The argument about Australia’s “moral duty” to stay in Afghanistan usually begins and ends with an invocation of Taliban barbarisms: the human rights abuses, the dictatorial regime, the oppressive legal code, the medieval misogyny, and so on. This, we are told, is what we’re fighting to overcome.
But the real war has nothing to do with that.
Start with the regime we’re helping prop up. Hamid Karzai remains in power primarily because of his prowess at rigging elections. His administration has little support outside Kabul, rests upon blood-stained warlords, and has become a byword for corruption and gangsterism.
The NATO counterinsurgency campaign in place means that, rather than protecting Afghans against Karzai, the US — and by extension, Australia — is actively fostering his abuses. Thus Ahmed Karzai — the President’s brother, a notorious drug lord, the focus of numerous graft allegations and “the most despised man in southern Afghanistan” — has been funded by the CIA for the past eight years.
The Washington Post subsequently suggested that the agency is, in fact, bankrolling numerous members of the Karzai court, despite, as the paper puts it, “concerns that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to wean Afghans’ dependence on secret sources of income and graft”.
Why? Because the war needs their support — and all other moral considerations are secondary to military imperatives.
The conflict we hear about in politicians’ speeches here — a stirring effort to defeat evil and restore democracy — is largely a fantasy. In fact, the US is increasingly seeing as its best-case outcome some kind of reconciliation with those Taliban prepared to renounce al-Qaeda. You can get a sense of what that might look like from President Karzai’s new “peace council”: the body he has given the responsibility for negotiations with the Taliban. It is headed by the brutal thug Burhanuddin Rabbani, and full of what Rachel Reid from Human Rights Watch calls “names … that Afghans will associate with war crimes, warlordism and corruption”.
In 1997, US diplomats famously assessed the Afghanistan taking shape then: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law,” one said. “We can live with that.”
Something similar is in the offing now.
There are no longer any particularly good outcomes for Afghanistan. An immediate withdrawal will not end the violence. Of course it won’t. But while an end to the occupation is not a sufficient condition for peace, it’s a necessary one.
That is, there will never be anything like normality in Afghanistan so long as foreign powers continue to deform its internal politics. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, the CIA has now established its own 3000-member covert army, roaming Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions to conduct secret assassinations. Now, that might make immediate sense as a counter-insurgency strategy. But, in a nation already wracked by warlordism, what will be the long-term results of unleashing yet another heavily-armed paramilitary force?
If we want to take a moral approach to Afghanistan, we might begin with the famous injunction of the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.
Everyone knows that much of Afghanistan’s current misery can be traced back to the willingness of the Soviets and the US to fund various groups of cut-throats during the cold war. We’re doing exactly the same today. What makes anyone think the outcomes will be different?
Furthermore, the pernicious consequences of the occupation will not simply be felt in Afghanistan. The US academic Robert Pape has just completed an exhaustive study on the roots of terrorism. He concludes: “We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns … and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign.”
The Afghan campaign is not, in other words, protecting Australians. It is, quite obviously, making terror attacks much more likely.
To be honest, it’s hard to take seriously rhetoric about “moral duties” to the Afghan people, given that the phrase only emerges in the context of inflicting violence.
That is, each time a boatload Afghan asylum seekers appears off the coastline, we’re presented with a case study from Ethics 101. Here are desperate, impoverished people fleeing a conflict that we have instigated, refugees from a nation in which we are one of the occupying powers. In those circumstance, fulfilling an obvious “moral duty” to the Afghan people wouldn’t entail shooting or bombing anyone, merely a modicum of political courage.
Yet, which Labor and Liberal politicians are prepared to countenance massively expanding the refugee program to harbor those fleeing from the Afghan conflagration?
In the Australian context, the word “just” always seems to be appended to the word “war”. That’s because, quite obviously, the Afghan campaign always had much less to do with moral arguments and much more to do with the US alliance.
Everyone knows that if the Americans hadn’t invaded, Australia wouldn’t be in Afghanistan — and that Australia won’t remain for an instant after the US leaves. That’s the elephant in the room for these debates, and it makes pious rhetoric about morality very difficult to swallow.
It was Australia’s ‘moral duty’ to send our boys to be slaughtered in WW1 for the British Empire. Similarly, it is now our ‘moral duty’ to send troops to Afghanistan to give US the pretense of a ‘multi-national force’. That’s the price you pay when you depend on another country for your national defense.
“We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns … and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign.”
The obvious conclusion from this is that it is those leaders who commit to wars upon foreign soil whom are the real sponsors of terrorism.
Do we have a law in regards to sponsoring terrorism? Because if we do then JWH should be charged with it.
Quite agree with all of this article. The Afghan campaign is being portrayed in the same way the Iraq war was and it is equally unjustifiable.
If morals motivated war, we would not be having so many wars. So I agree with the article.
Involvement in a foreign war, because of costs and lives lost, should never be an absolute necessity. There are a lot of noble sounding reasons given by politicians and approved commentators about the necessity, none of which are themselves sufficient or primary, which when examined closely, hide in their shadows much more sinister and unworthy motives, which suggest the stakes are much higher.
Different commentators have given different war justifications at different times, adding to the suspicion that reasons are given on the basis of plausibility, seeming nobility and political saleability, rather than based on the driving frailties of economic, social and national motives.
