Pakistan Bombs Afghanistan

 

Has the US given up on Pakistan?

 

Pakistan needs a "Deus Ex Machina"*

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi in The Dawn

WHAT is happening to Pakistan? Anyone interested in the question knows the answer. Who is to blame? Opinions differ.

However, there is broad agreement on the cast of culprits: political leaders; political parties; political institutions; non-political institutions; the security and intelligence establishment and its institutions; the civil services; comprehensive corruption; the dysfunctional state of the economy caught in a permanent debt trap and outrageous inequality; complete external dependency and a consequent lack of policy independence; a general lack of education and a scientific outlook; the media contributing to an uninformed, partially informed and misinformed public opinion; the deliberate misuse of religious fervour to obscure the true teachings of our faith; an obsolete social structure preserved by a voracious and unaccountable power structure; a judiciary that demands but does not command universal respect; uncontrollable population growth; irreversible climate change; a forever threat of nuclear annihilation, a security environment that challenges rational resource allocations; palliatives presented as solutions, etc.

We are taught that one should neither hate nor act in anger. This is true as far as persons are concerned. But actions that deliberately undermine the welfare of a whole people can and must be hated. When they threaten the survival of a nation and render its dreams and aspirations impossible they must be confronted by the elemental force of rejection.

If, instead, political observers and commentators couch their opinions in euphemistic and safely coded language they become complicit in the perpetration of a national crime. They convey a pathetic message of resignation, surrender and betrayal. There comes a time when Faiz Ahmad Faiz has to give way to Habib Jalib. Either Quaid-i-Azam was much mistaken or we are all complicit in insulting his memory and murdering his legacy. We prefer, however, to slander the father of our country instead of becoming the citizens it required.

We are today, accordingly, reduced to being spectators of a daily goon or puppet show in the guise of a morality play — without any wit, humour or goodwill. There are no good guys in the unfolding drama of our national tragedy.

The Baloch are killed. Their killers are martyred. When one political character attributes unspeakable and unforgiveable crimes and misdemeanors to his rival we know he speaks the truth. When his rival returns the charges redoubled we know he too speaks the truth. They are of course transparent partners in a single, massive and lethal crime against the people and the country.

So what else is new? What should be new is the realisation that we who are aware and do nothing are just as guilty. If one can live with this realisation so be it. If not, we need to do what we can and without delay. The chances are we won’t. The chances are we have already lost our country. Unless…

Another wasted year of political posturing by rupee multibillionaires representing their victims beckons. While the US contemplates a climate emergency, Pakistan is beset by an existential emergency that commands no contemplation. All the challenges confronting Pakistan will be ignored. Technocratic servants of the elite will continue to spin fairy tales about stabilisation and progress invisible to the eye of the uninitiated. They will be well compensated for dressing their employers in the finery of their analyses and assessments. Other servants or experts will do much the same in their own spheres. The people must learn to eliminate the word ‘sarkar’ from their political dictionary if they are to stand any chance against the forces arrayed against them.

When a country’s ‘leadership’ fails to address fundamental existential issues at home it can have no external policy to speak of. The rest of the world sees this and refuses to take its foreign policy seriously, however well articulated and reasoned it may be. Pakistan has itself become a major stumbling block to the success of its principal foreign policy issue: a principled, peaceful and lasting settlement of the Kashmir dispute with India that is primarily and ascertainably acceptable to the Kashmiri people.

The Kashmiri people cannot defeat India although they have so far heroically denied it the victory it strives for. Pakistan cannot defeat India although its nuclear deterrence capability limits India’s military options. A diplomatic stalemate maximises the suffering of the Kashmiri people. The world is aware of India’s perfidy in Kashmir but is simply not inclined to back a failed or failing Pakistan against the gigantic market and strategic value of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. China, for obvious reasons will continue to back Pakistan against India, while increasingly worried about Pakistan’s inability to learn anything from the amazing experience of its most reliable friend.

