He accused Nato of not doing enough to curb the production of heroin in Afghanistan.He blamed the US administration for ending a military drive to destroy opium poppy crops in Afghan fields. According to statistics from UNODC, in 2001, Afghanistan produced 185 tons of drugs, in 2002 – 3,400 tons, in 2003 – 3,600 tons, in 2004 – 4,200, in 2005 – 4,100, in 2007 – 8,200, in 2008 – 7,700 tons.

“We are poor farmers,” said Sayed Wakhan “We grow opium to survive.”

An evaluation by the UNODC of its Alternative Development project between 1997 and 2000 in three districts of Kandahar found that though the project succeeded in raising yields of legal crops (like wheat, cumin, beans, onions and fruit) by about 90 per cent, these improvements would not have been sufficient to make legal crops more profitable than opium poppy. The poppy crop can also be harvested earlier than wheat, allowing farmers to double crop, growing maize after harvesting the poppies. Poppies being weather-resistant are also a more reliable crop than wheat. Opium is also easy to store, transport and sell, providing poor farmers a simple means to smooth income. The income per hectare from opium poppy in 2000 was an average of $16,000. As the UNDOC report on The Opium Economy concluded, “at these gross income levels, no other crop which could be planted on a large scale would be competitive vis-a-vis opium poppy in Afghanistan” For the warlords, who still continue to rule much of Afghanistan, the narco-economy continues to provide a rich source of takings. Opium purchased directly from the farmers could be used by the western development agencies to provide morphine for easing the pain associated with various terminal illnesses, including AIDS, in many parts of the Third World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. WHO reports that 4.8 million people a year with moderate to severe cancer pain receive no appropriate treatment. Nor do another 1.4 million with late-stage AIDS. For other causes of lingering pain there are no estimates, but WHO believes millions go untreated. The vast majority are in developing countries.

“..this year we see also that there is a sharp decrease in the price of crops like wheat so it will lead the farmers to go more with illicit crops,” said Angela Me, who is with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“…Drugs and bribes have become Afghanistan’s largest source of income,” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) wrote in the report.

“The people who really control Marjah will be the people who control the drugs,” an analyst in Kabul said. “So even if the Taleban fighters go, the criminal networks will still be there and maybe they are the same.”

The Dutch military contingent from the Afghan province of Uruzgan must be completely withdrawn by late 2010 based on its Parliament’s decision. Gen. David Richards, head of the British army said British troops will likely remain in Afghanistan for five more years, and nation-building work will continue for 30 or 40 more years. A dire prospect for many.

Our own war ,the class war, needs no re-defining. The solution to the on-going insanity remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need to be united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism. This cannot be fought with guns and missiles, but using something more powerful – our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

No related posts.

The US occupation forces in Afghanistan have learned a particular lesson from the disaster that is Iraq, and they have learned it big time. In the first, largely contracted out war in history, US and other foreign civilians were brought in to carry out just about every task, from the mundane to those viewed as ‘front-line’. A direct consequence of this strategy was millions of unemployed and very disgruntled Iraqis, a large percentage of whom became active or passive supporters of the forces of insurgency/resistance against the perceived injustices of the occupation. In the corporate boardrooms of US War Machine Inc. the alarm bells were ringing; costs (dead bodies and bodies with bits missing) were eating into public opinion and support for the corporations’ products (perpetual war and war materials/services) was declining and, potentially, could severely impact their bottom lines. A slight shift in strategy was called for.

Afghanistan, in recent times, has never really been a nation state; it is an area of the world that is a patch-work of tribal fiefdoms that shift in and out of local alliances at the whim of chieftains or as balances of power dictate. In order for US and NATO forces to function, in what they like to call the ‘Battlespace’, they have to factor these tribal leaders and their shifting alliances into their planning. The logistics for any invader/occupier of this land are daunting in the extreme. It is a wild, unforgiving place peopled by proud, largely unconquered tribes with very long memories who do not take kindly to uninvited foreigners trying to lord it over them. Ameliorating some of that hostility would enable more focus on the ‘flagged-up’ enemy, al-Qa’ida and their Taliban associates.

As the conflict dragged on and soon to be president of US War Machine Inc. Senator Obama announced that, in his opinion, it was a ‘war of necessity’, the strategic planners came up with an ingenious ploy that would give gainful employment to Afghans, put money into their pockets and just might persuade them to view the occupiers of their lands in a sufficiently different light that they would stop shooting at or blowing up corporate assets and personnel. The name of this new strategy – ‘Host Nation Trucking’, and it works something like this . .

