The reality of war - Afghanistan and Central Asia

The Woodstock literary festival was held last week and one of the speakers was the Independent's legendary Middle East reporter, Robert Fisk. Fisk put forward the view, with which I totally agree, that the media are currently sanitising war reporting, and that the public should really be shown the full barbarous reality of war and its outcome. Fisk believes that if this happened that the public in the US and UK etc would find it much more difficult to distance themselves from the wars and allow the politicians and generals to ride roughshod over their views, which is what is happening now. Opinion poll after opinion poll in this country show that the majority of the public want British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan but the politicians continue to ignore their views. People should be much angrier about this and Fisk believes that the real images of war, which the BBC and Channel 4 etc disguise, would really lead to a wave of revulsion and outrage.

An article in last week's Morning Star made the point that the Afghan war is becoming increasingly similar to the war in Vietnam in that it is destabilising the surrounding countries, due to the attempt by the occupying powers to secure their interests in both the theatre of war and the neighbouring state. In the case of Vietnam it was Laos and Cambodia which were affected, the US bombing and napalming both in an effort to root out communist sympathisers. In the Afghan war it is Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The effort of the US forces to maintain an airbase in the latter country, and also to counter Russian influence in the country and the region generally, has In Kyrgyzstan the US intervention has contributed to two revolutions.

"The massive Manas air base is the key transit point for the Afghan war, with troops and material passing through the enormous facility. Some 55,000 US soldiers flew through Manas this May. Most Kyrgyz were very unsettled by a huge chunk of their land being leased to the US to fight a war. Widespread belief that supply contracts for the Manas base were being used to bribe the families of the president were significant factors in two revolutions.

President Askar Akayev was ousted by the relatively non-violent tulip revolution in 2005. A belief that his son-in-law was being paid off by Manas contractors was an important influence on the revolutionaries.

His successor president Kurmanbek Bakiyev fell in a bloodier revolution this April. Again, suspicion about where the money from the Manas contracts went was an important influence on the revolution.

The companies involved in supplying the fuel deny any wrongdoing, but they are very opaque.

They are based in Gibraltar, with allied offices in London. One of the Manas fuel companies has registered offices it shares with Elegant Escorts & Dating Ltd above a row of shops on the Finchley Road, north London, which does not build confidence.

A US congressional committee has launched an investigation into the Manas oil contracts. Investigation head Congressman John F Tierney emphasised "the significance of the allegations of corruption at the base as a driver of the revolution" in Kyrgyzstan."

Solomon Hughes also points out that General David Petraeus's "counter-insurgency" manual contains 86 references to Vietnam-era strategies for use in Afghanistan. The destabilisation of Pakistan is obvious for all to see and the issue was discussed at last Saturday's Steering Committee meeting of Stop the War Coalition which I attended. So the war continues to spread and to cause more and more security risks in the UK. It is also having a detrimental effect on the surrounding states and stoking up further civil wars and regional conflicts. The only way out is a negotiated settlement with all parties but NATO is not yet prepared to do this. Several speakers at the Stop the War meeting did not believe the drawdown dates of 2011 being given by Obama for the US and 2015 by Cameron for the UK. There is no end of this conflict in sight and the waves from the war spread out to engulf Pakistan, the Stans and finally Iran.

Fisk is right that only the broadcasting of the true images of the war will bring home to the UK public the real impact which the NATO forces are having there and not the sanitised images of coffins coming through Wooton Bassett, which no matter how poignant, do not reveal the horror of this war on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As Wilfred Owen wrote in the magnificent anti-war poem 'Dulce Et Decorum Est':

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace



Behind the wagon that we flung him in,


And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,


His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;


If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood


Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,


Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud


Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --


My friend, you would not tell with such high zest


To children ardent for some desperate glory,


The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.