by Mark Curtis
Afghanistan’s civilian infrastructure was targeted – now standard practice in the Anglo-American wars at the turn of the millennium, such as the 1991 war against Iraq, and the conflict in Kosovo. On 15 October US bombs destroyed Kabul’s main telephone exchange, killing twelve people. In late October, US warplanes bombed the electrical grid in Kandahar. On 31 October, seven airstrikes were launched against Afghanistan’s largest hydro-electric power station. On 18 November US planes bombed religious schools. There were several attacks on areas with no apparent military significance. On 25 October, for example, a bomb hit a fully loaded city bus in Kandahar killing between ten and twenty passengers. On 18/19 November US planes bombed the mountain village of Gluco – located on the Khyber Pass and far away from any military facility – killing seven villagers.10
US bombing destroyed the office of the Al Jazeera TV station in Kabul and another bomb hit a house used by the BBC a block away. I could find no evidence that the British government protested against this apparent attack on the BBC. In the first three days of the campaign US bombs knocked off the air and entirely destroyed the office of Radio Kabul. Farhad Azad of Afghanmagazine.com said that the Taliban had made music illegal but it was US bombs that destroyed the hidden music archive. There is little doubt that all these attacks were deliberate, recalling the attack on the Serbian Radio and Television building in Belgrade during the war against Yugoslavia (see chapter 6). Attacks on what were clearly civilian targets are therefore war crimes.11
Human Rights Watch appealed to the US and others to halt the use of cluster bombs immediately after the war began. It noted that in Yugoslavia there were more than 20,000 unexploded bomblets and that cluster bombs during the Kosovo war had killed between 90 and 150 civilians. Following the 1991 Gulf war there were an estimated 1.2 million unexploded bomblets, which have since killed more than 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians, injuring another 2,500.12
In spite of this, US B52s operating from the base of the depopulated British territory of Diego Garcia (see chapter 22) proceeded to drop hundreds of cluster bombs in Afghanistan. According to the UN in March 2002, Afghanistan had become littered with 14,000 unexploded bomblets. At least forty-one people have been killed and forty-six injured in Herat and nearby villages in western Afghanistan by cluster bombs that ‘nestled in the soil and bided their time’ long after the bombing ended there. A UN official in Afghanistan now estimates that live bombs and mines maim on average between 40 and 100 people a week.13
In October the US started supporting the Northern Alliance opposition groups in earnest, supplying them with food, ammunition and air support. These warlords had been so brutal in their rule over Afghanistan in 1992–95 – executing prisoners and committing rape and all variety of other atrocities – that much of the population welcomed the Taliban when it took over in 1996. Following the defeat of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance descended on villages occupied by Pashtuns, who had provided support to the Taliban, and proceeded to conduct a wave of looting, rape and ethnic killings. UNHCR estimated that 50,000 Pashtuns fled into Pakistan from January to April 2002 in fear of their lives.
By mid-2002, reports from Human Rights Watch were dispelling the notion that the Anglo-American onslaught had delivered peace and liberty to Afghans. It noted that ‘ordinary Afghans are increasingly terrorised by the rule of local and regional military commanders – warlords – who are reasserting their control over large areas of Afghanistan’. ‘US cooperation with certain of the warlords seems to be aggravating the problem.’ As for the situation of women, ‘Afghan women of all ethnicities have been compelled to restrict their participation in public life to avoid being targets of violence by armed factions.’ Especially outside Kabul, Afghan women ‘continue to face serious threats to their physical safety, denying them the opportunity to exercise their basic human rights and to participate fully and effectively in the rebuilding of their country’.14
The media in support
These brutalities, and even more the plight of civilians fleeing the bombing, received the barest of media coverage. Television news endlessly covered the suffering of New Yorkers who lost friends and relatives; but there was almost complete silence on the similar suffering of Afghans. The media played a critical role in the designation of Afghans as Unpeople.
On 3 January 2002 the Guardian contained a report on Maslakh camp, housing 350,000 internally displaced people. The organisation Medialens notes that the Guardian had by then reported on Maslakh only twice since September 11th. By contrast, during the Kosovo war, the plight of 65,000 Kosovar refugees on the Kosovo–Macedonian border was mentioned forty-eight times. This was an average of once every two days, compared to once every two months in the case of the Maslakh refugees – a crude measure, perhaps, but an indicator of how the media takes its cue from state policy: in Kosovo, the plight of refugees was worthy of attention since Britain was supposedly defending such people; in Afghanistan, refugees were an embarrassment and a hindrance to government policy, therefore unworthy of attention.15
According to Medialens, US media coverage of the first American combat casualty was greater than the coverage given to all Afghan civilian deaths. The BBC reported the deaths of seven US servicemen by saying there would be victory in Afghanistan ‘but it will be at a price’. This was in March 2002, well after estimates of thousands of civilian deaths – but these deaths, being of mere Afghans, are not worthy of being called a ‘price’.16
Guardian editors supported the war throughout, helping to frame it largely along good versus evil lines. They delivered editorials that, as in the case of Kosovo, questioned some US and British tactics but not the overall strategy or the just nature of the bombing. At the end of October, Guardian editors reported on a speech by Tony Blair in Cardiff:
The core of the speech – intellectual as well as moral – came when he contrasted the West’s commitment to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties and the terrorists’ proven wish to cause as many civilian casualties as possible, a point which Jack Straw followed up powerfully in the Commons yesterday. Let them do their worst, we shall do our best, as Churchill put it. That is still a key difference.17
Tony Blair visited India and Pakistan at the turn of the year as tensions between the two countries rose, partly over terrorism in Kashmir. Few in the media ridiculed – but many praised – the sight of Blair telling both countries not to resort to force while his air force was helping to pummel Afghanistan. If Blair had been consistent with his own policy, perhaps he would have advised both India and Pakistan to flatten the other to defend themselves against terrorism.
