Afghans and the Guardian
Matthew Leeming says that right-on liberal commentators were quite wrong about the war against the Taleban

I was halfway up the track that leads to the salt-mine at Taloqan, described by Marco Polo as producing the finest salt in the world, when an old man driving a donkey, two huge blocks of rock salt tied to its sides, stopped me and started jabbering in Persian. ‘He wants to thank you for getting rid of the Taleban,’ said my interpreter, as the man started shaking my hand. ‘Not at all,’ I said modestly. ‘Don’t mention it.’ ‘He thinks you are American,’ added the interpreter — rather snidely, I thought.

And one can see why the salt-miner is happy. Things are getting better. As I crossed the Shomali plain north of Kabul, where four years ago 200,000 civilians fled from fighting, I saw Perspex-visored locals clearing mines. Black smoke from new brick kilns drifted across my path. Bazaars of shops made from shipping containers have sprung up to sell tree trunks stripped of their bark as roof beams. Coca-Cola is available from roadside stalls at reasonable prices. The truck drivers no longer carry guns. In August the first party of tourists arrived at Kabul airport. For the first time since I started visiting Afghanistan in 1993, there is a sense that this country’s dreadful martyrdom may have run its course.

That night I returned to my file labelled ‘Lefties on Afghanistan’, which contains clippings of various articles that appeared last year and this, with renewed interest. The prospect of war in Afghanistan afforded George Monbiot, a stalwart of the Guardian op-ed pages, a truly biblical vision of the end of time. ‘The hungry will die quietly on forgotten trails in the mountains, huddled behind rocks, searching the streets of deserted cities, clawing for roots in an empty field.’ You can hear them cheering him on in the office: ‘Let ’em have it, Georgie! Give ’em the dead child spreadeagled like a broken doll on the deserted roadway!’

To put Monbiot’s gifts of prophecy to an unfair empirical test, I interviewed Khaled Mansour, head of the World Food Programme in Kabul during the American attack. ‘Sure, working under bombing made an already difficult task much harder, but, thanks to the support we received from donors [including America] and the 50 staff who worked under war conditions, by January it was clear that a possible famine had been averted.’ Delivering food aid under the Taleban was, he made clear, a nightmare. ‘We were moving from solving one problem with the Taleban one day to another the next.’ For instance, the Taleban believed that God had told them it was illegal for a man to be in the company of a woman to whom he was not related. Plainly, this made delivering food aid where it was needed almost impossible. In fact, the greatest threat of a famine was under the Taleban theocracy that Monbiot seemed to support.

Monbiot further opined: ‘There is plenty of evidence to suggest that if Afghanistan is attacked, the Afghans will side with the lesser Satan at home against the Great Satan overseas.’ Of course there was no evidence whatsoever, other than Taleban propaganda, but the remark is very revealing. Only a Western Leftie could imagine anyone preferring the Taleban to the United States, because for them the worst conceivable thing, the fons et origo of all evil in the world, is America. Presumably Monbiot would rather live under a lunatic regime of men who believe they are on a mission from God to return society to a state of mediaeval purity, than in America.

Ideology is a handy substitute for the difficulty of thought, but this one is also a substitute for the difficulty of visiting Afghanistan. It made finding facts easy, too; they were all helpfully provided by the Pakistani secret service who handled the Taleban and bin Laden’s public relations. My favourite is Terry Cook’s claim in the Guardian at the time of the American air drop of food parcels that ‘local people near the Pakistan border have refused to eat the food and are burning the packages in protest’. Oh yes. Like the little worker’s daughter in Bedford Square who sent three unused penny stamps to support the progressive cause in Ishmaelia. And John Pilger in the Mirror reported that bin Laden had volunteered to live under house arrest in Pakistan and stand trial for 11 September. It might be thought cruel to mention this, but in 1982 Mr Pilger — for reasons that no doubt seemed convincing to him at the time — was duped into ‘buying’ a five-year-old schoolgirl in Thailand, thus giving rise, in Auberon Waugh’s vocabulary at least, to the verb ‘to pilger’, meaning to be taken in.

Shortly before I left on a trip to Afghanistan in August 2001, a left-wing don pointed me to an article by Jason Burke in the London Review of Books. ‘Very interesting piece. Apparently the Taleban aren’t that bad.’ It was nothing more than a credulous regurgitation of Pakistani propaganda. The Taleban, it claimed, were a spontaneous law-and-order movement of theology students revolted by the widespread rapes perpetrated by the warlords. This is rubbish. The Taleban were armed and funded by the Pakistani secret service to give Pakistan the control over Afghanistan that they thought was their right. And, despite looking hard, I have never come across any evidence of widespread rape of women in Afghanistan.