Take a gaggle of well connected, powerful and non-too-scrupulous ‘business men’ and award them six trucking contracts currently worth $2.2 billion. People like the Popal brothers, owners of the huge Watan Group, both convicted whilst in the US of dealing in heroin and cousins of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Or Hamed Wardek, owner of NCL Holdings and son of current Afghan defence minister, General Abdul Wardek. NCL includes such luminaries as ‘legendary former CIA case officer and clear-headed thinker and writer’ (says Senator John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 2009) Milton Beardon on its advisory board. Or Asia Security Group, owned by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. (Aram Roston, ‘How the US Funds the Taliban’, The Nation, 30 November) These companies already have a well oiled model for doing business along the ancient trading routes and in the minefield that is present day Afghanistan – each has an armed ‘private security division’ and field agents who buy-off attacks by fractious warlords along any route. In this way US and NATO troops should get everything from ammunition to toilet paper supplied to even the their furthest-flung outposts with fewer inconvenient disruptions.

That was the theory behind the plan and in reality it mostly works pretty well. The US Defense Dept. throws huge quantities of dollars to the contractors, who in turn buy off the warlords who control those routes that pass through their territories. Many of these warlords are associated with the Taliban or are the local Taliban commanders, so extensive funding finds its way into Taliban coffers. Even the Taliban, who are the supreme warlords in control of the south of the country, are not immune from getting in on the action directly. Pay the premiums for their ‘insurance’ and it is sufficient for just two of their escorting ‘technicals’ to ensure the safe passage of any convoy through any stretch of hostile territory, which in reality is everywhere. Fail to pay up and the consequences are guaranteed to be devastating and deadly. Drivers can be picked off by snipers and rocket propelled grenades will blow the vehicles to pieces. One US owned firm, Four Horsemen International, has so far refused to pay and has tried to take on the Taliban with its own security teams; their convoys are attacked on almost every mission and the price in lives has been high. At some stage, no doubt, they will have to follow other security firms and do what they must in order to survive. An indication of premium rates can be gleaned from the following: per truck, per section of territory under a particular warlord = approx. $800, although it depends on what is being carried. Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar is about 300 kms, the local warlord, Commander Ruhullah, levies around $1,500 per truck and for military supplies this is the only route to the south, to Helmand and the Taliban heartland. The NCL company alone is billed $500,000 per month for ’services’ rendered en-route through Ruhullah’s turf, an indication of the scale of business.

Throwing money at a problem to make it go away has been elevated to the level of a doctrine within the US military, which goes under the title of ‘Money as a Weapons System’. To give some perspective, the $2.2 billion, two-year effort to hire Afghani trucks and truckers represents around 10 percent of that country’s GDP and although firm figures are hard to come by it is estimated that between 10-20 percent is finding its way to the Taliban. The regime in Kabul has recently increased the wages of its police and army by $45 to around $125 per month, far less than the Taliban pays its fighters, so why work for that lot when the ‘firm’ down the road is offering a better deal? No surprise then that the effective strength of these two organisations is around half of the claimed 90,000 for the police and 95,000 for the army, or that the power and influence of the Taliban continues to grow. They have their very own milch cow with a seeming never-ending stream of greenbacks. US spin would have us believe that it is drugs money that funds the Taliban in direct opposition to their actions when in power. Under Taliban rule poppy/opium production was almost eliminated; by contrast, since the US invasion and the re-establishment of the warlords, production is at an historic high. None the less, this is the lie fed to the US public rather than revealing the truth which could well swing public opinion so strongly as to imperil the very profitable merry-go-round that is the conflict in Afghanistan. Better to keep the mushrooms in the dark than let them see the light of truth!

Step back for a moment and look at it this way; the US military, possibly the world’s ultimate ’service provider’, is a gigantic consumer of goods and services. Its top people are highly paid executives who are guaranteed lucrative positions in supplying corporations when the time comes to move on. Working with their associates in government they benefit from continuing conflicts/wars that use up existing stockpiles/services which then need re-stocking from their appreciative suppliers. Prolonging the production run of any particular product or model is a well-proven policy for squeezing the last drop of profit from any venture. So it follows that in the context of modern, contracted-out warfare any strategy that strings out a conflict will mean more profits in the pockets of those corporations, organisations and their stock-holders who agree to play it by the rules of the capitalist system, and that includes Messrs. Taliban Associates Inc. In this lethal capitalist game, it is mostly the workers, the cannon-fodder on each side of any conflict who pay the supreme price; the elite, whether they wear the pin-stripped suits of corporate boardrooms or the black turbans of a Taliban leader, largely escape the extreme consequences of these policies.

