Faraway Countries Of Which We Know Little

Peter Hitchens is far more right than wrong:

Another British death in Afghanistan passed almost unnoticed last week. He was the 117th of our servicemen to die in the supposedly bullet-free operation promised by our ex-Communist then Defence secretary, "Doctor" John Reid. France is still recovering from the recent deaths of ten of her soldiers in one terrible massacre in that country - and now from distressing details of how some of them may have died. I am told (though I am open to correction by anyone with better information) that they died because air-power could not be used to save them. They were at such close quarters with their attackers that an aerial bombardment would have killed them as well as their enemies. Given the almost total reliance of Western troops on airpower to save them from such incidents, this is rather bad news.

Reported barely, if at all, over here, of course.

The presence of Canadian troops in Afghanistan may be an issue in that country's latest general election, as Canadians, too, are tiring of what seems to be an increasingly futile and counterproductive operation.

Please God, yes.

Human Rights Watch have just produced a report claiming that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, mainly caused by airstrikes, have risen alarmingly - doing immense damage to relations between Afghan civilians and 'Western' forces. Though not killing anything like as many as 'insurgent' terror attacks, Western forces are still causing a lot of innocent deaths. HRW said that in 2006 at least 699 Afghan civilians were killed in 'insurgent' attacks, including suicide bombings, and at least 230 in international military action, around half in air strikes. In 2007, at least 950 died in attacks by' insurgent' forces ... and at least 321 in air strikes. "Thus, civilian deaths from US and NATO air strikes nearly tripled from 2006to 2007."

In the first seven months of this year 2008, at least 367 civilians had been killed in insurgent attacks and at least 119 in air strikes, it said, adding its data was based on conservative estimates. The air strikes that accounted for almost all the civilian dead were unplanned and called in to help troops under attack.

"Rapid response air strikes have meant higher civilian casualties, while every bomb dropped in populated areas amplifies the chance of a mistake," said Brad Adams, an HRW official.

Making all this sharply worse is the recent case of the bombing of Azizabad, where the 'Coalition' says it killed five to seven innocents along with a large detachment of Taliban fighters - but where the Afghan government and UN investigators put the number of innocent deaths at 90. The village was undoubtedly attacked, apparently in an attempt to kill a Taliban leader known as Mullah Sadiq. As usual in these cases, precise information is hard to establish, though there is persuasive (and harrowing) evidence that many more than seven innocents perished in what seems to have been a storm of munitions and explosives delivered by an AC-130 plane.

It is of course well-known that terrorist militants like to hide among innocents, in the hope that this will protect them and in the knowledge that - if they are attacked - their opponents will be criticised for callous and barbaric behaviour. Despicable as this is, it happens because it is so effective. Either way, the West loses. Civilised states can only resolve this by sending ground troops in to such places, to capture or kill their targets.

But this is highly dangerous and very difficult, so they often launch the airstrikes anyway. It is easy to see why they prefer (as Israel has too often preferred in Gaza) air attacks which they know will kill a certain number of innocents.

Personally I am against this kind of war, which may achieve victories in the short term, but damages those who use it in the long-term. For it is the long-term that matters. Using bombs knowing that they will kill innocents is a deliberate act, and it is silly to pretend otherwise. Britain's decision to embark on the even more explicitly deliberate bombing of German civilians, taken in May 1940 and intensified hugely afterwards, is a serious stain on our national record. I think the knowledge that we used such methods has done serious damage to our general moral state ever since, and contributed to our post-war decline and diminishing self-respect, even though we have tended to try to deceive ourselves about what we did. It is still thought to be pretty bad taste to talk about this.

And, alas, the sight of so many comrades failing to return each night was a significnat contributing factor to the "live for today, because there might be no tomorrow attitude that led to the collapse of traditional moral standards during the War, leading in turn to the dismantlement of the social, cultural and legal enforcement of those standards in the decades following the War.

