Britain’s Own Pravda-Style Propaganda

Ten Years Of ‘Involvement’ In Afghanistan

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant ‘partner’ in the ‘coalition’. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

'It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what's been achieved in that time?'

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

'It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what's been achieved in that time?' (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC 'impartiality' in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been ‘unavoidable’ and that ‘we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events’, struggling with ‘the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable.’ The paper sighed that ‘an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect’ in that ‘we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies.’ This ‘hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain.’

‘The trouble’, claimed the editorial, ‘was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan’, coalition forces ‘were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents.’ Historically, invaders do tend to be resisted by those ‘shrewd and ruthless’ people in ‘obscure corners’ whose land is being occupied, and whose lives, livelihoods and resources are at risk.

‘Some Afghans’, however, ‘were indeed “like us”, recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number.’

The white man’s burden is surely lightened by that happy realisation. Especially because some of these people ‘like us’ – yes, the Guardian really did say that - ‘may have a more important role to play’ in the future. Thus reassured, ‘we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later.’

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war, asserted the Guardian, is that ‘we’ stumbled into an age-old conflict not of our making:

‘The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity.’

Now, ‘after 10 years of muddle and mayhem’, our ‘minimal common interest’ – indeed, 'our remaining duty’ - must be to aim at ‘a power-sharing settlement’ involving the Taliban.

There was no hint from this supposed vanguard of critical and liberal journalism that ‘our remaining duty’ should involve an immediate withdrawal of our forces. No hint that this country should make some attempt at restitution for the decade of ‘muddle and mayhem’ that ‘we’ have inflicted on yet more victims of the West’s grasping and destructive foreign policy.

The Independent’s editorial derived from a similarly tortured perspective of perplexed liberalism: ‘questions about what has been achieved yield far from encouraging answers’ and ‘what little progress there has been is looking increasingly vulnerable.’

However, the editors added, ‘it would be a mistake to overlook the real advances that have been made’ such as ‘democratic elections, a written constitution and a degree of social freedom’. The paper also appealed yet again to ‘the issue of women's rights – or the lack of them’ as ‘one of the most convincing’ supposed ‘justifications for international involvement in Afghanistan.’

There was token acknowledgement in the editorial of ‘Afghanistan's vast natural resources’ which, we are to believe, ‘could still be a source of funding and stability.’ But there was only silence about the realpolitik underlying Western foreign policy; namely, that control of these huge resources was, in fact, ‘one of the most convincing’ reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan.

Instead, the editorial makes a benign-sounding but pathetic plea for the ‘international community’ to ‘help realise the potential.’ But for whose benefit? The corporate media would have us believe that the interests of the Afghan people would be paramount, and that they would be allowed to prosper. For the truth, we have to look elsewhere. 

Turning Afghanistan Into A ‘Hub’ And ‘Conduit’ For US Interests

For example, energy analysts Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz note in a recent article in Foreign Policy in Focus, that:

‘Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized.’

In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what is expected to be a number of tenders for the country’s oil and gas resources. As in Iraq, the contracts include production-sharing agreements that have been strongly rejected by other major oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Why have such agreements been rejected? Because they heavily favour Western oil corporations, granting extremely long-term contracts (45 years or more in the case of Afghanistan) and greater control, ownership, and profits to the companies compared to the far more common contracts that are used for the bulk - around 88 per cent - of the world’s oil.

Dellawar and Juhasz warn that:

‘The Afghanistan contracts, moreover, would not require foreign companies to invest earnings in the Afghan economy, partner with Afghan companies, or share new technologies.’

Crucially, Afghanistan is not only important as an energy producer, but also as a potential ‘energy conveyer.’ Negotiations are proceeding rapidly for the vital Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The pipeline has long been an important objective of Western governments and fossil fuel corporations that have had their sights on the energy-rich countries of the Caspian region. Indeed, the Bush administration made completion of the TAPI a core part of its Afghanistan war strategy.

As then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said in 2007:

‘One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.’

