“You are two fools,” I answered. “You’ll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a recommendation down-country? I can help you to the chance of work next week.”

“Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, thank you,” said Murdoch. “It isn’t so easy being a King as it looks. When we’ve got our Kingdom in going order we’ll let you know, and you can come up and help us to govern it.”

“Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that!” said Windsor, with subdued pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet of note-paper on which was written the D-Notice. I copied it, then and there, as a curiosity:—

This Contract between me and you persuing witnesseth in the name of God — Amen and so forth.

Signed by you and me this day.
Henry Charles Albert David Windsor.
Rupert Murdoch.
Both Gentlemen at Large.

“There was no need for the last article,” said Windsor, blushing modestly; “but it looks regular. Now you know the sort of men that loafers are — we are loafers, Rupe, until we get out of England — and do you think that we could sign a Contrack like that unless we was in earnest?”

“You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don’t set the place on fire,” I said, “and go away before nine o’clock.”

“Good-by,” said Murdoch, giving me his hand cautiously. “It’s the last time we’ll shake hands with an Englishman these many days. Shake hands with him, Windsor,” he cried.

Windsor shook hands. My eye could detect no failure in the disguises. There was just the chance, therefore, that Windsor and Murdoch would be able to wander through Afghanistan without detection.

(more…)

There is much to say about the tawdry stunt of Prince Harry in Afghanistan. That the MoD should gleefully leap on the opportunity to produce such revolting propaganda is only to be expected.

That the media, after all this time and all it should have learned, lapped it up like a dog returning to its own vomit, should be more surprising but isn’t really. There’s a twinge of sympathy for the Prince, I suppose - he’s a puppet in all this. But then that was the role allotted to him at birth and he’ll be one until he dies.

You think he’d be aware of that by now. The fact that he says that he needed to go to Afghanistan and call in air-strikes in order to feel ‘normal’ would suggest not. The way this has been choreographed down to the minutest detail I’m amazed we’re not seeing photographs of the less-than-private shits Harry boasts he’s been taking over the last ten weeks. Fancy that, a member of the royal family needing to defecate! Lawks! I fort that kind of fing was only for the loiks of me and you, Mary Parpins.

Anyway, Marina Hyde in the Guardian says it all better:

On the one hand, it was nice to see Prince Harry in a British army uniform, as opposed to one of Hitler’s. It’s a little bit like Pokemon, really. I’m hoping he’ll give us a highly collectible Hutu warrior snap soon. Gotta catch ‘em all! On the other, is there anyone over Pokemon-playing age who believes it was really worth it? The sheer number of man-hours and money lavished on allowing one young man to experience job satisfaction is mind-boggling. It has to be the most fatuous use of Ministry of Defence resources since Geoff Hoon.

According to the executive director of the Society of Editors, who helped establish the controversial media blackout, it was not designed to mislead readers and viewers but to ultimately give them “a deeper insight into a new side of Prince Harry”. But how completely intriguing. And yet, is he basically still a fairly dim, fairly affable chap, you might ask? It would appear so. But he’s being fairly dim and fairly affable in Afghanistan. Or rather, he was until the news broke, at which point a detailed, prearranged plan to get him out - how many logistical brains are wasted on this nonsense? - was mobilised. So at least we have an exit strategy for Prince Harry, if not for the actual war.

Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and caused less damage to the psychological well-being of the nation to just give him an X-Box and a copy of ‘Call of Duty’?

I like it that Internet hack Matt Drudge got his Prince Harry in Afghanistan ’scoop’ from Australian supermarket rag, New Idea.

He’s moved on from the literally soiled goods of Monica Lewinsky’s dress to the literary soiled goods of second hand stories.

British soldiers have been issued with “cultural appreciation” manuals explaining how the war on terror and Western imperialism have alienated the Arab world and how they can avoid making matters worse. In a candid assessment of the grievances motivating the forces facing British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Ministry of Defence highlights Guantanamo Bay and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Where the hell have these ‘manuals’ been for the last seven years? Did the printers let the MoD down or something? Maybe they got lost in the post along with the instructions for telling the difference between right and wrong.

You can’t help but think that this comes a bit late in the day. Surely when you’re planning to liberate a country, a little cultural awareness would be handy before you actually begin the liberation. It seems a little strange now to have to go about the place explaining to Arabs that if only we’d known that they didn’t like being beaten for no apparent reason or imprisoned without trial, we could have all saved ourselves a lot of bother. Still, cultural misunderstandings, eh? What can you do?