The US sees Pakistan as a resentful puppet ruled by dependent elites who will do its bidding even it undermines the confidence of China in Pakistan’s resilience and strategic value.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan backs the Taliban which backs the TTP which perpetrated the massacre of schoolchildren and teachers in the Army Public School on Dec 16, 2014. The army today engages with the TTP, which is essentially a Pakistani branch party of the Afghan Taliban, while refusing to engage with the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement of Manzoor Pashteen which is a Pakistani movement because of its protests against the bombing of Waziristan.

Pakistan has practically no support among the Afghan political intelligentsia, particularly the educated youth who are the future of the country. India has the field to itself.

These absurdities are the direct result of the state of the state in Pakistan. Unless this state of affairs is addressed, foreign policy, indeed all other aspects of national policy, will not be able to develop coherence and credibility. This is all too clear to political observers in Pakistan. But they are by and large easily resigned to the prospect that this state of affairs will not be addressed — and that they will themselves be complicit in this dereliction of duty, citizenship and patriotism. Unless we await a deus ex machina.

* Deus ex Machina - an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.

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Who’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleaders

Today the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty Images
 

Everyone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.

Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it. 

Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”

The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.

Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.

The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.

So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?

An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.

Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.

For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.

But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.

Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.

You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.

Ten days that shook the world: The latest Taliban takeover of Afghanistan

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

The Afghan Taliban talked and fought. They won. The Americans talked and ran. They lost. The end was foretold in 2020 when President Donald Trump announced an exit from Afghanistan without installing a broad-based, inclusive interim government in Kabul. But few – certainly not President Biden who actually gave an unconditional cut-off date in September for full withdrawal but believed that the Afghan National Army could fight on for another year at least — expected the ANA to fold and President Ashraf Ghani to flee in ten days. This followed the last round of talks among the internal and external stakeholders in Doha, August 10-11.

​The Taliban’s brilliant strategy was based on the basic principles of guerilla warfare — gain Time to capture Space and use Space to erode the Will of the enemy to fight. This theory was first successfully enunciated by Mao Tse Tung in China in the 1930s and then by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in the 1960s. For a decade after their rout in 2001, the Taliban regrouped and reorganized on both sides of the Pakistan border, becoming bolder and more aggressive after 2010. But after signing the Agreement with the US in 2020, they dragged Time to forestall any US-selected “inclusive” government in Kabul while focusing on capturing Space in north Afghanistan – ethnically hostile regions led by warlords who had challenged and undermined their power in 1997-2001. Their tactics of talking and fighting on the front lines – “the Americans are leaving, lay down your weapons, surrender and go home, we won’t exact revenge or hurt you” – paid huge dividends. In the last stage, when the Americans began to progressively pull air support, commanders, trainers, contractors, and air supply lines to distant front lines were severely disrupted, the ANA lost critical elements of the war machine manufactured by the Americans, and crumbled. It didn’t help that massive corruption in the Ghani regime, including in the ANA, was a core demotivating factor, no less than the frequent shuffling of military commanders from the Presidency. The Taliban encirclement of Kabul was complete after the provincial garrison towns surrendered one after another and American soldiers caught their last flights home. 

​The biggest strategic mistake Ashraf Ghani made was fighting with Pakistan, a key stakeholder, and flirting with India, a distant spoiler. Pakistan’s stake in Afghanistan, for various reasons right or wrong, is forty years old. If Kabul couldn’t be overtly friendly with Islamabad, it should not have been overly hostile to it. Thus Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban became natural covert allies. The Americans, too, lost sight of the ball when they signed the 2020 Agreement by rejecting the Taliban’s demand to replace Ghani with an acceptable transitional option. What next?

​In America, President Biden – who was banking on popular goodwill for “bringing the boys home” by ending “America’s longest war” – is besieged with a popular backlash at another “Saigon moment”. Approval for his exit strategy has fallen radically among Democrats and Republicans from over 70% to under 50%. This implies that America might scapegoat Pakistan for its defeat. The anti-Pakistan narrative of “safe havens”, “Haqqani network is a veritable arm of the ISI”, “double-crossing”, etc, is already well established. If pushed, it could estrange Islamabad and derail international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan under an inclusive regime with regard for core human rights.

