LIARS

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY says that the Afghanistan War must be the first in which the journalists have been bigger liars than the politicians.

As I write, the votes are being counted in Kosovo, an undeserved tribute to President Clinton's caution but assuredly not a powerful argument against bombing. This was, let us remind ourselves, a brutal assault by Milosevic who said he was defending Christendom against the Islamic hordes and an alliance in most respects identical to that operating in Afghanistan defended the Albanians, an almost entirely Islamic people, against Serbians who called themselves Christians. So much for American and British mindless anti-Islamic, manipulative foreign policy. It must be obvious to all but the rabidly anti-American that the current assault on Afghanistan is not anti-Islamic. From what one can telling any case, Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Q'aida henchmen would not pass muster with your average Western-based Mullah, let alone the Taliban morality police.

But let that pass. The only point on the bombing which requires just a little more discussion is the pragmatic assertion that to bomb Afghanistan is to stir up anti-American resentment, to bring on another generation of terrorists; in other words, the hydra metaphor. The problem with this as a pragmatic argument is that there is no evidence for it. The reaction of their followers to the defeat of idealists and lunatics down the centuries is mixed.

Nobody knows whether the defeat of the Taliban, largely through aerial assault, will breed new generations of terrorists or, if it does, what the balance will be between this new cadre and our increased ability to combat terrorist networks. Beware actuaries without tables. On the whole, though, history shows that the tortoise usually outstrips the hare; and although nation states are apt to try to re-write history this is nothing to the nostalgia of the defeated. The victors may write the history but the victims invariably have much more colourful anti-history to call on.

So let us cast our minds back for a moment to September 12th and the options before President Bush and his allies: the first was to lash out without thought or planning, what might loosely be called the Clinton reflex; the second was to plan a co-ordinated campaign, knitting military, diplomatic and humanitarian action, which might loosely be called The Powell/Blair perspective; the third was to embark on a long-term, purely diplomatic and intelligence operation against Bin Laden with the objective of putting him into the dock of an international court, which we might call the Arab League muffler; and the fourth was to do nothing which we might call pacifist principle.

Pacifists in particular and self-regarding moralists in general have tended to rank these four options in ascending order of morality but this is utterly to confuse private with public morality.

The liberals and leftists most in favour of collective action are exactly those who want politicians in this case to abandon the collective in favour of their private view of violence. It is precisely because our politicians are elected to represent our collective interests (and desires as these do not conflict with our interests) that they have to balance opportunities and risks. A private citizen is entitled to stand motionless in the name of pacifism as his child is butchered but a government cannot allow my child to be butchered because that is what you would have happen to yours. At the other end of the spectrum the reflex action would clearly have been wrong; which leaves the middle two.

Contrary to popular belief or, rather (and we will return to this), media assertion, there has been an intelligence and diplomatic initiative against Osama Bin laden since the bombing by his followers of the American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam and little good did it do the occupants of the World Trade Centre. The global indifference to the slaughter in Africa was a scandal, yet another case of the world turning its collective back on African events, so Bin Laden fell out of the headlines.

Had he organised the bombing of Embassies in Western Europe it would have been a very different matter. Here we have the media problem again; just because it was not reporting the steady pursuit of Bin Laden does not mean it was not going on; the media does not make things real, it simply decides what part of reality to report.

So those in favour of long-term action without resort to military violence need to ask themselves how many atrocities they would accept before the capture or destruction of Bin Laden and his network.

Finally, in respect of the morality debate, when I ask opponents of bombing what is their alternative, the response is that they do not need to have one, they just oppose military violence and it is up to the rest of us to find an alternative. At that point you have to abandon discussion; to live in a world without alternatives is a private indulgence which politicians cannot allow themselves.

Let us now summarise events since September 12th once again. Bush was going to lash out; he didn't. Washington was going to ignore the United Nations; it went straight there and got a unanimous security Council Resolution. The Islamic world was going to implode; it hasn't. The Alliance was going to fall apart; it hasn't. The Taliban were the toughest fighters in the world; they weren't. Bombing wouldn't work; it did. What is worse, it would damage the passage of humanitarian assistance; it has enhanced it. These are only seven widely broadcast and published products of punditry.

