Afghanistan and the imperial graveyard

The WikiLeaks documents on Afghanistan have revealed not only a brutal and messy war, but also its uncanny similarities to earlier imperial conflicts, says Jeremy Seabrook.

DID the WikiLeaks documents from US military logs on the war in Afghanistan really jeopardise the lives of service personnel and of Afghan 'informants', or was this the response of those whose vainglory has led the West into yet another excursion of epic self-defeating belligerence?

The threat to life was the second line of defence by Authority, its first reaction having been that 'nothing new' had been revealed by the leaked documents. The third response was that these are 'historical' disclosures, since they cover the period only up to 2009, and are, therefore, of interest only to archivists. The new phase coincides with the shift from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency; an argument which suggests we have once more 'drawn a line and moved on' in the country of perpetual war.

What the leaks did reveal is the mendacious smoothness of official reports that 'we are winning' in Afghanistan, or 'making progress' or 'doing the job' - a range of workmanlike but imprecise statements to placate a public which increasingly interrogates why 'we' are there. The ghastly notion that 'hearts and minds' of the people of Afghanistan could be won by the destruction of bodies is a grotesque fantasy.

The most fateful revelation of these war-logs is certainly not new; for that is the old story: the invincible certainties which lodge in the imperial mindset, an antique conviction that military power can bend the world to its will, and that it is bound to work anyway, because it is the desire of everyone in the world 'to become like us'. To facilitate this necessary process, US troops are presently posted in more than 750 sites worldwide.

The recent operation 'Black Prince', as it is poetically called, followed hard on the WikiLeaks disclosures, as though to demonstrate to sceptics the high purpose of the endeavour. Yet even reports from embedded journalists could not disguise the breathless and exaggerated heroics of an operation inflated to reinforce an impression of tenacity. British troops had 'seized certain strategic positions'; they had 'chased out' the Taliban in the area around Saidabad in Helmand; no, there had not been any actual 'connective activity', only small-arms fire. Images on TV showed the 'capture' of the Taliban 'stronghold' - ditches, single-storey earthen houses and fields of crops. A frightened family was shown, forced from their house, while British soldiers searched the property, took photographs and fingerprints, in order to 'distinguish friend from foe'. 'Senior tribal elders' were then seen sitting in a circle explaining why they had not revealed to British soldiers the presence of Taliban. Reporters referred to 'these people' and 'the locals', terms of such disrespect that it was possible to view on real-time TV the alienation of those who need to be won over to the mysteries of a 'development' which has rendered the invaders so insensitive to those they want to take under their tutelage. 

These clumsy manoeuvres will only ensure that yet more coffins return to Britain for stricken crowds to throw flowers as soldiers are borne to their last resting-place. That these poor men died 'doing what he loved best', 'doing his duty' or 'for his country' is as small a consolation to the bereaved as the expressions of ritual sorrow at 'mistaken' NATO slaughter of civilians, such as the death on 26 July of 45 Afghans sheltering in a mud house in Regey village in southern Helmand. The authorities declared there was 'no evidence' that NATO forces were to blame, thereby repeating the bland official denials which were, at that very moment, being uncovered by WikiLeaks.

The US military were right to veil these documents in secrecy, not only because they reveal a chaotic and messy war, but because of the unmistakeable similarities they reveal with earlier conflicts. This is a war against a nebulous, scarcely identifiable enemy, which is of course the necessary consequence of declaration of hostilities against any abstraction, whether 'terror', 'subversion' or even 'poverty'. It is like fighting phantoms, a kind of sanguinary ghost-busting, for it is also a replay of Vietnam, in the sense that no one can separate 'insurgents' from 'locals', any more than Viet Cong could be distinguished from Vietnamese peasants.

There are other echoes. Vietnam veterans speak of the frustration caused by a 'frontierless war'. The enemy was 'invisible'. The Taliban, too, are invisible, even more so, since the population of Afghanistan is less than half that of Vietnam and spread over a far wider area. The enemy is once more the bearer of an ideology that threatens 'our way of life'. The most conspicuous difference is the landscape - the watery jungles of Vietnam could not be further from the stony undulations of Afghanistan. Perhaps it is the altered decor which persuades those conducting the war that they have avoided earlier errors. An even greater irony lies in the US threat that its arming of the mujahideen against the Russian invasion after 1979 would make of Afghanistan 'Russia's Vietnam'. Who would have imagined then that Russia's Vietnam would mutate once more in the way we have seen?