​In Afghanistan, the Taliban 2.0 can be expected to establish only a minimally acceptable inclusive regime with substantive levers of policy and power in their own hands. Initially they will try and run the country with an Amir ul Momineen or Supreme Leader at the helm of a handpicked Council of Ministers along the lines of Iran immediately after the Islamic Revolution. They will also crave international recognition and legitimacy by assuaging the fears of the regional powers – Russia, China, Iran, Central Asian States and Pakistan – by pledging economic cooperation and ending safe havens for regional militants, insurgents and separatists based in Afghanistan. For the international community, they will try to square their idea of human rights in an Islamic regime with Western notions of freedom and democracy.

​These factors are going to make or break the Taliban 2.0 regime. Al-Qaeda, TTP, ETM, IS, Daesh, Baloch separatists, etc., will not be easy to knock out or neutralize quickly. Their ranks have been swelled by the thousands of prisoners who have been released. If they continue to spill over across borders, tensions with neighbours will arise. If any Al-Qaeda attack on US soil is uncovered with footsteps going back to Afghanistan, America will come under pressure to exact revenge again.

​There is also the factor of Afghanistan 2.0. In the last two decades a new generation of Afghans has grown up in the light of secularism, media freedoms, women’s rights and information revolution. If the Taliban try to scuttle these in any brutal or swift manner, there will be a definite reaction at home and abroad with blowback consequences. Afghanistan 2.0’s economy — its financial system, education, administration and infrastructure , forex reserves, etc — are totally dependent on American largesse and aid.

Finally, much will depend on the experience and wisdom of the three top Taliban leaders who will guide Afghanistan into a new age. Their reputations and credentials precede them. The Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhunzada, was “an enthusiastic proponent of suicide bombings” who ordered his own son to blow himself up in an attack in Helmand province. He is also the strategist who fashioned the “talk talk, fight fight” strategy which proved so successful in the end. Sirajuddin Haqqani, number two, has been the “most dogged opponent” of the US who concentrated on “complex suicide attacks and targeted assassinations”. Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is the leading Presidential candidate, has served a decade in Pakistani prison on the say-so of the Americans.

​Pakistan is poised to win or lose big time. If Taliban 2.0 neutralize anti-Pakistan elements based in Afghanistan and facilitate the Pak-China CPEC corridor to Central Asia and the Central Asian rail, road, gas and oil corridor to South Asia, it will reap enormous dividends. But if the Taliban victory and American defeat raise the spectre of Islamic radicalism inside Pakistan either by emboldening disgruntled religious elements like the TLP or TTP or by triggering an anti-American populist wave that isolates Pakistan in the international community, the outlook will be bleak. Pakistan’s economy is totally dependent on the goodwill of the West and its civil society is sufficiently developed to resist any radical “Islamist” encroachments on their democratic freedoms.

​If the road to a Taliban victory in Afghanistan has been long and hard and bloody, the road ahead is neither secure nor assured. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban constitute only a small percentage of the 45-50% Pashtuns of Afghanistan. The other Pashtuns and ethnic regions may have surrendered to the Taliban military juggernaut but if they are not made real stakeholders in an inclusive broad based political and administrative state system, tribal revolts and foreign interventionists will start brewing once again in the bowels of Afghanistan.

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Pakistan and Radd-ul-Fasaad

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times


The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.

The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.

If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.

In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.

But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.

The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.

These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.

How a decade of misguided war has corroded the idea of Britain

Persistent unease about the legitimacy of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has left a toxic political legacy

• 
• • Ali Ansari
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 12 November 2014 17.48 GMT

Former Black Watch soldier John McCutcheon at a yes rally. ‘Geoff Hoon’s decision to announce the effective abolition of the Black Watch while the unit was fighting in Iraq went down like a lead balloon.' Photograph: Robert Perry/EPA

Few would deny that for all the wanton slaughter of the first world war, the conflict acted as a catalyst for profound change. The experience of war on such a scale had an immense and lasting impact on social relations and political ideas. Britain was shielded from the worst of the consequences that affected the continent, not least because victory provided a justification in itself for war, and because British values appeared to have been vindicated.

