By Javaid Trali
Afghanistan is, in fact, a classic case study of the convergence of interests of a wide range of actors — be it the transnational arms dealers or the multinational business corporations or for that matter even various nation-states — and their extensions in the media.
The recent developments in Afghanistan have once again brought civil wars to the centre stage of international politics. Even as the political and military strategists of the world’s best military-industrial complex – the US and its NATO allies – were yet again proved wrong in their assessment and calculations about the Taliban takeover of the country, it is very unlikely for them to be able to escape blame for this debacle in their respective countries.
No wonder that the political and academic research institutions are running overtime to find out and analyse what went wrong and who could be blamed for the Afghanistan debacle. A whole lot of scholarship is currently centred around the Afghanistan situation – its steady evolution to where it stands today, also where it may lead, and end up being.
While serious academic scrutiny is a matter of exhaustive research and takes time, social media is already abuzz with opinions and speculations – some really worthwhile and others equally absurd and insane. There are some careful dissections of the facts like how and who manipulated the situation over the years to bring it to the kind of climax, the world is witnessing in Afghanistan.
There is, at the same time, no dearth of some really skewed thinking about the situation. Some people are packaging and repackaging and then passing on their worst paranoia about the Taliban – they being Muslims more than any, and every other marker of their identities, being the major and perhaps only determinant – as an “objective” assessment of their (Taliban) politics.
Amid the clamour and the clutter, it is very difficult for ordinary people to separate the grain from the chaff! So people usually end up adding to certain stereotypes they have about the political, ethnic, religious or linguistic ‘other’, they also fail to stick to the basics which are key to understanding internal-internationalized conflicts like the one that has for long been raging in Afghanistan.
So even when primacy (read glory) of the religion (read Islam) seems an over-arching motivation and the life-blood of the Taliban, the fact of the matter is that it is just a cloak, a mask to conceal the basics and very common political aims and motivations of every single political actor anywhere and everywhere in the world – that is, to grab power.
A cursory and yet careful look at the civil war situations is enough to explain the complicity of international actors in fueling and sustaining these conflicts, sometimes for political and strategic reasons, and at times for pure economic interests.
The United States has been an active and malign influence in Yemen since well before the onset of war in 2014. Starting under the Bush administration, and continuing without pause under Obama and Trump, the US drone campaign killed somewhere between 1,020 and 1,389 people from 2004 to February 2020 in Yemen alone.
Groundbreaking investigative reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in the mid-1990s exposed the role of France, South Africa, Israel, Albania, Bulgaria, and others in arms supplies to Rwanda before and immediately after the 1994 genocide. As events in Rwanda tragically unfolded, the U.N. arms embargo imposed in the midst of the genocide went unheeded.
Afghanistan is certainly no exception to this rule. We have seen international actors meddling with the internal affairs of this impoverished country so much so that for the past more than 40 years in succession, the country has been in the thick of bloodiest civil wars, involving a huge multitude of countries and other international actors – USSR, USA, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UK, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, at al, and their collaborative blocks in the region and elsewhere, as also the hundreds of military contractors backed and supported by them.
Afghanistan is, in fact, a classic case study of the convergence of interests of a wide range of actors — be it the transnational arms dealers or the multinational business corporations or for that matter even various nation-states — and their extensions in the media.
The interfering countries have used different pretexts to pursue their agendas in the country. The Soviet Union intervened in 1979 in a bid to further its regional presence under the guise of supporting the Afghan Communist government against insurgency. At the same time, Pakistan played the role of broker for the United States, utilizing Saudi money to confront the Russians in Afghanistan. Once the Russians were defeated in late 1980s, the Americans and Saudis left the country at the mercy of the same warlords created by Washington during the face-off with the Russians. This was followed by interference from Pakistan in the fate of the post-communist regime, resulting in civil war. Iran, India and Pakistan picked their favorites among the warring groups. While Afghanistan kept bleeding during all those years, no one cared much about it, except as the chaos impacted their own regional strategic objectives.