The political debate on the Afghanistan war may be reactivated temporarity in the wake of the election, giving the major parties once again the chance to repeat their cloaking motives, arguments and boring platitudes. Let us itemise some of these cloaking motives which are going to be repeated by the principals with full pompous and self justified gravity, to be made indisputable by the authority of the speaker. The aura of sincerity cannot be criticised. And this does work for so many of the group mind who believe the manufactured delusions because its comfortable to do so, and reinforces our delusional self image. We need the excuses to believe, to make our jobs meaningful, to make the world rosy.
The comman reasons are:
The fight against terror(rism).
Assist in building a capable Afghan National Army.
Support the Afghan people. Bring democracy to Afghanistan.
The less cited reason is:
We do it because the US does it. What they do in wars we always support and smartly salute. The legacy of George Bush and John Howard lives on.
The geopolitical games between all the players in Eurasia are played for the Oil and Gas resources that power this current civilisation. In this great game everyone is a pawn to the “limits to growth” set by our addiction to fossil fuels. Each national economy attempts to grow or maintain its living standards, at the expence of global carbon pollution, and reduction in primary resources, and at the expence of other economies. This is the naked global competition theory, in which each player expects the worst of the others.
China is the giant that is currently ascending, building new pipelines and oil contracts with an eye to increasing supply and security, at least in the short term, without spending a cent on war, using its currency reserve surplus to buy friends and influence people.
The US continues to follow the policy of the big stick, because it has always seemed too easy when it held by far the biggest stick. It kind of works up to a point. It sure kills lots of people and drives others away. Sanctions, bombing, shock and awe, invasion and occupation, are followed by permanent insurrection, infrastructure and social breakdown, and failure to restore security. The fact that we can label the opposition as terrorists does not prove any worthwhile point. The results of the big stick approach for over 2 decades are miserable costly failures. Military overlordship does not provide resource control, or resource ownership, or enhance extractive efficiency. Its a strategy that is both self feeding and self defeating. It buys bleeding festering sores of quagmires that require continuous transfusions now amounting to trillions of dollars through the military economy to the commanding Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) This funds and bloats the power structures of the US today, but sucks the oxygen out of every other possibility. The US failed to complete the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, from Turkmanistan to India, that was to pass through Taliban controlled territory. Sanctions against Iran produce hardening of its regime, and push it into the willing arms of China. Meanwhile, China bids for and picks up Iraq and Iran oil contracts, a Turkmanistan gas pipeline and says thank you very much to the US for moving over all of its industrial manufacturing ability to China, because of cheap labor and currency. US foreign policy today makes the Chinese approach look very respectable, the very bastion of free trade and investment. China even diversifies into renewable energy better.
So China is quite happy for the US and its allies to be bogged down permanently in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, while they continue win at all of the legitimate games. The strategic position of US&A forces in Afghanistan, being dependent on a few long supply routes, means they can be closed out at any time, judging from the US reaction to threats to them in Pakistan.
As Japan was once impelled to strike against the US in WW2 because of increasing resource restrictions against its military empire, so too will the US be “forced” yet again to strike a war against China as China takes more of the depleting middle east oil. This seems be inevitable, as the US MICC will need to strike with their aging and depleting armed forces prior to inevitable decline and retreat, as it knows of no other strategy. Then Australia finds itself in the uncomfortable middle, as a committed US military ally, but a major trading partner of China, and a geostrategic land mass in the Southern Pacific. Each time there has been a major war, the price paid goes up. Can we really afford it this time?
The quest for renewable energy resources is now of dire importance. It is not just because of climate change, which should be more than reason enough. Its because oil and gas running out, while the big players become more addicted, and we are deeply involved in fighting proxy wars over access to the major fossil supplies to the globe. Be warned that Australian is one of the fossil fool prizes to fight over, being a major exporter of coal. By not being able to transition fast enough from the fossil fuel age, we risk multiple severe outcomes. The fossil fool prizes are not worth destructiveness of the game or the risk for the rest of us and this planet.
Mark Colvin has just written a good piece on the Drum about the human rights violators present at the Commonwealth games and completely forgot to mention Canada, England and Australia and their invasion of Afghanistan and England and Australia and their illegal invasion of Iraq.
He failed to mention our jailing of Afghans and Sri Lankans on the bogus claims that they are not really refugees and anyway we might accept less of them.
In recent estimates it is shown that this year the acceptance rate for Tamils ROSE from 29% to 69%, and the case for Afghans did not fall to 30% as claimed but on 8 April it was 99% and fell slightly to 84% by 11 June with almost no claims assessed after that date, about 1 a day.
Meanwhile 360 kids have been jailed all this time – $370 million per annum on Xmas island, the cost per person including building, in Curtin is over $500,000 or $98 million for 600 people to be illegally jailed.
The government were told on 16 April that their actions are illegal, they simply shrug it off and race around the Asia Pacific rim trying to convince the neighbours that we have a refugee crisis on our hands.
Well there are 3.6 million people of concern in Thailand, about 1 million in Malaysia, 600,000 in Sri Lanka and 1.9 million in Pakistan while we still wallow miserably in the massive over load of 5,000.
They have been told repeatedly that we cannot traffic people to other countries in the bogus name of “stopping people smuggling” but they want to do it anyway.
The media and pollies have this conspiracy of silence on this. They babble endlessly about policy and ignore the law because it suits them to.
And when people like me complain to them they whine about being rude.
Now I think a copy of Charlie Wilson’s war should be screened for the idiot pollies so they understand we are still fighting the war Charlie lost.
The funding of aid to the Afghans way back in 1989 which has led to today’s mess.
About the last line in the film is “we can’t get $1 million for a fucking school”.