Shaphan

"More primitive than torture"

David Hicks, who has been imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo Bay for over five years, is was a British citizen, until Home Secretary John Reid revoked his citizenship last July. 

... Mr Hicks is an Australian national whose government has refused to press the Bush administration for his release. He fought a long legal battle in the UK courts which ended with senior judges ordering the home secretary to grant Mr Hicks citizenship.  His mother was born in the UK and his grandfather fought for the British during the second world war.

On July 7, Mr Reid granted Mr Hicks British citizenship, only to use special powers to take it away just a couple of hours later.  Mr Reid's decision came despite criticism from the government, from the prime minister down, of Guantánamo and demands for its closure...

... In his letter to Mr Hicks, Mr Reid wrote that he "poses a threat to the national security of the United Kingdom and that to deprive you of your British citizenship is conducive to the public good". [Guardian]

Given that Hicks would probably, if freed, live in Australia, it's difficult to see what threat to national security he could possibly pose, except perhaps as a source of friction between London and Washington.  I'm reminded of the Trop vs. Dulles (1958) case in American law.  The majority opinion of the Supreme Court was that depriving someone of their citizenship was against the eighth amendment, which bans 'cruel and unusual' punishments.

We believe ... that use of denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment.  There may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture.  There is, instead, the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society.  It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development.  The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. [Trop v. Dulles]

Hicks does still have his Australian citizenship.  But given the Howard government's refusal to help their citizen, given the UK's alleged influence over the Americans, and given that the other British citizens have been returned, Blair and Reid, for once, could have done the right thing.  Instead they've overridden the courts and washed their hands of him, but the stain remains. 

I sometimes, but not often enough, think of Hicks, stuck in that prison without hope of release, abandoned by his mother countries.  And I wonder whether him being of Anglo-Saxon stock somehow makes him more dangerous in the eyes of his captors - if his name had been Aziz Abdul, would he still be there, five years on?

Anyway, I'm disgusted by our government's primitiveness and I hope that the tin man, John Howard, may be given a heart by some wizard in Oz and gets David Hicks home soon.

"An unprecedented global pain crisis."

Johann Hari is not my favourite columnist, and Prospect disappoints most times I read it, and I'm not a registered user of the website so can only read the first few paragraphs, but Hari has written on the Senlis Council's proposal to divert opium from the heroin trade and use it for medicinal purposes, and he describes the problem well.

In Kabul hospital, half the patients who need opiate-based painkillers are writhing in agony because they have none — while in the fields outside and across Afghanistan, farmers trying to grow opiates are having their fields trashed and livelihoods destroyed by western troops.  This is just the most ironic intersection between the west's "war on drugs" and what the World Health Organisation calls "an unprecedented global pain crisis."

The world is suffering from an opium drought.  The International Narcotics Control Board calculates that the US, Britain, France, Canada, Spain, Australia and Japan consume 80 per cent of the world's medical opiates, leaving the remaining 80 per cent of humanity with the dregs.  Even in developed countries, in cancer care alone there is a need for 550 metric tons more opium every year, and overall — according to a University of Toronto study — only about 24 per cent of the demand for medical opiates is now being met.

At the same time, a violent and utopian attempt to physically stop Afghans from growing the opiates we need is causing us to lose a battle there that Tony Blair has called "essential for the safety of civilisation."... [Prospect]

For once, I'm actually looking forward to reading an edition of Prospect.  (No doubt, I'll be disappointed.)

Repost: Crediting the Senlis Council

[I wrote this post in June but cannot access it from my control panel.  It belongs in the Afghanistan category, so this is just an administrative repost.  Original date, 2006.06.10]

Lest I Forget

Things are going from worse to hellish in Afghanistan. 

Soldiers deployed in Helmand province five years on from the US-led invasion, and six months after the deployment of a large British force, have told The Independent that the sheer ferocity of the fighting in the Sangin valley, and privations faced by the troops, are far worse than generally known.

"We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming.  We have killed them by the dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border," one said.  "We have used B1 bombers, Harriers, F16s and Mirage 2000s.  We have dropped 500lb, 1,000lb and even 2,000lb bombs.  At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles they have fired so many. Almost any movement on the ground gets ambushed.  We need an entire battle group to move things.  Yet they will not give us the helicopters we have been asking for.

