Statutory Warning: As usual, this post is a statement of my beliefs, my sources are as indicated, and I am in no way responsible for any fights, quarrels or disagreements arising from discussions on this article on any website or other medium where it appears or is discussed.
Something more than merely some Qurans lies
smouldering in a garbage pit at the Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, where they were tossed by uniformed US soldiers before being rescued, partly charred, by Afghan workmen. What lies
there, in cinders, is the last forlorn hope of the Imperial project in Occupied
Afghanistan.
And, tempting as it is to look at it in
those terms exclusively, it is not
about a few fanatical Muslims losing their cool about a few burned Qurans.
How do we know, in fact, that it is not
about a few burned Qurans, however much uninformed and bigoted individuals in
media and elsewhere insist on the contrary? How do we know that it isn’t just because
Muslims, for some irrational reason, get violently upset if their holy book is
sent up in smoke, whether or not that holy book is actually holy or merely, as
some would insist, a terrorist instruction manual?
We know it, because the Afghans themselves clearly and unambiguously say it’s not
about burned Qurans.
After all, it isn’t as though the Afghans
have been exactly living in paradise under the Empire’s colonial occupation (“liberation”)
since 2001. They have had the world’s most venal puppet “government” imposed on
them, one which cannot even control the capital but claims legitimacy. The rest
of the nation is a bone for contention between savage warlord armies of “freedom
fighters” (that’s what the term Mujahideen
means, as in the “heroic freedom fighters” the West paid, armed, trained and
promoted against the USSR in the eighties and then left to their own devices)
and a resurgent and quite clearly unstoppable Taliban insurgency. There is no
such thing as rule of law barring the (instant and brutal, but at least not
corrupt) justice of Taliban mobile courts. There is no hope, nothing to look
forward to, except more of the same.
Meanwhile there are the occupiers, who
claim to be “liberators” and friends, yet do such charming things as routinely
bomb civilian homes and weddings, kill children gathering firewood and then
claim they were armed, murder civilians for sport and collect body parts as
trophies, urinate on dead Afghans (we don’t even know whether they were Taliban
or murdered civilians), break into their houses in the dead of night, and pose
with Nazi SS flags. These are the occupiers who shoot unarmed protestors and
then claim that they were “restrained” because they didn’t kill even more, and
who can do nothing to prevent the return of the Taliban, something that grows
more inevitable by the day.
With friends and liberators like this, the
Afghans may be justified in thinking, who needs enemies?
So, the Quran burning is just the final
straw that broke the camel’s back, the spark that set off the conflagration.
The anger simmering needed a fuse, and the ineptness, arrogance, and stupidity
of the occupation provided that spark.
Always, in such cases, the ideals or motives of the perpetrator don't matter. It's the victim's view which matters, and the victim who reacts according to his own perception of the situation. The Empire might have been sincere in its motives (though, as will be discussed in a moment, there's no reason to think it was) - but if the Afghans are convinced it wasn't, then that's all that matters.
That is why Afghanistan went up in flames. Not because of irrational anger over a book, but because it was the final drop of humiliation that made the cup run over.
Often, in such a situation, there are some
things that tend to get overlooked, like driftwood adrift on a sea of data,
which carry the actual important information, if only one knows where to look,
and is interested in looking. There are several such things in this particular
situation, which actually are of far greater import than the protests
themselves.
First is the little fact that the response of General John R. Allen, the
U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, that all U.S. military personnel in the
country undergo ten days of sensitivity “training in the proper handling of
religious materials.”
If after occupying a nation for over a
decade, a nation which is well known for being deeply religious, the occupation
forces still have to be given “sensitivity training” in handling “religious
materials”, that displays a failure so staggering that mere ineptness can’t
begin to cover it. Even the old imperialist powers realised that in order to
rule over a restive populace, local customs must be, as far as possible,
respected. But the old imperialists, for all their faults, knew that they were
mortal. The new Imperial levies cannot even begin to assimilate the idea that
other peoples can have different cultural mores and value systems than their
own, and therefore see no reason to treat any such cultural and religious mores
with anything but contempt. Systematic brainwashing meant to instil hatred of
Islam and Muslims (often given such charming appellations as “ragheads,” “diaperheads”
and the like) has its own part to play. It’s even more pathetic that ten days
of “training” is supposed to instil “sensitivity” that over ten years of
colonial occupation could not.
