Random Numbers from Afghanistan

Maybe I’m a genius, or maybe for a while there I just had too much time on my hands – but I think I’ve worked out how our friends at the Ministry of Defence have been passing the time through the long unsummery afternoons of summer.

I call it Afpak Bingo. Draw yourself up a card with some random numbers on it, and cross one off whenever a top general, politician, or other running dog of imperialism says that’s how many years we’ll be in Afghanistan.

This summer, General Sir Richard Dannatt – the one who’d made a bit of a stir a year or two back revealing that everything we’re told about the Afghan resistance is basically bullshit, and now just goes on about helicopters – joined the American General David McKiernan in calling it 5 years. When he then retired to write his memoirs (which I’m sure will be a reet barrel of laughs), his replacement as head of the army, David Richards, then corrected him: more like 40 years.

The former commander of the forces in the field, Ed Butler, went for 20, while the various New Labour apparatchiks to express an opinion have mixed things up even more.

It’s a world away from 2001, when the then-Defence Minister John Reid was counting in months rather than decades, famously speculating that we’d be out before a shot was fired. You’d have thought he’d have learnt from the generation of aristocrats who’d humiliated themselves in 1914 reckoning that WWI would be over by Ecksmas of that year. But maybe that’s too much to expect of John Reid (whose war, by the way, has already gone on for longer than WWI, in case you’re counting).
After all, this is the guy who, in a subsequent role in the Ministry of Pushing-Immigrants-Around-In-Order-To-Make-Yourself-Feel-Like-A-Big-Man, publicly congratulated himself for making his guide to UK citizenship a bestseller as if it had nothing to do with his department forcing large numbers of people to memorise it if they wanted to stay in the country. But I digress – I just really fucking hate John Reid – where was I? Oh yeah, Afpak Bingo.

Anyway the only thing with the figures above is that they tend to be round numbers, which does limit things a bit. To mix things up a bit, how about this: 147 civilians were killed in the village of Granai on the 4th of May 2009, and even as Barack Obama’s sweetness-and-light Happy Ramadan message was going out this August, an attack on Dande Darpa Khel, Pakistan, took out 21 including 9 children. More and more attacks, including both of these, were carried out by unmanned “drones”, which I admit does appeal to my inner sci-fi nerd.

Granted, the fact that we can now refer to the war with snappy subtitle “attack of the flying robots of death!” probably doesn’t do as much to cheer up the many Afghans and Pakistanis who’ve lost limbs and relatives in the attacks, but help is at hand! Crooked puppet president Hamid Karzai offered to compensate the newly-widowed men of a devastated village in Farah province earlier this year with money for a second marriage.

This doesn’t sit well with the pretence that we are in Afghanistan to liberate its women, but it’s pretty consistent with Karzai’s overall performance: his government has now passed laws banning women from leaving their homes without permission from the husband, and even allowing men to starve their wives if they refuse sex. In fact one look at Karzai – as ineffectual as he is nasty – goes a long way towards explaining another set of crazy numbers for Afpak bingo: the various estimates for turnout in the recent Afghan elections. It’s starting to look like you can’t bomb people into democracy after all. Go fucking figure.

The main story of Afghanistan on the news this summer has mainly been about British soldiers being killed in greater numbers than at any time since the Falklands. But these “brave boys and girls” have been the butt of perhaps the cruellest joke of all. As soon as they die, there’s no getting away from them all over the TV and the papers. But while they’re still alive, everything is done to keep them silent. One captain in the Welsh Guards now faces a court martial for an incredibly moving anonymous letter to the Independent, and he’s not the only one.

The Generals and politicians have even been exploiting the legacy of Harry Patch, the recently deceased “last Tommy” from what was quite possibly the stupidest war in the history of the world ever. But those who cared to ask found that Harry was anything but on the side of the warmongers. He spent the war shooting and trying not to kill, and later commiserated with the last Jerries: “What the hell we fought for, I now don’t know.” It is this Harry Patch whose voice comes across in the new Radiohead single, backed by his grandson and with profits going to an ex-servicemen’s charity.

I have a lot of time for soldiers of Harry’s generation, for it is them who ended WWI. French soldiers refusing to fight were slaughtered not by their “enemies”, but by their own officers, but mass mutinies in the Russian and then German armies were instrumental in both stopping the war and overthrowing their governments to boot. By 1919, a mass demonstration of British soldiers was defiantly marching on Downing St to put a stop to Churchill’s crazy schemes for invading Russia.

I have a lot of time for the soldiers sent to kill and to die in Afghanistan too, but looking at how many ex-soldiers are left to rot in prisons, on the streets, or nursing mental illnesses, to the governments who send them they’re nothing but more random numbers from Afghanistan. This war was a monstrous crime when it started 8 years ago, and it will remain a monstrous crime until it ends.

Dave still gets vaguely scandalized by adverts at the pictures that turn out not to be trailers.

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