Lt. Gen. Richards, the British commander of NATO's forces, said,

We did not expect the ferocity of the engagements.  We also expected the Taliban to carry out hit and run raids.  Instead we have often been fighting toe to toe, endless close-quarters combat.  It has been exhausting.  I remember when we had to extract a Danish recce group which was getting attacked on all sides; it was bedlam.  We have greater firepower, so we tend to win, but, of course, they can take their losses while our casualties will invariably lead to concern back home.  You also have to think that each time we kill one, how many more enemies we are creating.  And, of course, the lack of security means hardly any reconstruction is taking place now, so we are not exactly winning hearts and minds.

This follows a pretty devastating exposé in the Sunday Times by the former aide-de-camp to the UK commander in Helmand. 

“Having a big old fight is pointless and just making things worse,” said Captain Leo Docherty, of the Scots Guards, who became so disillusioned that he quit the army last month. 

“All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British,” he said. “It’s a pretty clear equation — if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would.

“We’ve been grotesquely clumsy — we’ve said we’ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.”

We behave like the Americans because they passed on the mission to us in NATO because their military was being stretched by Iraq.  Ourselves and the Canadians should ignore the sensitivities of the Pentagon and reconsider the proposals of the Senlis Council re legitimizing the production of opium poppies, which would help meet the world's dearth of opiate-based medicines.  Or is it too late for sense to prevail?

Three strategic principles

William Rees-Mogg in The Times:

Field Marshal Lord Montgomery once lectured the Staff College on the principles of military strategy.  His opening words were:  “Gentlemen, there are only two principles of strategy.  The first is:  Do not march on Moscow.  The second is:  Do not fight a land war in South East Asia.”  He might have added a third:  Do not invade Afghanistan.

One of the classic blunders

According to reports, we're to send more young men to Afghanistan to kill the Mujahideen (*) who are killing our young men in Helmand province.  As The Economist reported in June, before the latest deployment:

[The] British contingent in Helmand province ... consists of only 800 fighting infantrymen in an area 250 miles (400km) by 250 miles, a battalion fewer than many thought the bare minimum.  British commanders say they have enough men to make a difference, adding that support troops, artillerymen, even cooks and clerks, can be pressed into the infantry role if need be.  But it looks far from ideal.

We have lost six men in the past month but have killed many more Mujahideen.  The more we kill, the more we create.  The more we create, the more troops we'll need to kill the Mujahideen killing our boys.  I'm reminded of the wise words of the Sicilian, Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, just before he dies after swallowing a goblet of red wine laced with iocane powder, a swift-acting poison that he wrongly believed was in the goblet of his interlocutor, the Man in Black (aka Westley, swoon):

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.  The most famous is:  "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."  But only slightly less well known is this:  "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line."

Okay, he was fatally wrong on that last point, but the first one is a classic blunder.   

I heard John Simpson, on FiveLive radio today, talking about the new deployment.  I've mentioned before on this blog about the Senlis Council and its proposal to divert the opium produced in Afghanistan away from the heroin trade and towards the world's desperate need for more opiate-derived medicines.  Simpson raised the subject, as he's done before, but this time negatively.  That is, and this is my impression, not his words: he said that the idea had recently been looked at by the UK's top-level policy-makers but it was a non-starter, for reasons he didn't explain and wasn't asked about.  If he had been asked, I think he'd have responded: because of the Americans.

In last week's Indie was a terrifying article about American plans for Afghanistan.  [It's now behind the Indie's sub. wall, but a copy survives in the NZ Herald.]  Tom Coughlin reported:

In Washington there is increasing pressure for a more radical approach to the drugs problem with the threat of aerial eradication being held up as the ultimate sanction if the softer methods favoured by the British and Afghan governments don't work.  Western sources have told the Independent that US counter-narcotics teams are exploring the possibility of using a form of the defoliant Agent Orange.

The United Nations remains completely opposed to the move.

If the Americans are itching to use their stocks of Agent Orange again, it's no wonder that they would oppose such a 'soft method' as that proposed by Senlis.  But, unless we can change the policy radically to a much softer approach, more of our troops, and many more Taliban and Mujahideen, will be killed. The trouble is, we choose to take our orders from the Americans, even when they are badly wrong.

(*)  I call them Mujahideen, and not Taliban, because apparently they are not now just Afghans but also Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens, etc.  It sounds so much like the '80s, when the Mujahideen took on the Soviet troops and won.

PS  Pedants may say it's not a "land war in Asia", as we have air power.  But massacring Afghanis using attack helicopters or planes doesn't really help our cause.

