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COMMENT: RICHARD SEYMOUR
Posted: Nov 03, 2009
In the notorious Afghanistan election, incumbant president Hamid Karzai has been declared winner after his leading challenger, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out.
Abdullah pulled out of the the second round--a run off--after credible evidence of widespread vote rigging in the first - claiming it was not possible to participate in a rigged poll..
Abdullah himself also had 300,000 votes disallowed in the first round over rigging.
Here Richard Seymour, of the blog Lenin's Tomb, comments.
A ruined tea party, and a brewing inferno.
Yes, you could talk about the fact that Afghanistan's 'election drama' is becoming more farcical by the day. The US-groomed former Talib and ally of Northern Alliance warlords
is, apparently, a massive
fraud. His rival, a US-supporting warlord named Abdullah Abdullah, is
withdrawing from the electoral spectacle on precisely those grounds. And the UN
is sending its supremo in to have a bit of a nosy, and tell the natives to buck
up their act and at least pretend that the freem-n-moxy that was graciously
conferred on them by the US is more than a paper-thin oligarchy. Yes, as I say,
you could talk about that.
Or you could talk about the regional apocalypse that is developing within the
bloody embrace of NATO and Obama-style multilateralism. I wish it were
redundant to spend too much time talking about the terrorising of the Afghan
population by the occupiers, but it plainly isn't. Johann Hari sometimes does a
good job of drawing attention to the humanitarian consequences of the war.
Here, he notes that according to Lt Col Kilcullen, in recent aerial attacks the US has killed 98 civilians for every two 'insurgents' killed. If that ratio holds for the air war as a rule, then consider that the US is currently boasting of having killed up to 25,000 insurgents. 25k is 2% of 1.25m. Lacking a Lancet-style cluster survey, one can only make an educated guess as to whether such a figure is approximately realistic.
There was one cluster survey carried out for the
first nine months of the invasion and occupation, which estimated that 10,000
civilians had been killed, the majority from air attacks. A similar survey
today would be reporting the effects of a far more intense aerial campaign, in
a war lasting for eight years now. Who can say that the soaring use of cluster
bombs, daisy cutters, 'smart' missiles aimed at wedding parties, drone-based
ordnance, and the usual deposits of unexploded ordnance, will have harvested a
negligible number of bodies? I just venture that, were this to be properly
investigated, levels of mortality way well exceed those in Iraq.
Further, nowhere is the point sufficiently taken that these consequences are an
intended, deliberate, and considered outcome of the aggression. It is not just
that as the US transfers the risks of its operations to the civilian population
through high-octane aerial attacks, it necessarily leads to a perhaps undesired
but accepted level of civilian slaughter. It is that the distinction between
civilian and combatant is being eroded as rapidly as it was in Vietnam. The Afghan population has simply become, in the context of a guerilla war, part of
the enemy. NATO planners know full well that the insurgency couldn't sustain a
heavy presence in 80% of the territory, and effectively take over the Nuristan province, without the backing of a socially significant layer of the population. I
would infer that the intention of constant attacks on civilian population
centres is to terrorise the population - perhaps with the hope that whatever
measly and corrupt civilian programmes are being promulgated can 'win hearts
and minds' at some point in the increasingly distant future.
The second point is that we are witnessing anew the way in which imperialism
and nationalism can intersect to bloodily reconstruct the geography and
political economy of whole regions. Such is the history of the Indian
subcontinent during and after colonial rule. There was little in the history of
Muslims and Hindus in India to give rise to any apprehension of the schism that
would arise in the 1930s, never mind the calamity that would unfold with
partition in 1947 - 90 years after an uprising uniting Muslims and Hindus had
delivered India's first body blow to the British behemoth. The story of India's
division is an extraordinarily rapid one, in which the divide and rule policies
of the British - some of whose deadly fruits were borne again this year in Sri
Lanka - interacted with the independence struggle that took off in the
1920s following the Russian revolution and the 1919 Amritsar massacre.
In Uttar
Pradesh, a highly mixed region notable for its role in the 1857 uprising, the
British authorities had already used such tactics by, eg, acceding to demands
that Hindi be the official language of the region. As Indian struggles wrung
forms of electoral representation from the British, the colonial power insisted
that voters identify themselves on a communal basis. One major example of such
divide-and-rule was the attempted partition of Bengal in 1905, then a mixed
state in the east of India. That was succesfully resisted, but the basic policy
of attempting to foment divisions based on confession remained.
This became important in the independence struggle as upper and middle class
Indian Muslims whose position had been established through the colonial state
sought to be included in any future settlement. The Muslim League, founded in
1906, was initially loyal to the British crown, and sought to promote these
interests, and had supported the partition of Bengal on the basis that it was
good for Indian Muslims.
The British patronised the League for this reason. Until the 1937 elections, however, the majority of Indian Muslims had sought representation in a future independent polity through the Indian National Congress. The turn to other forms of political expression, some class-based and others confessional, resulted from Congress refusing to work in coalition with the Muslim League in government, which aroused fears that it would be a de facto communal power.