For over a decade now, Britain has been apparently engaged in another “war for civilisation”. Though different in character and intensity, this engagement is at the same time more protracted, less tangible in its aims, and perhaps more important in its consequences. While the British withdrawal from Afghanistan last month closed a chapter, it did not provide a conclusion. If the British like their wars short and sharp, with a clear cause and a victory they can celebrate, then Iraq, Afghanistan, and its associated interventions, along with the seemingly open-ended commitments they represent, have been a major source of disaffection.

As the interminable course of the Chilcott inquiry suggests, there are a great many outstanding questions on the motivations, means and methods that launched Britain on this most dangerous of political trajectories.

Some years ago, at a meeting in the House of Commons, I suggested that the war in Iraq, and particularly its opaque causes, was leading to a dangerous loss of moral authority abroad that could rebound on domestic politics. A senior Labour MP responded with a confidence that surprised me: Britons don’t vote on issues of foreign policy,she said, and the war in Iraq would have no significant effect. The return of a Labour majority in 2005 no doubt bolstered that view.

Yet the remark also seemed profoundly out of touch with the undercurrent of unease that was building most clearly among the professionals who provide the intellectual and administrative backbone of the British state and wider society. What was most striking about this malaise was that it was affecting people who had hitherto enjoyed a positive relationship with the idea of Britain. This was not some containable peripheral group susceptible to radicalisation; it was something more fundamental to the body politic, something more subtle. Many had put their faith in New Labour and everything Tony Blair’s “cool Britannia” represented. Iraq, emblematic of the broader global war on terror, tested that faith to breaking point. Many have come, slowly but surely, to feel a sense of betrayal.

I invite anyone who finds it difficult to believe that this tear in the moral fabric of the British state has had no repercussions on domestic politics to take a look at developments in Scotland. Far from being marginal to the political process, as some in Westminster like to believe, it might be better to see events in Scotland as a harbinger of things to come should complacency persist and political stupidity take hold.

Among the politicians to seize on the sense of unease was Alex Salmond. While some cautioned against the folly of the war, Salmond – then an MP at Westminster – went for the jugular and attacked Blair directly in a manner calculated to draw the attention of those veering towards disaffection. As the war dragged on and victory seemed ever more remote, Salmond’s attempt to impeach Blair seemed increasingly to strike a chord with the public. Indeed his criticisms have felt only more appropriate with the passage of time as the perception grows that a war intended to make us safe from terrorism has encouraged homegrown radicalisation while the man seen as culpable spends more time making money than making peace.

Salmond’s attacks were matched by an incompetence on the part of New Labour that was breathtaking in its short-sightedness. The Scots are rightly proud of their contributions to the British army, and the army has traditionally recruited well in Scotland, which boasts some of the most famous regiments, including the Black Watch. But they expect some respect in return.

To paraphrase Barack Obama, people aren’t necessarily against wars – just dumb wars; they don’t expect their sons to be sent to fight on a false prospectus. The decision of the then defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, to announce the effective abolition of the Black Watch while the unit on active combat in Iraq went down like a lead balloon. The “military covenant”, now enshrined in law, was found to be sadly wanting. The mood in Scotland was in some ways mirrored by scenes in Wooton Bassett. As affection for the soldiers served and respect for the armed forces have risen, so has contempt for the political leadership behind Britain’s continuing wars. By 2007 the SNP had made big gains, not least in areas traditionally associated with key regiments, allowing the party for the first time to replace Labour as the governing party in Scotland. Salmond was returned as first minister, and relentlessly condemned “illegal wars” in which, he assured his public, an independent Scotland would not have become embroiled. It became a central tenet of the independence campaign that was to follow the SNP landslide at the expense of Labour in 2011.

It was not so much that Britain was broken; it was that its embrace of ill-defined military interventions showed it was morally bankrupt and beyond repair. This view was surprisingly common among professionals, and the SNP courted them with a discipline, some might argue, cynicism that would have made New Labour proud. There is irony in the fact that the SNP is on the brink of disestablishing Labour from its Scottish power base by applying methods, tactics and slogans learned from a Labour electoral machine at its strategic best.

