The BBC has been making hay with the news that a US airstrike in Afghanistan last week apparently killed around 50 civilians, sending its reporters hiking through the mountains to collect first-hand accounts of the tragedy, and generally giving the incident the sort of coverage that it wouldn't give to a story about 50 civilians being killed by the Taliban.
It's no more than we've come to expect from the BBC, and the Western news media in general. But grudging credit where it's due: when Peter Allen of the Beeb's Radio Five Live interviewed Carla Haddad, a spokeswoman from the International Committee of the Red Cross, about the incident he at least attempted to make a distinction between civilians being accidentally killed by Nato forces, and the Taliban's deliberate targeting of civilians.
Haddad was having none of it. Despite being invited to do so by Allen, she refuses to accept that there's any difference between Nato's actions and those of the Taliban, instead falling back on platitudes about appealing to 'all parties' in the conflict, and generally doing a passable imitation of a greased weasel playing Twister.
Here's the interview (I hope – this is my first attempt at recording and embedding audio. Web 2.0? Here at Monkey Tennis Centre we're still at Web 0.05). Allen first talks to a guy from international development think-tank The Senlis Council, who, while not being overly critical of Nato, says it should put more boots on the ground and rely less on airstrikes. He starts talking to Haddad at about 1:45.
In case the clip malfunctions, or disappears, here are the key exchanges:
Peter Allen: When you say you’ve appealed to all parties does that mean you actually talk to the Taliban and say ‘The suicide bombing must stop.’
Carla Haddad: The ICRC is in regular contact with all parties to the conflict, be it Nato/ISAF forces, US-led coalition forces, the Afghan Government or the armed opposition, which includes the Taliban. So the ICRC has contacts with everyone on a regular basis, and tries to remind them regularly of their obligations under international humanitarian law, or what is also called laws of war, which explains that they should distinguish between military objects and civilians.
PA: It’s probably worth pointing out, that of course, that when you get a suicide bomber, quite deliberately they walk into a crowded place and take out a lot of civilians, and do it deliberately, and that, at the least, the allied forces do intend to hit only combatants; they don’t aim for civilians but sometimes they strike them. So there is a difference…
CH: We’re not speculating on… what we’re deploring is the casualties; and many casualties are civilians. Each force has to take into account international humanitarian law and to respect it. We will not speculate we do not know the details of what happened in every single incident. All we can say is that casualties are civilian they are either injured or killed and all parties to the conflict should spare them and should make sure they’re distinguishing between military objects and civilian objects.
As an afterthought, she adds that the ICRC 'deplores' the Taliban's suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul last week. Perhaps she was worried about leaving listeners with the impression that the Red Cross supported it.
There's such a thing as not taking sides in a conflict, but this is ridiculous. The moral equivalence on display is nauseating. Haddad, and her colleagues at the Red Cross, clearly see Nato as no better than the Taliban, and the Taliban as no worse than Nato.
This is the sort of no-fault leftist claptrap that blights the work of not just the ICRC, but the UN and other transnational NGOs. There are no good guys or bad guys, just victims and oppressors, and Nato and the Taliban are equally guilty of oppressing the Afghan people.
Of course it may be that Haddad is personally sympathetic to the Taliban's aims, and just wishes it was a little more discerning in its target selection – you've got to love her characterisation of mass-murdering religious fanatics as 'the armed opposition'.
The line about 'not knowing the details' of various incidents is a transparent cop-out. And does she honestly believe that Nato and US forces need 'reminding' of their obligations under international law?
Like Allen, I'd dearly love to know what form the ICRC's 'regular contact' with the Taliban takes. Does someone from the Red Cross really call up the Taliban to complain about civilian casualties? If so what does the Taliban tell them? "Sorry, that was another software glitch"? or "Our boy mistook that busload of schoolchildren for a Humvee"?
Either Haddad is lying, which is perfectly plausible, or the Taliban is playing the Red Cross for the well-intentioned dupes that they are. Either way, by refusing to concede that the Taliban are the real enemies of the Afghan people, the ICRC is undermining the effort to defeat them, and ensuring that it'll be needed in Afghanistan for a very long time to come.
