Kevin McKenna: Who are the real savages – the Taliban, or Britain and the US?

On Monday, Susan Wild, an American Democratic politician, was discussing unfolding events in Afghanistan on BBC Newsnight. As in the UK, it seems that being a member of the political elite carries no guarantee of wisdom.

Signalling her approval of US president Joe Biden’s Pontius Pilate speech earlier that evening, she said: “We cannot impose our western values on countries that aren’t able or willing to accept that assistance and then rebuild themselves.”

What she meant was this: “It’s not our fault if these savages refuse to bend the knee and accept our civilised way of doing things.”

So, let’s have a look at America’s civilised values. This country’s penal system still permits the government to fry its miscreants (of whom a disproportionate number are poor) to death. Its police forces routinely torture and kill black people, knowing there’s a decent chance a jury won’t convict.

It blockades Cuba – a small, impoverished neighbouring country – as punishment for ejecting the mafia gangs which ran its economy under the protection of the CIA. Unlike its assassinations of other South American leaders, it failed in numerous bizarre attempts to murder Fidel Castro (above).

The US terrorised and ruined the lives of tens of thousands of law-abiding Americans whom the state suspected of being communists. Throughout the Arab world it pursues its own customised form of jihad (this one informed by Christian fundamentalist television evangelicalism). During the current 30-year rule of the neocons in American politics (both Republican and Democrat) US foreign policy has proceeded on the understanding that Islam and the Muslim way of life are essentially wicked. This is cultural defamation.

“They are evil. They hate what they see here in this chamber,” President George W Bush once told Congress. This was just after he urged all good Americans to report dodgy behaviour to the newly established Department of Homeland Security. The new McCarthyism.

By dehumanising Muslims in this way and selling it to the American public, the US was thus able to treat those it suspected of being “Islamist” like animals in Guantanamo Bay. Other civilised Nato countries readily acquiesced by permitting their airspace to be used to torture suspects.

Having trained, armed and fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in the late 1970s and 1980s against the Soviet army, America then spent billions occupying Afghanistan to hunt him down, slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children in the process. As the great American writer Gore Vidalonce memorably put it, this was “like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia”.

Bin Laden, like many of the west’s former allies in the region, had long signalled his intention to punish the occupying infidels when it became clear that “Gharbzadegi” would be the end product. No-one in the civilised west ever thought there might be a price to pay for centuries of demonising an entire culture and ransacking its territorial lands for imperial wealth and power.

In Britain, a Game of Thrones fantasy has defined our entire policy in the Middle East for two centuries. We even called it “The Great Game”. This was a brutal and sprawling conflict, joined with Czarist Russia, to control the region and carve up its territories. Not, you understand for the purposes of bringing civilised values to the warring tribes, but merely to gain influence and maintain an empire.

The sole purpose of this was to enrich western corporations by ensuring they might continue to profit from these lands while using the locals as serfs. This is when the seeds of the current instability in the region were sown. Britain hard-wired it into the Middle-East’s DNA. We are ultimately responsible for this.

ALL of the west’s incursions into the Middle East and Africa and the Indian sub-continent proceed on a lie: of bringing western values of civilised behaviour to savage people. But who are the real savages?

During Britain’s occupation of India, the crown bled that beautiful country dry and repressed all opposition by the most brutal means imaginable. When it finally opted to depart in 1948 it left regional chaos in its wake, bequeathing a brutal civil war that would claim millions more lives. Its imperialism was principally about imposing the values of naked capitalism on those countries lacking the means to resist it. Britain and its western allies have been preying on the Middle East for an entire millennium. The medieval Crusades were little more than a war of religious fanaticism on a grand scale encouraged by corrupt Popes peddling salvation to dissolute western princes. Little in our attitudes since then has changed.

In more recent times we have emptied our working-class neighbourhoods of their youth to feed the imperialist war machine. The trick is to maintain these communities in conditions of such poverty at home that military service is regarded as a step up in their standards of living. Their regiments are named for an indolent and vacuous royal family to provide the second lie: that they’re doing this for some greater good.

And so it’s come to this: another distant, beautiful land sacred to its citizens reaping the bitter harvest of centuries of imposing our western values through the barrel of a gun and the roar of cannons.

Not only has Afghanistan signalled the total defeat of imperialist capitalism, it has also flagged up the inbred stupidity of the educated elites. Joe Biden reminded us that America had spent $1 trillion on civilising Afghanistan. Sadly, none of it appears to have been spent on decent project management.

How much of it reached its intended target? Did anyone check that the training was working? Wasn’t this then just inevitable? Didn’t Biden and his Downing Street stooges not stop to think on their actions: that decades of state-sponsored Islamophobia in Britain and the US and air strikes on blameless Afghan villages might one day have consequences?

Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway and the anti-war movement predicted this 20 years ago. But the cowed, government glove-puppets in the British press demonised them as Trots and hippies.

And still we use the 1000-year-old language of conquest and occupation to dehumanise the people of these lands. They are tribal; chaotic; medieval; and by God haven’t we let them know that down through the centuries.

Now, though, we must seek some kind of rapprochement with the Taliban. Yet, how can we expect to do that when we’ve made it clear we think they’re savages, while disregarding our own implacable savagery in their lands?