Curtis writes:
Five years after Britain deployed forces to Helmand province in Afghanistan it is becoming clear that British and US policies in the country are not helping but setting back development prospects.
Although more children now go to school and health services have improved, it is remarkable how little Afghanistan has progressed, given that it is the world's most aid-dependent country, with 90% of its budget financed by donors. One in five children die before the age of five and one in eight women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
There are few signs that donor support is improving. Hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted while up to 80% of donations return to donor countries in corporate profits or consultants' salaries.
Aid itself has become militarised. Nato's use of the military to deliver much of the aid – essentially as part of its counterinsurgency strategy – turns aid personal and projects into targets for the insurgents. It doesn't help that CIA agents also use aid teams as cover to gather intelligence. Unicef has reported that military operations are making more than 40% of the country inaccessible to humanitarian workers for extended periods. Thus military operations, far from paving the way for development, are undermining it.
The UN security council says that 25 times as many Afghans die every year from poor nutrition and poverty as from the war; yet Britain has spent 10 times more on military operations than on development (for the US, it is 20 times as much). Afghanistan has become the most militarised country on earth, where the government spends nearly half its entire budget on "security". Britain exported to a country already awash with arms £34m worth of military equipment, including more than 18,000 assault rifles, between 2008 and 2010.
Using aid money, from 2004 to 2009 the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development spent £69m on the "shadow army" of private military companies providing "security" and "combat support" to regular forces. These companies have considerable immunity from criminal prosecution but the British government has refused to ban or even regulate them.
Nato has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars recruiting and arming more than 1,000 illegal "armed support groups" to provide security at bases and escort convoys – militias often run by former military commanders responsible for human rights abuses or involved in the drugs trade. Alongside them are thousands of CIA-backed paramilitaries, working closely with US special forces, some of whom are accused of being little more than death squads.
A reduction in the number of civilian deaths would be the one sign of progress, yet the number has increased every year since 2006, and a third of the nearly 10,000 total are attributable to Nato or Afghan government forces. A confidential US military report in 2009 conceded that Nato was causing "unnecessary collateral damage"; but policies causing civilian deaths continue, notably the use of drones for surveillance and "targeted" killings – though they mainly kill civilians.
It is not just the Taliban but also western forces who are holding back the prospects for the next generation of Afghans. Yet our leaders keep troops there. As the defence secretary, Liam Fox, said recently, this is because a withdrawal of troops would "damage the credibility of Nato". Similarly, the chief of the general staff, General David Richards, told Chatham House in 2009 that a key issue was the "grand strategic impact on the UK's authority and reputation in the world of the defeat of the British armed forces and its impact on public sentiment in the UK". The British exit is being delayed by British imperial hubris.
Helping Afghanistan develop means not only facing up to a withdrawal of troops. There is also an even more immediate need to stop the drone attacks, end the backing of militias, regulate private armies, close the secret torture network and stop selling arms.
He perfectly exemplifies what Hitchens is rightly criticizing in his Slate article.
I can only too well remember attending some press conferences in Pakistan in the winter of 2001 and seeing the unbearably smug expressions on the faces of various human rights and "relief" spokesmen who were concerned lest the military operation against the Taliban should disrupt their relatively modest efforts. They failed or refused to see that the removal of the Taliban was a necessary precondition of any serious relief and reconstruction. It's heartening to learn that, almost a decade later, they are at least open to the awareness that the Taliban is the worst offender. The next stage—may it come soon—will be the realization that the Taliban does not "violate" human rights, but entirely lacks the concept of their existence.
It's worth adding to Hitchens article by recounting some extremely important, but all too often neglected facts about the Taliban, their time in power, and their actions after their removal from power.
- Banned women riding on motorcycles.
- Banned women from riding in taxis without a mahram (a relative who acts as a chaperone)
- Banned women from working and expelled all female civil servants without offering an alternative livelihood, making many previously employed women destitute and homeless.
- Banned women and girls from education, something they are still attempting to enforce, despite the protestations by their apologists.
- Expelled the United Nations from Afghanistan during their time in power.
- Banned NGOs from operating in Afghanistan, and are still doing it in areas of Pakistan where they have control (they also banned polio vaccinations for children).
- They are still murdering aid workers for being Christian.
The British forces leaving Helmand province to the Taliban, a group that acts in such a way, is supposed to make the lives of Afghans better and allow for increased humanitarian aid to flow to the area? What world does Curtis live in?
The NATO/ISAF presence has been far from ideal, could have been, and still can be, run in a way which helps the Afghan people much more than it is now. The excuse that war is a messy business has a basis in reality, but it should not be used to excuse failings of policy, of which there have been many, especially under the Bush administration which criminally neglected the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and allowed a movement which had been broken in late-2001 to regroup and restablish itself as a brutally violent insurgency which has increased in strength for years and managed to destablize almost the entirety of the south and east of the country, as well as, increasingly, the north.
Recognizing the many failings of NATO/ISAF policy in the region though, should not blind us to the nature of the Taliban and the threat of humanitarian disaster which they still pose to the Afghan people. NATO/ISAF is not perfect. But it counter-insurgency campaign to combat the Taliban and their allies, and the effort to construct a more stable and secure Afghan state which can protect itself, offers the only chance for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and a brighter future for the Afghan people. The Taliban offers no hope to the Afghan people. It offers only poverty, misery and the rough justice of the village Sharia court, enforced through the sword.
Ahmed Rashid in his classic book Taliban, used Tacitus' famous quote about the Roman Empire to describe the peace that the Taliban brought Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001:
They create a desolation and call it peace.
It seems that history needs to be relearned by many of those who would abandon the Afghan people to this desolation called peace because this desolation seems easier to them than the difficulties associated with doing the right thing, condemning the Taliban to the ash heap of history, and establishing a real kind of peace. A peace not of desolation, but a peace of reconstruction, free of terrorism, both of the international kind exemplified by Al Qaeda, and the more national terrorism of the Taliban.
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