Standing around our village war memorial on Sunday I was struck by how few WW2 veterans were now able to be there. With them is literally dying out a living memory of why we fought the second world war, the Gestapo, what happened to the Jews and the gypsies and everyone else who didn’t fit in with Hitler’s radical ideology.
At the same time it also struck me that very few who read the western press have any real understanding of what life under the Taliban was really like before they were pushed from power by the western intervention after 9/11.
Life under the Taliban: I lived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan as an aid worker during the time that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. It was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. People lived in daily fear of the religious police known as the ‘vice and virtue’ police. When they appeared people froze with fear, just as those living under Nazi rule must have frozen at appearance of the Gestapo. The traffic was stopped every day at the Islamic prayer times, at which point the Taliban who patrolled the streets with lengths of plastic hose pipe whipped anyone found not praying. Girls schools were closed, women were banned from being out on the streets without a male relative, which literally meant a death sentence for the thousands of widows whose husbands and sons had been killed in 20 years of fighting – they couldn’t even go out to beg. Those who tried to were savagely beaten up by the Taliban. Others suffered far worse fates. Captured soldiers from the various mujahaddin groups that the Taliban had seized power from were given a stark choice - either join the Taliban or walk through minefields as human mine clearers; There were reports of large scale ethnic cleansing, particularly of the Hazara population; while non Muslim Afghans – chiefly Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers in cities such as Kabul and Jalalabad, were forced to wear yellow cloth badges in public – not dissimilar to the star of David that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear. The few remaining Jews left in the country, remnants of an ancient community there, were imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban in an attempt to force them to convert to Islam. While any Afghan who dared to leave Islam suffered a more immediate fate. Just outside Jalalabad where I lived at the time, the Taliban searched a man’s house and found a Bible. He was immediately taken outside and hanged. He courageously maintained his Christian faith to the end. There were many stories of atrocities, but I can vouch for the truth of this one as a colleague carefully questioned several Afghans who had witnessed it to establish its truth.
Why we are fighting in Afghanistan:
That was not all that was going on under the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 1996 the Taliban had invited Osama bin Laden there to fulfil his dream of creating the world’s first truly Islamist state. Their ideology was both totaliterian and expansionist, even more so than that of Hitler’s Third Reich. Afghanistan as a truly Islamist state was to be the base from which jihad attacks would be launched as part of a Islamic holy war to impose Islamic government and sharia law on the rest of the world. This plan quickly began to be put into action. In February 1998 bin Laden now resident in Afghanistan issued a fatwa calling for a jihad to kill ‘the Americans and their allies – civilian and military’. In August that year al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; then in September 2000 suicide bombers directed by al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Aden. A year later came the 9/11 attacks on America. All these were planned from al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan. In fact, after 9/11 US forces found a video in an al Qaeda house near Jalalabad in which bin Laden boasted about the attack on the World Trade Centre that he was about to mount. This was but one of many major attacks on the West that Bin Laden and al Qaeda planned from the safe haven the Taliban gave them in Afghanistan. We are fighting in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups establishing a radical Islamist state there from which to launch jihad attacks on the rest of the world.
The specific threat to the UK: The success of the 9/11 attack enabled al Qaeda to undergo a major transformation. Instead of spending years planning a small number of terrorist spectaculars against the West, al Qaeda became an inspirational force, inspiring, training and ultimately franchising terrorist attacks. Young radical Muslims who now came to al Qaeda seeking bin Laden’s approval for their schemes. Al Qaeda changed form being a small organisation to being an inspiration for a movement that while global in reach, is still centred on bin Laden and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region where the Taliban gave him sanctuary. It was to this region that Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan two of the 7/7 London bombers came.
The cost of appeasement:
If we appease the Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups by withdrawing from Afghanistan now, the consequences will be severe:
a) The Taliban will take over again in Afghanistan with all the harsh cruelty and brutality they had before.
b) Afghanistan will once again become a radical Islamist state – that not only al Qaeda, but also other radical Islamist groups would use it as a base to launch terrorist attacks on West – and those attacks would increase both in scale and in numbers. Britain would almost certainly be a particular target.
c) The threat of nuclear terrorism. There has long been evidence that nuclear material form the former Soviet Union has for some years been passing through Afghanistan. During the 2001 western military intervention in Afghanistan canisters of uranium were found at an al Qaeda base near Kandahar airport. Access to such materials would have given al Qaeda the capacity to use a dirty radioactive bomb (i.e. spreading radioactive contamination by means of a conventional explosive) against a western city. There is also evidence that both al Qaeda and the Taliban have access to materials necessary for using chemical and biological materials in terrorism, as was demonstrated by an attempt a few years ago to use Anthrax against Royal Anglian soldiers in Afghanistan.
d) The threat of a nuclear armed Islamist state in Pakistan. If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban again, then Taliban fighters and weapons will flow across the border to the Pakistani Taliban. This will make it much more difficult to prevent the Pakistani Taliban gaining control of the North West Frontier Province and ultimately even of Pakistan itself. The prospect of a nuclear armed Islamist state run by the Taliban would create the unpalatable possibilities of nuclear blackmail against other states or even nuclear war.
e) Withdrawal from Afghanistan would also give Islamist movements worldwide a massive propaganda boost. They would proclaim to the Islamic world that they had defeated the might of a superpower and now nothing would seem impossible to their jihadist followers. They would now announce that it was now a realistic possibility that radical Islam could be imposed on the rest of the world. It would give a massive boost to the recruitment of thousands more jihadists and lead to a huge increase in terrorist financing.
f) Political blackmail by non violent Islamist groups in the UK. These groups share the same ultimate goals as violent Islamists – the creation of Britain as an Islamic state with islamic government and sharia imposed on both Muslim and non Muslim alike. They have simply adopted a different political strategy to achieve that end. Their strategy is to push test cases through the courts and lobby for changes in parliamentary law so that British law is increasingly aligned and 'compliant' with sharia. Their political strategy also involves a certain degree of political blackmail. They insist that unless their demands are appeased for more and more sharia compliant legislation, then it is ‘inevitable’ that more young British Muslims will go to train in Afghanistan and Pakistan and return to commit terrorist acts in the UK. A classic example of this sort of political blackmail occurred in August 2006 when the security services disrupted a plot to bomb planes flying from Heathrow to North America, a plot that had the potential to kill 5,000 people. When Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott met leaders of key Islamic organisations the next day, they were presented with a demand for implementation of sharia relating to family law in the UK. (And just in case anyone thinks this sounds benign, the sections of sharia dealing with family law give significantly lesser inheritance rights to women, give automatic custody of children to fathers, while any woman who leaves Islam for another faith can automatically be divorced, lose her children and even the right to see them). Once such concessions to Islamist ideology are given, the threat of terrorism doesn’t go away, there is just a new demand for more concessions. The only way to deal with such political blackmail is not to give into it, but to tackle the threat of terrorism on the ground. That includes tackling it with military action in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, which has become an inspirational and training centre for Islamist attacks on the UK. If we withdraw from Afghanistan, it would not stop this at all, in fact it would most likely increase the influence of that area for radicalised British Muslims. That would leave as our only options either enduring ever more terrorist attacks or more and more appeasement of the demands of these Islamist groups for a step by step implementation of sharia in the UK. Right now we are at the stage where such groups are demanding the implementation of sharia for financial dealings (which the present government has already appeased) and for family law. However, if we did withdraw form Afghanistan, then how long might it be before Islamist councillors in an area with a Muslim majority population demand a local implementation of sharia within their area…?
We cannot afford stop fighting than the Taliban any more than we could afford to stop fighting the Nazis while they remained undefeated in World War Two.