The whole business is made somehow worse by the fact that the bombing was carried out with selfless courage by some of the bravest young men who ever lived, the bomber crews themselves, who believed they were helping to win the war and had quite enough to think about without wondering what their incendiaries and high explosive were doing, thousands of feet below. Their contribution to defeating Germany is debatable. My own view is that it probably did not shorten the war at all, but I doubt if this can ever be resolved. The casualties among those flyers were appalling, the worst since the mass human sacrifice of the flower of British youth on the Somme in 1916, and just as wasteful of young talent and hope. As for what happened when their bombs hit the ground, most people prefer not to know.

And who can blame them? The details (unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, immense clouds of bluebottles gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed) are beginning to be published in mainstream histories and they are deeply distressing to anyone who possesses an ounce of human sympathy. The fact that most of the victims were the German urban working class (who as Social Democrats had been Hitler's principal democratic opponents) makes it difficult to claim that the bombing was some sort of judgement on the Nazis. I'd like to see how much courage most of us would have shown faced with a similar regime, and how we would then have felt if we'd been bombed to bits, or baked and suffocated in cellars, for the misdeeds of a government we loathed and feared.

The protests of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, against this method of warfare were sneered at, at the time, but seem to me to have been both honourable and right. Bell was no simpleton pacifist. He was a long-term friend and contact of German Christians who opposed Hitler, and if the British government had taken more notice of him and of what he told them, the July plot against Hitler, or something like it, might have succeeded and saved us a year of bloody war, as well as preventing Stalin taking over much of central Europe.

Very well said. And, of course, almost never said.

Yes, I digress, but mainly because I meant to. The main subject of this posting is whether wars are justified, and the answer has to be 'very seldom' and 'only when there is a very good reason indeed to fight them'. This runs counter to the semi-religious view of World War Two which most British and American people believe (based on a largely fictional idea of what happened in that war, how it came about and why it was fought). This suggests that wars are in general a good thing, if we, the British or the Americans, fight them. If only this were so. But it isn't.
So as we suffer death ourselves, and rain down death upon the Afghans, can anyone tell me what, exactly, we expect to achieve, what we have achieved, or why it should matter enough to justify even one of these deaths and the ripples of misery and loss (not to mention potential vengeance in many cases) which has spread out from each one of them?

We are supposed to be doing something or other to a body called 'The Taliban' and, indirectly to another body called 'Al Qaeda'. Readers of this weblog will know that I don't have much time for the idea of 'al Qaeda', a thing simultaneously nebulous and tightly-organised, everywhere and nowhere, generally used as an excuse or a short-cut by people lacking either facts or an argument. (What exactly, I'm always growling at the TV set or the radio, are 'all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda' which various outrages are always supposed to display?).

I'm not even wholly convinced that the 11th September bombings can be traced to a cave in Afghanistan, or a 'hatred of our way of life'. I think they originated in the Middle East, and were aimed directly at US support for Israel, as well as against the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

I offer in support of this the version of his own motive offered by one of the 11th September mass murderers, a Saudi citizen called Abdul Aziz al-Omari, who helped to hijack the plane which was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and who in a prerecorded video explained that his aim was to send "a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine."

I have always been puzzled that this tape, which so far as I know is authentic, has attracted so little attention, along with the fact that the 11th September outrage was immediately preceded by a hurricane of hatred unleashed against Israel and the US by the Arab and Muslim world at a United Nations 'anti-racism' conference in Durban.

And let us not forget the wave of exultation which was observable in East Jerusalem, Gaza and much of the Arab Middle East immediately after the atrocity - so noticeable that the Palestinian Authorities worked very hard to suppress videotaped evidence of the celebrations. Arabs in the Middle East knew what this was really about, even if we in the West have decided to pretend otherwise. Afghanistan has always seemed to me to be a diversion from the real issue, and 'Al Qaeda' a convenient decoy, a bit like the questionable but convenient claim that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

This is massively important, and at last someone of substance in the MSM has said it. While it is not clear that the broadcast images of Palestinian jubiliation on 9/11 were not several years old at the time and while Hitchens himself is no uncritical friend of Israel (like many of us, he accepts it as a fact of life but has serious doubts about the status of its Arab citizens, about the number of non-Jewish Russians getting in under the Law of Return, and so forth), but no, Libya was not behind Lockerbie.

