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After the massive leak of military documents about the war in Afghanistan, our illustrious Foreign Secretary William Hague said the leak could “poison the atmosphere in Afghanistan“.

Yes, because the litany of military incompetence, uncounted and unaccounted for civilian deaths, torture, war crimes and deals with corrupt monsters has been a gust of sweet mountain air through Afghanistan these last nine years, hasn’t it?

Right up until this week, you could take a deep breath anywhere in that country and savour the scent and taste of a job well done.

The hateful thing about people still criticising New Labour over the conduct of the Iraq (and, indeed, the Afghan) war after all this time is its inherent sickening decadence. It’s sheer navel-gazing insularity and self-obsession. Hand-wringing concerns over birth defects and cluster bombs and white phosphorus and torture and corruption and lies and death and betrayal and (for God’s sake) power drills is just so, so comfortably middle class. So ‘chattering class’. Doesn’t it make you want to puke? Won’t somebody think of the Sure Start?

The bastards who go on about this want to see you and your family placed under the tender mercies of a Tory government who will then visit horrors upon the most vulnerable. David Miliband said so, so it must be true. New Labour helped bring poverty, disease and misery to Iraq but were a future Tory government to bring the same to the UK, that would be the personal responsibility of those who voted against New Labour. The selfish shits.

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Hard as it is to imagine, while the we’ve been furiously and feverishly trying to find any difference or disparity in our isosceles of ideologically identically idiots, things are happening elsewhere. Many of us have been remiss in looking over at what’s been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent days. I’d include the likes of the Foreign Secretary and his shadows in that.

We’re indebted then to the admirable and estimable Bensix who’s been sending dispatches from our dirty wars. Here’s a few things you’ll have missed while you decide which man who can talk out loud the best to vote for.

How about us making Afghanistan safe? For perverts and sexual abusers, that is…

We worked with a girl who had run away from home. She had terrible problems with her family, and she went to police. The police immediately accused her of having committed zina. She said she hadn’t, but they insisted on performing an examination. Three of them put her on the table and made her take off her clothes, and touched her, calling it a medical examination, and claiming to be doctors. She was terrified. What could she do? Nothing ever happened to these men.

To give us and them credit, the police we’re empowering are equal-opportunities monsters.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of “bachabazi,” or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

Meanwhile in Iraq, they’ve got a cop problem of their own…

Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.

The Iraqi government, however, quickly came up with something with which to bury this bad news.

So, death, torture and the sexual abuse in the countries gloriously liberated by our good selves. Surely topic for the leadership debate tomorrow evening? Yeah, right.

Clearly I’m no expert on foreign policy. That’s why I’m typing this in the spare room and not ordering the bombing of villages in Afghanistan.

That said, something bothers me about Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s plan for peace in the country:

This involves three things. First, the reintegration into Afghan society of low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government. Second, political engagement with those disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework. Third, a wider regional political settlement that sees all Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours supportive of an independent Afghan state.

It sounds like a plan although it does sort of fly in the face of the hardline ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ thing we’re fed when some poor sod is kidnapped and is about to get his head sawn off by an al Qaeda affiliate somewhere. Define ‘low-level insurgents’. Is it those that only work weekends or don’t load their AK-47s?

What if Ken Bigley or Margaret Hassan’s murderers were ‘low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government’ being merely ‘disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework’?

We need a moral philosopher of Miliband’s calibre to make the distinction between a beheader and a mere IED-layer or woman-stoner. Still, if we’ve learned anything in the last 14 years, it’s that there’s no moral, logical or rhetorical cul-de-sac out of which the likes of Miliband cannot handbrake-turn.

No, what bothers me is this. Hamid Karzai has been the elected leader of Afghanistan since 2004 and we’re only just coming up with this now? This plan’s six years and countless deaths late isn’t it? Mind you, only a cynic would suggest that the glorious liberators of Aghanistan are scrabbling around for this fix now because they’re saddled with a seriously bent partner in Karzai and a military campaign limping into its ninth year.