The average US citizen thinks that it is ‘their’ money that’s paying for ‘their’ military to fight a war in Afghanistan that will protect ‘their’ homeland from another 9/11 or some crazed mullah with a suicide atomic bomb under his jacket. Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. The media has convinced them that it is a price worth paying, and anyway, aren’t there tens of thousands of good US households that, directly or indirectly, depend on defence company salaries to pay the mortgage? If they ever wake up to the fact that it is also ‘their’ money that is paying for the munitions that kill their sons and daughters and is providing the Taliban with much of what it needs to carry on its campaign indefinitely, to the benefit and enrichment of all the stakeholders in the business of war and conflict, might they not get very angry? Might they not rise up against the Masters of War and their corrupt system? Don’t hold your breath!

‘You can fool some of the people . . .’ Was this saying concocted by some US president or other to convince his people that they are really too smart to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a system devised to enrich the few whilst keeping the majority in bondage? How else to explain the predatory economic ways of the world and the widespread apathy towards them in the so-called ‘world’s only superpower’ and its war-mongering allies?

. . . you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’

Oh, yeah!

Alan Fenn

No related posts.

2. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are devoted to the principles of free trade and free enterprise. That is why we want to protect the heroin export business of President Karzai’s brother and other Afghan warlords against interference and unfair competition by the Taliban.

3. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to secure the route for a pipeline to pump vast quantities of natural gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

4. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we need stability there. We need stability to prevent the disruption of free enterprise (especially for the sake of Reason 3). Previously we backed the Taliban as a force for stability. Now we back the warlords as a force for stability. They too need stability (see Reason 2). Stability is something you can never have too much of.

5. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we hope that we’ll be lucky enough to survive unmaimed and then perhaps the army will pay for our college education and then perhaps we’ll find one of the few well-paid jobs that still exist by then.

6. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to be fair to our generals and give them a chance to get it right this time and overcome the trauma of their failure in Vietnam (the poor guys).

7. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to stimulate the American economy by expanding the market for U.S. arms manufacturers.

8. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to capture Osama bin Laden, who is no longer in the country.

9. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we want to show the world that we are no worse than the British and Russians, who fought in Afghanistan before us.

10. We are fighting in Afghanistan because President Obama is a transformative and restorative national leader and we do not want to undermine his position.

No related posts.

Among the rituals so consoling to our Servants of the People in Westminster is the solemn roll call of the names of recently fatal casualties of the Afghanistan war proceeding to formulaic assurances of grief, of sympathy for family and friends and an assertion, defiant of a mass of disruptive facts, that from the dead will blossom a victory to bring a happier, freer Afghanistan and a safer Britain. All of this will happen, argue the MPs, through some process so far undefined. Meanwhile it is notable that the casualties’ names are exclusively those of members of the British armed forces; the fighters on the other side and the hapless Afghan people who die terrified in their homes from the blast of the missiles do not get a mention. It is all very satisfactory for the Honourable Members on the green benches, dreaming of their expense claims while scheming of how most effectively to avoid any too probing questions from their constituents about the policy of satisfying the appetite of that voracious war.

This is reflected in the style of the heavily publicised repatriation of the dead soldiers, brought in flag-draped coffins to a military airfield and, after a ceremonial unloading, paraded through the streets of the nearby town – all carefully orchestrated and recorded by the TV news cameras. It would be a very brave person who defied this official smothering of doubts about the reasons for the troops being in Afghanistan. Part of this disreputable process is the eulogising of the dead who, one after another, are remembered, each in their own way, as a rare combination of courage, good humour, compassion, intellectual power…An example of this receptive attitude was a full page article by Audrey Gillan – who has some direct experience of Afghanistan – in the Guardian of 23 September about the late Corporal Michael Lockett: “…one of the most affable and funniest…one of the most courageous…handsome face and bright blue eyes flickering…Each time I met him I admired (him) more…” In another case – which did not have the advantage of being written up by a doting journalist – a dead soldier was praised because he had “loved” being a sniper – loved, in other words, practising his craft of abruptly and clinically killing people as if there can be no higher human talent.