Civil wars across the globe, like the war in Afghanistan, are in smaller or bigger measure sustained by some kind of symbiotic relationship between these actors. Living in an era where knowledge and information are the most potent and effective levers of power – the same levers if employed effectively, can play a vital role in controlling and curbing the incidence of civil wars.
Like international wars, civil wars are started as propaganda wars wherein the enemy is demonized and consent is manufactured for violent action. We have seen this happening in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
We have seen this happen in Afghanistan as well, though in a different manner. It was the US and its soft power – its media industry, including the Hollywood (movies), and of course its radio and TV — which eulogized and glamorized the valour and fighting skills of the Afghan Mujahideen, also employing for the purpose a selective interpretation and patronage of a certain kind of political Islam – ‘Wahabism’. Geopolitics of the time encouraged it for such an adventure to avenge its defeat at the hands of USSR backed Communists in Vietnam.
It worked perfectly well for the US interests as the bear that had been hugging the world (‘bear hug’) was forced to unravel (release) its clasp (hold). Not only did the USSR end up being disgraced and dismembered, but the USA also emerged as the lone superpower in the world, abruptly ending decades of cold war hostilities of the bi-polar world.
But the project would also set free a Frankenstein’s monster of Islamic radicalism – a genie which has since been refusing to go back into the Aladdin’s lamp! Whatever has been and is happening in Afghanistan today, in West Asia and elsewhere in the world, is in good measure the fallouts of the experiment going wrong in the land of Pamir.
The West despite its desperate efforts could not prove the ‘lab leak’ theory in the case of COVID-19 (novel coronavirus, which former US President Donald Trump would call “Wuhan virus” after the name of the Chinese city of Wuhan where the virus was alleged to have leaked from a laboratory). But ‘lab leak’ is a perfect terminology to explain how the US (backed by its Muslim – like Saudi and Pakistan– and European allies) experiment with Islamic radicalism and violent militancy in the lab called Afghanistan leaked and spilt over to engulf the rest of the world as well!
Armed militancy in Kashmir is largely also a spillover effect of this same botched-up US experiment in Afghanistan during the eighties!
All these instances and failures must serve both as an eye-opener and a challenge for the international community so that effective ways and means of employing media for anti-war purposes are devised and employed. Today when social media has outplayed the traditional media in terms of both reach and appeal, this channel of communication if employed effectively together with the traditional radio and TV channels, could sufficiently alter the contours of war and peace.
The trick of course lies in truth – for a story truthfully told with academic neutrality and dispassionate objectivity is capable of working wonders which no amount of false and disjointed propaganda and name-calling could do. The recent 20-year history of Afghanistan or for that matter Iraq are living examples of the limitations of the mediatized untruths, falsehoods and deceit!
Nobody can predict what will happen to Afghanistan in the days and months ahead. A lot will however depend on how the Taliban conduct themselves and how the international community mediates its engagement and relationship with them so as to make them amenable to sharing power with other minorities for a broad-based representative and just political order in that country. For the people of that war-ravaged deserts and valley beyond the Hindukush, “We the people of India” could just pray and hope everything works out well for them so that they are delivered from the clutches of continued wars.
But what about us at home? I fear there is no more room for any more delay to discipline our own media, including the social media – to have it shun the hate-filled rhetoric and act responsibly for peace, assimilation and inclusion.
References:
https://www.globalissues.org/
article/157/war-propaganda- and-the-media https://www.hrw.org/legacy/
wr2k4/download/13.pdf https://thewire.in/world/war-
yemen-west-arms-complicity http://www.hscentre.org/sub-
saharan-africa/media-tool-war- propaganda-rwandan- genocide/ https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/
cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= 1081&context=psilr https://thediplomat.com/2017/
01/time-to-stop-meddling-in- afghanistan/ https://thekashmirimages.com/
2019/06/10/tune-to-peace- frequency/
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