Afghanistan
has revealed to us the emptiness and hypocrisy of many of our
beliefs, and that we may be returning from there also haunted by
Mujahideen ghosts, knowing that, underneath, we believe in nothing.
America and
the coalition forces invaded Afghanistan not just to find those
behind the attacks on America, but also to transform Afghanistan into
a modern democracy. It was a grand plan but the logic behind it was
simple: if the innocent people of Afghanistan could be liberated from
the evil forces that had terrorised them, then they would become free
individuals. And out of that, a democracy, like those in the West,
would grow naturally.
Tens of
thousands of Americans and Europeans would pass through the country
over the next ten years - soldiers, diplomats, experts, political
advisers and journalists. All of them trying to build this new
society. But few of them stopped to think whether what had happened
to the Russians 20 years before might also happen to them. That, in a
strange way, Afghanistan has revealed to us the emptiness and
hypocrisy of many of our beliefs, and that we may be returning from
there also haunted by Mujahideen ghosts, knowing that, underneath, we
believe in nothing.
After the
shock of the attacks in September 2001, the greatest fear was that
the American economy might collapse as well. In response, the
politicians, advised by their economic experts, cut interest rates to
almost zero. This allowed cheap money to flood through the system and
avoid disaster. The banks lent money to anyone and everyone. It was
the politicians looking to the financial system to stabilise the
country.
At the same
time, thousands of experts and advisers flooded into Afghanistan.
Their aim was to transform the country into a modern Democracy. This
optimistic vision of a future Afghanistan was celebrated in the Kabul
Stadium. It was the same stadium where the Russians had celebrated
their new model for Afghanistan 20 years before.
All kinds of
groups came to Kabul to help the project. It was like a snapshot of
what those in power in America and Britain believed made democracy
work. Underlying it all, was a belief that the battle was to create a
good society, one that would be strong enough to stand against the
bad, anti-democratic forces that had overwhelmed Afghanistan.
But then, it
began to get confusing. The Americans discovered that was it was very
difficult to know exactly who was good and who was bad. When they had
invaded, they had been helped by Afghans who were already fighting
the Taliban. The Americans had assumed they would help to create the
new democracy, and appointed many of them to run the country. But now
it turned out that many of them were actually the very same corrupt
and violent warlords who the Taliban had overthrown, and they were
using their new power to terrorise the country all over again.
Gul Agha Sherzai had been made Governor of Kandahar. But
he was also alleged to be making a million dollars a week from
running the opium trade, while at the same time siphoning off
millions from the Americans in inflated contracts. When President
Karzai was persuaded to remove Sherzai, he simply made him governor
of another province. But he was not alone.
Throughout
much of Afghanistan, the warlords had returned to power. But this
time it was worse. The massive influx of American money allowed them
to extend their networks of bribery and corruption to every corner of
Afghan society. But the money was not just corrupting individuals. It
was undermining the whole structure of society, above all the police.
Rather than enforcing the law, the police had become transformed into
violent militias who worked for the warlords. They organised a
massive expansion of the drug trade and they also terrorised the
local people. Ordinary Afghans came to hate the police and they saw
them as the enemy.
And the
Americans also weren't as good as they appeared. Jack Idema had been portrayed as a hero, working with the
US Special Forces to hunt down bin Laden. He had arrived in Kabul
three years before and become a legendary figure. CBS television had
made an hour-long special about the secret world of terror that Idema
had discovered in the mountains. It showed a tape that he said he had
found of the Al-Qaeda group training. But then Idema was arrested.
The Americans said that he was a fake. He had nothing to do with
them, and had conned CBS. They alleged that Idema had a dungeon,
hidden underneath his house in Kabul, where he tortured innocent
Afghans. Idema was put on trial in Kabul. He insisted, though, that
he had been working with the highest levels of the US military and
government. Jack Idema was found guilty and sent to jail. But then it
got even more confusing because reports emerged that the real
American military had been doing exactly the same as Jack Idema. They
had set up a special torture centre in an old Soviet hangar at Bagram
Air Base. Ordinary Afghans were shackled to the ceiling and subjected
to all kinds of violent abuse. But they went further than Jack Idema.
The reports said that two of the victims had been tortured to death.