Next is the case of the two American officers, a lieutenant colonel and
a major, who were found shot dead inside an office in a “secure” portion of the
Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul after they allegedly mocked the protestors. Now, more and more Afghan troops and
policemen are beginning to turn their weapons on their “liberators”, so in
itself the shooting isn’t anything new. But in this case, there’s something
else that’s important – the fact that this particular shooting happened in a “secure”
part of the Interior Ministry, the command and control complex. The word “secure”
here meant that most Afghans themselves had no access to that part of the
building, even if they worked in the Interior Ministry, though officers of the American
occupation forces had no such restrictions.
If after ten years of “partnership” (or
whatever the current dispensation in Afghanistan is supposed to be), the locals
can’t even be given the run of their own government buildings, there’s such a
deficit of trust that it can’t ever be bridged – least of all when the metaphorical
ceiling is falling down on the occupation’s collective head. And the extent to
which the rot has spread is indicated by the fact that they were shot dead
inside that “secure” office, by one of the (presumably tried and tested and
found loyal) few Afghans who were permitted access. Whether the man was a Taliban
mole or acted on his own can’t be independently known, because he successfully
escaped – but that is less significant than the fact that someone at such a
high level went over to the enemy. This means, just as clearly, that there is
no such thing as a friendly Afghan any longer, where the occupation forces are
concerned.
Not that this little fact was unknown to
the troops on the ground, the ones responsible for training and liaising with
the so-called New Afghan Army and police. That these forces are disasters is to
put it mildly; but that’s not the point. The point is that they are not just far
too riddled with inefficiency and corruption to ever take care of their nation’s
security, they are lethal; not to the Taliban they are allegedly fighting, but to their “allies”, the occupation forces who
live among them and train them. No partnership can possibly survive if one side
has to constantly guard against the threat of having its throat cut by the
other. But the cases of this kind are increasing very rapidly since the Quran
burnings, leading to the Empire's European vassals hurrying to pull out their own contingents from the line of fire - and, logically, the reason is that latent anger has been sparked to
active violence by the Quran burning, with even surrendered Afghan insurgents returning to the resistance.
It’s not enough to glibly say that the Taliban
are taking advantage of the anger over the burnings, as if it were some kind of
foul in a game. Of course the Taliban
are taking advantage; anyone would in such a situation. If the circumstances
were reversed, the Empire would have taken advantage of the situation, quite
unapologetically. To state or insinuate otherwise is a travesty of common
sense.
Having put itself in an untenable position,
the Empire then promptly made things much worse for itself. After a lot of
natter, the Obama administration “apologised”. Said “apology” was another
travesty, because after making it, in order to deflect Republican criticism,
the Nobel Peace Prizident promptly backtracked, saying
…my criteria in any
decision I make…is what is going to best protect our folks and make sure that
they accomplish their mission…
In other words, he apologised not because
he was sorry, but because it allegedly, as he also claimed, “helped calm things
down”. It was an apology of convenience, not one of sorrow, and was seen as a hollow sham by Afghans, who took it as a further marker of contempt. In fact,
since apparently Obama didn’t consider the possibility that the Afghans might
be aware of his explanations for his apology, it is difficult to see what it could be taken as except a fake.
Ultimately, whatever twists and turns the occupation
resorts to, the Afghan enterprise has failed. Nobody can win if they create
more enemies than they eliminate, and there is nothing the Empire can do in
Afghanistan that won’t make the situation worse for itself. They have never set
a foot right after the Taliban were (temporarily, as it turns out) ousted in
2001, and they can’t set a foot right now if they try. Even if they leave
tomorrow, they will leave as hated foreign interlopers, not as friends and
liberators.
So what can the Empire do to save the
situation? In a word: nothing. On the battlefield, the world’s most powerful
military has been fought to a standstill by illiterate peasants in flip-flops
and turbans. Off the battlefield, it has been stymied by its own arrogance,
greed and hubris. Its defeat is complete and total.
I suppose, in the aftermath of ruin, the
Empire could send in nuclear missiles and turn Afghanistan into a sea of molten
glass, and try and make up some plausible sounding excuse for why that had to be done. But then such an
excuse wouldn’t fly even among the domestic populace, who are now
overwhelmingly against the war. And, more importantly, the Empire then wouldn’t
have access to the pipelines and the minerals under the ground, which, of
course, is the real reason for the Afghan occupation.
But then the Empire isn’t getting them
anyway.
Further reading:
Burning those Korans was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Beyond stupid really.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree. This was not a smart move at all.
ReplyDelete