Yet appreciation of the strategic lie of the land is woefully missing from the current political class in Westminster. If the SNP’s rise is anything to go by, then foreign policy and war have consequences that, while not immediate, are all the more profound for it. Among the many inventions credited to the Scots, perhaps the greatest was the idea of Great Britain as a political construct. The September 2014 referendum has shown that among its progenitors there is life yet in the idea.

But the result should never have been as close as it was, and there is no doubt that the idea of Britain was under serious attack – not from without but from within: not only from critics but from pro-union politicians unable effectively to articulate a sense of what Britain means. Britain’s modern wars are by no means the only cause of our difficulties, but their mishandling has arguably tipped the balance from self-criticism to self-loathing. This country still lacks closure. We need to talk about the war.

Like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State spawned by those countries now in the lead to combat it.

Brahma Chellaney in The Hindu

Like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has been inadvertently spawned by the policies of those now in the lead to combat it. But will anything substantive be learned from this experience?

U.S. President Barack Obama has labelled the jihadist juggernaut that calls itself the Islamic State a “cancer,” while his Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel, has called it more dangerous than al-Qaeda ever was, claiming that its threat is “beyond anything we’ve seen.” No monster has ever been born on its own. So the question is: which forces helped create this new Frankenstein?

The Islamic State is a brutal, medieval organisation whose members take pride in carrying out beheadings and flaunting the severed heads of their victims as trophies. This cannot obscure an underlying reality: the Islamic State represents a Sunni Islamist insurrection against non-Sunni rulers in disintegrating Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, the ongoing fragmentation of states along primordial lines in the arc between Israel and India is spawning de facto new entities or blocks, including Shiastan, Wahhabistan, Kurdistan, ISstan and Talibanstan. Other than Iran, Egypt and Turkey, most of the important nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan (an internally torn state that could shrink to Punjabistan or, simply, ISIstan) are modern western concoctions, with no roots in history or pre-existing identity.

The West and agendas

It is beyond dispute that the Islamic State militia — formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — emerged from the Syrian civil war, which began indigenously as a localised revolt against state brutality under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before being fuelled with externally supplied funds and weapons. From Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-training centres in Turkey and Jordan, the rebels set up a Free Syrian Army (FSA), launching attacks on government forces, as a U.S.-backed information war demonised Mr. Assad and encouraged military officers and soldiers to switch sides.

 “By seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria while simultaneously working to shield jihad-bankrolling monarchies from the Arab Spring, Barack Obama ended up strengthening Islamist forces.” 

But the members of the U.S.-led coalition were never on the same page because some allies had dual agendas. While the three spearheads of the anti-Assad crusade — the U.S., Britain and France — focussed on aiding the FSA, the radical Islamist sheikhdoms such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates as well as the Islamist-leaning government in Turkey channelled their weapons and funds to more overtly Islamist groups. This splintered the Syrian opposition, marginalising the FSA and paving the way for the Islamic State’s rise.

The anti-Assad coalition indeed started off on the wrong foot by trying to speciously distinguish between “moderate” and “radical” jihadists. The line separating the two is just too blurred. Indeed, the term “moderatejihadists” is an oxymoron: Those waging jihad by the gun can never be moderate.

Invoking jihad

The U.S. and its allies made a more fundamental mistake by infusing the spirit of jihad in their campaign against Mr. Assad so as to help trigger a popular uprising in Syria. The decision to instil the spirit of jihad through television and radio broadcasts beamed to Syrians was deliberate — to provoke Syria’s majority Sunni population to rise against their secular government.

This ignored the lesson from Afghanistan (where the CIA in the 1980s ran, via Pakistan, the largest covert operation in its history) — that inciting jihad and arming “holy warriors” creates a deadly cocktail, with far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on international security. The Reagan administration openly used Islam as an ideological tool to spur armed resistance to Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

In 1985, at a White House ceremony in honour of several Afghan mujahideen — the jihadists out of which al-Qaeda evolved — President Ronald Reagan declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.” Earlier in 1982, Reagan dedicated the space shuttle ‘Columbia’ to the Afghan resistance. He declared, “Just as the Columbia, we think, represents man’s finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so too does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man’s highest aspirations for freedom. I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March 22 launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan.”