Then again, maybe they just want to ensure that they're never out of work.
Thanks to Rusty for the link.
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Afghan biofuels: a magic bullet for energy security?
Two of my pet subjects are the war on terror and global warming, and they overlap in the area of energy independence. While I'm a global warming skeptic, I do think that for security reasons the West needs to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil by developing alternative energy sources.
Reading about the struggle to discourage Afghan farmers from growing poppies for the heroin trade, I've wondered for a while whether it would be feasible to get them to grow biofuel crops instead, which would have the multiple benefits of reducing the supply of heroin, cutting off funding for terrorists, helping the Afghan economy and producing energy without diverting farmland from food production.
It turns out that people a lot smarter than me have been thinking the same thing, and I have a piece on the subject up at Pajamas Media, which you can read here.
Reading about the struggle to discourage Afghan farmers from growing poppies for the heroin trade, I've wondered for a while whether it would be feasible to get them to grow biofuel crops instead, which would have the multiple benefits of reducing the supply of heroin, cutting off funding for terrorists, helping the Afghan economy and producing energy without diverting farmland from food production.
It turns out that people a lot smarter than me have been thinking the same thing, and I have a piece on the subject up at Pajamas Media, which you can read here.
Monday, October 1, 2007
This is no time for Karzai to go wobbly
The next time someone’s compiling a book of inspiring speeches by wartime leaders, Hamid Karzai’s response to the suicide bombing that killed 30 Afghan military personnel on Saturday is unlikely to feature alongside the words of Churchill, Thatcher and Franklin Roosevelt.
Rather than vowing that the terrorists would never again impose their will on the Afghan people, and indeed would be hunted down and killed, the President’s response to the atrocity was to invite the perpetrators of the attack to join his government, and ask exactly how high they wanted him to jump.
The Taleban’s response, in addition to dismissing Karzai’s offer out of hand, has been to issue its very own constitution for Afghanistan, lest anyone should be confused as to their intentions towards the country. As the UK’s Telegraph reports, the 7th Century lobby appears to have won out over the Jeffersonian wing:
The 23-page document envisages a country where women would remain veiled and uneducated, "un-Islamic thought" would be banned and human rights would be ignored if "contrary with the teachings of Islam".
No doubt the UN will be prepared to meet them half-way on that last point.
As the Telegraph notes, Karzai isn’t the only one who regards the Taleban as potential ‘partners for peace’. Last week, Britain’s pitiful excuse for a Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said Afghanistan’s erstwhile oppressors would need to be involved in the peace process. But it’s Karzai who’s the real worry.
After Saturday’s bombing he said he wished he could contact Taleban leader Mullah Omar and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to ask why they were "trying to destroy Afghanistan". As if that wasn’t enough, he said he would meet both men personally, and even offer them cabinet posts, if it would help to bring about peace. There’s a thought: Mullah Omar as Minister for Women’s Education.
Karzai lived in exile in Pakistan for most of the Taleban’s rule. Maybe he thinks the stories about life under the mullahs have been exaggerated – executions in the soccer stadium? Come on! And perhaps he’s also prepared to let the several attempts the Taleban have made on his life (they also assassinated his father) be bygones.
Or maybe he’s just been spending too much time with the multi-culturalist, multi-lateralist bureaucrats of the UN and the EU, who have yet to encounter a threat to human life and liberty that can’t be dealt with by means of a five-nation working party, a sprinkling of special envoys and a week of seminars at a nice hotel in Europe.
Of course, Karzai knows precisely why the Taleban and their al-Qaeda allies want to destroy his country: because a peaceful, stable Afghanistan led by Islamic moderates and with ties to the West is a very large obstacle to the extremists’ dreams of restoring the Caliphate over large areas of the Middle East and Asia. So perhaps Karzai's words were no more than a cry from the heart from a man tasked with an almost unbearable responsibility.
