The garden was overgrown,
the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar heat, the dust in our eyes, noses,
mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. "This is a secret
war," the Special Forces man told me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't
know what is happening." And of course, we are not supposed to know. In
a "war against terror", journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely
on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about
human rights.
How many human rights did
the mass killers of 11 September allow their victims? You are either with
us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the garden was
worried. He was not an American. He was one of the "coalition allies",
as the Americans like to call the patsies who have trotted after them into
the Afghan midden. "The Americans don't know what to do here now," he went
on. "Their morale in Afghanistan is going downhill – though there's no
problem with the generals running things in Tampa. They're still gung-ho.
But here the soldiers know things haven't gone right, that things aren't
working. Even their interrogations went wrong". Brutally so, it seems.
In the early weeks of this
year, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed 10 policemen belonging
to the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating
the survivors. American reporters – in a rare show of mouse-like courage
amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting – quoted the prisoners
as saying they had been beaten by US troops. According to Western officials
in Kandahar, the US troops "gave the prisoners a thrashing".
Things have since changed.
The American forces in Afghanistan, it seems, now leave the beatings to
their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special
Forces, a Washington-supported group of thugs who are based in the former
Khad secret police torture centre in Kabul. "It's the Afghan Special Forces
who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now – not the Americans,"
the Western military man told me. "But the CIA are there during the beatings,
so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen."
This is just how the Americans
began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky clean with advisers, there were
some incidents of "termination with extreme prejudice", after which it
was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture. The same with
the Russians. When their soldiers poured across the border in 1979, they
quickly left it to their Afghan allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police
to carry out the "serious" interrogations. And if this is what the Americans
are now up to in Afghanistan, what is happening to their prisoners at Guantanamo?
Or, for that matter, at Bagram, the airbase north of Kabul to which all
prisoners in Kandahar are now sent for investigation if local interrogators
believe their captives have more to say.
Of course, it's possible
to take a step back from this dark and sinister corner of America's Afghan
adventure. In the aftermath of the Taliban's defeat humanitarian workers
have achieved some little miracles. Unicef reports 486 female teachers
at work in the five south-western provinces of the country with 16,674
girls now at school. Only in Uruzgan, where the Taliban were strongest,
has not a single female teacher been employed. UN officials can boast that
in these same, poverty-belt provinces, polio has now been almost eradicated.
The UN was fighting polio
before the Taliban collapsed, and the drugs whose production the Taliban
banned are now back on the market. The poppy fields are growing in Helmand
province again, and in Uruzgan local warlords are trying to avoid government
control in order to cultivate their own new poppy production centres. In
Kabul, where two government ministers have been murdered in seven months,
President Karzai is now protected – at his own request – by American bodyguards.
And you don't have to be a political analyst to know what kind of message
this sends to Afghans.
Kabul is alive with the
kind of rumours that can never be substantiated but that stick in the mind,
just as the dust of Kandahar stays in the throat and on the lips of all
who go there. "The British forces were right to leave," a British humanitarian
worker announced over dinner in Kabul one night. "They realised that the
Americans had no real interest in returning this country to law and order.
They knew that the Americans were going to fail. So they got out as soon
as they could. The Americans say they want peace and stability. So why
don't they let Isaf (the international force in Kabul) move into the other
big cities of Afghanistan? Why do they let their friendly warlords persecute
the rest of the country?"
Far more disturbing are
persistent reports from northern Afghanistan of the massacre of thousands
of Pashtuns after the slaughter at General Dostum's Qal-i-Jangi fort last
November These mass murders, according to a humanitarian worker I have
known for two decades – he played a brave role in preventing killings in
Lebanon in 1982 – went on into December with the full knowledge of the
Americans. But the US did nothing about it, any more than they did about
the 600 Pakistani prisoners at Shirbagan, some of whom are still dying
of starvation and ill-treatment at the hands of their Northern Alliance
captors.
"There are mass graves
all across the north, and the Americans, who know about this, have said
nothing," my old friend said. "The British intelligence people knew this,
too. And the British have said nothing."
There are those in Kabul
who suspect that the Americans are now in Afghanistan for secondary reasons:
to operate in and out of Pakistan, rather than in Afghanistan itself. "They've
had plenty of muck-ups in Afghanistan and they could not base thousands
of their soldiers in Pakistan," a Western officer in Kabul said. "They're
safer here, and now they can go in and out of Pakistan and keep the pressure
on Musharraf from here – and on the Iranians too."
Last week, The Independent
revealed that FBI officers have been seizing Arabs from their homes in
Pakistan and bringing them across the border to Afghanistan for interrogation
at Bagram.
It was the Special Forces
man in the south who saw things a little more globally. "Perhaps the Americans
can start withdrawing if there's another war – if they go to war in Iraq.
But the US can't handle two wars at the same time. They would be overstretched."
So to end America's "war against terror" in Afghanistan – a war that has
left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control
of the Afghan government, many al-Qa'ida men on the loose and absolutely
no peace in the country – we have to have another war in Iraq.
As if the Israeli-Palestine
conflict is not enough. But when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State,
can identify only a "so-called" Israeli-occupied territory on the West
Bank – the occupation troops there presumably being mistaken by the Pentagon
as Swiss or Burmese soldiers – there's not much point in taking a reality
check in Washington.
The truth is that Afghanistan
is on the brink of another disaster. Pakistan is now slipping into the
very anarchy of which its opposition warned. And the Palestinian-Israeli
war is now out of control. So we really need a war in Iraq, don't we?
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