Still, I doubt whoever wrote the manuals had to do a lot of work. This passage sounds like it was cannabalised from the Abu Ghraib Big Book of Rotten Apples, turning a threat into an opportunity, as it were:

They also emphasise how Arabs value the notion of shame. “The socio-psychological need to avoid a loss of face… and a consequent diminution in social status in the eyes of society, to a large extent underpins social behaviour and interaction between Arabs, at least in public.”

To tell the truth, it’s as much the Arabs’ fault as ours. They should have told us they don’t like being threatened with dogs and sexually humiliated. Come on, guys, throw us a bone.

(Via Philip.)

Update: You can read the MoD’s manuals for yourself here. Thanks to Richard in the comments.

There’s an impeccably sourced story in The Sun today. Impeccable in that the sources are anonymous so you have no idea if this is true or just some cloak and dagger bullshit cooked up to captivate the kind of man who enjoys novels about the SAS.

RAF experts eavesdropped on radio traffic in Afghanistan — and heard Taliban fighters speaking in Brummie and Yorkshire accents.

It’s a story that combines a number of elements to form a piquant stew. It’s got the plucky airmen hunting terrorists. It’s got the edge of paranoia about the homeland being a hotbed of dusky suicide bombers. Is that brown chap a few seats away on the bus heading for Afghanistan? Maybe he can’t be arsed and plans to go boom somewhere closer to home?

Best of all, it shows that The Sun are privy to secret intelligence. How cool is that? Check out the intelligence services and, by extension The Sun, getting one over on the hapless Taliban who are no match on the electronic frontier of The War Against Terror:

They do now, dickheads. The melodramatic have been screaming ‘TRAITORS!’ about the Black Country bombers, missing the fact that splashing details of military operations tracking dangerous terrorists doesn’t really speak to the national interest either.

If this all is true, the Brummie Taliban and their supporters have just read on the Internet and in a national newspaper how the British armed forces are tracking them. Now that their spy in the sky cover is blown, the RAF are going to have to switch to tracking the imports of Slade records and Cup-A-Soup into Afghanistan.

A national security snafu or a big pile of steaming page-filler? I can’t decide.

As Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) used to say, ‘freedom is untidy’. And messy.

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan.

Pervez Kambaksh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge.

Still, at least it’s improvement on the Taliban. Under that lot Kambaksh probably wouldn’t have even got a farcical trial before they killed him.

This via Ten Percent:

British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new “super weapon” to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday.

The “enhanced blast” weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US “bunker busters”.

There are, needless to say, nicer ways to go than being caught in a thermobaric blast:

According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, “The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant…. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.”

A second DIA study said, “shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue… it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.”

But it’s all ok:

The MoD said in a statement that it was buying “a small number of enhanced blast munitions for use on operations”. It added: “These have been procured in full accordance with the UK’s obligations under international humanitarian law.

Yay! for humanitarian thermobaric weapons! And, what’s more…

Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs were different. “They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]“, one said, adding that it would be misleading to call them “thermobaric”.

Sounds familiar. Anybody else remember then Defence Secretary John attempting to argue the moral merits of ‘fire bombs’ over napalm, the last time questionable military tactics were discussed? Afghan civilians must be praying that it’s a nice cool British thermobaric weapon that hits their house as opposed to one of them nasty hot American ones.

Imagine you’re fighting two wars. Neither of them seems to being going very well unfortunately. Cock-ups, conspiracies and downright childlike incompetence masquerading as malice have managed to serve up a bloody banquet of bugger all.

You’re losing the media war as well. Stories of your cock-ups, conspiracies and downright childlike incompetence masquerading as malice are rife.

So, what are you to do? Roll up your sleeves, stamp out the cock-ups, debunk the conspiracies and evict the downright childlike incompetence masquerading as malice? Nah. Why bother when you can just choke off the sources of tales of your amateurism? If it’s not in the papers, who cares?

Sorted.

TYR can exclusively reveal that the Iraqi insurgency is being funded by the trade in a toxic, explosive, and highly addictive substance that is peddled on Britain’s streets. Junkies, known as “petrol heads”, are willing to spend almost anything to get their hands on their next “tank”. It offers them a passing sense of boundless power and confidence - but the downsides include thousands of people a year being killed and injured, billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions, and our cities filled with toxic, stinking smoke. Millions of Britons are sending vast sums of money to foreign pushers - many of whom are in league with our enemies - enough money to make it a significant contribution to the trade deficit. Even as we speak, oil dealers are selling their wares only a few hundred yards from my keyboard.

read the rest

‘Mr Tokhi and his family had long feared this would happen. He repeatedly pleaded while seeking asylum in Britain that his life was in danger in a sectarian and political blood feud back home . But the Home Secretary at the time decided that Afghanistan was now a safe place thanks to the intervention of Britain and the US, and Mr Tokhi was sent back to his home, and his death, after the appeal process failed.’

read the rest

Two years ago the US military invited Mr Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander accused of plotting against the United States, to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal. As was his right, Mr Mujahid called four witnesses from Afghanistan.

