Afghanistan dangerously off the radar

By FINLAY MACDONALD

It's hardly an anniversary many will register, but last week marked 30 years since President Jimmy Carter authorised the first covert CIA operations against the government of Afghanistan.

By backing the anti-Communist mujahideen and creating civil unrest, the plan was to provoke a Soviet invasion and thus, in the words of Carter's adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, "[give] the Soviet Union its Vietnam War".

History records this Cold War gamble paid off. But the laws of unintended consequences have also meant that 30 years on we're still living with its legacy.

The "warlords" who inherited the ruins of Afghanistan after the Soviet army began pulling out 10 years later in turn provoked the reactionary extremism of the Taliban. The ensuing fundamentalist Islamic state became a refuge for bin Laden and al Qaeda. September 11 provoked another invasion, this time by the US and its western allies. Seven years on we are hearing the familiar comparisons with Vietnam all over again.

Despite Afghanistan being the only foreign field where New Zealand troops are engaged in overt military (as opposed to peacekeeping) duties, there is barely a conversation, let alone a debate, going on here as to the logic or morality of our continued presence there.

Given the blur of official denial, military secrecy and public indifference, there's little chance our role in Afghanistan will become an election issue either. That's despite a couple of bits of recent news that should have disquieted anyone who cares about our place in the world.

Last month turned out to be the deadliest for US troops since the war began in late 2001. June was also the second consecutive month in which more US and Nato troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq. If we were genuinely serious about our foreign policy this might at least have raised the odd eyebrow.

Instead, a sentimental fog seems to have descended over the issue since the awarding of a VC to Corporal Willie Apiata for bravery under fire somewhere in the Boy's Own version of "rugged and inhospitable terrain" that passes for a mental map of Afghanistan in the national mind.

In itself this was a weirdly double-edged propaganda exercise for the government and military. On the one hand, Apiata's undoubted courage was inspiring making him the most admired and trusted New Zealander since Sir Ed shuffled off.

On the other it gave the lie yet again to the official version of our deployment in Afghanistan being all about rebuilding schools and installing water-purifying plants for grateful villagers in "relatively peaceful" Bamiyan province.

That was certainly the picture being presented at the time of the action for which Apiata was decorated in 2004. So while our conventional troops were indeed nailing roofs on hospitals and teaching local kids the rudiments of rugby, the SAS was somewhere else, patrolling the notional front line of the "war on terror".

The official citation for Apiata's VC is about as unspecific as it's possible to be, making no mention of the region where the fighting took place and referring only to "enemy fighters" who, for similarly unspecified reasons innate evilness perhaps decided to attack some Kiwi soldiers.

Of course, this was all just confirmation of what has been suspected and known for some time certainly since Green MP Keith Locke pointed out in 2002 that a couple of American military websites had published information about our troops' movements that was being withheld by our own government for specious "operational security" reasons.

Since then Iraq has tended to push Afghanistan off the news map, as well as helping promote the false impression of it as a worthy campaign by comparison with the mess in Mesopotamia. In reality, things are falling apart in both theatres of conflict.

Does anyone actually remember Operation Enduring Freedom, the name given the US-led invasion and occupation? Enduring chaos is more like it. The Taliban have regrouped much as the old mujahideen did after the initial Soviet onslaught in the 1980s.

Earlier this year the first roadside bomb attack in Bamiyan was reported, perhaps a sign of a new Taliban strategy of attacking in areas where foreign forces are weaker, destabilising the country in the run-up to already delayed elections in 2009. New Zealand duly sent extra troops to the province.

Overall, civilian deaths are at their highest since the start of the war and military casualties, while not as bad as in Iraq in terms of sheer numbers, are rising. Pakistan now harbours something like 1.5 million Afghan refugees. The opium trade is back in business. The Afghan army remains inept and untrained. Iraq has drained American and Nato military resources.

Seven years after it began it seems reasonable to ask whether the convenient explanation for our presence there reconstruction, laying the groundwork for democracy, making it a place unsafe for terrorists is anything more than a simplistic fantasy. Operationally or philosophically, does anyone really know what we're still doing there?

 

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