Afghanistan - a hidden catastrophe
Monday, 30 June 2008
There has been scandalously little reporting of the war in Afghanistan, even though the 7,700 British and more than 40,000 NATO troops there are engaged in more intense fighting than in Iraq.
When it is mentioned at all, the war in Afghanistan is presented as a humanitarian, nation-building operation. The reality is that the occupation is itself creating a humanitarian disaster.
In the summer of 2007 the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that the situation in Afghanistan was becoming desperate: “Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security, such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and regular aerial bombing raids…Thousands of people have fled their homes and are continuing to move in search of safer areas”.
The Red Cross report said that the local population was suffering particularly badly in the south where the fighting has been heaviest and where most British troops are based.
Afghanistan is now one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world. It stands at 174 out of the 178 countries on the UN’s world development index. More than one third of children suffer malnutrition. Seven per cent of under-fives die of hunger. Life expectancy is 44, health care is non-existent for the majority of Afghans and the country has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
The authoritative Senlis report says that only two countries in the world have worse child poverty rates and that poverty and fighting have led to the uncontrolled spread of refugee camps across the country. The report blames this situation directly on the NATO forces’ war against anti-government groups which has “rendered reconstruction efforts in the area obsolete” and on the shameful level of aid delivered “notwithstanding proclamations of commitments towards the people”.
In the first year of occupation the US promised Afghanistan 1/ 40th of the aid promised to Iraq in 2003. Very little even of that has been delivered. Only 8 billion dollars of the 20 billion promised by the international community has materialised.
All the indications are that over the last year the level of fighting has increased dramatically. There are now nearly twice as many foreign troops in Afghanistan as there were in 2006, and Oxfam estimates that last year therewere four times asmany aerial bombing raids on Afghanistan as Iraq.
But a series of official reports out in January 2008 show that the military strategy is not working and that Afghanistan is on its way to becoming a failed state.
It is not surprising that opposition to the occupation is growing. The Senlis report states that the Taliban has “increasing control of several parts of southern, south eastern and western Afghanistan”. In the past, it says, the Taliban was finding it difficult to retain control of terrain it had conquered.
“That situation has nowchanged”.Anti-occupation forces now control much of Afghanistan’s key infrastructure. They regularly disrupt the ring road from Kabul to Herat, and have the capacity to close the other main roads to the capital. They run electricity substations in three key districts in Helmand, effectively giving themcontrol over the region’s power supply.
The resistance is not mainly inspired by religion. It is fuelled by a mixture of social and economic grievances which include the number of civilian deaths caused by the occupiers, lack of aid, forced crop eradication, lack of public services and the perception that the Karzai government is a puppet regime. No wonder that even US appointee, President Karzai, has recently criticised the occupation and refused to back Paddy Ashdown as ‘Viceroy’.
Military commanders from Britain and the US have been warning it will take decades to ‘pacify’ Afghanistan. The disaster that is Iraq has made some semblance of success in Afghanistan vital for the western powers. But the truth is that the mission here too is failing, and recognition of failure is causing a crisis in NATO. Canada has served notice it will withdraw its troops unless there are significant reinforcements, and in defiance of the US, Germany has refused to send its troops to
the combat zones in the south. In the meantime the occupation causes untold suffering for the Afghan people. It is time for the troops to leave.