By 2006, the
British and the Americans realised that their project to bring
Democracy to Afghanistan was failing, and large parts of the country
were descending into anarchy. In Helmand, in Southern Afghanistan,
armed groups had risen up and there was constant fighting. The
coalition were convinced that this was the return of the Taliban, and
British troops were sent there to restore order and to help protect
the regional government. But when the British commanders asked the
Ministry of Defence for information about what was happening in
Helmand, there was none. There weren't even any satellites looking at
it. They had all been moved to look at Iraq. The one thing they did
know was that they were going to the very heartland of the tribe that
had decisively defeated the British 125 years before, at the Battle
of Maiwand.
The British
commander called a meeting with the local elders. He reassured them
that the British were there to defeat the Taliban and support the
regional government. But the elders thought that the British had
completely misunderstood the problem. The real enemy was not the
Taliban, but the corrupt and vicious government that President Karzai
had installed in Helmand and was doing nothing to stop. Before they
came to Helmand, the British had forced President Karzai to get rid
of its governor. But they didn't realise that he had left behind him
a completely corrupted society and nothing was what it seemed. When
the British went into towns like Sangin, they tried to support the
police, but the police were really the armed militia for the sacked
governor. To the locals, this meant that the Western troops were
supporting their oppressors. So they started to attack the British.
The British thought that this must mean they were Taliban, so, in
response, they dropped giant bombs on them.
But this
then devastated the town centres, which made even more local people
join in the attacks. Seeing their chance, the real ideological
Taliban, who were now based in Pakistan, flooded back in and they
started attacking the British, too. At the same time, the corrupt
militias who worked for the local government also turned against the
British. Faced by the chaos, the British still clung to their simple
narrative of good and evil. They - the Western forces - were good and
all the different groups who were attacking
them were Taliban, and were bad.
But this
extraordinary simplification had terrible consequences, because if
you were an Afghan and wanted to kill a rival, all you had to do was
go to the British and tell them that he was a Taliban and the British
would obediently wipe him out. The British were being used. The
terrible truth was that the British presence did not contain the war,
it did the very opposite: it escalated it so much that it ran out of
control. And the bodies - Afghan and British - piled up.
But then,
the British and the Americans had to face up to the fact that they
might not be as good and innocent as they thought they were. In 2009,
the Presidential elections were held.
Hamid Karzai stood and allied himself with some of the most powerful
warlords. But there were allegations that the warlords rigged the
vote on a massive scale. This was backed up with videos that seemed
to show the warlords' followers stuffing the ballot boxes with
hundreds of fake voting papers.
The
coalition tried to rerun the election, but Karzai's main opponent
refused because he said it would be even more corrupt. So, the
British and Americans had no choice but to abandon their great dream
of a real democracy in Afghanistan. They gave in and allowed Karzai
to become president again.
And at the
very same time, as their simple plan was falling apart in
Afghanistan, the politicians had to face a crisis at home. They had
given power to the banks because the bankers and the financial
technocrats had promised that they could hold the economy stable. But
in 2008, the whole intricate system of credit and loans that the
banks had created, collapsed, and there was growing panic as giant
financial institutions faced bankruptcy. The politicians in America
and Britain stepped in and rescued the banks. As they did so, they
began to discover that most of the major financial institutions were
also riddled with corruption. But unlike President Roosevelt in the
1930s, they didn't then try and reform the system. Instead, they
simply propped it up by literally pouring billions more pounds and
dollars into the banks, hoping that this would somehow spread through
the economies. They had no other idea.
And, faced
by disaster in Afghanistan, the politicians did exactly the same
there, too. The Americans knew that the idea of Democracy was
failing. In desperation, they poured even more money into the Afghan
economy. The idea was that this would somehow create a simpler,
economic form of Democracy and that the free market would liberate
people. They would become model consumers following their own
rational self-interest, just like in the economies of the West. And
in an odd way, it worked. Many of those in charge of the money did
behave in their own rational self-interest. They simply stole the
money, smuggled it out through Kabul Airport, and used it to buy
luxury properties in Dubai. During this period, it was estimated that
10 million dollars a day was being taken out of Afghanistan this way.
The scandal
seemed to confirm for many Afghans that the United States had not
brought Democracy or free markets to their country, but instead, a
corrupt Crony Capitalism that had taken over Afghanistan and its
government, which was the very same allegation that was being made
against politicians at home, in America and in Britain.
Taken from
the documentary Bitter Lake
by Adam
Curtis.
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