Rather, the country’s leading liberal newspaper regularly chose to shower unadulterated praise on the wondrous virtues of Our Leader, once saying for example:
From the word go, Mr Blair understood what some others took time to realise, and a few still fail to grasp, that the assaults on New York and Washington were a qualitative long term challenge both to the United States and to the rest of the advanced capitalist western world … By his speeches, by his international diplomacy and, do not forget this point, by his responsiveness to criticism and doubt in many quarters that he might easily have overlooked, Mr Blair has been in some ways exemplary … He deserves especial respect for attempting to engage with the issues of Palestine and of Islam in a serious way.18
By contrast, the Guardian’s comment pages carried many articles critical of the war and US strategy, thanks to Seumas Milne, the Comment pages editor. This was quite unusual in a major newspaper in a time of war. But in the news pages the plight of Afghan civilians was mostly ignored and relevant background was usually not presented. And this was the best of the reporting in the mainstream media.
Neither did the media – following political leaders – dwell on the illegality of the war. The government was advised that military action would be illegal if taken in retaliation. Only if it could claim self-defence would it be legal. This was clearly not the case: Blair stated clearly that �
�no specific credible threat’ of terrorist action in Britain had been detected.
Guardian editors stated the day following the launch of the war that ‘it needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response’. Columnist Martin Woollacott later added: ‘We have to accept that a military response of some kind is necessary for America.’19 Neither the editors nor Woollacott stated whether Sudanese leaders, for example, might deem it ‘necessary’ to strike back at the US for the latter’s 1998 attacks on Khartoum – to cite just one example of how those on the receiving end of Western policies are accorded a completely different set of rights than the defenders of civilisation.
UN security council resolution 1368 called on states ‘to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organisers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks’. As usual, the US and Britain interpreted this as allowing them to do what they liked; the media followed.20
The option of pursuing a legal route to bringing those responsible for September 11th to justice was never seriously considered by US leaders or the media. The latter often ridiculed the idea as hopelessly naïve but mainly ignored it, preferring to accord the US the right to bomb Afghanistan into dust. Yet, as Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University has argued, it is possible that with the universal horror expressed over the terrorist attacks in the US, global support could have been sustained for a rigorous political and legal process of undermining support for Al Qaida around the world. He argues that ‘intelligence and security cooperation would have been unparalleled. An appropriate international court could have been established under UN supervision. The existing UN conventions on terrorism would have been hugely strengthened.’ Rogers also argues that what makes this route even more attractive ‘is the nagging suspicion that the perpetrators of the 11 September atrocities expected a strong US military reaction and counted on it as increasing long-term support for their cause’.21
In November Guardian editors, while supporting US violence in Afghanistan, admonished those in the Israel–Palestine conflict ‘who, despairing of peaceful solutions to problems, resort directly or indirectly to violence’. Also, an editorial in January stated that some members of Hamid Karzai’s coalition government ‘have demanded a halt to US operations’.22 It was surely important that ministers in the new government – whose creation supposedly vindicated US strategy – were calling for a halt to military operations. But I saw no other mentions of this call in reporting, as the US and Britain continued the war.
The views of Afghan people were almost never heard in the British media. In a rare exception in the US media, the New York Times reported on a gathering of 1,000 Afghan leaders in Peshawar at the end of October that was ‘a rare display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians and former guerilla commanders’. They unanimously ‘urged the US to stop the air raids’ and appealed to the international media to call for an end to the ‘bombing of innocent people’. They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the Taliban regime. Since these were the wrong messages, it was perhaps not surprising that Afghan voices were little heard.