And yes, yes, a thousand times yes, the 9/11 bombers were overwhelmingly Saudi (whereas none was Afghan). Have you got that? Saudi. The same Saudis who bankroll both the Bushes and the Clintons. In fact, in probably the only good move that Bush that ever made until Sunday, he responded to 9/11 by removing the pointless, but to many people gravely offensive, American troops from Saudi Arabia. As a result, there has been no attack on American soil since, just as there has been none against Spain since she withdrew from Iraq, even though Spain was part of the Caliphate for many centuries. Post-7/7 Britain, get the message.

But 'the Taliban' is also a vague and shape-shifting entity which seems to include most of the Pashtun people, often those who are friendly to us by day, and hostile to us by night. The Pashtuns laugh (with some justification) at the fictional and nonsensical border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, running along the Durand Line, which divides Pashtun from Pashtun. Or rather it doesn't. The Pashtun, or 'Taliban', fighters move from one side to the other pretty much unmolested by Pakistan, which sends in expeditions for show, but generally leaves the Pashtuns alone.

The New York Times reported last week that US forces had recently opened fire on Pakistani border troops, who had opened fire on them as they had attempted to attack 'Taliban' targets in Pakistan. Interesting, eh?

This is no surprise to people such as me, who have long believed that the 'War on Terror' was a ludicrous fantasy fuelled by the need which American neo-conservatives have for an identifiable enemy who can have large bombs dropped upon him from a great height.

These people are also confused by the fact that the 11th September hijackers mostly came from Saudi Arabia, our friend, customer and ally.

Yes, Yes, Yes!

Yet Pakistan is also supposed to be our ally in the 'War on Terror'. Well, in a way, it is, or rather used to be, sometimes is and might conceivably be again. And in a way it isn't, and never was. (See that profane but clever movie 'Charlie Wilson's War' for a witty exploration of this paradox). The Islamabad government's relations with its more remote provinces are complicated and Pakistan tends to regard them as a private matter. But if we really want to track these people down to their lairs then we are going to have to have a war with Pakistan as well as one in Afghanistan, and - since Pakistan is a nuclear power and since it now has large numbers of its sons and daughters living as voting citizens in Britain and the USA - that could be complicated.

Now it is certainly true that Afghanistan could do with a period of peace and stability to try to rebuild itself after the horrible destruction brought down on it by civil wars and foreign interventions over the past 30 years. But it strikes me that the presence of foreign troops makes this less likely rather than more likely, and that by sustaining a weak government which couldn't survive ten minutes without us, we are doing no long-term good at all, and will eventually have to admit it, as all other foreign invaders of Afghanistan have had to do. In the meantime, the sad deaths continue.

So let there be no meantime. Let's just get out.

More faraway countries of which we know little.

I note that the EU has (as I predicted might soon take place in a recent MoS article) begun softening towards the ghastly Alexander Lukashenko's almost unbelievably wicked regime in Belarus. If this happens, it will be another sign of just what hogwash our new anti-Russian policy is. It plainly isn't based on a love of 'democracy' or freedom, since Mr Lukashenko does not permit either and responds to them with cynical brutality. I wonder if he can be persuaded to hold 'elections' which can, even so, satisfy the foreign observers who from time to time reclassify despotisms as democracies, to suit our preferences.

Yet see Hitchens's own very recent article on Belarus in The American Conservative here.

Another case of the contradictions is Azerbaijan, which I visited a few years ago when I was one of the few people in the British media who knew that it (or Georgia) was a real place, or who was aware that an oil pipeline was being built from Baku to Turkey through Georgia.