Afghan follies

Yesterday the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs released its fourth report, which included a section on the Afghanistan mission.     (Is Sunday the usual day of publication?)  It mentions the Senlis Council (passim) and its proposal that, instead of eradication, the opium production be diverted away from the smugglers and instead go to meet the global shortfall in opium-derived medicines.  It quotes, approvingly I think, the government's position as set out by Hilary Benn:

The Afghan Government has expressed its opposition to licit cultivation of opium.  The Afghan Minister for Counter Narcotics, Habibullah Qaderi has said recently:  "The poor security situation in the country means there can simply be no guarantee that opium will not be smuggled out of the country for the illicit narcotics trade abroad.  Without an effective control mechanism, a lot of opium will still be refined into heroin for illicit markets in the west and elsewhere.  We could not accept this."  The UK agrees that licensing opium cultivation in Afghanistan for medical use is not a realistic solution to its drug problem, not least because it risks a high level of diversion of licit opium into illegal channels.  The production of opium is also contrary to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

On the last point, between 1919 and 1933 the constitution of the United States prohibited the manufacture of alcohol - Afghanistan's constitution can and should be amended so as to distinguish between medicinal and illicit opium production.   As for Habibullah Qaderi's substantive response, maybe the farmers need to be bribed to sell the opium to the government and not to the smugglers - they should receive at least as much money for their crop as they would from the heroin producers.  Those farmers who do comply should also receive preferential treatment regarding security:  their farms should receive as much protection as possible from the Afghan security forces.  Those who don't comply  would not receive the same protection.  Of course, there are going to be great difficulties, but they are more surmountable than those generated by continuing along the same path as now.

Good news from Afghanistan?

There's a worldwide shortage of morphine and codeine, which means there are millions of people, some of them dying, suffering pain because of a lack of opium-derived medicines.  Meanwhile, NATO's mission in Afghanistan includes the aim of forcing Afghani farmers to grow crops other than opium poppies.  An NGO called the Senlis Council has been urging the US and NATO to radically rethink its policy towards opium farming in Afghanistan.  And there may be good news afoot.  This from Bill Roggio at Counterterrorism Blog, who was recently in Kandahar:

... The Coalition and Afghan government made a serous mistake in its implementation of a poppy crop eradication program without providing an alternate source of income.  The destruction of crops turned the local population to seek protection from the Taliban.  A senior coalition officer indicated a major shift in the policy dealing with the poppy crops is in the works. ... 

While poppy production is viewed as a national security problem by Western governments, this is a critical part of the social and economic fabric of the region.  Great care must be taken to address the issue, lest the Coalition continue to alienate the local population and drive farmers and harvesters into the sphere of the Taliban.  Alternate crops may provide a solution, however the poppies are easy to grow and provide the highest cash output for available crops.

The omens are, I hope, that the 'senior coalition officer' may be referring to the Senlis proposals.  Its report into the feasibility of licensing opium production in Afghanistan was launched last November at Chatham House (see also), which suggests high-level interest and support.  Then, in March this year, Senlis gave written evidence to the Commons Defence Committee.  Now, we hear of a 'major policy shift' on opium production is coming.  One is desperately needed - our current policy is causing unnecessary pain and suffering all round.

[See also:  Senlis' Feasability Study; and my previous entries, here and here.]

Opium in Afghanistan

Britain shouldn't be in Afghanistan.  But, since we're there, let's rethink the whole policy on opium farming.  Here's the deal.

We should let the farmers plant whatever crop is most suitable for their environment, even if that's poppies.  The central government should collect all the opium harvested, and pay the farmers more than they would receive from the smugglers.  The world's requirements for morphine and other opium-based products could be met by Afghanistan.  The exports would help offset the cost of paying the farmers well enough, and the international community could contribute funds to make the operation financially viable.

I know there must be good reasons why this isn't being done, but I don't what they are.

Afghan plane crash

I was going to write about Afghanistan today, but an hour ago first reports came through of a plane crash at Lashkar Gah in Helmand province.  Defence Secretary John Reid was flying from Kabul to Lashkar Gah today - how many planes would be landing there on an average Monday morning, the same morning as the British VIP?  The Beeb's gone into Auntie mode, reporting very little - I hate it when they do that.  I find it odd that there's been no quick word that Reid and his party are safe. I hope there's positive news about him soon.  I find Reid an attractive rogue, oddly charismatic, and enigmatic. I don't trust him at all, but I can't help liking him.

Update:  Seems that the canny bruiser has survived - his plane landed earlier.  Peter Hain can now put his CV back in his desk and get on with his work.