Dellawar and Juhasz conclude:

‘If the pipeline is constructed and U.S. companies begin producing in Afghanistan, its importance to the West will only intensify, as will the desire to keep Afghanistan “open for business.” If Afghanistan does not have the internal capacity to provide this “openness” itself, the United States and other foreign governments may feel forced to do so on its behalf – utilizing their own troops.’

As ever, then, Western states and corporations are striving relentlessly to maintain control of resources and global markets, and to maximise profits for themselves, with as much force and skullduggery as they can muster. And Western media will provide intellectual cover by selling the resultant theft, slaughter and misery as ‘stabilisation’, ‘investment’ and 'the protection of human rights.'

As former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges writes:

'The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.' 

Supine Reporting In Service To The State

Regular readers may recall an alert in 2007 which compared Soviet and recent US/UK reporting on Afghanistan. The alert was a collaboration with Nikolai Lanine, who had fought with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. He had subsequently spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

As we pointed out then, if the claims of impartiality and balance in modern professional journalism are to be believed, the similarities should have been few and far between. After all, Soviet-era media such as Pravda - meaning, ironically, ‘The Truth’ - are a byword for state-controlled mendacity in the West. Instead, as the alert showed, the similarities were painfully precise.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an unalloyed act of aggression, an attempt to crush a perceived threat to Soviet security and power. But it was portrayed by the Soviet government, and compliant Soviet media such as Pravda and Izvestia, as an act of humanitarian intervention ‘to prevent the establishment of... a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide’, and also to provide ‘aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression.’ Once the ‘terrorists’ had been defeated by the Soviet army, Afghanistan would be left to become ‘a stable, friendly country’. Soviet ‘involvement’ was presented as being in the best interests of the Afghan people: the focus of the Soviet government’s benevolent concern. (Lyahovsky, A.A., & Zabrodin, V.M., 1991, Taini Afganskoi Voini [Secrets of the Afghan War]. Moscow: Planeta.)

The parallels to the media’s coverage of Western ‘involvement’ in Afghanistan today are obvious.

Western media support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, was steadfast from the beginning. Ten years ago, as the bombs and missiles rained down, an Independent editorial described the ‘war’ – in reality, a massive attack on a Third World Country by the planet's most powerful military force -  as ‘ultimately inevitable’. Moreover, ‘Washington had the right – indeed, the duty – to respond’ and ‘there was no question that the United States was justified in using armed force.’  Piling up the insults to readers’ intelligence, the paper said that it was ‘to the immense – and unexpected – credit of America that it approached the business of retaliation with such method, caution and responsibility.’

In fact, the US launched its brutal assault despite dire warnings by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) that more than seven million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread starvation if military action were initiated. In September 2001, the US government had demanded that Pakistan stopconvoys of food on which much of the already starving Afghan population depended. The FAO warned of a likely 'humanitarian catastrophe' unless aid convoys were immediately resumed and the threat of military action terminated. Compare the grim reality with the Independent’s claim of ‘caution and responsibility’ underpinning the US ‘business of retaliation.’

Three months into the war, a rare report in the Guardian highlighted the desperation of Afghan people:

‘The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers' milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. When the children's pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. “We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat it [grass] ... until we die,” said Ghalam Raza, 42, a man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.’

But on the eve of war, the Guardian had told its readers:

‘it needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response.’

The invasion was ‘an act of legitimate self defence to protect our nations from further attack.’

The paper offered token words of hope that Bush and Blair’s promises of food, medicine and other supplies to Afghan civilians would be honoured. Blair tried to sweet-talk the Afghans by saying that, in the past, the West had simply ‘walked away’ from its people. But not now:

‘This time round we must not repeat that mistake. This conflict will not be the end... once the conflict is over we've then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future... We are not going to walk away again.’

This is the standard, patronising rhetoric beloved of all triumphant invaders.

As defenceless Afghan civilians were being slaughtered, the Guardian editors asserted that ‘nothing in the world is more important right now than that [Bush and Blair] succeed.’

