Simon Jenkins: From Newry to Helmand, the lessons are the same
[Simon Jenkins is a British journalist and author.]
An explosion, then silence. Next come the shouts and the sirens. It is another bomb. Oh God, people cry, is anyone dead? On this occasion, no. But Northern Ireland sees a terrorist incident, a bombing or a shooting, twice week, double the rate of a year ago. Someone is charged with terrorism every six days. Each time, local leaders are summoned to plead for calm. Each outrage is dismissed as the work of criminal dissidents and described as "a matter for the police". Nothing must disrupt the narrative of normalcy.
Terrorism in Northern Ireland is nowadays hardly reported because it has rightly been redefined as a crime. The terrorist must be denied the oxygen of publicity. And it works. If Monday's court-house bombing in Newry had been perpetrated on a public building in London there would have been pandemonium. Security chiefs would have been summoned. Doors would have been kicked down in immigrant suburbs and "suspects" arrested.
Gordon Brown would have dived for his Cobra bunker, declaring "the nation is under threat" and the bomb was proof of the necessity of the Afghan war. That was how Washington reacted yesterday to news of a (failed) plot to put a bomb in the New York subway. It was nothing as commonplace as a crime but, said a spokesman, "an assault on our nation … a threat to our homeland security".
The war in Afghanistan has progressed since 2006, when the defence secretary, John Reid, and his local commander, now the head of the army, General Sir David Richards, confidently told the world that driving the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan would be easy. After ridiculing intelligence and advice – not least the Russians' experience of trying to do likewise – Nato troops found the Pashtun people reacted badly to being invaded, shot and blitzed. They found insurgents fought back ferociously. It made no difference how many schools and roads were built. It made no difference how often Nato apologised for bombing the wrong targets. The Kabul regime's hold on Afghanistan continued to slide and does so to this day.
This week the prolonged campaign to reassert central authority in the small town of Marjah in Helmand is drawing to a close. By adopting the surge tactic of blanketing an area with soldiers, the occupying power has forced the enemy into retreat. As in Falluja in 2004, American troops are adept at "making a wilderness and calling it peace". But they must now contemplate the barely conceivable prospect of doing likewise in Afghanistan's second city of Kandahar. Fighting the Taliban there will make the slaughter of 60 Afghan civilians in the past week seem mild.
Despite publicity from embedded journalists about the brave Afghan army, there is no comfort to be had from any analyst that Afghan troops and police can ever hold southern Afghanistan against the Taliban's ruthless guerrillas. The reliance of the British government (and the Tories) on "training the Afghan army" as a precondition for a British withdrawal is not a strategy. It is a figleaf concealing the absence of a strategy. The weekend air strike against "escaping Taliban" – massacring some 27 civilians 150 miles from Marjah – shows how far attrition has degraded Nato discipline and left various special forces operating as private warlords.
The policy of trying to kill Taliban to the negotiating table is as barren as that of winning over peasants by rocketing their homes and destroying their poppy crops. One day some sort of treaty will have to be reached with various Taliban leaders, some of whom had by 2001 qualified as "moderates" and were hostile to al-Qaida. Yet it is Nato policy to assassinate these leaders, mostly by much-vaunted drones, replacing older negotiators likely to be more amenable to peace with younger successors furious for revenge. Yet again, policy is counter-productive. An undiminished concomitant of war down the ages is stupidity.
This week the British government received an answer to its oft-pleaded question, how can it possibly withdraw?..
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
An explosion, then silence. Next come the shouts and the sirens. It is another bomb. Oh God, people cry, is anyone dead? On this occasion, no. But Northern Ireland sees a terrorist incident, a bombing or a shooting, twice week, double the rate of a year ago. Someone is charged with terrorism every six days. Each time, local leaders are summoned to plead for calm. Each outrage is dismissed as the work of criminal dissidents and described as "a matter for the police". Nothing must disrupt the narrative of normalcy.
Terrorism in Northern Ireland is nowadays hardly reported because it has rightly been redefined as a crime. The terrorist must be denied the oxygen of publicity. And it works. If Monday's court-house bombing in Newry had been perpetrated on a public building in London there would have been pandemonium. Security chiefs would have been summoned. Doors would have been kicked down in immigrant suburbs and "suspects" arrested.
Gordon Brown would have dived for his Cobra bunker, declaring "the nation is under threat" and the bomb was proof of the necessity of the Afghan war. That was how Washington reacted yesterday to news of a (failed) plot to put a bomb in the New York subway. It was nothing as commonplace as a crime but, said a spokesman, "an assault on our nation … a threat to our homeland security".
The war in Afghanistan has progressed since 2006, when the defence secretary, John Reid, and his local commander, now the head of the army, General Sir David Richards, confidently told the world that driving the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan would be easy. After ridiculing intelligence and advice – not least the Russians' experience of trying to do likewise – Nato troops found the Pashtun people reacted badly to being invaded, shot and blitzed. They found insurgents fought back ferociously. It made no difference how many schools and roads were built. It made no difference how often Nato apologised for bombing the wrong targets. The Kabul regime's hold on Afghanistan continued to slide and does so to this day.
This week the prolonged campaign to reassert central authority in the small town of Marjah in Helmand is drawing to a close. By adopting the surge tactic of blanketing an area with soldiers, the occupying power has forced the enemy into retreat. As in Falluja in 2004, American troops are adept at "making a wilderness and calling it peace". But they must now contemplate the barely conceivable prospect of doing likewise in Afghanistan's second city of Kandahar. Fighting the Taliban there will make the slaughter of 60 Afghan civilians in the past week seem mild.
Despite publicity from embedded journalists about the brave Afghan army, there is no comfort to be had from any analyst that Afghan troops and police can ever hold southern Afghanistan against the Taliban's ruthless guerrillas. The reliance of the British government (and the Tories) on "training the Afghan army" as a precondition for a British withdrawal is not a strategy. It is a figleaf concealing the absence of a strategy. The weekend air strike against "escaping Taliban" – massacring some 27 civilians 150 miles from Marjah – shows how far attrition has degraded Nato discipline and left various special forces operating as private warlords.
The policy of trying to kill Taliban to the negotiating table is as barren as that of winning over peasants by rocketing their homes and destroying their poppy crops. One day some sort of treaty will have to be reached with various Taliban leaders, some of whom had by 2001 qualified as "moderates" and were hostile to al-Qaida. Yet it is Nato policy to assassinate these leaders, mostly by much-vaunted drones, replacing older negotiators likely to be more amenable to peace with younger successors furious for revenge. Yet again, policy is counter-productive. An undiminished concomitant of war down the ages is stupidity.
This week the British government received an answer to its oft-pleaded question, how can it possibly withdraw?..