The Afghan war veterans came to haunt the security of many countries. Less known is the fact that the Islamic State’s self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — like Libyan militia leader Abdelhakim Belhadj (whom the CIA abducted and subjected to “extraordinary rendition”) and Chechen terrorist leader Airat Vakhitov — become radicalised while under U.S. detention. As torture chambers, U.S. detention centres have served as pressure cookers for extremism.

Mr. Obama’s Syria strategy took a page out of Reagan’s Afghan playbook. Not surprisingly, his strategy backfired. It took just two years for Syria to descend into a Somalia-style failed state under the weight of the international jihad against Mr. Assad. This helped the Islamic State not only to rise but also to use its control over northeastern Syria to stage a surprise blitzkrieg deep into Iraq this summer.

Had the U.S. and its allies refrained from arming jihadists to topple Mr. Assad, would the Islamic State have emerged as a lethal, marauding force? And would large swaths of upstream territory along the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers in Syria and Iraq have fallen into this monster’s control? The exigencies of the topple-Assad campaign also prompted the Obama administration to turn a blind eye to the flow of Gulf and Turkish aid to the Islamic State.

In fact, the Obama team, until recently, viewed the Islamic State as a “good” terrorist organisation in Syria but a “bad” one in Iraq, especially when it threatened to overrun the Kurdish regional capital, Erbil. In January, Mr. Obama famously dismissed the Islamic State as a local “JV team” trying to imitate al-Qaeda but without the capacity to be a threat to America. It was only after the public outrage in the U.S. over the video-recorded execution of American journalist James Foley and the flight of Iraqi Christians and Yazidis that the White House re-evaluated the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Full circle

Many had cautioned against the topple-Assad campaign, fearing that extremist forces would gain control in the vacuum. Those still wedded to overthrowing Mr. Assad’s rule, however, contend that Mr. Obama’s failure to provide greater aid, including surface-to-air missiles, to the Syrian rebels created a vacuum that produced the Islamic State. In truth, more CIA arms to the increasingly ineffectual FSA would have meant a stronger and more deadly Islamic State.

As part of his strategic calculus to oust Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama failed to capitalise on the Arab Spring, which was then in full bloom. By seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria while simultaneously working to shield jihad-bankrolling monarchies from the Arab Spring, he ended up strengthening Islamist forces — a development reinforced by the U.S.-led overthrow of another secular Arab dictator, Muammar Qadhafi, which has turned Libya into another failed state and created a lawless jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep.

In fact, no sooner had Qadhafi been killed than Libya’s new rulers established a theocracy, with no opposition from the western powers that brought about the regime change. Indeed, the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. For the same reason, the U.S. has condoned the Arab monarchs for their long-standing alliance with Islamists. It has failed to stop these cloistered royals from continuing to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in other countries. The American interest in maintaining pliant regimes in oil-rich countries has trumped all other considerations.

Today, Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is coming full circle. Having portrayed Mr. Assad as a bloodthirsty monster, Washington must now accept Mr. Assad as the lesser of the two evils and work with him to defeat the larger threat of the Islamic State.

The fact that the Islamic State’s heartland remains in northern Syria means that it cannot be stopped unless the U.S. extends air strikes into Syria. As the U.S. mulls that option — for which it would need at least tacit permission from Syria, which still maintains good air defences — it is fearful of being pulled into the middle of the horrendous civil war there. It is thus discreetly urging Mr. Assad to prioritise defeating the Islamic State.

Make no mistake: like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State is a monster inadvertently spawned by the policies of those now in the lead to combat it. The question is whether anything substantive will be learned from this experience, unlike the forgotten lessons of America’s anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan.

