Mohammad Daud, a Marxist “numa” (look-alike) was leaning excessively on Moscow.

Diehard communists around Daud had to be eliminated. As happens in many intelligence operations, the plot hatched by Savak was leaked. Mir Akbar Khyber, a communist trade union leader, was inadvertently killed, alerting the communists across the country of the Savak plan.

In a preemptive move, military officers Aslam Watanjar and Abdul Qadir Dagarwal mobilized armoured carriers, drove into the Presidential Palace, killed Daud and his relatives. Communist took power.

Kabul under the Communists paved the way for the Soviets into the country. Once again, Brzezinski was in action. Peering into Afghanistan from the automatic “frontline state”, Pakistan, he began to think tactically towards a strategic end.

The US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan got into a huddle for their own purposes. The US would provide military training and hardware to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Saudis and the Pak establishment wanted this outcome too, but the two had key agendas of their own. Saudis would spends billions in the project to manufacture a kind of Arabized Islam to undermine the Shia Ayatullahs in Iran who had come to power just the previous year. It suited President Zia ul Haq of Pakistan. He was able to embark on his Nizam e Mustafa, or government based on Islamic laws. This would Arabize the country’s Islam and wrench it away from the “mumbo-jumbo” of secularism and composite culture being promoted in India. Had he lived, the social evolution of India would have pleased him.

Hundreds of Madrasas or seminaries came up on the Pakistan side of the border, hatcheries to breed the Mujahideen who eventually helped drive the Soviets out in 1989. True, a year later the Soviet Union fell but the departing Americans left behind unemployed Islamic militants who farmed out for work in Kashmir, Egypt, Algeria. The spiritual heirs in the diaspora of this brand of militancy were utilized most recently in the Syrian carnage.

All of this, in every detail, was lucidly exposed at a congressional hearing by Hillary Clinton. Her statement is still available on youtube. Some years ago, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Morgulov Igor Vladimirovich told a high powered Raisina Dialogue that Islamic militants from Syria were being airlifted to Northern Afghanistan. The following week, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatullah Khamenei repeated the allegation at a sermon following Friday prayers in Tehran. Is it true? Or has the narrative changed in the last few years?

In 1996, the Taleban, a progeny of the Mujahideen, fired by the kind of Islam instilled into them in the Madrasas, were once again boosted by the Americans. Others, including the section of South Block which had joined the US camp after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, acquiesced in the Taleban’s surge. The lemon sold to everybody was: Taleban will control Afghanistan and the US will control the Taleban. This co-ordination will facilitate UNOCAL’s TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline. After UNOCAL was sold to Chevron in 2005, the US found other reasons to stay on: Pakistan next door was too nuclear to be ignored; Uyghurs in Xinxiang and Muslim populations in the Caucasus looked like low hanging fruit, accessible from Afghan real estate. Priceless poppy in Helmand?

Founder of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden had made Afghanistan his headquarters since 1980 with a singular mission: to help the Taleban see the backs of the Soviets. Their occupation of a Muslim country was an insult to Islam. Once the Soviets had been driven out bin Laden set his sights on foreign soldiers and oil companies in his homeland. Bin Laden raised his banner of revolt against Riyadh, soon after Juhayman al-Otaybi and his al-Ikhwan group (an extremist cousin of Muslim Brotherhood) shook the Kingdom by occupying the mosque of Mecca for 20 days. The Saudi Royal family’s strong links with the Bush family was the backdrop for the clash of civilizations as soon as George W Bush entered the White House in January 2001. Eight months later 9/11 happened. Egged on by the neo-cons, the US occupied Afghanistan.

It is being made out that this is the first time that soldier trained by the Americans waged no battle against Taleban. What happened in Vietnam? Google C-Span and see Gen. Lloyd Austin, now Defence Secretary, being grilled by the Senate Armed Services Select Committee on a $500 million project to train Syrian militants.

“How many of our trainees are fighting?”

Huge pause. Austin: “four or five.”

Media neo cons will not give up. In a satirical piece Thomas Friedman of the New York Times expects the Taleban “the morning after the morning after” to turn up at the White House, turbans in hand. Please sir, take over our country once again.

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Does Taleban Victory In Afghanistan Mean A Pak Triumph?

Does Taleban Victory In Afghanistan Mean A Pak Triumph?

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

 

It is a flawed line of thinking that Taleban victory in Afghanistan is somehow victory for Pakistan too. To the contrary, Pakistan’s problems begin now. Pushtoon populations on both sides of the border is just one of them. The failure of the Istanbul conference on Afghanistan reflects Pakistan’s inability to persuade the top Taleban leadership to attend what was billed as a 10 day jamboree. All participants, including President Ashraf Ghani, were expected to emerge having sorted out Afghanistan from A to Z.

Nothing of this happened. Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu came down a few notches in his boss, Tayyip Erdogan’s esteem. The Foreign Minister believed that Pakistan would deliver the Taleban at the conference. It could not.

