No more war songs —Salman Tarik Kureshi

Wars do not ever end, they spread. If victories of one side over another do occur, these victories themselves become the seeds of further conflicts down the road

“Afghanistan, Bananistan!” said President Truman. Like most of his countrymen, he did not imagine that the distant Durrani Kingdom could ever impact on the lives and fortunes of American citizens. Even well into the 1960s and beyond, Americans thought of Afghanistan as a place for hippy backpackers to lose themselves in a haze of marijuana smoke before trekking further on towards a Nepalese Nirvana.

But, as we know, this was to change and that backward Central Asian state, the left-over bits of Ahmed Shah Abdali’s kingdom, would be thrust into the limelight of both American and world concerns. The government of Sardar Daoud Khan was overthrown in April 1978 by a cabal of army officers and leftist politicians in a coup dubbed “the great Saur Revolution”. The social radicalism of the revolutionary regime brought it into conflict with the Afghan ulema, tribal chieftains and landowners. By October, resistance to the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) reforms had become an open revolt. By March 1979, a major insurgency in Herat, led by Ismail Khan, was assisted by the ‘Panjshiri’ expatriates, operating out of Pakistan.

On our side of the border, the unconstitutional Zia regime was exploiting a self-proclaimed ‘Islamisation’ project as a pretext for clinging to power — and for hanging, flogging, lashing and imprisoning citizens. The continuing raids into Afghanistan of the Panjshiris, in support of Ismail Khan’s insurgency, offered varying but convergent opportunities. Zia saw the chance of using these anti-communist Islamist guerrilla bands as a means of gaining acceptance for his regime with the US and other governments, as well as for securing large inflows of military and other aid. US National Security Advisor Brzezinski saw the chance of preparing what he called his ‘bear trap’. We know from the published memoirs of former CIA Director and present US Defence Secretary Robert Gates that the CIA began to arm and train the mujahideen under President Carter’s executive order of July 3 authorising CIA covert operations and funding for the mujahideen, to be channelled through Pakistan. This was six months before the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan on December 24, 1979.

Brzezinski would later recall, “That secret operation…had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap…The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: we now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.” The rest — comprising over 30 years of warfare, insurgency, terrorism, anarchy, state failure, enormous refugee displacements, human misery and millions of lost lives — is, as they say, history.

The Soviet Army was fought to a standstill by the combined forces of the Afghan volunteers (now labelled ‘mujahideen’), Pakistani intelligence services, US weaponry and US and Saudi funds. Finally, the USSR itself collapsed and disintegrated. The war in Afghanistan morphed into armed conflict between a Pakistan-sponsored Pakhtun militia labelled the ‘Taliban’ (itself morphed out of the mujahideen), the Uzbek militia of Rashid Dostum and the Tajik militia of Ahmed Shah Massoud.

The victorious Taliban permitted headquarters to be created for the al Qaeda multinational enterprise’s terrorist campaign against the US. With the US and NATO actively entering the theatre, the war in Afghanistan now took yet another form. It also spilled across the border and into Pakistan, drawing our army into action against the Taliban franchisees in Pakistan.

And all this, bear in mind, is happening at the same time as the continuing war in Iraq, by no means yet concluded, the never-ending violence in the Middle East, conflicts in the Caucasus between Russia and Georgia, ethnic conflict (the Chechens) within Russia itself, Sudan, Darfur, Yemen, Somalia, and the especially murderous ethnic flashpoints across the African continent.

The first point I wish to make in my piece today is this: wars do not ever end, they spread. If victories of one side over another do occur, these victories themselves become the seeds of further conflicts down the road.

Observe, also, the consequences of war, the nations, economies, roads, factories, homes, lives destroyed. Consider the ranks of the jobless, the homeless, the destitute. Again and again, writers and commentators have pointed to the senseless destruction of warfare. Wars do not, as we have seen, either achieve any objectives or, in most cases, even come to an end. And this is my next point: wars are irrational, causing completely gratuitous destruction. And this is without even considering the extraordinary horrors of nuclear war.

The third point is that modern armies and weaponry are extremely expensive, requiring large proportions of a nation’s GNP to support. Even the mighty USSR crumbled, unable to support the military expenditure necessitated by its superpower status. Thus, war is clearly an economically senseless enterprise. If a nation must destroy its people’s livelihoods and homes in order to defend them, what exactly is it supposed to be defending?

In one person’s adult life, one has seen both the mightiest superpowers in history embark on great military enterprises, only to be bogged down, demoralised and humiliated. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — surely, these examples are sufficient for even a child to appreciate the futility of modern warfare. Clearly, war is not an answer to any problem, or even a desirable option.

But how can one square this view with the clear necessity of the present military action against the insurgents in Pakistan? Well, let’s face it: it was a combination of Pakistan’s bizarre ‘strategic depth’ concept with the opportunistic American desire to give the USSR a bloody nose — both products of similarly spurious military thinking — that created this cancerous excrescence and the need for military surgery.

In any case, one is not advocating any simplistic pacifism or impracticable pseudo-Gandhian idealism. Nations do need to defend their people’s freedom and prosperity and their national integrity, in that order, and for this they need armies and weaponry. The issue is one of the priority given to the military, as opposed to political or economic approaches to solving problems.

The mature nations of the world — Japan, Malaysia, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, among several other examples, and, increasingly, China as well — clearly emphasise commercial relationships over territorial issues and peaceful handshakes over military pugnacity. It is all in the mindset, all in the attitude that rejects the teaching of war songs and encourages playing on the pipes of peace.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet