Interpreting | 2010.02.04
Only pressure to withdraw can stop this blood price | Seumas Milne
Today Afghanistan\'s occupiers will start to signal retreat. But they are sacrificing its people for Nato credibility
Eight years ago, Tony Blair\'s office issued a triumphant denunciation of the small minority in the media who had challenged the war on terror and the invasion of Afghanistan that launched it. Reported by the Sun as " Blair shames war weasels ", Downing Street named 10 miscreant writers, including several on the Guardian, for suggesting that the war risked a Vietnam-style occupation, would increase the threat of terrorism and ignore the interests of Afghan women. They had "proved to be wrong", the spin machine declared: kites were flying, women were throwing off their burkas and the Taliban and al-Qaida had been swept from the scene.
How preposterous such claims seem now. This week\'s events in London are already offering a grim review of the multiple crimes and disasters the war on terror has unleashed. A succession of unrepentant ministers and buck-passing civil servants have underlined the deceit and arrogance that forced through British participation in the US aggression against Iraq – in the teeth of all legal advice except that of Blair\'s own placeman, Lord Goldsmith; and yesterday\'s UN human rights report confirmed that Britain had indeed been complicit in the "enforced disappearance" and torture of its own citizens.
When the former prime minister takes the stand at the Iraq inquiry tomorrow to defend the maelstrom he helped unleash on the Middle East, that can only entrench the scepticism the public already has for anything they are now told about the war\'s still multiplying fronts. The latest, Yemen, was the subject of the first of two official London conferences yesterday, just as the full scale of US military operations in the country started to emerge.
But it is the reversal in Afghanistan, the focus of today\'s much more ambitious international event, that truly seals the verdict on New Labour\'s disastrous US-led foreign policy, backed to the hilt by the Conservatives at every turn. Eight years on, far from being swept from the scene, the Taliban controls much of the country, al-Qaida has spread across the region, the war is escalating, thousands of civilians are being killed, corruption is rampant and the position of many women, according to women\'s leaders such as the MP Malalai Joya , is actually worse under Nato-warlord rule than under the Taliban.
Having failed to subdue Afghanistan militarily or achieve any credibility for the US and Nato-installed Hamid Karzai, the London conference is supposed to endorse their plan B. That can be summed up as: talk to the Taliban and buy them off wherever possible. The one-time boasts of destroying the Taliban or capturing its leader, Mullah Omar, alive or dead, are long gone.
Instead, US defence secretary Robert Gates explained last week that the Taliban are part of Afghanistan\'s " political fabric ". Nato\'s commander, General Stanley McChrystal, went further still, floating the possibility of a power-sharing deal with the ultra-conservative Pashtun-based guerrilla force. There is much talk about the New Taliban leaders the occupiers think they can do business with, as well as the need for guarantees on women\'s rights and al-Qaida in any potential deal.
Karzai has meanwhile brought a begging bowl to London to pay for a "reconciliation and reintegration" plan to lure away Taliban fighters with pensions and jobs and the offer of a loya jirga peace conference for Taliban commanders prepared to give up the fight. After years of western hubris in Afghanistan, this represents a shift in the right direction, as well as a clear line of retreat. So does the fact that all the regional powers, who would have to guarantee any settlement to end the war, have been invited to London – even Iran is sending a low-level representative.
But of course this is not yet a policy to end the war. The aim is not to negotiate with the Taliban as one part of a wider political agreement, but to split them. And instead of winding down the occupation, Barack Obama is expanding it, sending tens of thousands more US troops to intensify attacks on the "insurgency".
The idea is to weaken the Taliban, whose leaders have rejected negotiations until foreign troops leave the country, and then deal with them from a position of strength. Certainly, the result will be more bloodshed on both sides, including among Afghan civilians. But at most such a strategy is likely only to delay the inevitable. As the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, wrote last November, in cables leaked this week : "Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable."
The most hopeful interpretation of the US surge is that it could lay the conditions for withdrawal. But so far there are few signs of a genuine exit strategy. Obama\'s pledge to start winding down troop numbers next year, a sop to a sceptical US public, has already been hedged with get-out clauses – and some, such as the British general David Richards, are still talking about a military presence for decades.
In spite of the failures, Afghanistan\'s occupiers remain afflicted by wishful thinking. The attempt to bribe Taliban defectors and establish loyal militias is modelled on Iraq\'s awakening councils, which helped to weaken the resistance. But the sectarian and regional factors which underpinned that strategy do not exist in Afghanistan and, in any case, the Iraqi model is looking less appealing, with violent attacks once again on the increase.
Some have seized on an upturn in acceptance of foreign troops in a recent opinion poll , but since it also showed 91% backing for Karzai, who managed less than 50% even in last year\'s flagrantly rigged election, that shouldn\'t be taken too literally. Angry protests against last month\'s reported US slaughter in Kunar of 10 civilians, including eight teenagers, are perhaps a safer guide to Afghan opinion.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan is meanwhile hardening across the occupying states, including the US, despite David Miliband\'s claim that the occupation commands "widespread global support". Few now buy the fiction that it is preventing, rather than fuelling, terror attacks elsewhere. The shape of the eventual negotiated withdrawal is beginning to take shape. But without still greater pressure to end the occupation, the blood price paid for US and Nato credibility can only grow for years to come.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]sure-withdraw-stop-blood-price