Two Friends

But among the hysteria a more sombre and realistic event intruded – a young man by the name of Barry Delaney in a woman’s dress weeping for his best friend Kevin Elliott who was killed in an ambush in August. Three years ago the two agreed that if Elliott was killed Delaney would attend his funeral dressed like a woman. On his last leave Elliott told Delaney that he was terrified to go back to Afghanistan and could see no proper reason for the British army being there. Delaney is chronically unemployed, living in Dundee where there is a persistent problem – which Elliott avoided by joining the army when he left school at 16. In this context it is particularly pertinent that the Ministry of Defence report a 25 per cent rise in army recruits in this year of the recession – more than at any other time since 2005.

Delaney and Elliott do not conform to the stereotype so lovingly fostered onto us by media hacks. Elliott told of many ingloriously gruesome episodes, such as while trying to leave the battle under fire having to scoop up from the dust the body parts and internal organs of another soldier. Experiences like that are likely, in every case except the most hardened or resistant, to devastate a person’s morale so as to insert unforeseen, unwelcome and unmanageable aspects into their personality so damaging as to make the effect endure for a long time after the immediate experience has expired. The Guardian quotes Professor Tim Robbins, former head of trauma and stress services at St. George’s Hospital: “If we are asking people to do appalling things, to take part in regular firefights and hand-to-hand combat, you get to the stage where it de-sensitises them to violence”.

Prisoners

The durability of these effects was illustrated by a recent survey by NAPO, the Probation Officers’ trade union, which estimated that there are over 20,000 ex-service personnel – over twice as many as are in Afghanistan – being processed by the criminal justice system such as police, courts, prisons and the like. Of these 8,500 have committed offences serious enough to get them sent to prison, making a tenth of the total prison population and the largest singe identifiable occupational group there. In many cases their offences were the immediate result of excessive consumption of alcohol or drugs, or both. The most common offence was for domestic violence, usually by men on their wives as an anarchic response to the stress of the discipline required by a close living relationship. Typical examples are, firstly, by a man who went through two spells in active war zones: “Hard to reconcile the devastation, horror and distress of the war with the comfortable life” and, secondly, a man who in his first few days in the Iraq war saw a friend blown up; he now has nine previous convictions beginning in 2005, of which two were for domestic violence and he is known by his ex-partners as a “Jekyll and Hyde” character. Facts like these throw serious doubt on the official propaganda, abetted by the media weasels, that the British forces in Afghanistan are unique in being impeccably mannered and humane. In addition they raise the question of whether Kevin Elliott was driven to join up when he left school because the army offered him better prospects than a life on the bread-line.

Torture

An example of how soldiers, of whatever nationality, are liable to respond to the everyday stress of militarism was the case of Baha Mousa, who was working as a receptionist in a Basra hotel until the day in September 2003 when 120 British soldiers (from a group known as “The Grim Reapers”) raided the hotel and took him, with nine others, into detention at the Battle Group Main camp. It was there that Baha Mousa – called “fat boy” or “fat bastard” by the soldiers – was subjected to a process of “conditioning” – or more accurately torture – until he died with 93 separate injuries to his body including a broken nose and fractured ribs. A video recording shows Baha Mousa, with other detainees, hooded and forced into stress positions, being screamed at, abused and threatened. At the subsequent enquiry there was evidence suggesting that Baha Mousa was arrested and tortured because he had complained after seeing some of the soldiers breaking open a safe in the hotel and stealing money. One of the soldiers admitted to this but probably did not help his case by saying he wanted the money “to make a collage”. There was a court martial but, in what looked suspiciously like a closing of ranks, the blame was focussed on only one of the soldiers, who then had to plead guilty to inhumane treatment while the others were acquitted. Counsel for the Ministry of Defence did his best for his majestic client by apologising for the “brutal violence” and “appalling behaviour” of the soldiers. Which left just the government and the media to do their best to plaster over such an embarrassing episode and insist that things are different now, as the soldiers go about the business of killing and of being killed in Afghanistan.