This is what we may call 'the curse of imperialism': great power doomed constantly to repeat its blunders. If in doing so it invokes the 'lessons of history', this only shows how incompetent an instructor history is, for its pedagogic qualities remain opaque to actors destined to repeat the very failures from which they claim to have learned so much. Power is a bloated beast, programmed to express itself only in one way, and fated to do so. The savage video-games - the use of drones to 'take out' Taliban targets by remote control from a facility in Nevada - to which this war has been likened, are not merely metaphor: they are an emanation of the same culture, and convergence between them is not fortuitous.

The WikiLeaks war-log disclosures cover four main areas: the way in which the intensification of the war is actually playing out on the ground; the flimsy nature of much of the Coalition 'intelligence'; the disparity between the upbeat official accounts of the war and the messy reality, including the deaths of civilians, caused both by the Coalition and by the improvised explosive devices placed by the Taliban; and the ambiguous role of elements of the Pakistani intelligence services in relation to the Taliban.

The hitherto secretive Task Force 373 has as its objective the killing or capture of thousands of named individuals belonging to the Taliban or al-Qaeda high command. This shadowy group has killed an undisclosed number of such people, often with no attempt to take them alive, and in the process, has also taken the lives of many civilians. One such excursion in 2007 killed seven Afghan policemen, while shortly afterwards seven children died along with a number of Taliban fighters. This is apart from such well-documented events as the US patrol that machine-gunned a bus in 2008, killing 15 passengers, and the bombing of hijacked tankers from which villagers were collecting fuel in Kunduz in September 2009, which killed an unknown number of civilians.

The official reporting of the war bears a declining relationship to reality: the futuristic rhetoric of high-precision arms remorselessly homing in on their targets is war-speak for assassinations, faulty intelligence, loss of innocent life, and the sheer frustration of soldiers on the ground unable to distinguish friend from foe. The military use now familiar stories, rehearsed wherever civilians are slain - we heard them in Iraq and in Gaza: a ruthless enemy is using civilians as human shields. 'Friendly fire' is inevitable in the presence of long-distance tele-war and a few 'bad apples' among Afghan army recruits have turned their weapons on those supposed to be tutoring them in the mysterious art of pacifying their own people.

All this was 'known', but known only with that twilit form of cognition which has not been sanctioned by power, and thus remains, as it were, in the penumbra of unofficial acknowledgement. It has now been interpreted by the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel, which have translated laconic military acronyms and euphemistic abbreviations into intelligible language.

Arbitrary borders

But perhaps the least commented area of this disastrous conflict, and the chains of consequences which stretch back through the arming of the mujahideen against the Soviets and into the great imperial struggle of the 19th century between Britain and Russia, is the arbitrary and still indistinct borders between what have failed to become 'settled' nation-states, created in the image of colonial powers which, in 1893, scribbled in apparently indelible pencil the fateful Durand Line, cleaved Pashtun belonging and later partitioned South Asia.

The question of the creation of a Pashtun homeland for the 24 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and the 12 million or so in Pakistan - the most obvious answer to a cartographic convenience that has resulted in such bloodshed - now appears academic; even though it is tacitly recognised by the use of the term 'Afpak' to designate a conflict which does not acknowledge imposed frontiers and also calls into question what were thought to be long-settled imperial squabbles. Pashtuns are, like the Kurds, one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a state; their numbers are also about the same.

The breathtaking unknowing of the US and its allies never ceases to shock, since, it seems, they are determined to acquire the best unwisdom money can buy. Vast tracts of academic literature are devoted to explanations of Sunni/Shia tensions in Afghanistan (about 20% are Shia, mostly the Hazaras and in Helmand); everyone knows of India's interest in Afghanistan, an involvement calculated to infuriate a Pakistan whose attention has been distracted by the war from Kashmir; it is common knowledge that Afghanistan is one of the most wretched countries on earth, with a life expectancy of 42 years, literacy less than 30%, while more than a quarter of children die before their fifth birthday. Somehow, the aggregate of such knowledge is nullified by the conviction of US invincibility and its firepower, which nonetheless fail to deliver the 'security' these are supposed to guarantee.

It is, in some ways, regrettable that the West 'prevailed' over Communism, since when it did so, it also jettisoned any idea of 'coexistence' with other, conflicting belief-systems, religions and ideologies in the world. If Communism could be vanquished, it seemed, no creed, godly or godless, no belief-system, materialistic or other-worldly, could withstand the potency of the Western appeal to the whole world. Yet if the topography of Afghanistan appears increasingly inimical to the 'victory' of NATO forces, this is nothing compared to the wayward, intricate and impenetrable landscape of human hearts and minds, to the conquest of which the West has also, foolishly, committed itself.

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 238/239, June-July 2010, pp 41-42