According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden’s extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing.
Yet in late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily Telegraph), this had both bin Laden’s approval and that of Mullah Omah, the Taliban leader.
The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way, he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf who said he ‘could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety.’
But who really killed the deal?
The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said that ‘casting our objectives too narrowly’ risked ‘a premature collapse of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin Laden was captured.’
And yet the US and British governments insisted there was no alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had ‘refused’ to hand over Osama bin Laden. What the Afghani people got instead was ‘American justice’ – imposed by a president who, as well as denouncing international agreements on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture and global warming, has refused to sign up for an international court to try war criminals: the one place where bin Laden might be put on trial.
When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he was correct.
Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic audience then to accelerate American influence in a vital region where there has been a power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to surpass even those of the US. That is why control of Central Asia and the Caspian basin oilfields is important as exploration gets under way.
There was, until the cluster bombing of innocents, a broad-based recognition that there had to be international action to combat the kind of terrorism that took thousands of lives in New York.
But these humane responses to September 11 were appropriated by an American administration, whose subsequent actions ought to have left all but the complicit and the politically blind in no doubt that it intended to reinforce its post-cold war assertion of global supremacy – an assertion that has a long, documented history.
The ‘war on terrorism’ gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress into pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American justice and democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism laws of the very kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the Irish war.
In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and Britain, mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America invites ludicrous accusations of ‘treachery’.
Above all, what this false victory has demonstrated is that, to those in power in Washington and London and those who speak for them, certain human lives have greater worth than others and that the killing of only one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that, we beckon the repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again. John Pilger, article November 2001, ‘The War of Lies Goes On’
On the day Gordon Brown made his ‘major policy speech’ on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to syphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. ‘At least’ 90 were killed, although Nato prefers not to count its civilian enemy. ‘It was a scene from hell,’ said Mohammed Daud, a witness. ‘Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere.’ No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street ...
The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected ...
There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trial made that clear. He has been told as much by British Intelligence and security services. Brown’s own security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence and grief to his own people. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘For Many Britons the Party Game is Over.
Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.
First question: Why are ‘we’ in Afghanistan? Answer: ‘To try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme.’ Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.
Second question: Why are ‘we’ in Iraq? Answer: To ‘plant a western-style open democracy’. Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.
Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush's speeches for ‘evidence’ of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: ‘The D word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it. After all,’ he says, the invasion of Iraq ‘was launched as Operation Iraqi Freedom.’ Moreover, says the BBC man, ‘in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy … These examples show that these were on Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion.’
Try to laugh, please.
Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan by ‘coalition’ aircraft, including those directed by British forces engaged in ‘the country’s rebuilding programme’. The bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, ‘our’ aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept, according to eyewitnesses. BBC News initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that ‘less than peanuts’ (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan. Such wags, the Welsh. John Pilger, article September 2008, ‘A Murderous Theatre of the Absurd’
And so what happens is the Bush administration singles out a country Afghanistan where probably some terrorist cells, some of the many many many terrorist cells, exist and bombs Afghanistan for a year killing several thousand people. Probably killing as many people who were killed in the Twin Towers on September 11th. What does that do to combat terrorism? Nothing. Does it diminish terrorism? ... Imagine how tough the United States must be to be the most powerful military country in the world and to be able to bomb Afghanistan, one of the poorest more miserable countries in the world. Howard Zinn, Liberty Bound 2004
It’s heroin. And in Britain and the rest of the world almost all of it comes from one place: Afghanistan. Despite international aid projects, attacks on crops, and rough justice, an explosion of heroin is coming out of Afghanistan – purer and cheaper than ever before. Fed by fighting, instability, poverty and corruption, this is another battle with global consequences. Afghan Heroin: The Lost War
Televisions had been banned in Afghanistan but these men were honoured guests. Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda faithful were there to watch the horror of 9/11 unfold. What al Qaeda called the Manhattan Raid. So the West invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistan: War Without End?
The president told his generals to unleash holy hell. ibid.
Washington rejected a deal with the Taliban. Their Afghan mission was kill or capture, and they made no distinction between Taliban and al Qaeda. ibid.
The Americans had deployed less than a hundred troops in which to seal all routes out of these vast mountains. ibid.
Greeting the fugitives were not only friends and family but also elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence sympathetic to al Qaeda and who had also helped the Taliban win the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. ibid.
Britain was going to Helmand come what may. ibid.
The summer of 2006 saw the British army engaged in some of the fiercest fighting for half a century. ibid.
A slow drum-beat of death began to roll. ibid.
The CIA concluded that America’s closest ally in the region could no longer be trusted. Pakistan’s Intelligence Service the ISI was playing a double game. ibid.
America was getting sucked in deeper and deeper and there was no way out. ibid.
The presidential election was weaved with corruption. ibid.
Afghanistan was beginning to look like another tin-pot dictatorship. ibid.