Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  This echoes Ankara’s special relationship with Washington. Most of the arms used by Turkey in its campaign against the Kurds were supplied by the US. Former Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit recently offered strong support for the US ‘war against terrorism’ because, he said, Turkey owes the US a ‘debt of gratitude’ since Washington ‘had backed Ankara in its struggle against terrorism’.

  New Labour also helped Ankara out by closing down the Kurdish TV station, MED-TV, in April 1999. In the same month, BAE struck a deal through its subsidiary Heckler & Koch to provide facilities for the production of half a million assault rifles for the Turkish army. Kamal Mirawdeli, a Kurdish poet, wrote to Tony Blair saying that ‘thus, on the one hand, we were deprived of access to our language, culture and free speech through our own satellite channel; on the other you rewarded us for this by facilitating better killings of our children.’85

  Britain under New Labour has been especially active in supporting Turkey’s bid to join the EU. Robin Cook told the Foreign Affairs Committee that ‘the question of rejection does not arise’ – being inconceivable that Britain would invoke mere human rights atrocities to block Turkish entry.86 While it may be true that joining the EU will force Turkey to improve its human rights performance, London’s policy towards Ankara hardly betrays much concern for human rights, but rather with bringing a strategic ally firmly into the Western orbit. Past atrocities will, it can be safely assumed, remain forgotten. This contrasts to Iraq’s atrocities, of which Blair reminds the British public every other day. Most media comment also ignores such atrocities: the debate on Turkish accession to the EU is confined largely to absurdities as to whether Turkey is ‘too Muslim’, or not, to be part of ‘Europe’.

  There is even more evidence of the Blair government’s indifference to human rights. While Britain and the US have been patrolling the northern ‘no fly zone’ in Iraq supposedly to protect the Kurds, Turkey has been more or less permanently invading northern Iraq in brutal pursuit of Kurds. The ‘no fly zone’ allows Turkish warplanes to operate in Iraq virtually at will. Ankara launched invasions with 20,000 troops in 1992, 35,000 troops in 1995, 50,000 troops in 1997, 10,000 troops in 1998, and 10,000 troops in 2000. Turkish forces have sometimes stayed for months while destroying villages and committing widespread human rights abuses. No other country has conducted so many invasions in recent times, all with the tacit consent of Washington and London. When the US and Britain launched their full onslaught against Iraq in March 2003, Turkey already had thousands of troops in the north of the country and was poised to conduct a deeper invasion.

  Britain and the US have been more directly complicit in Turkish actions. An article in the US Air Force Times in December 1994 noted that:

  When Turkish bombing missions … are being flown, the Turks ground coalition aircraft … Turkish military officials are privy to virtually all intelligence gathered not only from Americans but from Britain and France … The Turks continue to have access to information from AWACS aircraft … The Turks also review American and British reconnaissance aircraft data compiled during Provide Comfort flights’.87

  RAF pilots protested in 2001 about being ordered to return to their base in Turkey to allow the Turkish air force to bomb Kurds. The Washington Post reported that ‘on more than one occasion [US pilots] have received a radio message that “there is a TSM inbound” – that is a Turkish Special Mission heading to Iraq.’ The US pilots are then required to return to base. When the pilots flew back into Iraqi air space they would see ‘burning villages, lots of smoke and fire’. When Turkey invaded in December 2000, for example, most patrols in the NFZ were suspended to allow Turkey to continue bombing.88

  The House of Commons Defence Committee asked Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon: if Britain was ‘supposed to be defending those Kurds in the no fly zone, what has been your reaction in relation to Turkey when those events take place?’ Hoon replied: ‘It is not something that I need to react to in my present position.’ He added that ‘it is not something that the government is specifically aware of as far as incursions by the Turkish government is concerned.’89

  The argument that the British government is motivated by human rights concerns in Iraq is simply laughable. Humanitarian concerns are always invoked to justify terrible policies and Britain’s real role in the world has other motivations – as we see in the next chapter, by looking at the first phase in the supposed ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan.

  Finally, in terms of the international community’s approach to Iraq, the issue is not whether the Iraqi regime is evil – clearly it is – nor whether Iraq’s people would be better off without it – clearly they would. To me, there are two important sets of questions: first, how regimes that abuse human rights, like Saddam’s (and Turkey’s) arise, and how in some cases they are enabled to develop weapons of mass destruction; second, how the international community should deal with such regimes. These are big questions and brief answers cannot be sufficient. But on the first, it is clear that Britain and the US are partly (though of course not solely) responsible, as they are for helping to create many of the world’s monsters, due to their basic foreign policy priorities and their conception of ‘international order’, described elsewhere in this book.