An organisation that has courageously defended women’s rights in Afghanistan for twenty-five years, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), issued a statement on 11 October saying that America ‘has launched a vast aggression on our country’. It noted the US claim that only military and terrorist bases of the Taliban and Al Qaida would be struck and that actions would be targeted and proportionate but that in reality ‘this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of our country’. Later, RAWA noted that:
The US has taken the ‘Northern Alliance’ into service through wooing and arming certain infamous warlords. By so doing, the US is in fact abetting the worst enemies of our people and is continuing the same tyrannical policy against the people and the destiny of Afghanistan which successive US administrations adopted during the past two decades.23
A similar criticism of the bombing was conveyed by Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq, who was highly regarded in both Washington and London and had in the 1980s visited Margaret Thatcher, then sponsoring mojahidin warlords. Just before he was killed in Afghanistan, Haq condemned the bombing and criticised the US for refusing to support his and others’ efforts to create a revolt within the Taliban. The bombing was ‘a big setback to these efforts’, he said. The US ‘is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.’ The Guardian ran one article by Haq, and that was pretty much it as far as the voices of Afghans were concerned. This approach was similar to that taken by the rest of the media.
Overall, the British political class acquiesced in the further destruction of a country and thousands of civilian deaths for the right of Our Ally, supported by its ‘junior partner’, to take whatever action it liked. It was an extraordinary performance. Let us turn to two other critical aspects of this ideological role.
Help in creating the monster
An important function of the media, especially in a war, is to present relevant background information – in this case, this would have included past US and British policy towards Afghanistan. But there was little attempt to provide such information, with only a few mentions before and during the onslaught of the covert British role in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This role makes Britain partly responsible for creating the monster that attacked on September 11th. The lack of media attention was despite sufficient evidence already in the public domain on that covert role.
More than 50,000 fighters from all over the Arab world had been trained to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan following Moscow’s December 1979 invasion. The US and Saudi Arabia financed this huge operation, providing around $6 billion in aid to bolster or create the mojahidin groups fighting for the Islamic cause. Most training of the mojahidin took place in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan and most US arms shipments to the mojahidin groups were organised by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI. But the US also trained Pakistani and senior mojahidin commanders in the US itself. The training was in areas such as the use of explosives, automatic weapons, and remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs, demolition, and arson. Some programmes also included training in how to stab a sentry from behind, murder and assassination of enemy leaders, strangulation and murderous karate chops.24
The veterans of this struggle against the Soviets – known as ‘Afghanis’, though most are not Afghan – now make up many of the targets of the ‘war against terrorism’. ‘Afghanis’ have been involved in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, the murder of sixty tourists in Egypt in 1997, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 as well as the attacks of September 11th. Russian officials claim that between 4,000 and 5,000 militants from Tajikistan passed through the camps in Afghanistan before returning to fight the Tajik government. China, Egypt, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Algeria are some of the other countries where ‘Afghanis’ have resurfaced.25
Bin Laden’s Al Qaida organisation grew up by drawing on the ‘Afghani’ network. By the mid 1980s, Bin Laden was paying with his own money to recruit and train the Arab volunteers who flocked to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. In 1983 the Bin Laden family construction company had won a £3 billion contract to restore the holy places of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. John Cooley, an expert on Afghanistan, notes that ‘delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Bin Laden free rein in Afghanistan’ to organise Islamic fighters. According to Cooley, in 1986, the CIA even helped Bin Laden build an underground camp in Khost, where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world. The US only seems to have turned against ‘its former partner Bin Laden’, in Cooley’s words, in 1995 and 1996, after the US suspected Al Qaida involvement in bomb atta
cks on US personnel in Saudi Arabia.26
Cooley also notes that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US had by 1994 ‘hatched a monster of Islamic extremism, the Taliban movement’. The first Taliban was made up of mainly students of religious seminaries armed by Pakistan and some of the Afghan guerilla groups. One American observer told Cooley that:
The Taliban began, essentially, as a kind of experimental Frankenstein’s monster. They were created in the laboratories, so to speak, of Pakistani intelligence, the ISI – in order to produce a counter-force to Iran and Iranian Islamism which would be even more repugnant and unacceptable to the West and Russia than the Ayatollah Khomeini successors in Tehran.27
The Taliban’s path to power was also partly aided by US policy. In 1988, the USSR finally agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan, but on condition that the West and Pakistan stop arming the mojahidin. But the Reagan administration broke the agreement signed in Geneva and continued the arms flow. According to Fred Halliday, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics, ‘this illegal decision … was the root of the subsequent chaos and fighting, which led to the triumph of the Islamist guerillas in 1992’.28
Afghan forces liberated Kabul in April 1992 but in May a reign of terror was initiated principally by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who took over as prime minister. Hekmatyar cut off Kabul and subjected it to mass bombardment, driving half a million people from the city. By summer 1993, there were estimates of 30,000 killed and 100,000 wounded in Kabul. Hekmatyar was Washington’s and Saudi Arabia’s favourite and carried out these atrocities with US- and Saudi-financed weaponry.29 The atrocities committed by the Islamic guerillas who terrorised Afghanistan from 1992 to 1995 partly explain why many regarded the Taliban as liberators when they took control of Kabul in 1996.