But months later the tribunal president returned with bad news: the witnesses could not be found. Mr Mujahid’s hopes sank and he was returned to the wire-mesh cell where he remains today.

The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid’s witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai. Another was teaching at a leading American college. The third was living in Kabul. The fourth, it turned out, was dead. Each witness said he had never been approached by the Americans to testify in Mr Mujahid’s hearing.

read the rest…

The British government has failed to honor its pledge to compensate Afghani farmers for eradicating poppy crops, causing widespread anger in the volatile south of the country and leading to increased support for Taliban insurgents, a new report by the Senlis Council think tank claims.

…

“These farmers kept their side of the deal and eradicated their crops, but the British Government did not keep their word,” said Mohammad Gull, a local representative from the Sharwali District in Helmand who was involved in the initial negotiations with the British representatives. “In our culture this is very dishonorable and we are very angry.”

Gull told the Senlis Council he had over 400 checks in his possession which farmers had been unable to cash because of insufficient funds in the account. In total, the farmers allege they are owed $21 million and are planning to sue the British government for the money that was promised them.

more…

Why all the fuss over Abdul Rahman, the Muslim who converted to Christianity? Some people need to grow up.

What are you complaining about? Isn’t that why we bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and warmed the heels of the Taleban to the Pakistan border? So that Afghans have the freedom to put each other to death?

I mean, come on, you can’t spend all that money on cluster bombs to improve a country’s lot, to kill so many of them in order to free them, and then expect them not to act on that freedom. You can’t have it both ways, greedy. Where’s the logic and humanity in that, eh? Eh?

It would seem that current Western policy towards Afghanistan has been lifted from The Man Who Would be King, when Peachy Carnehan, realising that ruling Kafiristan is not all it’s been cracked up to be, tearfully snarls:

Leave them to slaughtering babies, playing stick-and-ball with heads and pissing on their neighbours.

SENIOR Customs officials have condemned Tony Blair and his Cabinet colleagues for their “spineless leadership” of the anti-drugs battle in Afghanistan, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

read the rest

Women all over Afghanistan are still being murdered, raped and imprisoned with impunity, the human rights group Amnesty International has said.

read the rest

In a leaked cable to Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, officials at the US Embassy in Kabul complained that British administration was to blame for a failure to reach the levels of eradication that they had hoped for. They said that the British were often targeting less important growing areas. Since beginning work last month, the eradication force has destroyed fewer than 102ha (250 acres). The original target was 15,000ha (37,000 acres). The cable, shown to The New York Times, also criticised President Karzai for failing to take a strong line against opium farmers, partly for fear of a backlash in elections this year.

reda the rest…

Following on from this comes this:

Hi Pakistan: Afghanistan rules out legalising opium cultivation

Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali ruled out Monday the possibility of legalising Afghan opium production, the largest in the world, for making medicines.

ABC News: Use Afghan Opium Crops to Make Morphine, NGO Says

Opium from Afghanistan, the world’s biggest source of heroin, should instead be used to legally produce morphine and codeine, a drugs think tank said on Wednesday in a suggestion cautiously endorsed by Afghanistan.

It’s a solution so simple and elegant it’s hard to believe someone hasn’t thought of it sooner. The opium farmers get to keep their livelihoods and you put paid to drug-related warlordism.

But on further thought I can see pitfalls: The system would have to be pretty heavily monitored to prevent “leakages” onto the heroin market. Plus, you’d expect the price of heroin to rocket as the supply dried up which would make such leakages more profitable - you’re back to the blackmarket and the opportunity for corruption within the system. We’ve seen how baser human instincts got in the way of a laudable project like the Iraqi oil-for-food programme.

Just what happens to the heroin market in the UK would be difficult to guess; higher prices and the drug cut with more crap to make it go further, perhaps?

And will the Afghan farmers get a fair price for their crop? Or do they become just like the coffee producers - paid poverty wages to produce a commodity for western consumers.

Let’s hope there’s some joined up thinking on this.