I read this article out to a class I took at Kabul University. I thought that they would find it quite funny, but halfway through I realised it wasn’t getting any laughs. I stopped because the women were angry. The few of them who had received any education during the long night of Taleban rule had done so at secret schools. The mother of one had been beaten with electrical flex because a spy from the ministry for the prevention of vice and propagation of virtue had heard her shoes clicking on the pavement.

‘Who is this man?’ she demanded. I said that he was the Observer’s chief reporter. ‘How can he say such things?’ ‘Because he hates America,’ I said. ‘He also says that all the Taleban did was to make law out of what had always been the case in rural areas.’ There was uproar. Even the men joined in. They thought that this was really impertinent and offensive. ‘He also says,’ I went on, ‘that there is no need to ban television because there aren’t any.’ ‘Who does he think we are. Of course we’ve got television.’ And that’s true. I’ve watched television all over the country, even in a Khirgiz yurt in the High Pamirs.

The only perspective from which one can make sense of these vapourings (by Burke in the London Review of Books, March 2001) is an assumption that if the Taleban were anti-American, they must basically be OK. Presumably they think the same thing about Saddam Hussein.

Not content with recycling bin Laden’s propaganda, the Lefties are also rewriting history. Julie Burchill has repeatedly claimed, post-11 September, that the Soviets invaded in 1979 to nip Islamic fundamentalism in the bud. Most Russian nationalists would not dare to claim this until after at least half a bottle of vodka. Does one need to spell it out? It was the Soviet invasion that created the problem. Ahmed Shah Massoud’s attempted Islamic putsch had been defeated by the Afghan army in 1975, and he had been forced to flee to Pakistan with just five followers. It was the Russian invasion and his brilliant guerrilla resistance to it — he defeated the Soviets in 13 separate battles — that turned him into a completely genuine hero. Russia has had imperialist designs on Central Asia since the 19th century and got away with them. Lenin forcibly incorporated Muslim Central Asia into the Soviet Union after a brutal war in 1922. Stalin (Burchill’s great hero) carved bogus republics out of the area by drawing lines on a map that, for example, gave Bokhara and Samarkand, Tajik cities both, to the Uzbeks. He then used the region as the receiving ground for victims of ethnic cleansing — those groups such as the Tatars who, in his paranoia, he regarded as a security risk. In 1965 the Soviet Union built the Salang Tunnel in Afghanistan, driving a road from the southern border of its empire, through the Hindu Kush, straight to Kabul. Presumably the Lefties think that this was to encourage more Soviet citizens to take their holidays in Afghanistan.

You can still buy a Moscow-published book in Kabul called Afghanistan: The Revolution Continues. It contains heartwarming pictures of the achievements of Soviet economic assistance and the social benefits of the Revolution. The Russians, we now know, didn’t believe it even at the time, but the Lefties still do.

To be fair, the Lefties do make one point that is true. United States policy played a huge role in the disintegration of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taleban, to the extent that a court would probably find it guilty of contributory negligence. In the 1980s they subcontracted arming the mujahedin against the Russians to Pakistan, which pursued its own divide-and-rule agenda by arming seven competing factions. At one point American money was being channelled, via the Pakistanis, to their old friend Osama bin Laden. And when the war was won and the evil empire collapsed, the Americans stood back as Pakistan stirred their witches’ cauldron throughout the 1990s and Afghanistan collapsed into chaos. I remember asking the brother of the head of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, in 1998 why his troops did not snatch bin Laden and make a present of his head to the Americans. His response was depressing and astonishingly prescient.

‘Because the Americans would say “Thank you very much” and walk away. No, what we need to do is make the Americans see that Osama bin Laden is their problem, too, not just ours.’ Remembering that conversation now makes me shiver.

But it is not clear why this makes American intervention now so immoral. You would have thought that the Lefties would cheer as the US got down to the unaccustomed job of cleaning up one of its own messes. But no. Over my desk is a quotation from Keynes, which they would do well to ponder: ‘When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

Matthew Leeming is taking parties to Afghanistan in 2003 in association with the Afghan ministry of tourism.