Distress

The pressure on us to misinterpret the deaths, as the bodies come back, as nobly purifying is a cynically orchestrated propaganda exercise intended to justify the war, to obscure the fact that the great powers’ interest in Afghanistan does not arise from any concern for the people of that country but from its position in an area vital to the interests of those powers, rather like the situation when it was an unwilling participant in the “Great Game” of Victorian imperialism. It is almost as a grisly tradition, that those same powers should readily support any Afghan tribal ruler no matter how corrupt and repressive – and that so many of the attempts to control the place through conquest have failed. It is hardly surprising that some of the soldiers should begin to ask why they are there and what the end will be for it all. The official response is to promote a massive lie with insidious propaganda fashioned to strait-jacket any tendency to dissent from the popular delusions. The killing goes on as the government gambles that their lies will be more acceptable than the distress of facing reality.

Ivan

No related posts.

“The 10th anniversary of the air strikes will lead people to think about the bombing campaign, which they saw as unjust, unfair and illegal action carried out by Nato,” says Serbian political analyst Bratislav Grubacic.

Some 2,500 civilians were killed, among them 89 children, while 12,500
were injured.

US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said that NATO’s air attack on former Yugoslavia a decade ago was “the right thing to do” .

Holbrooke when questioned by Charlie Rose during the bombing of Yugoslavia as to why the Serbs didn’t agree to the terms of the Rambouillet text, Holbrooke, who delivered the final ultimatum to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, stated that Serbs claimed that signing the Rambouillet text would amount to agreeing to a NATO occupation of their country. Holbrooke told Rose he insisted this ‘isn’t an occupation.’ In fact, an examination of the Rambouillet text shows that it did fundamentally call for an occupation of Yugoslavia.

David N. Gibbs an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Arizona said:

“The 1999 Kosovo war is often remembered as the ‘good’ war which shows that American power can be used in a morally positive way and can alleviate humanitarian emergencies. In fact, the NATO air strikes failed to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo; instead the strikes worsened the atrocities and heightened the scale of human suffering.

The NATO states could have achieved a negotiated settlement of the Kosovo problem and resolved the humanitarian crisis — without war. However, the Clinton administration blocked a negotiated settlement at the Rambouillet conference, leading directly to the NATO bombing campaign. The U.S. government sought to use the Kosovo war as a means to reaffirm NATO’s function in the post-Cold War era. It was this NATO factor — rather than human rights — that was the main reason for the war.
The Kosovo war had many features in common with George Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. In both Kosovo and Iraq, American presidents avoided diplomatic avenues that might have settled the disputes without war, went to war by circumventing the UN Security Council, and engaged in extensive public deception.”

What we said 10 years ago was that:-“Faced with this latest manifestation of capitalist barbarity and cynicism we once again place on record our abhorrence of all war and call upon workers everywhere to unite to bring the war-prone capitalist system to a speedy end.”

No related posts.

As we socialists never tire of pointing out, the primary function of military power in capitalism is to protect and expand control over resources, markets and transport routes on behalf of the capitalist class of the country concerned. However, the costs and risks that wars and armaments entail for the capitalists themselves often outweigh the benefits to them.

For example, while the U.S. did have real interests at stake in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, those interests were hardly commensurate with the enormous costs of the war it was waging there. Growing awareness of this fact within the capitalist class eventually led to withdrawal.

In other words, states have a tendency to act in ways that appear to be irrational even in terms of the capitalist interests that they are supposed to represent.

War – a capitalist enterprise

There are various reasons for this apparent irrationality. But the main reason is this. War is not only a service that the state provides to the national capitalist class as a whole. War is also – and increasingly – a massive capitalist enterprise in its own right, a “war business” that wields considerable political clout and has special interests of its own.

The core of the war business, of course, is the so-called military-industrial complex. Arms manufacturers, like other capitalist firms, seek to maximise their profits. It does not concern them whether the weapons they sell have a cogent strategic rationale.

The military-industrial complex has a direct interest not only in the build-up of armaments but in war itself. War is the only way of testing weaponry under battlefield conditions. It uses up and destroys old stocks that then have to be replaced – rearmament is now, for instance, the top priority of the Georgian government – and stimulates demand in general.

But nowadays arms firms are not the only large-scale “merchants of death.” Companies like Blackwater sell combat capability directly as the labour of hired mercenaries. Other companies, such as Halliburton, sell logistics and other war support services.

Resource wars, “strategic” wars

The argument is not that all armed conflicts are irrational in terms of the costs and benefits accruing to national capital. Some undoubtedly make good sense in these terms, as when valuable resources can be acquired at moderate expense. One example might be the “cod wars” of the 1970s between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Another, perhaps, is the ongoing conflict over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, whose oil and gas deposits are coveted by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

At the other extreme, some wars have no discernible connection with the control of markets and resources. The recent war in Georgia was in this category (see October “Material World”). Although important oil and gas pipelines run through the south of the country, Russia did not contest control over them. Russia’s rationale for war was “strategic” – that is, getting into a better position to fight future wars.

