Ahmed Shibli, director of ETD Consulting, writing for The Leaders Council is putting forward his thoughts on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the foreign policy aims of the West. As the US sticks to its deadline for full withdrawal, the country is left in a period of instability as the Taliban seeks to impose its own ideals on a nation under occupation after 20 years.
The 21st century didn’t start so well for many developing nations across the globe, with wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, Libya, Yemen and the Ukraine. All of this amongst countless other civil wars and minor engagements. We were told by our leaders that liberal democracies don’t go to war, but in the last quarter of a century, we have found that nothing can be further from the truth.
Referring to the Syrian forces in Lebanon some years ago, President George W. Bush told us that you can’t hold free and fair elections when a country is under occupation. And then we were told that free and fair elections had taken place in Iraq and Afghanistan, this during our massive military presence. The so-called ‘war on terror’ made life difficult for ordinary travellers, both in developing countries and in the West, who had to travel overseas going through endless queues and security checks.
If you were relatively young and brown, then questioning at airports became almost definite and highly irritating. If you had a recognisable Muslim name such as Mohammad, Ahmed, Hussain etc. then half a day or a whole day wait at the airport was not unexpected. A German colleague of mine who was flying from the USA to Germany via Heathrow airport soon after 9/11 told me that after seeing how brown people were treated, he thanked God that he was not of that colour! I travelled quite a bit during these years to attend international science meetings and conferences, and was questioned many times at UK airports by plain clothed men who introduced themselves as intelligence officers and asked to see my passport. The questions that were being asked were sometimes pretty useless and always perplexing.
Upon seeing an old Chinese visa stamp on my passport an intelligence officer asked me ‘what do you think of China?’, at another time I was asked ‘what do you think of Iran?’ despite the fact I had no Iranian visa stamp on my passport.
I was never sure how to answer such broad, and in my view, meaningless questions. I was not a young man at the time but, admittedly, I do have a brown face and a Muslim name.
I was once told, by a Polish colleague and friend of mine who had visited Syria when it was still a peaceful country a year or so after our invasion of Iraq, a harrowing story. Staying in a five-star hotel while having a drink in the lobby he was approached by a young hijab wearing woman, the age of his daughter and accompanied by a child, who proposed to offer her ‘services’. The next day he told this sad story to his Syrian colleagues, they responded that there are thousands of Iraqi women refugees in Syria whose husbands were killed during the Iraq invasion. As there are no jobs or any form of social security system in Syria, many Iraqi mothers find that this is the only way they can keep their children alive. Turning to me he said ‘why do you people go to other countries and ruin their livelihoods and cultures’?
Moving on to Afghanistan, after our latest debacle where we have spent billions of dollars, thousands of young soldiers' lives and tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties, all we have achieved is to replace the Taliban with the Taliban! I often hear our politicians and journalists talking about the plight of women in Afghanistan, their education and their future, and how brutal these fanatics are going to be to their own people. The stories of beheading, medieval punishments and removal of rights for marginalised sections of society, are rightly remembered from the time when the Taliban were last in power about 20 years ago.
What is not remembered by our ‘patriotic’ journalists and ‘corporate’ media is that the same fanatics were blowing up girls’ schools during the Soviet occupation and guess what, we used to fund them and call them the Mujahideen (holy warriors/freedom fighters). I remember well, that one day we all heard the news that a party of school children bound for a schools’ visit to Moscow was blown up at Kabul airport. The head of the group that had claimed responsibility was in London at that time and the next day he was standing in front of No. 10 Downing Street shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher. So much for our love of children's safety and girls’ education! I also remember reading in the Guardian newspaper that the CIA had printed millions of copies of the Quran and was distributing them amongst the Afghans and other Central Asian countries and telling them that we are all people of the book and are fighting together against the godless Russian ‘infidels’. The then American Secretary of State Brazinsky’s speech on the strategy can be seen making rounds on the internet these days!
The question is that if we are so concerned about the education, health care and wellbeing of women now, then why did we not give two hoots about these issues in the late 1970s or 80s? Maybe we did become more aware of it recently, but this hypothesis can’t be credible either. If so, then why don’t we care even today about women’s rights, welfare and education in a number of Middle Eastern countries that we strongly support? The examples that immediately come to mind are the bombing of the same women and children in Yemen. The bombs and their methods of delivery, designed and manufactured in the West. What about the human rights and plight of ordinary people that feel occupied in their own lands such as Palestine, Kashmir and elsewhere? And talking of the brutal behaviour of the Taliban with their Sharia law, do we know of any other country where beheadings and the removal of limbs is carried out under Sharia law, where women are still lingering in prisons because of their demand for the right to drive and where opponents can be dismembered and dissolved in acid in broad daylight in a foreign embassy? Yet the nation in question is seen as an ally and the media rarely talks about them in unfavourable terms!
Our media constantly, and rightly, talks about the plight of Hong Kong citizens and Uyghur Muslims and the brutality of police, but when did we last hear of the Indian Army control of the Kashmiris, gun pellets blinding young protesters and long curfews, lock downs and never ending quarantines. How often do we hear of what is happening in Libya that now lies in ruins divided into a number of fiefdoms each controlled by its own warlord? ‘Black Lives Matter’ protesters often talk about the distortion of history, and here we have the blatant distortion of the present and the half-truth can be worse than the plain lie!
As a student I travelled from the UK to Asia by public transport some years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Going through the country I remember seeing and meeting western travellers in every small place, never mind the big cities. Nobody ever seemed to be bothered about who was who and who was of what religion. Did we play a role in creating the present day fanatics and extremists?
Coming to more recent times, I remember sometimes reading on the internet and occasionally in more liberal newspapers, the stories of corruption in Afghanistan and that the Coalition paid millions of dollars to warlords to keep a lid on the conflict in their areas of influence. Why did our mainstream media not make a big issue of this and warn the people and the politicians of this unsustainable situation? It must have been clear that whenever we left the country, chaos would follow.
Someone must have realised that a lot of blood was being wasted on each side in this conflict. I suppose that the winners in these wars, apart from the extremists, are the weapons manufacturers and arms traders who must have been minting gold. After all, each time you drop a bomb someone has to make another to replace it. So, the more bombs that you drop the more the profit for the weapons industry! No wonder they say ‘there is no business like war business’.
The biggest question now is, can we the people of the Western democracies create a media platform that can tell the truth, as it is, to save the lives of our own young men and women and countless poor civilians of the poor countries.
Will we ever have leaders who can think ‘out of the box’ and consider the justices of the world and try to change the present system of world domination at any cost? Will we, in the UK, forever remain helpless followers of the decisions and whims of US politicians, a number of whom have shares in big companies that profit from war, or will we ever be strong enough to make independent decisions?
Brexit was about winning sovereignty back from Brussels. Will we ever be able and strong enough for ‘Brexit-2’ and have our own foreign policy? One can possibly argue that the amount of money that we spent on the wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, if we could have spent that amount on education, health, welfare, and disease control in developing countries, including some of the poorest Muslim countries, we could have reduced and possibly eliminated terrorism and the fear of it. The wars of ideology are won by conquering the hearts and minds, especially when we cannot control the media and the outflow of ideas, these wars are not won by sending more B52s for carpet bombing!
We, the people of the UK need to dream big and think outside of the narrow view of military intervention to come out of this perpetual cycle of violence. We can make more money by spreading education, health care and food production in developing countries than by selling them arms.
Are our politicians big enough, imaginative enough and bold enough to change the course that we have followed for centuries?
In my view, possibly not, especially during these times of the populist politician.
Photo by Andre Klimke on Unsplash
