The three fallacies that have driven the war in Afghanistan

Johann Hari
London Independent
Wednesday, Oct 21st, 2009

The case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa’ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. That’s not my view: it’s that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. That’s worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the “training camps” they want there – but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

Even if – and this is highly unlikely – you could plug every hole in the Afghan state’s authority and therefore make it possible to shut down every camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can scuttle off to the next day and pitch some more tents. Again, that’s not my view. Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, says: “As we disrupt [al-Qa'ida], they will seek other safe havens. Somalia and Yemen are potential al-Qa’ida bases in the future.” The US can’t occupy every failed state in the world for decades – so why desperately try to plug one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water will only seep out anyway?

There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan – but they are a different matter to al-Qa’ida. The latest leaked US intelligence reports say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them are “a tribal, localised insurgency” who “see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. They have “no goals” beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

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