There has been nothing but disinformation, contradictory information and rumour surrounding this current war in Afghanistan. There has also been crass prejudice on the part of many, perhaps even most, journalists working on the story for the bourgeois media. or as Mr Chomsky euphemistically calls it, the mainstream media.
For instance CNN, BBC, Guardian and London Independent journalists now describe the non-Afghan Taliban in the Kunduz as die hards fanatics because they, it is claimed, refuse to surrender. What they fail to point out is that, according to their very own reports, the non-Afgahn contingent are left with little choice since, it is being said, that they will not be allowed to surrender. Rumsfeld is reported as saying that he wants these defenders dead rather than alive. Yet they are now labelled die hard fanatics by bourgeois journalism. At this stage most of the bourgeois journalists concerned have lost credibility. Journalists have been providing false information whether purposely, due to ignorance or disinformation. These guttter press hacks have persistently refused a healthy journalistic scepticism. They have been contradicting each other and individual journalists have been contradicting themselves. The journalists on the front line, invariably they are on the Northern Alliance side, they have been largely providing the most appalling propaganda as a substitute for serious reporting. Their reporting contains the most appalling assumptions. They paint the Taliban as demons while presenting the US and its ally the Northern Alliance, as protectors. Different journalists, from even different broadcasting companies, use the same tv pictures even though each indivuallyt claims to be on the front line. One Irish journalist who paid a visit to Afghanistan said that many Western journalists based in Afghanistan were pretending they were on the front line and in danger when they were neither on the front line nor in any real danger. We are presented with these pictures of what appear to be Northern Alliance soldiers. Most of the time they are just sitting around on tanks or whatever apparently doing nothing --like unemployed guys in a ghettoe. The odd time we see an apparent Northern Alliance soldier let a round of artillery fire off wwith a grin on his face and a cigarette hanging from his lips. One might be forgiven for thinking that this exercise was phoney and merely executed for the TV team --probably for a few dollars. Indeed it is questionable as to how much fighting has taken place at all. It would seem that the Northern Alliance just strolled into Kabul and elsewhere. Defections and retreat by the Taliban forces (and of course the massive bombing by Yankee imperialism) seems to have been the victor rather than the Northern Alliance. Again the media have been rather useless in investigating this matter. How these defections took place and how they led to the Northern Alliance being able to saunter into Kabul and elsewhere is something that bourgeois journalism does not even raise as an issue. Indeed the absence of investigative journalism has been conspicuous by its absence. What these journalists are doing all day in and around Afghanistan is questionable. Do they just sit around, all snowed up, taking stories from the Northern Alliance --lazy journalism. Concerning the north of Ireland during the height of the troubles there, I was informed that most of the journalists with some exceptions, such as Robert Fisk, lounged about that big hotel in Belfast, The Europa, and took stories from BA officers who drank there and from the few journalists that bothered to venture out onto the streets. The Northern Alliance people are sheer liars. From my observations they tell different stories to different journalists. I bet too the journalist have to pay them dollars for these stories. Then again you don't always know how reliable some of these interpreters are too. They may be misrepresenting what these guys are saying. Then there is the extraordinary situation surrounding the Taliban. They are always going on about dying and fighting to the death. After a while you get sick hearing this. Especially when so many of the seem to engage in musical armies concerning what side they are on next. Mullah Omar says they will fight to the death while many of his soldiers have defected and are surrendering up north. You just would not know what to believe. Only to some degree is it not the journalists fault. It is a secret war. Information is so tightly controlled by all sides that it is rendered more difficult to understand what is going on. In many ways this war is an invisible war. Assuming that there have been mass defections and that many of these defectors are now fighting the Taliban it would seem that the Northern Alliance now contains within itself the Taliban. Essentially there is no essential difference between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Rabbini, he invited OBL to Afghanistan, is largely as Islamic as Taliban. For all the talk about the emancipation of women with Taliban out of the way only men were able to attend the cinema in Kabul the other day. Bourgeois journalism has been so impoverished as to have failed to find out what, if any, policy differences exist between the different indigenous forces. Certainly they all share the common feature of being the foot soldiers of imperialist states. It seems that rather than a war there has been a well organised coup engineered by the CIA against the Taliban regime. It would seem that the defections and surrenders, in many cases, were planned in advance. In this way, as with Milosevic, power was transferred by a virtual palace coup from within its own ranks to the Northern Alliance. The fact that the Taliban leadership did not see this coming is a measure, it would seem, of their cretinism. They just dont seem to have a clue as to what is going on. But as I have said there is no essential difference between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. Consequently politically, in a sense, there has been no winner nor looser. Much of the anti-war left go on about the fact that bombing does not achieve anything except misery. It is not the job of communists to advise capitalists as to how best to wage a war or defeat an enemy. The point is bombs do make a difference. The devastation caused to Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the WW2 accelerated Japans surrender. Please forgive this rough draft form. Karl Carlile Be free to visit the web site of the Communist Global Group at http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/ Karl Carlile Be free to visit the web site of the Communist Global Group at http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/