The Guardian even claimed that Afghanistan had brought the storm of destruction upon their own heads:

‘Offered the opportunity to hand over Bin Laden and to act against his networks, and pressured to do so even by those closest to them, including Pakistan, the Afghan regime has refused. There is no question, therefore, but that a monstrous injustice against America remains unassauged [sic].’

In fact, even before 11 September 2001, the Taliban had offered to present bin Laden for trial following attacks on US targets in the 1990s, ‘but the US government showed no interest.’

Following the 11 September atrocities, the US refused to present evidence of bin Laden’s culpability to the Taliban ‘presumably because’, as Noam Chomsky said in an interview at the time, ‘that would have suggested some limit on the imperial prerogative to act without any authority.’

How genuine the Taliban offer was may never be known. But, as Chomsky points out, the brutal US stance could be put succinctly as follows:

‘hand him [bin Laden] over, or else; and if you do, we may leave you alone (overthrowing the Taliban regime was a late afterthought). No government, surely not the U.S., would ever accept such a demand, unless compelled to by the threat of extreme violence. There was, then, no alternative to such [a] threat, if that was the demand, as it was. But that offers no justification for the threat of violence, or its implementation.’

As for the editorial cheerleaders, press stenographers and armchair-warrior commentators who abased themselves before Western state power, they would do well to heed the cogent summary offered by WikiLeaks:

‘If a journalist hides the truth they are not journalists; they are partners in the crime they are hiding.’

The Statistics of Western State Terror

Ten years later, the violent consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan are truly appalling. A Stop the War video, ‘What is the true cost of the Afghanistan war?’ details some of the appalling statistics:

·         9,300 Afghan civilians have been killed by International Security Assistance Forces, i.e. Nato.

·         380 British soldiers are dead.

·         £18 billion of UK taxpayer’s money has been spent.

·         The war is costing Britain £12 million per day. The same amount could employ 100,000 nurses (at £21,000 annually) and 150,000 care workers (£15,000).

·         A study by Brown University in the United States estimates an unimaginable combined sum of up to $4 trillionto fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

·         In Afghanistan, ‘cautious estimates’ of the total civilian death toll exceed 40,000 people, of which:

·         25.6% killed by ISAF forces.

·         15.4% killed by anti-government forces.

·         60% killed by poverty, disease and starvation.

In particular, the horrendous killing of Afghan children in US air strikes and night raids gets scant coverage, if any, before the Western media swiftly looks away.

There are now three million refugees from Afghanistan: 30.7% of the world’s total, exceeding the figures of 16.9% from Iraq, 7.7% from Somalia and 4.8% from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

74% of the British public want the occupation to end either ‘immediately’ or ‘soon’.

Very little of this reality made it into the largely uncritical coverage of the ten-year anniversary of the West’s aggression against Afghanistan.

In the conclusion to a new report for Stop the War, David Swanson provides a stunning example of the media’s systematic bias:

‘On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported "the deadliest day of the war" because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.

‘But compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.’

But the deaths of Afghan children, and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, are seemingly of little consequence for most Western journalists who would rather focus on the ‘progress’ and ‘achievements’ of the Nato ‘campaign’. 

Exchange With The BBC’s Afghanistan Correspondent, Paul Wood

In the runup to the ten-year anniversary of the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, star presenter Fiona Bruce and her editors on the BBC News at Ten excelled themselves, as we mentioned in Part 1 of this alert:

'It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what's been achieved in that time?' (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

Bruce then introduced a segment from Paul Wood, former embedded BBC correspondent in Iraq, and now firmly embedded in the NATO establishment in Afghanistan. His report, later posted online, typified the media’s unquestioning acceptance of the official line on Afghanistan. We emailed him the following day (October 5, 2011):

Hello Paul,

I hope you’re safe and well there. Thank you for your report from Afghanistan on last night’s BBC News at Ten.

You introduced your report:

‘Stabilising Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.’

Portraying the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as ‘stabilising’ the country echoes NATO rhetoric. How can this constitute news ‘balance’?