I for one cannot wait to see the fighters, extremists and women-haters that Miliband is hoping to coax onto our side (not to mention the ones already on our side) implement his much loved universal values.

…The Sun was one of the principal cheerleaders and propagandists for it.

See also, courtesy of Alex Ross.

Here’s a fun little story from the government’s News Distribution Service…

Plot to keep Iran’s ‘Top Gun’ jets flying … …with parts from eBay!

I like the exclamation mark. Hahaha Iran hahaha with its hahaha crappy airforce hahaha needing part from hahaha eBay!

Three men were jailed for a total of ten years for their part in a plot to supply military equipment to keep Iranian F-14 ‘Tomcat’ fighter jets airborne and combat ready in contravention of an embargo on military exports to Iran.

The thing is, I’m not sure if the British government should be crowing about this, to be honest. Not with our soldiers being killed because we’re too incompetent (or, in the case of former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, too evil) to make sure they got body army. Not with our Snatch Land Rovers which in Iraq and Afghanistan are called ‘mobile coffins‘. Not when US troops in Iraq called our lot the ‘borrowers’. Not with our welcoming of a greater deployment of US troops into Helmand in Afghanistan because it finally means our troops might get some decent helicopter support.

No, instead of jailing Mohsen Akhavan Nik and his son, along with Nithish Jaitha, for breaching the embargo, we should be making them heads of equipment procurement for the Ministry of Defence.

More souls delivered from evil (and unto God) in The War Against Terror:

The Pentagon yesterday promised to launch a joint investigation with the Afghan government into reports that dozens of civilians were killed in US air strikes on Monday night.

…

Villagers brought truckloads of bodies, most of them women and children, to the provincial capital.

In response Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai made the welcome observation that you so rarely hear from our so-called top political strategists and military tacticians (not to mention the legions of elite keyboard warriors of the pro-war bloggerati):

This war against terrorism will succeed only if we fight it from a higher platform of morality

In other words, we can’t beat the beast by becoming a beast ourselves. Strange then that Karzai, only the other month, was backing a law legalising the rape and house arrest of women, and has chosen for one of his two vice-presidential running mates the bloodsoaked warlord Muhammad Qasim Fahim.

Tony Blair earned 12 million pounds last year.

Update: ‘Washington “deeply, deeply” regrets the death of Afghan civilians killed by an air strike, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said.’

That extra ‘deeply’ makes all the difference.

Afghanistan:

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan’s presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands’ permission.

Iraq:

Urgent action is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of those awaiting execution were convicted for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, according to IRAQI-LGBT, a UK based organisation of Iraqis supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq.

As Nick Barlow says: ‘could someone remind me why all those people had to die to bring this about?’ Anybody? Tony?

I think we can all agree by now that the war in Iraq was defined by incompetence, hubris, stupidity, and corruption. Remember this?

The US has lost track of about 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion, some of which will have ended up in the hands of insurgents, according to an official report published in Washington. Among the missing items are AK-47 rifles, pistols, body armour and helmets.

Still, life’s a learning curve, isn’t it? Once we re-trained our sights on Afghanistan, our leaders and tacticians could obviously be expected to have learned from their experiences and mistakes made in Iraq, couldn’t they?

Oh. No, no they couldn’t…

The US military has failed to keep track of thousands of weapons shipped to Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to being lost or stolen, a report says.

[...]

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s only superpower.

You know, I can understand why soldiers weren’t fully and properly equipped in the early days of the Iraq war. A political decision was made not to order kit and equipment too far in advance in case it tipped people off that the decision to go to war had already been made while the charade of consulting Parliament and the United Nations was still ongoing. Those soldiers died to save political careers and pensions and we honour them for that. That is, after all, what sacrifice in wartime is all about.

The thing is, we’ve been in Afghanistan for seven years and our soldiers still aren’t properly equipped.

[SAS commander] Major Sebastian Morley claims that Whitehall officials and military commanders repeatedly ignored his warnings that people would be killed if they continued to allow troops to be transported in the vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers.