  In answer to the second question, my view is that there is surely hope for the world if all countries are treated equally according to due processes of international law and if genuine global cooperation is seen as paramount. Following these concerns would have been a better route to dealing with the Saddam regime, together with taking all steps to encourage the Iraqi people themselves to overthrow the regime, a strategy that would have been aided by the lifting of sanctions. British and US policy generally rejects action genuinely based on multilateral, legal and ethical standards to cover all nations equally, including themselves and their allies, like Turkey (and many others described in this book). Although this is a far from easy outcome to aim for, it has real prospects, not least given the stupendous power now available to those who control world order. The latter’s pursuit of unilateral options puts them in the same camp, ultimately, as the Iraqi regime, and is making the world far more dangerous for ordinary people.

  2

  AFGHANISTAN: THE NEW UNPEOPLE

  Maroff, aged thirty-eight, lived at his farm located about one kilometre from the village and told Human Rights Watch that he had witnessed the attacks, first on the Taliban military base, and then on the nearby village, from his home. When he rushed to the village the next day, he found the family compound of his relatives in ruins, and villagers digging through the rubble. Twelve bodies of his relatives were recovered from the debris of the family compound. The dead included the two sons and two daughters of his twenty-five-year-old sister Rhidi Gul: Aminullah, aged eight; Raminullah, aged three; Noorjan, aged five; and Gulpia, aged four. Rhidi Gul was recovering from serious wounds, together with her surviving one-year-old son Hamidullah, also seriously wounded in the attack. Kamno, a ten-year-old sister-in-law of Rhidi Gul, also survived the attack and was recovering from serious shrapnel wounds to the face in Quetta hospital.1

  THIS IS AN account of the effects of a US bombing attack in Afghanistan in October 2001 in the first phase of what US and British leaders call the ‘war against terrorism’. It is one of what appears to be many deliberate US attacks on civilians, in this case killing twenty-three villagers.

  The image of Maroff desperately searching for lost relatives echoes the plight of New Yorkers doing likewise in the rubble of the destroyed World Trade Center. The twenty-first century opened with not one but two hideous crimes. One of them – the horrific attacks of 11 September 2001 – has been rightly condemned as an act of criminal barbarity, indefensible at every level. The other crime was the US and British response in Afghanistan.

  In this chapter, I outline some of the main features of what was a very brutal onslaught, and some of the ways in which the media falsely framed it. I also address the forgotten issue of how B
ritain helped create the monster that struck on September 11th. Finally, I try to offer some plausible explanations of British and US strategy, beyond absurd claims of defending civilisation in the face of barbarity.

  The main features of the war

  To recount, briefly: following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the US and its close allies took military action in Afghanistan against the Al Qaida network, and the Taliban government protecting it. After a fierce bombing campaign the Taliban regime was overthrown and the Al Qaida network dispersed from Afghanistan, although Bin Laden himself escaped. Opposition groups in the so-called Northern Alliance – tribal warlords who had effectively been the US’ ground troops during the campaign – undertook brutal revenge attacks against Taliban forces and villages occupied by ethnic Pashtuns, killing hundreds and forcing thousands to flee. US and British troops were deployed on the ground to hunt down the remnants of Al Qaida and Taliban forces while an international peacekeeping force was introduced to provide stability in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A new Afghan government, more representative of the population, was established with pledges of foreign aid to support it.

  The Official Story is that the war in Afghanistan was in defence of civilisation against barbarity. President Bush said it was a fight ‘for all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom’. Tony Blair said: ‘We will do it all because we believe in our values of justice, tolerance and respect for all regardless of race, religion or creed’.2

  Almost everywhere in the mainstream media and political culture, the war was regarded as both just and having a favourable outcome: just, because the evil of September 11th, killing 3,000 people, was good cause to launch the attack on Afghanistan; a favourable outcome, since the Taliban regime was toppled, Al Qaida bases in Afghanistan destroyed, and a more representative government in Kabul created. The first phase of the ‘war against terrorism’ has been the subject of much rejoicing and widespread praise given to Bush and Blair for defending high values.

  There is just one fact sufficient to dispel this cosy scenario – we killed more people than they did.

  Almost all estimates put the number of civilians killed as a result of the bombing as greater than those killed in the attacks in the US. The real figure may even be several times greater. A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an ‘indirect’ result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3

  The attacks in the US were horrific because of the scale of deaths of innocent, defenceless people. By the most basic values, the same applies to the people of Afghanistan. Yet their deaths have received the barest of concern from political leaders and the mainstream media, who have essentially deemed Afghan lives expendable to avenge the attack on the US.

  Afghans are Unpeople, whose deaths go unnoticed – they join the East Timorese (see chapter 21), the Chagossians (chapter 22) and the children of Iraq (chapter 1) as people whose lives are valueless when they get in the way of Western policy.

