For 101 days, Royal Marines have been engaged in a farcical operation as mercenaries of the United States whose lawlessness now qualifies it as the world’s leading rogue state.
Shooting at shadows, and the occasional tribesman, blowing up mounds of dirt and displaying “captured” arms for the media, all have been part of the Marines’ humiliating role in Afghanistan - a role foisted upon them by the Blair government, whose deference to and collusion with the Bush gang has become a parody of the imperial courtier.
Gang is not an exaggeration. The word, in my dictionary, means “a group of people working together for criminal, disreputable ends”. That describes accurately George W Bush and those who write his speeches and make his decisions and who, since their rise to power, have undermined the very basis of international law.
In Afghanistan, their record is beyond question. The killing on Monday of some 40 guests at a wedding was not a “blunder” but the direct result of a policy of shoot and bomb first and find out later, as announced by George W Bush in the weeks following September 11.
The capacity of the American military machine to smash impoverished countries was never in dispute - conditional, that is, on the absence of American ground troops and their substitution by “allied” forces, like the Royal Marines. (During the heyday of the British Empire, Indian and other colonial troops were used in a similar role, although the British, unlike the Americans, were also prepared to sacrifice their own soldiers).
Since last October, Afghan leaders have reported American aircraft destroying villages “too small to be marked on any map” with “more than 300 people killed” in one night. In a family of 40, only a small boy and his grandmother survived, reported Richard Lloyd Parry of the Independent.
Out of sight of the television cameras “at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10…an average of 62 innocent deaths a day”, according to a study carried out at the University of New Hampshire in the US. This is now estimated to have passed 5,000 civilian deaths: almost double the number killed on September 11.
There is no evidence that a single leader of al-Qaeda has been captured or, to anyone’s knowledge, killed. Neither has the leader of the Taliban. The change in Afghanistan is minimal compared with the murderous feudalism that ruled during the 1990s, and before the Taliban came to power.
For all the cosmetic changes in Kabul, the capital, women still dare not go unveiled. “The Taliban used to hang the victim’s body in public for four days,” quipped the new American-installed regime’s Minister of Justice. “We will only hang the body for a short time, say fifteen minutes, after a public execution.”
Describing this as a “triumph of good over evil”, as Bush has said, with an echo from Blair, is like lauding the superiority of the German war machine in 1940 as a vindication of Nazism.
Not only the Marines but the British public ought to feel duped. Both Washington and Whitehall knew long ago al-Qaeda was finished in Afghanistan. Apart from the element of revenge, for home gratification, the Americans have set out to reassert the control of their favourite warlords: people responsible for thousands of deaths in their stricken country.
In October, the US planned to install a regime dominated by members of the Pashtun tribe, who, they predicted, would desert the Taliban. But the split in the Taliban never happened and the Americans have since changed tack and tried to put together a “coalition” of Tajik and Uzbek warlords. The current “interim president”, Hamid Karzai, although a Pashtun, has neither a tribal nor military powerbase. He is simply America’s man.