(In truth, the Congress had allowed a certain blurring of
the edges between secular nationalism and Hindu communalism by permitting joint
membership of Congress and Hindu Mahasabha until the early 1930s. Much of its
leadership was reactionary and sectarian, and the inspirations for avowedly
secular Indian nationalism often included dubious Hindu communalist figures
such as the writer Bankim Chattopadhyay.) By 1940, the Muslim League was
campaigning for a Muslim state to be named Pakistan, including Sindh, Punjab,
Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province and Bengal. Jinnah, who was no
sectarian and had attempted to broker unity with the Congress, had concluded
that Muslims and Hindus were two nations.
It turns out that there were more than two potential nations in there. India was first divided at the cost of 1 million lives. Then, as the Pakistani state came
under the domination of the military in 1957, it escalated its practises of
discrimination and oppression against the more populous eastern 'half' of the
country, and thus sparking an independence struggle which it unsuccessfully
attempted to suppress with near genocidal violence.
It might have succeeded had it not provoked Indian intervention. But Pakistan was divided at a cost up to 3m civilian lives. Kashmir has remained a running sore and an object of military rivalry between India and Pakistan. Whatever happens to Kashmir, it has cost up to thousands of lives every year. And today, the authority of the Pakistani state over substantial swathes of its territory is in question - not because of fundamentalism, but because the state is unable to meet the needs of the population, and is instead devoting resources and firepower to fighting its own front in the 'war on terror'.
Obama's $7.5bn aid package is supposed to
help overcome this, but the conditions that come with this commit the Pakistani
state to a prolonged, expensive and destabilising war (admittedly with the
assistance of Xe, née Blackwater). It also infringes further on the polite
fiction of Pakistani sovereignty by demanding more and larger US permanent military bases in the country. The military is divided over this strategy, and
- despite much bravado - is unable to control south Waziristan or the Swat valley. It
is taking sustained blows in major cities such as Rawalpindi, Lahore,
and Islamabad.
Some of the attacks reportedly aren't even coming from Talibs, but are mutinies
from within. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, created by the British to
contain Pashtun revolt, are now a faultline in the 'war on terror'. The
North-West Frontier Province, originally annexed from the Emirate of
Afghanistan, may as well now be an autonomous region of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's viability as a national state is also now in question. The US has attempted to control the country using largely Uzbek warlords, with
a handpicked, carefully groomed and scented Pashtun leader. Whoever 'won' the
Afghan election wouldn't be able to claim much legitimate authority outside of Kabul. Lacking much of a fiscal base, it is almost entirely dependent on US and donor
funding, aid projects, World Bank programmes etc. Even if the Taliban and its
associates were decisively defeated, it is hard to see this fractious bunch of
mercenaries emerging into a coherent national ruling class, since their brand of highly
profitable narco-capitalism comes with military competition and territorial
struggle built in.
The insurgency (not yet convinced by the insights of
satyagraha for some reason), has marginally better chances. It has more
national cohesion than the warlord factions do, but is inherently self-limiting
by its rootedness in one dominant ethnic group and its reactionary ideology. Of
course, the Taliban have proven to be capable of reinventing themselves, but
that still doesn't mean they have a remotely plausible social vision. At best,
they would be capable of forming an authoritarian nationalist coalition with
some defecting warlord groups. It is hard to see a coherent national movement
emerging here. If anything, the trend is toward a combination of regionalism
and localism.
NATO imperialism is thus intersecting with national and regional politics in
such a way now as to accelerate the centrifugal trends already in evidence. The
legacy of British 'nation-building' in southern Asia has at times commanded
applause and admiration from some of the intelligentsia, but it is a legacy
that we are constantly living with no less than with the current reality of US
empire. In both the long and the short view, the 'divide and quit' settlement
has actually been catastrophic.
Its problems may have been resolved more amicably and less bloodily if not for constant outside subventions, the pressures of the Cold War, the coopting of the Pakistani military, the creation of a layer of reactionary Wahabbis to fight Afghan communists and then the USSR etc.
That the one force capable of subverting the barbaric heritage of colonial nation-building, international socialism, meets the present challenge in an historically weak state, only adds to the presentiment of grave danger.
Read also these recent articles on Afghanistan:
Jan 08, 2010: Afghanistan - the graveyard of US power?
Dec 15, 2009: Answering Obama's Afghanistan deceptions
Dec 14, 2009: 'Obama Peace Prize? He's a killer!': Video feature
Dec 08, 2009: Save over a quarter million Euro by withdrawing Irish troops from Afghanistan
Dec 03, 2009: It's Obama's war now
Nov 18, 2009: Millions more turn against Afghan war
Nov 15, 2009: Short Cuts in Afghanistan
Nov 03, 2009: Afghanistan: A ruined tea-party
Oct 08, 2009: Will the U.S. back off Iran?
Sep 23, 2009: Withdraw the seven Irish soldiers from Afghanistan
Sep 12, 2009: How Afghanistan became the graveyard of the Russian empire
Sep 07, 2009: Malalai Joya’s Raising My Voice
Aug 21, 2009: Afghanistan: The warlord election
Aug 19, 2009: NO to the war in Afghanistan, NO to Lisbon
Aug 12, 2009: Afghanistan: Growing resistance to the '40-year war'
Jul 24, 2009: Granai: the murder of an Afghan village
Jul 15, 2009: Afghanistan War Resister to “Put the War on Trial”