Again, Israel’s wars are senseless from the point of view of the Israeli capitalist class as a whole, which has a clear interest in a peace settlement that will give it full access to the markets and cheap labour of the Middle East. This interest, however, seems unable to prevail against the political stranglehold of Israel’s military-industrial complex.

The nature of the wars that the US and its allies are currently fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is less clear-cut. Control of resources, markets and transport routes is certainly an important factor, especially in Iraq, but the likely outcome is hardly such as to justify the enormous costs involved. While the ultimate motive for war may be to arrest the decline in the competitive position of the US in the world economy, the actual effect is to accelerate that decline (see May “Material World”).

Capitalism and war: two models

So we end up with two contrasting models of the relationship between capitalism and war. In the first model, war appears as an instrument in the hands of the state, which acts as the “executive committee of the (national) capitalist class as a whole” (Marx). The second model, unlike the first, takes into account the fact that war is evolving from an instrument at the service of the national capitalist class as a whole into a capitalist enterprise in its own right — what we might call the war business. The war business has special capitalist interests of its own, so it cannot function simply as an instrument of more general capitalist interests.

Does the first model represent capitalism in its “normal” form, while the second model represents an “abnormal” ultra-militaristic mutation of the capitalist system? Is the first model rational, in capitalist if not in human terms, while the second model is irrational? At first sight that seems reasonable.

But is there in fact any good reason to regard one model as any more irrational than the other? Each model represents a possible variant of capitalism and a possible form of capitalist rationality. The difference is that the first model assumes the existence of such a thing as “national capital as a whole,” while the second model envisions only separate capitalist enterprises. Some firms sell sausages, some sell computers – and some sell war.

STEFAN

No related posts.

No related posts.

The article reported the case in a Paris courtroom where 42 officials went on trial for taking millions in kickbacks and organising huge arms commissions from the Angolan government during the mid-1990s. This group, which included a former French Interior minister,Charles Pasqua and the son of the late French President Mitterand, were charged with having supplied almost $800 million worth of arms to Angola, including 12 helicopters, 6 naval vessels, 150,000 shells and 170,000 mines.

The Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos used this huge stockpile to crush the US-backed Unita rebels during Angola’s devastating civil war. It is worth noting that Dos Santos is reckoned to have made millions of dollars from the transaction and that he is still in power with no prospect of a fraud trial for him.

The source of this arms hardware was the huge stockpiles of Soviet weapons left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed. The French businessman Pierre Falcone allegedly plied Angolan officials with tens of millions of dollars – some of it stuffed in in suitcases – and deposited other sums in offshore accounts.

You might imagine that these shady dealings having been brought to light could no longer occur, but you would be dreadfully wrong. “Researchers say arms trading has boomed in the decade since the Angolagate scandal was uncovered. That’s partly due to hightened supply. As ex-Soviet republics emerged as economic actors in their own right, several countries developed national arms industries, refitting weapons from their stocks and manufacturing new weapons of their own.

These industries have taken off in in recent years. Ukraine has about 6 million light weapons from Soviet stockpiles, and has modernised tanks, anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry, says Hugh Griffiths, an expert on illicit weapons at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.”
“It is very difficult to stop arms trafficing, because there is no control,” says Griffiths, who has researched Ukraine’s arsenal for the US government. Although NATO funds Ukraine to destroy its stockpiles, “the Ukrainians realize how much money they can make by selling surplus weapons,” he says. In an action that broke no laws, the Ukrainians shipped about 40,000 Kalashnikov rifles to Kenya last year during the tense standoff following the country’s disputed presidential election.”

As the struggle for oil and minerals intensifies inside capitalism we have rebel conflict in Chad, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere. This conflict needs weapons and so the arms trade legitimate or otherwise flourishes. In Africa and all over the world capitalism reigns supreme. The basis of capitalism is production for profit, so in its remorseless drive for profit it leads to conflict, and eventually armed conflict.

It is the nature of the beast to maim and kill and all attempts to civilise it by such grandiose titled groups like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute are doomed to failure. As the expert Hugh Griffiths himself admits – “there are plenty of arms out there – so long as you have the money to pay for it.”

