The following is a transcript of Tariq Ali’s talk to Media Workers Against the War on Afghanistan in May. An audio version of the talk is also available here.

Let’s we look back now at what was said when they went to war in Afghanistan, what were the war aims? They were very basic. If we look back at the speeches by Bush and the pronouncements of the US military, the aim was to destroy Al Qaeda as a force and capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban faction that supported al-Qaeda), dead or alive. That was all. Nothing else was said.

In terms of war aims this was (a) extremely limited and (b) very foolish. If you’re going to announce that this is your main aim, then you wait three weeks, then you go into the country and imagine that the people, you want to capture are going to be waiting for you, and then you’re surprised that these people have actually left the country and found new hiding places – it’s slightly bizarre.

In any event, if we accept that these were the war aims, they failed. Far form destroying al-Qaeda they strengthened it. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Zawahri – the key people on their list – are still at large. But I think there was another reason. I remember 3 weeks after 9/11 I was debating on TV one of Bush’s most fervent supporters in the American media, Charles Krauthammer. The compere asked me what do you think is the real reason for the war in Afghanistan? I said it as a war of revenge, simple as that, they’ve been hit, there’s no basic war aims, they want to strike back, and it’s just revenge. She then turned to Krauthammer to rebut this but he said I agree, what’s wrong with revenge? The compere was absolutely astonished.

That was the aim for a large chunk of the American military establishment, they had to hit back, and they were backed in this by the entire world. Not a single country opposed it because of the position the USA occupies in the world today. Other countries have been victims of terrorist attacks, before and after 9/11, but no one reacts in the same way. And that in itself is a fact worth understanding. The USA is a very special country because of its strength, it is the only imperial power in the world today, and most governments at the time caved into it, there was no criticism.

Ironically enough there was more criticism in the American media in the first few weeks after 9/11 than in the British media, which became totally servile, just shaken by what had happened. The Los Angeles Times published in the first week a 4-page supplement on US foreign policy in the 20th century, looking at everything the US had done to other parts of the world. But this was not permissible here, the atmosphere was fear, you weren’t allowed to open your mouth. I remember a Cambridge academic in ancient history wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying what’s the fuss about, all the people I meet in academic circles say they had it coming. She was apolitical, just being honest. All hell broke loose in the liberal media, how dare you even publish it? You can think it but don’t publish it. An atmosphere of fear was created.

And within this atmosphere of fear Afghanistan was invaded and occupied without any big battles being fought. Why? Because the Taliban government basically decided not to fight. Why? Because the Pakistan military told it not to fight. It was very dependent on that army, it was armed by them, in fact the Pakistani general inn charge of the ISI, told them: I have been told by the president of Pakistan and the government don’t fight, withdraw, let them take the country, then we’ll see, don’t lose lives. But my advice to you is to fight back.” He was sacked within 24 hours. I make this point to show the links between these two outfits. Without the support of the Pakistani military the Taliban could not have seized power in the first place. It’s not that they didn’t develop their autonomy – they did. But those three crucial weeks the Americans didn’t attack was to give their Pakistani ally time to withdraw its equipment, air force and officers from inside Afghanistan. They were given Pakistani military bases to use, they couldn’t use these bases to hit Pakistani personnel.

So they took Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, with the approval of the Pakistani and Iranian governments – the Iranians hated the Taliban. If you look at what these people in Pakistan and Iran are saying now, they say we thought it would be different, we thought that it would be a more democratic dispensation, that the occupying powers would institute power sharing very sharply and transform the country. This last bit is not unimportant. One of the reasons they haven’t been able to get any grip on the country, because they have completely failed to build any social infrastructure. Here it is worth comparing with what the Russians did when they occupied Afghanistan in 1979 for 10 years. Their bad luck was that the Afghan communists were tiny, without a real mass base outside Kabul and consisting of largely of squabbling factions. But what they did do was build an infrastructure. However weak, they built schools, hospitals, they educated women, women teachers and doctors, they did succeed in doing that for a while. Which is why even the Russian troops lasted, that government didn’t fall to the offensive against it. They had some element of support because people could seen what they had done.

Corrupt, iniquitous elite

This occupation has done nothing. It costs less than $5000 to build a cheap home in which an ordinary family can live. Ask anyone in Afghanistan how many have been built, virtually none. Most of the money that has gone into the country has been used by the tiny clique around Karzai to build luxury homes and villas, in the face of the most poverty-stricken people in the world, and all this corruption is being defended by NATO troops, and they are seen now as being defenders of this extremely corrupt, iniquitous elite, a tiny ruling elite that runs the country. Without the backing of foreign troops this little group would collapse.

There is constant confusion of Taliban with Pashtun and Taliban with Afghan. This doesn’t exist only on the level of ignorant journalists. I was told by a senior Pakistani government minister that soon after they took Afghanistan Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in a meeting with high officials in Pakistan actually said the problem is the Pashtun Taliban, we have to wipe them out. How can we do this? The Pakistani foreign minister said: “Why don’t you ask two members of the Taliban sitting at this table? They are Pashtun. Please try to understand, not every Pashtun is Taliban, it’s very divided. But the way you are operating you are going to antagonise them.”

In February this year there was a senate committee in the US on national security and defence that said the following:

“Afghans have over centuries proven themselves to be fierce fighters, particularly when confronting invaders from outside cultures. They repeatedly defeated the British during the 19th century Afghan wars when Britain was the world’s dominant military power. They routed the Soviets during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was the world’s second most dominant military power. Superior military technology does not always win the day, particularly in an era when suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices have proven themselves to be very effective tools in this kind of war. Afghans are used to killing and being killed. Their society has been in a state of war for most of the last two centuries.”