But if Karzai is in fact ‘going wobbly’, this isn’t the time. Coalition forces are killing Taleban fighters at a prodigious rate, including 200 or so in the past week. Assorted jihadis are fighting among themselves over the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and according to this article in The American Thinker, al-Qaeda is on the run and getting pounded in the vicinity of Tora Bora.
The occasional bombing, however devastating, doesn't mean the Taleban can't be beaten; on the contrary, such attacks are a sign of their increasingly desperate attempts to terrorize the population into rejecting Karzai and his Western allies.
Thousands of former Taleban fighters have already laid down their arms and pledged to work with the Afghan government, and it makes perfect sense for Karzai to reach out to other moderate elements. But there’s no negotiating with the extremists; Mullah Omar is the epitome of extremism, and he and his followers need to be killed or captured. Karzai can talk to the survivors all he likes at Bagram airport, when they’re shackled to chairs and dressed in orange jumpsuits.
Rather than vowing that the terrorists would never again impose their will on the Afghan people, and indeed would be hunted down and killed, the President’s response to the atrocity was to invite the perpetrators of the attack to join his government, and ask exactly how high they wanted him to jump.
The Taleban’s response, in addition to dismissing Karzai’s offer out of hand, has been to issue its very own constitution for Afghanistan, lest anyone should be confused as to their intentions towards the country. As the UK’s Telegraph reports, the 7th Century lobby appears to have won out over the Jeffersonian wing:
The 23-page document envisages a country where women would remain veiled and uneducated, "un-Islamic thought" would be banned and human rights would be ignored if "contrary with the teachings of Islam".
No doubt the UN will be prepared to meet them half-way on that last point.
As the Telegraph notes, Karzai isn’t the only one who regards the Taleban as potential ‘partners for peace’. Last week, Britain’s pitiful excuse for a Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said Afghanistan’s erstwhile oppressors would need to be involved in the peace process. But it’s Karzai who’s the real worry.
After Saturday’s bombing he said he wished he could contact Taleban leader Mullah Omar and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to ask why they were "trying to destroy Afghanistan". As if that wasn’t enough, he said he would meet both men personally, and even offer them cabinet posts, if it would help to bring about peace. There’s a thought: Mullah Omar as Minister for Women’s Education.
Karzai lived in exile in Pakistan for most of the Taleban’s rule. Maybe he thinks the stories about life under the mullahs have been exaggerated – executions in the soccer stadium? Come on! And perhaps he’s also prepared to let the several attempts the Taleban have made on his life (they also assassinated his father) be bygones.
Or maybe he’s just been spending too much time with the multi-culturalist, multi-lateralist bureaucrats of the UN and the EU, who have yet to encounter a threat to human life and liberty that can’t be dealt with by means of a five-nation working party, a sprinkling of special envoys and a week of seminars at a nice hotel in Europe.
Of course, Karzai knows precisely why the Taleban and their al-Qaeda allies want to destroy his country: because a peaceful, stable Afghanistan led by Islamic moderates and with ties to the West is a very large obstacle to the extremists’ dreams of restoring the Caliphate over large areas of the Middle East and Asia. So perhaps Karzai's words were no more than a cry from the heart from a man tasked with an almost unbearable responsibility.
But if Karzai is in fact ‘going wobbly’, this isn’t the time. Coalition forces are killing Taleban fighters at a prodigious rate, including 200 or so in the past week. Assorted jihadis are fighting among themselves over the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and according to this article in The American Thinker, al-Qaeda is on the run and getting pounded in the vicinity of Tora Bora.
The occasional bombing, however devastating, doesn't mean the Taleban can't be beaten; on the contrary, such attacks are a sign of their increasingly desperate attempts to terrorize the population into rejecting Karzai and his Western allies.
Thousands of former Taleban fighters have already laid down their arms and pledged to work with the Afghan government, and it makes perfect sense for Karzai to reach out to other moderate elements. But there’s no negotiating with the extremists; Mullah Omar is the epitome of extremism, and he and his followers need to be killed or captured. Karzai can talk to the survivors all he likes at Bagram airport, when they’re shackled to chairs and dressed in orange jumpsuits.
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