RD

No related posts.

Crises And Depressions Pt 1, Pt 2 We highly recommended this talk given by ‘Hardy’ of our companion party in the UK. MP3 format.

Please feel free to forward, e-mail, repost and/or print them widely.

No related posts.

That remains true today. Never, however, has it been more important for governments to win public support for wars by claiming humanitarian motives. As in the past, some of the “facts” underlying the claims are fabricated. Thus, Tony Blair repeatedly claimed that 400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves, although the number of corpses uncovered was only 5,000.

But again, the claims are false even when the facts are true. Often this is obvious because the atrocity occurred long before foreign governments expressed any outrage over it. Why bring the matter up just now? Britain and the US had no objection when Saddam used poison gas on Kurdish villages in 1988 because at that time he was their ally. The weeks preceding the dispatch of British troops to Afghanistan were marked by a media campaign against the oppression of women in that country, with even Cherie Blair roped in. The issue was then dropped as suddenly as it was raised.

A public movement for humanitarian intervention

What is new is the emergence, within the broader human rights movement, of a loosely organized network that campaigns for military intervention wherever that seems to be the only effective means of halting or preventing genocidal atrocities against some ethnic group. Currently, for example, there is an international campaign for intervention in Darfur (Sudan).

During my non-socialist period, I was involved for a while in one of the organizations that makes up this network: the Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG). My research, publicized through the ISG, helped to bring the massacres of Bosnian Moslems by Serb militias to the attention of the US media and politicians – including, notably, Bill Clinton, who at that time was campaigning for president. Later Clinton did intervene militarily in Yugoslavia, though over Kosovo rather than Bosnia.

Unlike governments, anti-genocide activists like the ISG have quite genuine humanitarian motives. They recall how “the world sat by” and allowed the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to proceed. (Though at war with Nazi Germany, the Allied command turned down pleas to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz.) They are determined to establish humanitarian considerations as an integral part of policy making, so that “we” will not let such terrible things happen again.

Any decent person will sympathize with this line of thought. But there is a problem with it. Let us shift our focus from the moral imperative of effective action to the political forces capable of such action. Who is “the world”? Who is “we”? The only “we” capable of intervening is governments with their armed forces. But governments do not exist for humanitarian purposes. They are therefore loathe to intervene for humanitarian reasons, and it is close to impossible to compel them to do so.

Pros and cons

From the point of view of governments, the existence of a public movement for humanitarian intervention has both pros and cons. It is irritating and embarrassing to have to face down emotional public demands to intervene in places where no important “national interests” are at stake – in Rwanda, for instance, or Darfur. On the other hand, when you are inclined to intervene anyway for other, more “important” reasons it is extremely convenient to have a public movement pressing for intervention. That makes it much easier to drum up public support for war, and at the same time you can enhance your democratic credentials by “responding to public opinion.”

In the case of Yugoslavia, the demand to intervene effectively over Bosnia was resisted, but the campaign in which I participated prepared the ground for intervention over Kosovo. The evidence now available suggests that in Kosovo, in contrast to Bosnia, there was never any real danger of genocide (as opposed to the usual ethnic cleansing). In Kosovo, however, and again in contrast to Bosnia, significant interests were at stake, such as a major oil pipeline and metal-mining complex (see April 2008 Socialist Standard).

Illusory success

It may appear to campaigners for humanitarian intervention that they have a certain limited success. They “win some and lose some.” But if we look more deeply into the real interests involved we see that their success is largely illusory. It is by no means clear that their efforts have the net effect of reducing the amount of suffering in the world. In fact, by supporting and helping to legitimize brutal and devastating wars they may well increase the total of suffering.

The epithet “useful idiots” (or “useful fools”) was used to pillory Western pacifists who supposedly served the interests of the Soviet Union, though without intending to do so and for the best of all possible motives. Jean Bricmont borrows the expression for a different purpose, calling campaigners for humanitarian intervention the “useful idiots” of Western militarism and imperialism (Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2006). Again, this is not meant to cast any aspersions on their motives.

As socialists we would only question the stress on “Western.” In principle such people could equally well serve as useful idiots for non-Western (Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc.) militarism and imperialism, though in practice they are active mostly in Western countries.

Calls for humanitarian intervention only make sense in terms of a false conception of the nature and functions of government. They feed a delusion that obscures the reality of our capitalist world, thereby making it harder to overcome that reality.

No related posts.