A War Without End: Savagery in Afghanistan is Centuries Old

By Robert Fisk, Independent UK. Posted November 19, 2008.

Yet it pays to remember that Afghan wars have always been dreadful. Sir Mortimer Durand – he who created the Durand line which masquerades as the Afghan-Pakistani border, crossed with such impunity today by Americans and Taliban warriors in order to kill each other – witnessed the cruelty of the Afghan war at first hand. "During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec 1879," he wrote, "two squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives... I saw it all..."

Yet Durand himself objected profoundly to a statement from General Frederick Roberts – he of Kandahar fame – after the murder of the British mission diplomats in Kabul. The killings had been "a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people... all persons convicted of playing a part in (the murders) will be dealt with according to their deserts". Durand confronted Roberts over this Victorian version of the message that George Bush would give to the Afghans 122 years later.

"It seemed to me so utterly wrong in tone and in matter," Durand would later write, "that I determined to do my utmost to overthrow it... the stilted language, and the absurd affectation of preaching historical morality to the Afghans, all our troubles with whom began by our own abominable injustice, made the paper to my mind most dangerous for the General's reputation."

Of course, it did Roberts no harm at all. In the age of "shock and awe" – when a Canadian general can call his Taliban opponents "scumbags" – it still doesn't seem to worry Nato officers. They should know better. Montgomery never cursed Rommel; he kept a photograph of the Afrika Korps commander in his caravan to remind him of the man he was fighting. But then again, didn't Montgomery fight in the age of the Holocaust, of industrial killing, of the Hamburg and Dresden firestorms? Indeed, the very Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 were supposed to end the mass destruction of human life. And President Bush has torn them up.

I know it's easy to ridicule the Red Cross. There's something very preachy about the post-war conventions. But apart from the precedents of international law, it's all we've got. Maybe a million Pushtu-language editions should be handed out to the Taliban and their followers as well as to the Nato combatants whom Barack Obama absurdly believes will win the Afghan war. But I doubt it would do much good. Victimhood sits easily on all our shoulders. If Osama bin Laden had a conscience, it would be quickly eased by the destruction of the last Caliphate, the colonial occupation of the Muslim world, the deaths of millions of Arabs. And if we have a conscience, what do we say? Remember 9/11. And so on we go.

See more stories tagged with: george w. bush, nato, taliban, red cross, aghanistan, winston churchill

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