What’s the reason for the delay in equipping troops in Afghanistan properly? Did the invoice fall behind a filing cabinet or get left on a train by a feckless official? I mean it’s one thing to send men to their needless deaths when you’re trying to give political cover to a war crime but this is inexcusable, surely?

It suggests that political attitudes towards soldiers haven’t changed much since the Battle of the Somme. Do you think they still have those big maps on tables at the Ministry of Defence where they push toy divisions around with big sticks? It’s the best way to avoid seeing soldiers as human, I suppose.

Here’s a breathless, erotic press release from the Ministry of Defence. I bet the guy who wrote this had a sock handy:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles scanned the horizon for enemy action. Jackal vehicles with their awesome firepower raced ahead using the latest surveillance and targeting systems. Infantry stood ready to strike with deadly sniper rifles, mortars and grenade machine guns – this wasn’t a major operation in Afghanistan but the UK’s largest demonstration of military equipment purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh my God, I think… I’m going to… ohhh… deploy.

Can I just ask one thing though. If all these throbbing, thrusting engines of hot death have been ‘purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan’ then WHY THE BLOODY HELL are they being flaunted on Salisbury Plain for drooling death fetishists? Shouldn’t they be on transports heading to where they’re needed?

(Those are rhetorical questions by the way. There’s no brownie points in just sending this stuff to the army, is there? Where’s the PR value in that? If New Labour hadn’t made such a cock-up of supplying troops up until now, there wouldn’t be any need for this dick-waving. ‘Look at us! Look at us! We’re finally getting it right! And it only took 14 years and four wars to do it!‘)

It’s not all down, down, down in the news right now: some things are up, up, up…

The number of those sleeping rough: UP!

The number of Afghan civilians killed by the Taleban and Nato: UP!

The number of people killed by Clostridium difficile: UP!

In a not-at-all-patronising speech to troops in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister compared British soldiers to our Olympic heroes…

This week we are celebrating the Olympics, where we have had great success. People have been winning medals in areas where we have been breaking ground.

But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication.

…said the Prime Minister likening ‘exactly‘ the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to ride a bicycle round in circles to the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to fight the Taleban. I think that’s what they call faint praise.

He is of course, however, exactly right. Our troops are just like our Olympians. They’re underfunded and spend most of their time abroad. They perform obscure activities that we only pay attention to once in a blue moon before turning over to watch the X-Factor. And politicians love their reflected glory unless they’re losing in which case they get barely a mention.

How goes the crusade? Not well:

Earlier this year a report by Womankind, Taking Stock: Afghan Women and Girls Seven Years On, revealed that violent attacks against women, usually in a domestic setting, are at epidemic proportions – 87 per cent of women complain of such abuse, and half of it is sexual. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced and, despite laws banning the practice, 57 per cent of brides are under 16. Many of these girls are offered as restitution for a crime or as debt settlement. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with a higher suicide rate among women than men.

We can’t clean dogshit up properly off our own streets. Just how we thought cleaning up Afghanistan was a task within our capabilities is a mystery to me.

Tony Blair is at the Olympics.

When George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal visit Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole, it is always a ‘surprise’ visit. It is always ‘unannounced’. The media agree to a blackout until they are on the ground with said bastard.

There is a very good reason for this. If it was announced that George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal was visiting Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole, every yahoo with a shoulder mounted anti-air missile would be gathered around Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole airport in order to try and bag themselves a prize amongst prizes as said bastard’s plane (or any other plane for that matter, just to be sure) came corkscrewing in to land.

Or maybe the same yahoos would make every effort to get a suicide bomber or sniper within striking distance of George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal.

That being the case, why are the media saying that Barack Obama will ‘probably’ be visiting Iraq and Afghanistan during his tour of Europe and the Middle East?

Update: As if by magic, A.N. Other War Criminal turns up unexpectedly in Baghdad on a ‘surprise visit’. Why weren’t we told he was ‘probably’ going?

“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.

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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.

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‘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