And, later, you ask:

‘What, then, has the British army’s engagement in Helmand been for?’

In answer, you chose to include this from Lt General James Bucknall, deputy NATO commander:

‘Yes, there’s been considerable sacrifice by many, many courageous people. But actually I would say, you know, look at what we’re trying to achieve, and it is to enhance our own national security. And that is, you know, a price worth paying.’

What about the views of those who do not believe it is a ‘price worth paying’? In fact, more fundamentally, why ignore those who argue, including within Britain’s own intelligence services, that UK foreign policy hasendangered ‘national security’?

In short, where is your journalistic scepticism of the official line? Are you really so unaware of the longstanding realpolitik: namely the Western push for geostrategic dominance over the valuable resources of this region? Shouldn’t the ample evidence for this be reflected somewhere in your reporting?

If you continue to echo state propaganda, then you are emulating Pravda and Izvestia when they reported the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in comparable terms.

I hope to hear back from you, please.

Best wishes

David Cromwell

Wood replied on 7 October:

David, sorry about the delay; it has been a bit busy.  I do try to answer emails personally (and quickly) and, as you know, we do have also a complaints unit, reachable through the website.

Anyway, you could regard 'stabilising' as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.  Let me deal at greater length with your other point, about the use of a clip by General Bucknall, who said that Britain was in Afghanistan to “enhance our own national security”.

It is certainly an argument that Britain's national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan -- and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.  But a report cannot go in all directions at once, and in this piece, General Bucknall was used to reply -- or balance -- a series of earlier criticisms of the way the Afghan campaign is going.

In Helmand, the piece showed a police chief saying that he couldn't survive without Nato -- and bear in mind that the whole strategy is to hand over to people like him -- and also a long-serving aid worker, who had reached the pretty damning conclusion that all the blood shed in Helmand had simply been to return the place to its condition before British troops arrived.

This is hardly Izvestia style propaganda in the service of the British state -- as I hope any dispassionate observer would agree.

You raise a number of good points about western motives, worthy of further debate, though I hope you will forgive me if I don't enter into a protracted correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Paul Wood

BBC Afghanistan correspondent

We replied the same day:

Thanks Paul,

I appreciate you getting back to me. Many of your BBC colleagues are all too quick to duck direct challenges, and instead divert the public into the arcane depths of the hopeless BBC complaints system.

You claim that: 

‘...you could regard “stabilising” as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.’

I’m afraid that comes across as a cop-out in defence of poor journalism. To add ‘inverted commas’ in a spoken report on BBC News at Ten, you would have had to insert a word like ‘claimed’ or ‘alleged’ and say something like:

‘The UK government's alleged goal of “stabilising” Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.’

You also say that:

‘It is certainly an argument that Britain's national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan -- and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.’

But why did you not include such a relevant and crucial argument in this report? You claim that Lt General Bucknall’s assertion that Britain is in Afghanistan ‘to enhance our own national security’ is the ‘balance’ for criticisms of ‘the way the Afghan campaign is going.’ That’s a revealing admission. The argument is not that there are criticisms of ‘the way the Afghan campaign is going’, but that you have excluded the more fundamental criticism that the invasion-occupation cannot be justified. Instead, you deploy a standard cop-out: 

‘a report cannot go in all directions at once’

But a report like this could, and should, have been balanced on its own. Instead, you’ve decided to rely on a hand-waving appeal to balance having been achieved in some other report, somewhere else on the BBC. This is the eternal refrain from BBC journalists when challenged with serious biases and omissions. In fact, there can be no BBC news ‘balance’ when it consistently buries the argument that the British role in the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan is wrong.

The ‘good points about western motives’ that I made in my earlier email should be central to responsible news reporting from Afghanistan; not merely pushed aside as ‘worthy of further debate’.  Otherwise, you are indeed performing a useful role ‘in the service of the British state.’

I understand that you’re a busy reporter and that you may prefer not to become involved in a ‘protracted correspondence’. Or, more optimistically, you will see that there are fundamental and serious issues here that need to be addressed.

Best wishes

David