Britain’s Afghan expendables

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Fury has erupted in the media regarding the fate of Afghan personnel who fought alongside the British military—but the State’s betrayal of those who fought for it will be swiftly forgotten

~ punkacademic ~

For two years the British press has known—but been unable to report—that a major data breach has resulted in the names of thousands of Afghans who fought alongside the British armed forces during the ‘war on terror’ being leaked, placing them at risk of reprisal and death at the hands of the Taliban.

A government injunction has prevented the story from being told until now. Ostensibly in place to prevent information falling into the hands of those who might use it to target individuals, the injunction has been decried as laughable and part of a cover-up—the identities of the individuals were known the minute the data breach occured. What the injunction served to do instead was to spare the British state its blushes.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds familiar. Indeed, in a separate story which has gradually been revealed over the past year, resettlement claims from Afghan special forces personnel who were trained and armed by Britain before fighting alongside them, have been repeatedly rejected by a senior UK military officer at the same time as an investigation into war crimes by UK special forces is underway.

Whilst the investigation can compel evidence from witnesses in the UK, it does not have the authority to do so for those abroad. Convenient then, that those who fought alongside British special forces, and who might have witnessed what they had done, be left to die in Afghanistan.

These cases have exposed a rift in the military apparatus, between those soldiers and officers who are aghast at the treatment of their former allies, and those—typically more senior—potentially complicit in their fate. Indeed, it is alleged that many of the former special forces ‘operators’ (as they are euphemistically dubbed) have already been tortured or killed.

Anarchists aren’t known for being particularly sympathetic for those engaged in imperial adventures, or indeed those who agree to support them. Nonetheless, it is worth being mindful that in the imperial power plays of the ‘war on terror’, choices for many around the world have been, to say the least, more loaded than for those of us whose homes were not decimated by foreign invasion or fundamentalist persecution.

The revelation that a secret resettlement scheme had been underway over the past two years for at least some of these Afghans has met with a mixed reaction in xenophobic Britain. For some, this is the very least that can be done for those who fought alongside British troops. For the far-right conspiracy-mongers onsocial media, this is another attempt by the ‘deep state’ to secretly import foreign nationals into Britain.

These divisions are telling. Britons, both elites and public, are deeply uncomfortable when the wars come home. The post-2001 ‘war on terror’ took hold of a British popular imagination increasingly turning towards nationalism as the only viable collective understanding of self, following decades of the neoliberal destruction of any alternative idea of community and the institutions which might underpin it.

At a point in history when fewer Britons had either served in the armed forces or were likely to know someone who had, donations to the Royal British Legion soared, as did attendances at Remembrance and Armistice events. In 2009 at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the New Labour government instituted a new occasion on the calendar—Armed Forces Day—as an overt celebration of the military, less freighted with the complicated memories of mass death which had historically characterised Remembrance. The events of course amounted to a series of rituals that had their origins in the aftermath of the killing fields of France and Flanders, following World War 1—a conflict of such scale that statistically every household in the UK knew someone directly affected by.

The presence of the British military in the popular imagination has, in the past several decades, become hugely out of proportion with the size and relevance of the armed forces in terms of membership or public spending. Support for groups such as Help for Heroes—whilst genuinely motivated for some by attachment to individuals who have been grievously wounded in conflict—is for many a statement of national identity, along with wearing an England football shirt or the sacrosanct nature of Brexit.

But the language of heroism—what the American literary scholar and Vietnam veteran Paul Fussell once called the ‘high diction’ which makes war romantic when it is quite the opposite—is not extended to the peoples of the nations Britain sought to ‘liberate’, even when they were trained by them or fighting alongside them.

Indeed, Afghans were curiously and consistently absent from what in theory was their own story. In the ‘war porn’ books which emerged after the British move into Helmand province in 2006 (often ghostwritten by journalists from the Sun or other tabloid newspapers), the protagonists were the Royal Marines, the Parachute Regiment, or Apache helicopters, facing an orientalised and invisible enemy, in an unforgiving and alien landscape.

Neither who, nor what, the war was ‘for’ was given any serious consideration. That the British armed forces may have committed serious war crimes in wars of dubious legality comes as no surprise to those—usually abroad—who know the British armed forces’ historical track record on issues such as taking prisoners. They did not see the case of Marine A as the aberration the British domestic public did.

But just as Sergeant Alexander Blackman was ultimately reconstructed as a wounded hero by the media and his victim’s name lost to history, so too will Britain’s expendable allies be swiftly forgotten—except by the far right. Once cannon fodder in Britain’s latest (and now memory-holed) imperial adventure, they live on as cannon fodder in the meme-wars of extremist trolls driving Britain into fascism.

Image: Wes Calder on Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

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