John Pilger | New Statesman, 25 September 2008
The media turns the other way, or perverts the truth, while an increasingly imperialist United States, with Britain in tow, pursues its expansionist interests
Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his “unrivalled access to No 10”. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and, my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
The Guardian‘s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one error of judgement? The bank-rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.
Following the US
Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as “Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns”, thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. “When truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour’s engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new “economic strengths” to be its transnational corporations, the “aerospace” industry (weapons) and “the pre-eminence of the City of London”. The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on “values”. Mandelson and Liddle demanded “a tough discipline” and a “hardworking majority” and the “proper bringing-up [sic] of children”. And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used “moral” and “morality” 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.
A “think tank” called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair’s “policy units”, wrote a book called Connexity. “In much of the world today,” he offered, “the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used.” As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: “For the first time ever, most of the world’s most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory.”
That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political “culture” that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our “too many freedoms” to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.
The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe’s most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America’s military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified “black” – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.
In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The “change” candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
War of the world
On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.
It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington’s historic rapacious intervention in its “backyard”. Washington’s “Plan Colombia” is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund “the war on drugs and organised crime” in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its “business stability”.
Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British “School of the Americas” is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of “global security”.
In Latin America, the Bush government is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia and possibly Paraguay
None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of “the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years”. He describes a catastrophic “relentless winner-take-all of Russia’s post-1991 weakness”, with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”. The result, writes Cohen, “is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era.”
This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as “a duel to the death – perhaps literally”. The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, “reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac”. The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a “pariah”. Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, “when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?” It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.
*Stephen Cohen’s article, “The New American Cold War”, is reprinted in full in the current issue of the Spokesman, published by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation: http://www.spokesmanbooks.com
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Peace and Justice Post 
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan
October 2, 2008Bush’s Other Failed War
By DEEPAK TRIPATHI | Counterpunch, Sep 30, 2008
The audacity of recent attacks by the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan has caused alarm in the region and beyond. The bombings of the Indian embassy in Kabul in June 2008 and the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20 have been devastating. Large swathes of Pakistan’s frontier provide militant groups with sanctuaries, from where they launch attacks in both countries. The targets are chosen with precision and the campaign of violence has spread to India. A few days before the Islamabad bombing, a series of explosions in the Indian capital, Delhi, killed and maimed scores of shoppers at several locations. There have also been attacks in other Indian cities in recent months.
These events have caused tension between the Bush administration and Pakistan, America’s main ally in the ‘war on terror’. On more than one occasion, U.S. helicopters carrying troops have attempted to land inside Pakistani territory, without authorization. Pakistani troops have fired on them and the helicopters have had to retreat. The anti-U.S. sentiment has rarely been so strong in the region. The authorities in Pakistan cannot afford to allow American troops on their country’s soil. The authorities in India, with a Muslim minority nearly as large as the entire population of Pakistan, struggle to decide how far to move towards imposing draconian measures. How have things come to such a pass?
The origins of today’s crisis rest in the past. For almost half a century after the Second World War, the United States had been at the forefront in efforts to contain communism. By December 1991, the Soviet empire had collapsed and America was in search of a new role. America’s proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan had ended. Billions of dollars worth of weaponry was left in the devastated country. The strategic importance of Afghanistan had diminished for the United States. The army of Islamic groups, financed and equipped by America, turned bitter. In their eyes, it was a deliberate act of abandonment.
The American economy had suffered years of decline, to which vast military expenditure on foreign wars had contributed. There were new opportunities to achieve economic renaissance at home and reshape the international order abroad. Bill Clinton, who won the presidency in November 1992, was keen to seize these opportunities.
However, there was a problem. Following the breakup of the Soviet state, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus had found themselves with almost all long-range nuclear weapons. Smaller tactical arms were scattered all over the territory of the defunct state. Every republic except Kyrgyzstan had inherited them. One nuclear state had suddenly become many. Unless these weapons were dismantled and Russia was helped to transform itself into a democracy in control of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal, the world would be a dangerous place.
When Clinton assumed the presidency in January 1993, America had already liberated Kuwait after brief Iraqi occupation. Clinton moved on to his agenda to stabilize the former USSR and rebuild the American economy. He was aware that a conservative takeover in Russia could start a new arms race and sink his plan for American renaissance. Clinton told his advisers to help Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, in the transformation of his country. The focus of Clinton’s policy was to be investment in Russia.
One of its consequences was a move from Afghanistan, left in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ – war of all against all. The policy to rescue Russia continued until the end of the Clinton presidency. In the darkest period of Russia’s economic crisis, Yeltsin was forced to default on repayment of foreign debt and devalue the Russian currency in 1998. Clinton pushed the International Monetary Fund to support a recovery program. Within two years, Russia’s income from oil sales had risen substantially, helped by an increase in the world prices. The crisis had subsided.
It was in late1994 that a little-known Islamic militia, described as the Taleban, came to prominence in southern Afghanistan, amid the destruction of what was left of the Afghan state. The country was split into numerous fiefdoms run by rival warlords. Afghan and foreign Mujahideen had spent years fighting the Soviet Union and its client regime in Kabul. Now, they had nothing to do. Foreign money had dried up. Weapons were plentiful and America had walked away.
Murder, rape, looting and plundering became the way of life for these fighters, as Pakistan’s rival agencies tolerated or collaborated with the Taleban to impose a brutal regime in Afghanistan. The civilian government of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the most important U.S. ally in the region, were the staunchest supporters of the Taleban regime, which gave sanctuary to Al-Qaeda. America had, in effect, handed over Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, which represents the most totalitarian brand of Sunni Islam. Its junior partner was Pakistan.
The 9/11 attacks prompted the United States to return to Afghanistan to overthrow the Taleban regime and destroy Al-Qaeda. Overthrowing the Taleban regime was the easy task. But the stabilization and reconstruction effort has suffered a calamitous failure. The Taleban and Al-Qaeda are regrouped and reinforced. Their top leaders continue to elude capture. Afghans at first welcomed their liberation from the Taleban. They are now very resentful of the Americans and their use of overwhelming force, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties.
Afghanistan has been at the center of great power games for centuries. But outsiders have always failed to tame the spirit of resistance of its people. At the peak of their dominance, the British and Russian empires played the Great Game. In the Cold War, it was between America and the Soviet Union. Today, as the United States, the only hyperpower in the world, tries to reshape the Afghan state, it finds the new game as difficult as ever.
As the turbulent presidency of George W. Bush comes to a close, it leaves a legacy of two wars, with colossal economic and human costs. And America needs a president who knows how to extinguish the fires of war abroad and how to lead his own country into a period of renaissance once again.
Deepak Tripathi, former BBC correspondent in Afghanistan, is the author of a study of the Cold War. Its finding were published in DIALECTICS OF THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT, a short monograph, by the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, in March 2008. The full study is to be published as a book. He is currently writing a book on the presidency of George W. Bush. More about his works can be found on http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com.
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Tags:Afghanistan, America's proxy war against the Soviet Union, George W. Bush, Mujahideen, Pakistan, President Clinton, Taliban, United States, US attacks inside Pakistan, weapons in Afghanistan, Yeltsin
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