Turkey’s willingness to “look after” Kabul airport was based on Ankara’s anticipation that, atleast in the interregnum, Ghani and Taleban would agree. Taleban would have none of it. Bring in mechanics, engineers and experts at handling airports, but no military presence “on Afghan soil”.

Describing Indo-Pak dynamics on Afghanistan as a zero-sum game has antecedents.

In 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, as the force commander in Afghanistan, was unhappy that the popularity of India’s socio-economic development work distracts Pakistan from its war-on-terror focus. To this, Gen. David Petraeus added his bit: “India’s Cold Start doctrine worries Pakistan.”

It is impossible for an itinerant journalist to gauge public opinion across the board, but my interactions in Kabul, Gardez and Mazar-e-Sharif some years ago surprised me: Pakistan was seen as a trouble maker. India’s development works were appreciated. At night all of Kabul was glued to Bollywood on TV.

After US Deputy Secretary, Richard Armitage threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the stone age” a terrified President Pervez Musharraf made a U-turn. His army turned upon exactly the mujahideen that Pakistan ISI had trained to see the back of the Soviets in 1989.

This about-turn by Pakistan became part of the historic memory of Taleban. That’s the rub: the “unreliability” quotient of Pakistan was cited even by Taleban spokesman who showed disinterest in the Istanbul conference.

There is a suspicion that promoting the Turkish profile in Afghanistan may well have been a Pak ploy to ensure a friendly nodal point, namely Kabul airport in the neighbouring country. Chatter on any high profile role for Ankara in Kabul is, for the moment, inaudible.

Abdus Salaam Zaeef was the Afghan ambassador in Islamabad and a friend of the late Mullah Omar. After Pakistan joined the war on terror, Zaeef found himself in Guantanamo Bay for four years. Zaeef was bitter: “the manner in which they treated our prisoners was worse than the Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners.” These plaints belong to an era many moons ago. Surely, the situation has changed after Prime Minister Imran Khan took charge. The Taleban today are not the ones who won in 1996. The new Taleban have Shia and Uzbek commanders too but keep your fingers crossed for the women of that country.

Like it or not, the Taleban are ascending. Ashraf Ghani, by all accounts has had it. Will he clamber onto the last helicopter out of Kabul? He is being maliciously mocked in this fashion. South Block probably knows the truth but is still clutching onto the myth of Ghani on the Kabul throne. It is short sighted to rubbish the Taleban. Let us face it, they will be dominant in any eventual power sharing. A harried Ghani has fired his army chief as if the chief was responsible for the Afghan National Army spreading out red carpets for the Taleban advancing with breathtaking speed into urban centres – in addition to the 70 percent of territory in their control. Taleban spokesman, Suhail Shahleen, told the BBC that districts fell because of mediation: Afghan soldiers refused to fight.

Was this collapse of a large section of the Afghan Army unexpected? Is one to believe that Green on Blue attacks had ended just because the US media had stopped reporting such incidents? US officers training the Afghan army were frequent victims of their own trainees. Little wonder President Joe Biden was almost bitter: “I don’t regret the decision to withdraw.” He said the US had spent $3 trillion for 20 years training and equipping an Afghan army of 3,00,000. “Now it is time for the Afghans to sort it out among themselves.”

Years ago, a former Governor of Balkh, Prof. Habibullah Habib, told me a story which sounded conspiratorial then. “The British Provincial Reconstruction team was doing excellent work in the north of the country.” Why did they so willingly agree to vacate the peaceful region for the Germans to take over? What surprised Prof. Habib even more was the alternative destination selected by the British contingent. “They chose to be headquartered in the troubled province of Helmand – why?

Prof. Habib’s question may well have been answered two days ago by a former British Defence Minister, Johnny Mercer, who served in Afghanistan: “A lot of British blood was spilled in Helmand.” He asks angrily: “Was it really for nothing?” Helmand, it must not be forgotten, is the world’s largest centre for poppy production which blossomed in 20 years of the war.

His colleague, another Defence Minister, Tobias Elwood has gone one better; he wants Afghanistan re invaded. “Britain must step up and show international leadership, convene a conference of like minded states and get a plan in place to deliver effective military support. If we don’t, everything we fought for since 2001 will be lost.”

The Mercer-Elwood duo revive images of Laurel and Hardy in frayed army uniform looking after a giant warehouse packed with canned food. News of the armistice has not reached the two, surrounded by mountains of opened cans which have been their only source for food. A bi plane flies low and the pilot asks them what they were doing.

“We are incharge of the war’s biggest canteen” Hardy says.

“But the war ended years ago.”

As Bobby Talyarkhan used to end his columns, “do you get me Steve?”

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How Wars Are Created On TV Channels To Boost Ratings

How Wars Are Created On TV Channels To Boost Ratings

                                                                                       Saeed Naqvi

I have been holding my sides watching two films, back to back, to dispel the Corona blues. There is an abiding moral in both.

In Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon, the US President builds up a war with Canada because his ratings in peace time are plummeting after the Soviet threat melted away in 1990-91. Peace destroys the business of his friend Hacker an arms manufacturer.

The other movie, Wag the Dog, has spin doctor, Robert de Niro and filmmaker played by Dustin Hoffman, collaborate, to salvage the election campaign of a Bill Clinton look-alike, caught in a sex scandal two weeks before voting. The duet create a national hysteria about a war with Albania even though there is no war. It takes place entirely on TV channels. The De Niro-Hoffman team has made the media eat out of their hands. The 72 days bombing of Serbia under Clinton’s watch and the carving out of Kosovo with its large Albanian population created a certain familiarity with Albania which otherwise would be totally unknown.

In Canadian Bacon an attempt is also made by the President’s men to persuade Russian President named Vladimir Kruschkin to start a mutually beneficial Cold war. A Cold war with Russia would help boost the arms industry. Kruschkin takes the sensible decision: he refuses to initiate a Cold war.

The media is central to Canadian Bacon. When the Commander of US forces, itching for action, gets ready to invade, the National Security Advisor intervenes. Military action with a weak country would end in a day. A huge quarrel with Canada has to be dragged on for a reasonable period, giving enough time for the American people to be mobilized. The President’s ratings would then skyrocket. The channels, with an eye on their own ratings, serve the national purpose by saturating the media space with war drums and startling revelations. Canada now has a nuclear bomb directed at America, an anchor announces, emoting with suitable anger.

A charged up Sheriff of Niagra county, Bud Boomer, distributes guns to an equally frenzied beer drinking clientele in the crowded bar, all riveted on TV which is focused relentlessly on the Canadian enemy.

Boomer’s girlfriend, Honey who is also his well-armed Deputy Sherriff, will not wait for Washington to announce action. She has ideas of her own. To cut the story short, Honey, climbs the pinnacle of the Toronto tower to hunt out secret codes designed to fire missiles aimed at America. The last scenes of the film show her firing automatic weapons in all directions. She earns for herself high praise in the ending montage: she is named the “Humanitarian of the Year” by the National Rifle Association. The delicious irony, in this vein permeates the body not only of Canadian Bacon but numerous satirical films.

Will Bollywood ever have the courage to mount such satire on the establishment? I suppose it is insensitive to ask such a question when a new Bill for double distilled censorship is being scripted.

An overriding reason why such audacity cannot be on show here is because we are primarily a feudal people: irreverence is alien to our ethos. We have our parochial humour, but cannot laugh at authority. Iconography comes easy to us. We cannot satirize “Mai Baap”. Some youthful standup comedians are trying but not without incurring the wrath of the cultural constabulary.

The baby must not be thrown out with the bathwater. Indian cinema has after all set high standards in portraying social reality. This was particularly true during the early days of Indian cinema. Penury inflicted on a peasant (Balraj Sahni) deprived of his patch of land for a factory, is the theme of Bimal Roy’s classic, Do Bigha Zameen. In fact as early as the late 40s, Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar has the landlord divert sewage water towards the township below to enhance the value of his land on high ground. The film was made 60 years before Roman Polanski’s Chinatown focused on the water wars in California, including in Los Angeles.

Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa’s remark was on Satyajit Ray’s social realism. “Those who have not seen Ray, have not seen the sun.”

Even though I have a sense of the reality, I was astonished nevertheless at the way Indian theatre or cinema ignored Enron, a scandal which had its centre of gravity in Maharashtra, home to Bollywood. There was an uproar, with Shiva Sena and the BJP taking the lead. The opposition to the deal was over high electricity tariffs beyond the reach of the poor. It collapsed. Enron, facing a host of other problems, declared bankruptcy. The CEO, Kenneth Lay, friend of George W Bush, died a broken man.

Lucy Prebble wrote a superb play, Enron, which ran to packed houses at the Noel Coward theatre in London. Reception to the play at its Broadway premiere in 2010 was tepid. The Corporate World smarting under the Lehman Brothers collapse, did not accord the show much encouragement. Even though, earlier David Hare’s “Stuff Happens” actually mimicked Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice for manufacturing the Iraq war.

Much of the script for Enron was centred on characters who negotiated the deal with Dabhol power project. Surely there is a vigorous enough amateur theatre in Mumbai to have picked up the script?

However, even in the West the audacity of screen and stage is singularly missing in mainstream media. This is particularly so since post 9/11 wars for which the media, by and large, became the drum beaters, compromising its own credibility. The adage makes sense. “When wars break out, the first casualty is the truth.” This has resulted in the media’s declining credibility and, in consequence, a rise of “illiberal” democracies. When Donald Trump complained that “China is going ahead of us”, Jimmy Carter’s response was succinct. “China has not been to war since 1978; we have never stopped being at war.”

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