Here's an extract from the article I wrote back in July 2004: "They call it the New Great Game, a cunning, merciless and secretive struggle for power and oil around the Caspian Sea, in which Britain, America, Russia and China are playing. The discovery of a gigantic bubble of oil and gas beneath the Caspian waters has turned the eyes of the great powers to the Caucasus, a lovely maze of tiny rival nations only recently escaped from Soviet control. Here, along a narrow, dangerous and troubled corridor of mountainous territory, two pipelines are being built to bring these riches to the West. With Saudi Arabia in danger and Iraq in limbo, this region is rapidly becoming nearly as important as the Middle East. It is also nearly as dangerous. The pipeline route is far longer than it really needs to be, but this is an unusual and sensitive spot, unwisely neglected for many years, pulsing with ethnic conflicts egged on by a mischievous, spiteful Kremlin. Nobody is entirely sure if it is in Europe or Asia.

It lies on the land bridge between Russia and the Middle East. Iran is building a nuclear bomb just down the coast. Iraq is not much further. The suppurating boil of Chechnya is within driving distance, if you are mad enough to want to go. Take the boat across the windy Caspian to the weird republic of Turkmenistan, whose dictator builds revolving golden statues of himself, keep going east and you will surprisingly quickly find yourself at the frontiers of Afghanistan and China. This is a political pipeline, a thousand miles long, designed to bypass two great oil powers that America mistrusts in one case, and fears in the other: Russia and Iran. When it opens next year it will deliver the oil directly to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, a deepwater harbour open to the biggest supertankers, avoiding the dangerous chokepoint of the Bosphorus.

Two places especially have felt the effects of so much global interest, for they lie along the new oil route, which their citizens have been hired to patrol on horseback. One, Georgia, is now ruled by a dashing pro-Western revolutionary who knows the language of human rights. Mikhail Saakashvili claims he can eliminate corruption from a nation so rife with it that nobody would be much surprised if they woke up one morning and found the whole country had been stolen overnight.

Next door, Azerbaijan is apparently governed by a dead KGB general. Heydar Aliyev's face, sometimes stern, sometimes smiling, looks out from billboards all over the country, reassuring the citizens that the 'shining son of the people' has their best interests at heart. On the walls of the capital, Baku, he can even be seen in bow tie and dinner jacket, striding purposefully towards his destiny.

The trouble is that, rather like North Korea's perpetual Dear Leader Kim Il Sung, Heydar Aliyev is no longer with us. He died last December in an American hospital. But, also like Kim Il Sung, he had hurriedly secured the succession for his son Ilham, until then mainly known as a playboy with an alleged taste for casinos, which it is not wise to talk about in Baku.

The country, so soaked with oil that parts of it are permanently on fire, is not much more honest than Georgia - joint sixth in the league of the world's most corrupt nations. And though the oil has given Baku a jolly feeling of prosperity and restored many of its lovely old buildings, survivors from the last oil boom 100 years ago, many of its people live in the most horrible poverty in dingy, neglected outskirts.

This is not the fault of oil companies such as Britain's BP - a main partner in the pipeline. They do what they can to spread the benefits of their investment. It is the result of decades of Soviet sloth, stupidity and crime. You only need look at the desolate forests of ancient, rudimentary, Communist-era oil derricks, clonking sadly away amid black puddles as they suck crude oil from the polluted deserts round Baku to realise the level of wasteful incompetence that ruled here for so long. For much of that time none other than Comrade Heydar Aliyev was in charge. In an amazing political resurrection, he would later come back as the leader of independent Azerbaijan.

Western experts now use modern methods to get the oil. The Soviets are gone. But their spirit lives on. And here is the good bit for those not convinced by Washington's militant trumpeting about democracy and human rights. Last October, Ilham 'won' a presidential election. It was shamelessly rigged from start to finish and at least one man died when police responded with boots and clubs to opposition protests.