Now, this is pretty accurate. Seventy per cent of Afghans know how to use weapons. That is part of the culture, they’ve been doing it from a very young age, the men mainly. This means it’s not dificult for them when they join a resistance group to start fighting immediately, they know how to do it.

Secondly, the Taliban now is becoming an umbrella organisation for fighting the occupation. Many people who hate it are fighting underneath its umbrella and that is extremely dangerous for the occupying armies because they are isolated, there is no way they can win the war.

The only way they could have done if they wanted to create a slightly different social infrastructure was to spend billions on completely transforming the country, finding an alternative to poppy production. The sales of heroin have shot right up since the occupation. Ironically the Taliban had put a stop to it in the bulk of the country. Afghanistan is supplying 60-70 per cent of the world’s heroin. And you can’t tell the farmers don’t do it because they have nothing else to do. If you read the surveys conducted by the occupying armies when asked what is the biggest problem you confront, 70 per cent of the population say feeding our families twice a day, and we’re prepared to do anything to do so. This the occupation has been completely incapable of doing. How could they? Many people who initially supported the occupation said the Taliban is a horrible government, anything else is better – including many liberal journalists, not just in Britain but in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, said that. They are now saying it was a very big mistake, we thought the Americans could do some good in the region. But how can you expect an imperial power and a NATO force that operates in today’s world, a neo-liberal world where they are deregulating and privatising everything in their own countries, to go and build a strong state in Afghanistan and make that state a sort of social-democratic one? It’s just unthinkable! And they are not doing it and it is completely isolating them.

Propaganda and news management

Every single day you read reports: 100 militants dead, 50 dead, 30 – don’t believe it, it is pure propaganda, wartime propaganda that goes back to every war waged by imperial powers, that’s how they report it, they assume everyone they kill is an enemy. Which they may or may not be, but by killing them they are making sure that the bulk of the country now is moving to a stage where they want the occupying forces out.

There’s no doubt about that, because they have failed, they have succeeded in destabilising their ally Pakistan where two provinces are in quite a delicate state. And who knows how this is going to end? One reason we don’t know how this is going to end is precisely because of the way the media have plaid it, Iraq was the bad war Afghanistan was the good war. But it wasn’t a good war ever, and it’s become worse as time goes on. So it has to be seriously analysed, there are very few serious journalists who spend time there and report.

One of the ways in which journalism functions today is as a pillar of the system, not just in times of war. There has been a fundamental shift in journalism in the west, largely in television but also to a certain extent in the print media. Serious coverage of the rest of the world is missing in most newspapers and certainly on the TV. You are given sound bites, there is very little regular reporting from important countries in the world so that when something happens you are surprised, people are deliberately encouraged to have short memories, so you forget, you can’t remember. And now we have this category of embedded journalists, who go in with the army and see what the army wants them to see, and then they report on that, which in itself affects the way they write.

Of course there are exceptions, Robert and Fisk and Patrick Cockburn break these rules. But they are few and far between. When a few journalists on British TV did it during the Balkan wars they were denounced. When John Simpson said he was watching the television station in Belgrade being bombed and he was appalled by it, he was denounced.

News management in all the western countries, but especially in Britain, is reaching the levels of an art form. There is a crisis of this news management thanks to the Iraq war. The fact that you have a majority of the population opposing a war and the majority of politicians in parliament supporting it created a crisis for the system of news management. When the BBC tried to balance it, it wasn’t permitted, even though it was a very strange kind of balancing there was an attempt. But Blair sacked his own placemen at the BBC, Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke, after the bogus Hutton report. As Dyke revealed in his memoirs, the real reason was not Hutton but the constant pressure from 10 Downing Street during the coverage of the demonstrations, the reporting of the war.

University departments teaching journalism have to teach what is the power of journalism. Students have to decide what sort of journalists they want to be, either it’s like selling goods in a shop – that’s one sort of journalism. Or the other sort of journalism is, I’m not saying a biased journalism, but a critical, independent-minded, aware journalism which at least tries to seek the truth.

In Afghanistan this has not existed, with rare exceptions. By and large that country has been written off as a small, poor country. It’s not that small – 29 million people, bigger than many members of the EU, and Scotland. So it’s a country that’s ignored because it’s not covered, and it’s not covered because covering it won’t benefit those who are occupying it. And this is not just a problem with the British media, it’s a European media. The press releases – you can see them in virtually every mainstream European newspaper, the reports are often the same.

I’ll give you another example of how PR dominates journalism. I was travelling two or three weeks ago and could read most of the European papers. There was a story coming out of Saudi Arabia, obviously a PR story, saying we’ve visited a school where those terrorists who supported al-Qaeda are now sitting in a class being re-educated. A total fantasy. Published in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The Herald tribune. Exactly the same story.

What happens from the Saudi government’s PR agency happens generally because they’ve down-graded serious coverage of the world. Take Somalia – no one knows what’s gong on, it’s just not covered. Afghanistan is not so bad because British troops are being killed, and British politicians go there for a photo-op with the brave boys. But that’s about it.

This is a big, big problem confronting us. We have the problem of Afghanistan and we have the problem of what is happening to journalism. Both have to be fought against because they are both related.