Let me get this straight, I am not blaming the journalists on the ground who were as good as sources would allow them to be, it was the news directors and editors who ran their coverage in such a way that this must be the first war in history where the journalists were bigger liars than the politicians.

Indeed, on the one occasion when the politicians tried a media stunt which went disastrously wrong, they called for a re-enactment which the television networks knowingly broadcast without comment. It was only much later that we discovered that the attack on Mullah Omar's compound was a near disaster.

Once the re-run of September 11th lost its impact, the calls for caution were forgotten and impatience for action set in.

Once the action began it was not working quickly enough and after a week we were told it would never work.

When it began to work it was described as a "Surprise" but, as I've said before, to describe anything as a surprise if you're a supposed pundit says more about your lack of skill than about the events you are describing. Frankly, I was not in the least surprised by the massive and precipitate collapse of the Taliban because we had been repeatedly told how murderous and treacherous the whole lot were, Taliban and Northern Alliance alike; they would sell their grannies for a bag of rice. I know, I've been to the Afghan/Pakistan border.

Still, some of that is a matter of speculation and capable of debate, but from September 12th to this very day almost every journalist and broadcaster has lied about the meteorology and topography of Afghanistan, urging speed because of the onset of Winter, urging caution because of the mountainous terrain. Well I know that global warming has a lot to answer for on the weather front but it is now mid-November and all the roads are still passable and the journalists are reporting from Kabul in shirtsleeves with the leaves barely yellow in the background. And you only have to look at a relief map to see that more than half of the country is flat!

The media have tried to run this war and bully elected politicians into acting unwisely and hastily against the interests of their peoples. In order to maintain viewers and readers they have lied and distorted. I have seen evidence bent by anchormen and seen commentators contradict their previous pronouncements without a reference back.

We now have to think the unthinkable; we are approaching the time when democratically elected politicians will have to impose curbs on media which are beginning to destroy the democratic process for their commercial ends. The antithesis of the wicked politician and the principled journalist is self-serving cant; it is a caricature of a much more complex reality.

So, here we are. The self appointed moralists are still calling for the handover of all responsibility in Afghanistan to the United Nations which is, you may have noticed, still not ready after ten weeks with anything like a coherent plan for a provisional government.

We are also told that the Northern Alliance is as bad as the Taliban though emerging evidence of the past four years would put that seriously into question.

By inference Bush and Blair are somehow responsible for this; but they never claimed that they would install a democratic, enlightened government in Kabul any more than Churchill promised to replace Stalin once Hitler had been defeated. Meanwhile, the plane crash of November 12th and our individual and collective reaction to it show how vulnerable we are, psychologically and economically, to terrorist attacks.

Those who, out of a sense of moral purity, oppose bombing, should look at the latest US unemployment statistics which show a massively disproportionate effect on poor and black or Hispanic people. Upheaval always hurts the poor more than the rich and so stability for us all is a necessary precondition for prosperity.

Which leads, elegantly, to the one area where the Bush administration has been so far disastrously inept. Its reaction to the latest round of climate change talks in Marakesh has been muted, if not ungenerous. The same can be said of its behaviour at the WTO Agenda Meeting in Dohar and in its reaction in Ottawa at the IMF Meeting to British Chancellor Brown's proposal to double development assistance to poor countries.

As the planes smashed into the World Trade Centre it was my firm hope that good would come of it, that the United States would lever itself back into a position of global responsibility and sensitivity, dissolving the need for a world alliance against its bullying and indifference. I still think that that is possible, but if Washington turns its back on the world --- or, much worse, kicks it in the teeth -- after Bin Laden's threat is neutralised, we will be even more provoked than we were before.

For the first time since 1945 there is an opportunity to change the fundamentals of global geopolitics: the best option is an alliance of all progressive, democratic governments against poverty and against terrorism and dictatorship; the worst is a split in the democratic world which forces Europe, Japan, Russia, China, India and Indonesia into an alliance against America. It is the great sadness of these past two months that the worst option is still an option at all.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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