Immediately afterwards, Washington's Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, congratulated young Ilham on his 'strong performance at the polls', which is one way of putting it. After the disgrace became so obvious that he couldn't ignore it, he made some mild protests.

But when Ilham attended last week's Nato summit he managed to get himself photographed in the company of a smiling George W. Bush and an even more smiling Anthony Blair, pictures prominently displayed in the Baku press. There is serious talk of admitting Azerbaijan to Nato and eventually even to the EU.

When Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of the first entire people ever to become Christian, finally rejects once and for all Soviet-imposed borders and declares independence from globalisation, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony, and the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied, then we must stand four-square with the Russians in recognising her, and in backing her every step of the way.

In Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili threw out the old corrupt government in what is soppily termed the 'Rose Revolution'. It was a very bad government which had just rigged its own elections and Mr Saakashvili has many good points. But it was, in effect, a putsch.

Mr Saakashvili, an expert on human rights, soon afterwards held elections which were almost as overwhelming as Ilham's, though nothing like as nasty. And he too basks in the favour of the White House. There is even more serious talk of letting Georgia join Nato and the EU, whose flag flies from all Georgia's public buildings as if it were already in. Small, lonely Georgia longs for exactly what many in Britain do not want - the embrace of a superstate.

Abkhazia and South Osssetia has finally rejected once and for all Soviet-imposed borders and declared independence from globalisation, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony, and the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied. We must stand four-square with the Russians in recognising them, and in backing them every step of the way.

But for the moment, let us return to Baku and the offices of Isa Gambar, the man who was beaten in last October's election, about which Human Rights Watch declared: 'Too much manipulation, too many arrests, and too many beatings have taken place.' Mr Gambar's headquarters is a suite of shabby rooms reached through a dark, ruined slum, many miles from the city centre. His party was turned out of its old home on some feeble pretext, three of his colleagues are in jail charged with inciting riots, his party newspaper cannot be sold on the street and he sits glumly smoking a pipe, presumably wondering whether it can all possibly be worth it.

It is strangely impressive to hear this quiet academic insist: 'We won the elections. I am pretty sure we got more than half the vote.' It is the understated way he says 'five of my colleagues were tortured' that makes him believable. How was it done? 'Similar to Abu Ghraib,' he replies. 'They threatened to bring their female relations to the jail and humiliate them in front of the prisoners.' Politics here is not like the British version, he explains. Opposing parties do not have discussions. The winner takes all, the loser loses everything. Elections may be held, sometimes even fair ones, but they do not mean what we think they mean. 'The West has to decide whether it will be satisfied with democratic declarations or push for real reforms,' he said."

That was then. And the 'West' was plainly quite happy with 'democratic declarations' as it has shown in the four years since. Now, along comes American Vice-President Dick Cheney on a visit to Baku designed to rub Moscow up the wrong way (again) while expressing support for our plucky little oil-and-gas-rich friend on the Caspian sea. (Another recent visitor to this interesting place has been our own Duke of York.) This is a little awkward as, try as we may, we cannot really pretend that Mr Aliyev is a great fighter in the cause of freedom. And what does our loyal ally in Baku do in return for this flattery? Well, according to reports in the Moscow media, the 'friend of the west', President Aliyev, pretty much snubbed Mr Cheney, delaying their meeting and taking a call from Russian President Medvedev on the same day.

I cheered out loud when I read that. Clearly, nobody is all bad.

The USA, by raising the stakes so high over Georgia, and by allowing itself to be dragged deeper into a meaningless confrontation with Russia by the Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, has probably made it too dangerous for Azerbaijan to be seen talking to Mr Cheney, or anybody else much from Washington, and grandiose plans for more gas or oil pipelines direct from Baku to the EU may now have to be forgotten. This is perhaps the biggest single loss to the 'West' from the recent clashes in the Caucasus - mainly caused by ignorance and bravado. It could get worse, given the standard of political leadership we now have.

So change the leaders.