At a time when jihadist groups are gaining ground from Mali to Malaysia, Mr. Obama’s current effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban, for example, gives little hope that any lesson will be learned. U.S.-led policies toward the Islamic world have prevented a clash between civilisations by fostering a clash within a civilisation, but at serious cost to regional and international security.

Soldier worship blinds Britain to the grim reality of war

A Royal Marine's murder of a wounded Afghan in his custody lays bare the truth of military campaigns

• 
• • Joe Glenton
  • The Guardian, Friday 8 November 2013 16.49 GMT

'We should not feel compelled to point out that brave men and women are fighting in Afghanistan to secure our safety every time the military is mentioned.' Photograph: Getty Images

With the official Remembrance Day ceremony closing in, and soldier worship about to hit its tedious annual peak, the public have been given an unexpected glimpse of war's unsanitised face. A Royal Marine has been convicted of murdering a wounded Afghan in his custody. Two marines were acquitted.

While the public has for 12 years been told otherwise, the Afghan occupation is not simply a case of good guys and bad guys. Nevertheless, tired references to "bad apples" will now flow. The Ministry of Defence will repeatedly and frantically highlight the supposed "good work" the troops have been doing in the smoking ruins of Afghanistan. A stock statement will be released by the MoD about military values and high standards of behaviour. Allegations of law-breaking, they will tell us, are investigated thoroughly and can result in disciplinary action up to and including court martial, discharge and prison. And all of this will obscure rather than address the issue.

From the outset this episode has been written through with the brand of self-delusion that has come to typify the "good war". The original arrest of seven marines in 2012, following the discovery of footage on a laptop, sparked an indignant Facebook campaign to "Support the 7 Royal Marine Commandos arrested for murder in Afghanistan". To date, it has attracted 63,000 "likes". If nothing else, this highlights how a section of society can leap to the defence of servicemen long before the facts are known.

It is my view that Royal Marine commandos are the best light role infantry in the world – bar none. Bootnecks, as they are colloquially known, are capable, professional and robust soldiers. But I can say all this without once gushing about "heroes" and without ever once needing to shy away from an uncomfortable truth simply because it happens to concern soldiers.

We should not feel compelled to point out that those brave men and women are fighting in Afghanistan to secure our safety every time the military is mentioned. First, because it is not true that they are; and second, because such blustering at the merest glimpse of camouflage clothing is an obvious and embarrassing capitulation to dogma.

The question at the core of this is not how we can most tastefully play down criminal acts carried out by the services. The question we ought to be brave enough to ask is: why is there such surprise when atrocities occur? There is a belief in moralistic sections of the political left and the more dumbly macho sections of the political right that soldiers, as a rule, relish killing people. Both sides are wrong – a trained killer does not equate to mindless robot.

To understand why an occupying soldier turns to vigilantism and murder, we can do worse than look at their daily experience, which can never be divorced from the over-arching political context. Killings like this most often occur when soldiers have lost a comrade or comrades. They lose comrades because they are in a war. Killings like these can reasonably expected to be carried out by all sides in any conflict.

What radicalises soldiers then is not too far from what radicalises lone wolf killers, terror cells and drone strike orphans: the impact of policy on an individual and the people you care about. Marine A, now convicted, was a 39-year-old senior non-commissioned officer. He had done six tours of Afghanistan as an infantryman. He is likely to have experienced countless engagements and lost various friends in a failing war. This does not excuse his actions, but why should he and his fellow marines' callous attitude to death, shown in the transcripts of the helmet camera recording of the event, be a surprise?

When a political decision is taken that puts men who are primed for violence into a war, bad things will happen. This is another reason to make sure that war is the very last resort and not, as in the case of the post-9/11 wars, something that is engaged in lightly, in a spirit of hubris or in the pursuit of narrow interests.

At its core, this is a problem at the political level, which can only be resolved or avoided at the political level. It does not diminish the responsibility of the killers to say the issue is more complex than bad apples letting the side down. The culture of irrational and uncritical soldier worship serves only to blind us to the realities of war and occupation – and this contrived, blinding effect, I have long suspected, is rather the point of lionising the military.

In Defence of Dialogue