A Fairy Tale at Christmas Coverage of This War
Has Played Down the Civilian Deaths and
4 Million Refugees,
Feeding a New US Doctrine of Terror
by Madeleine Bunting
Reprinted from The Guardian
It's all settled then
- this really does seem likely to prove a war that ends
before Christmas. Any day now Bin Laden should be blown up in a cave, and then we
can settle down to our turkey and Christmas pudding. We can send cards and sing carols
about peace and goodwill without a chorus of daisy cutters in the background. Christmas
is a time when, above all else, we like to feel good about ourselves; we give to
charities, we give presents, we offer hospitality and we remember those lonely old
relatives. If it works, the objective is to feel expansive, warm-hearted and generous.
So all good wars must end before Christmas.
Indeed, this one is shaping up in every respect to having been a jolly good war.
It is fitting all the criteria for what a modern war should be - very neatly. It's
been short; it's been successful; and we've had right on our side. Not a day is going
by without another al-Qaida bomb factory or terror manual being discovered; and now
an Advent goodie, the smoking gun himself, Bin Laden, chortling as only an evil genius
would do over his handiwork. Even the ascetic Mullah Omar comes in for demonisation
as his vast compound in Kandahar allegedly exposes his corrupt egotism while his
people suffered in poverty (worst of all, it appears, he had execrable taste in interior
decor).
So this year, as we pull the crackers, we can happily reflect on the fact that those
dear Afghans are now flying their kites and listening to their screeching music (though
it's a mystery as to why they would want to) once again, thanks to us. To top it
all, feeling really good usually requires some measure of feeling superior; so round
off that seasonal glow with some gloating at the idiots who opposed this war.
All so neat, just too neat, and I don't buy it. The coverage of this war raises more
questions than any other war I can remember (and I'm not even talking about the video
tape). Of much more concern has been the way the coverage has been heavily skewed
towards the military conflict: it's been a boys' war. We've followed planes and bombs,
we've watched plumes of smoke from distant brown hills, we've seen picturesque Afghan
fighters hanging about in mountain hideouts - and now it has culminated in a grand
finale, a mountain shoot-out. It's been as gripping and as plausible as one of the
black-and-white westerns we'll watch this Christmas, only fewer dead bodies. Very
occasionally, we've glimpsed that people are getting killed - the images of the castrated
Taliban fighter pleading for his life before he was shot, and the massacre at Qala-i-Janghi.
But our sympathy for these near-feral wildmen is limited - they got what they deserved,
they were Taliban after all.
What has been strikingly absent is the humanization of
this war. Unlike in Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and newspapers have not been filled
with the terrible trauma of recognizable individuals and their families. The cameras
haven't hovered on the faces of shocked tearful children, and the impotent anguish
of their parents and grandparents. On a few occasions, reporters have reached a bombed
village, but it's hard to tell the rubble from the hovels, and estimates of the dead
are always circumspect; there has been no sense of outrage about these atrocities.
Yet the number of Afghan non-combatants reported killed (how many more do we not
know about?) in this war is edging close to those who died in the World Trade Center
The latter has provoked global outrage, the former is accepted with an astonishing
equanimity as a necessary price to pay for two very uncertain prognostications -
Afghanistan's peaceful future and ridding the world of the evil al-Qaida.
But the even bigger story that has barely surfaced in recent weeks
is the huge dislocation the war has caused to the entire population. The World Food
Programme estimates that as many as 3m-4m people have fled their homes because of
the bombing. Medecins Sans Frontires claims that Maslakh - a name that should be
on every newspaper front page - is the biggest refugee camp in the world. The few
aid workers there haven't even been able to assess its population, which is believed
to be somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 and growing; new arrivals have recently
shot up from 20 a day to 1,200. It is one of five refugee camps around Herat, but
the route there is too insecure for western journalists. They are largely sticking
to the main cities and Tora Bora (there are a few notable exceptions, such as the
Sunday Telegraph's Christina Lamb, who sent a horrifying report from Maslakh).
But it's not even those dusty, cold refugee camps that are the WFP's biggest headache,
according to its Rome spokesman: at least it knows where they are. It is the refugees
who have fled into remote rural areas, many of whom could die - or may already have
died - a bitter death from starvation and cold this winter.
Part of the explanation for why we are not hearing this is the unprecedented danger
of reporting this war, in which as many journalists as western combatants have been
killed. Partly it's because journalists always depend for help on local participants
in a war who want to use the western media to advance their cause. But the only Afghans
helping western journalists are the Northern Alliance, and they have no interest
in shocking a western public with the suffering caused by the bombing.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the bodies too
quickly for western cameras. Just compare them with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which
ensured a storm of western moral outrage at Serbian ethnic cleansing by taking the
cameras to remote villages to show them the dead bodies. Nor did the Afghans flee
into Pakistan in sufficient numbers to provide the kind of disaster footage always
inexplicably described as "biblical".
All of this has conveniently dovetailed with the west's pursuit of this war. So we've
been left with a straightforward moral narrative: good triumphs over evil. It's been
this kind of easy moralizing that kicked me into the idiots' camp from the start.
The US may have wanted to exact revenge, but it was never something anyone could
claim to be morally right. The Americans have unleashed a principle of foreign policy
-- it is legitimate to fight terror with even greater terror - that is causing
havoc in the Middle East, could cause more havoc in Kashmir and is being used from
China to Zimbabwe to warrant brutal repression.
The fact that it hasn't yet caused the kind of havoc feared in Afghanistan (such
as a protracted guerrilla war) is small recompense when we choose to overlook that
we are not getting anything like the full picture of the suffering it has caused
in this most tragic of countries.
Email m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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