THE horrific suicide bombing at Kabul airport, deliberate murder of people only trying to flee to safety, points to the savagery of terrorist groups at home in Afghanistan today.
The Taliban reports injuries among some of its own troops, and given its concern to be recognised as Afghanistan’s new government is an unlikely culprit. US sources say they instead suspect Islamic State (Isis).
This gives the lie to claims from politicians from former prime minister Tony Blair to current Labour leader Keir Starmer that the 20-year war in Afghanistan was effective in preventing Afghanistan becoming a haven for terrorist groups.
Not only does the Taliban control more of Afghanistan than it did in 2001, groups like Isis were unknown there then.
Indeed, Isis is a creation of the war on terror, an offshoot of the al-Qaida group that was empowered and spread across the Middle East in the wake of the US-led wars on Afghanistan and then Iraq.
The Stop the War Coalition is right to challenge Blair to debate the legacy of the invasion of Afghanistan: he should not be allowed to get away with his nonsensical claims that the trail of death and destruction left by his and former US president George W Bush’s wars made the world a safer place.
That is why it is crucial we identify the root cause of this catastrophe in Western aggression, not in allegedly premature departure.
This is doubly so as the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is not the result of some new peace policy by President Joe Biden.
The determination of successive presidencies to extract themselves from the Bush-era wars is tied to their new priority: the new cold war against China, the “pivot to Asia” spoken of by Barack Obama.
That cold war is being pursued aggressively even now. The US decision to reject the findings of a World Health Organisation probe into the origins of Covid-19 and hold its own investigation is political, not scientific, as scientists from multiple countries point out. It is a bid to blame China for coronavirus.
Other cold war fronts are also heating up. Ukraine this week launched the Crimea Platform, inviting EU and US politicians to a summit on reclaiming the peninsula from Russia.
Attendees listened to accounts of Russian persecution of the Crimean Tartars, who make up around 15 per cent of Crimea’s population, from bodies like the Crimean Tartar Mejlis, which claims to represent the ethnic group.
Russia’s record on minority rights is not good. But we should be wary of what bears all the hallmarks of a nascent propaganda campaign. No convincing evidence exists to support the Mejlis’s claims of forced demographic change in Crimea (which Russia would hardly need anyway, since the peninsula has a large ethnic Russian majority).
Nor is the neutral-sounding Mejlis an objective source but a member of the EU’s Platform of European Memory and Conscience, an organisation set up to promote revisionist historical narratives that equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. There are echoes of the unusual credence given to claims by anti-China extremist organisations such as the World Uighur Congress regarding events in Xinjiang.
Expressing scepticism about such claims often attracts accusations of apologism for various governments. Yet we have abundant evidence of the way dubious atrocity narratives are used to justify Western aggression, from the “incubator babies” of the first Gulf war to the hypothetical Benghazi massacre that prompted the destruction of Libya.
The appalling events in Afghanistan are the legacy of British and US military aggression. As Western forces withdraw, we must not forget that in other parts of the world they are moving —– with warships despatched to the China seas and the shores of Crimea.
The left must stand firm against such reckless aggression, and be alert to the cynical exploitation of “humanitarian” causes to keep justifying it.