  The standard argument is that civilian deaths in Afghanistan were the regrettable consequence of military action that was needed to destroy Al Qaida bases and thus prevent further terrorist attacks. But this is a spurious argument since it is obvious that Al Qaida is a decentralised network. The counter-argument – that bombing Afghanistan has made it more likely that terrorists will attack – is equally plausible. Most of the September 11th hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the ‘war against terrorism’. It is obvious that at stake here are US geopolitical interests (discussed further below), more than concerns to prevent future terrorism.

  The sheer number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan makes it impossible to vindicate US/British strategy, by the most basic moral standards. The reason why most commentators are happy with the war is that ‘we won’, which reveals how easily they abandon a professed morality in their servility to state power. Certainly the demise of the vile Taliban is welcome and the more representative government in Kabul is a major change. But against this must be set not only the devastation wrought by the US bombing – surely its dominating fact – but also the empowerment of the former warlords whose respect for human rights reaches the same lofty heights as that of the Taliban.

  The Official Story has largely managed to suppress the main features of the war: mass bombing with terrifying weapons; many apparently deliberate attacks on civilians; and the use of cluster bombs leaving a legacy of thousands of unexploded shells.

  The bombing campaign began on 7 October 2001. The US president received much praise in the media for not immediately lashing out after September 11th and waiting a whole month before beginning the obliteration of the world’s poorest country. (The all-party House of Commons Defence Committee praised ‘the measured response taken by the United States’.) More than 22,000 weapons were dropped on the country in the first six months. One in four of these missed their target.4

  The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an ‘international coalition’ in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain’s military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was called upon by Washington to replace US troops in ‘mopping up’ remaining Al Qaida and Taliban fighters after the fall of the major towns. This role showed that Britain was by now acting as a proxy US force, and was undertaken since ‘the British public has a higher tolerance for casualties than the Americans’, in the words of one British soldier.5

  Despite public reassurances by the ‘junior partner’, ever more indiscriminate bombing took place as the campaign went on. The US war strategy gradually escalated from using medium-sized missiles to cruise missiles to bunker-busting 2,000 lb bombs, then to B52 carpet-bombing and finally to the devastating ‘daisy cutter’ bombs that destroy everything in a 600-yard radius. The city of Kandahar was reduced to rubble by US bombing.

  The bombing exacerbated the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, just as it did in Kosovo (see chapter 6). According to Human Rights Watch, the airstrikes ‘contributed to the humanitarian crisis, with thousands of Afghans fleeing their homes. Their flight swelled the ranks of hundreds of thousands who were already internally displaced because of drought, war, and conflict-related violence.’ A quarter of a million people fled to Iran and Pakistan after September 11th while a further 200,000 fled their homes but remained inside Afghanistan. All these people were left wandering in cold and hunger usually with no outside support, since the humanitarian effort had been blocked by the bombing too.6

  There were many apparently deliberate attacks on civilians, which are war crimes. One example has been cited at the beginning of this chapter. A US attack on the village of Chowkar-Karez in October killed between twenty-five and thirty-five civilians. There were no military targets in the vicinity, which was a remote rural area of Afghanistan. According to Human Rights Watch, after the bombing started:

  Many of the people in the village then ran out of their homes, afraid that the bombs would fall on the homes. All witnesses stated that the aircraft then returned to the area and began firing from guns. Many of the civilians were killed from the firing. The bombing and firing lasted for about one hour.7

  In November, at least 250 Pakistani fighters were killed in a school after trying to surrender. US warplanes hit the compou
nd twice, after the fighters had agreed to give themselves up, devastating the main building. The Guardian wrote that the Pentagon’s decision to bomb the school was supported by the Uzbek warlord, Abdul Dostam, ‘but opposed by other local generals, who argued it would be more humane to allow the fighters to surrender’.8 It appears that US strategy was too cruel even for ‘local generals’ in Afghanistan, not the most human-rights minded of soldiers.

  A Red Cross compound and warehouses storing humanitarian supplies, food, blankets and oil in Kabul was hit twice by 27 October. The Red Cross called the attack a ‘violation of international humanitarian law’. It pointed out that staff on the ground had seen ‘a slow and low-flying plane drop two bombs on the compound, the roofs of which were painted with three-by-three meter red crosses on a white background’. In the second attack, food and non-food items intended for 55,000 people in Kabul were destroyed.9

  The biggest single massacre was at Qali-I-Jhangi fort in Mazar-I-Sharif, when hundreds of rioting prisoners were killed. SAS and US special forces took part in the operation and directed massive aerial bombardments. Full details of the massacre have not emerged, while the US and Britain continue to resist calls for a UN inquiry.