Brace Yourself For Part Two Of The War For Civilisation
Roll on next year, and don't worry about bin Laden - he may be back
just in time to participate in Part Two of the War for Civilization.
Robert Fisk
It needed my old Irish journalist colleague, Vincent Browne, to point
out the obvious to me. With a headache as big as Afghanistan, reading
through a thousand newspaper reports on the supposed "aftermath" of
the Afghan war, I'd become drugged by the lies. Afghan women were free
at last, "our" peacekeeping force was on its way, the Taliban were
crushed. Anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan had collapsed -
we'll forget my little brush with some real Afghans there a couple of
weeks ago. Al-Qa'ida was being "smoked out" of its cave. Osama bin
Laden was - well, not captured or even dead; but - well, the Americans
had a videotape, incomprehensible to every Arab I've met, which
"proves" that our latest monster planned the crimes against humanity
on New York and Washington.
So it needed Vincent, breathing like a steam engine as he always does
when he's angry, to point to the papers in Gemma's, my favourite
Dublin newsagents. "What in Christ's sake is going on, Bob?'' he
asked. "Have you seen the headlines of all this shite?'' and he pulled
Newsweek from the shelf. The headline: After The Evil.
"What is this biblical bollocks?'' Vincent asked me. Osama bin Laden's
overgrained, videotaped face stared from the cover of the magazine, a
dark, devilish image from Dante's circles of hell. When he captured
Berlin, Stalin announced that his troops had entered "the lair of the
fascist beast''. But the Second World War has nothing on this.
So let's do a "story-so-far". After Arab mass-murderers crashed four
hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and
Pennsylvania, a crime against humanity which cost more than 4,000
innocent lives, President Bush announced a crusade for infinite
"justice" - later downgraded to infinite freedom - and bombed
Afghanistan. Using the gunmen and murderers of the discredited
Northern Alliance to destroy the gunmen and murderers of the
discredited Taliban, the Americans bombed bin Laden's cave fortresses
and killed hundreds of Afghan and Arab fighters, not including the
prisoners executed after the Anglo-US-Northern Alliance suppression of
the Mazar prison revolt.
The production of the bin Laden videotape - utterly convincing
evidence of his guilt to the world's press, largely, if wilfully,
ignored by the Muslim world - helped to obscure the fact that Mr Evil,
seemed to have disappeared. It also helped to airbrush a few other
facts away. We could forget that US air strikes, according to
statistics compiled by a Chicago University professor, have now killed
more innocent Afghans than the hijackers killed westerners and others
in the World Trade Centre. We could forget that Mullah Omar, the
mysterious leader of the Taliban, has also got away.
We could ignore the fact that, save for a few brave female souls,
almost all Afghan women in Kabul continued to wear the burqa. We could
certainly close our eyes to the massive preponderance of Northern
Alliance killers represented in the new UN-supported, pro-western
Government in Kabul. We could clap our hands when a mere 50 Royal
Marines arrived in Afghanistan this weekend to support a UN-mandated
British-led "peace" force of only a few thousand men who will need the
Kabul government's permission to operate in the city and which, in
numbers, will come to about one-third of the complement of the British
Army destroyed in the Kabul Gorge in 1842.
The "peace" force thinks it will have to defend humanitarian aid
convoys from robbers and dissident Taliban. In fact, it will have to
fight off the Northern Alliance mafia and drug-growers and warlords,
as well as the vicious guerrillas sent out to strike them by bin
Laden's survivors. If nothing else, the Taliban made the roads and
villages of Afghanistan safe for Afghans and foreigners alike. Now,
you can scarcely drive from Kabul to Jalalabad.
Presumably, the CIA will let us pay the Alliance mobsters for their
war in Afghanistan. One of the untold stories of this conflict is the
huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to
fight for the US. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance
payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt
on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance - which didn't
have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier - could throw
a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a fire
site. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province are now
riding around in brand-new four-wheel drives with thousands of dollars
to hand out to their gunmen. I wasn't surprised to read that a Somali
warlord is now offering his cash-for-hire services to the US for the
next round of the War on Civilization.
Fortunately for us, the civilian victims of America's B52s will remain
unknown in their newly dug graves. Even before the war ended, around
3,700 of them - not counting Mullah Omar's and bin Laden's gunmen -
had been ripped to pieces in our War for Civilization. A few scattered
signs of discontent - the crowd that assaulted me two weeks ago, for
example, outraged at the killing of their families - can be quickly
erased from the record.
It is obviously perverse to note that I haven't met a single ordinary
Muslim or, indeed many westerners - Pakistani, Afghan, Arab, British,
French, American - who actually believe all this guff. Let's just
remember that the new Kabul government is as committed to support
"Islam, democracy, pluralism (sic) and social justice'' as Mr Bush is
to Good (sic) and the Destruction of Evil. Roll on next year, and
don't worry about bin Laden - he may be back just in time to
participate in Part Two of the War for Civilization.
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