China (and UK) head towards bad error on energy

 by Michael Meacher

Fukushima I nuclear accident diagram. Key: 1 Reactor building; 2 Turbine generator & associated condenser; 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7 trenches & pipe tunnels;

Author: Nesnad (source: Wikimedia Commons)

The nuclear industry and its cheerleader DECC [1] will be pleased at today’s announcement that China has re-started its nuclear programme after an 18 month hiatus following Fukushima. The Chinese government have made clear they remain very concerned about the safety issue, as well they should be – Fukushima came very close to making Tokyo uninhabitable for decades to come – but once again industry lobbies have prevailed over sober analysis and common sense. The decision by China and the UK is of course taken on purely economic and industrial grounds, marginalising whatever environmental considerations there might be, but sadly it is also a view taken on very different grounds by such splendid environmental campaigners as George Monbiot and Mark Lynas [2], for both of whom I have enormous respect. But in this matter they are wrong.

The only plausible environmental case for nuclear is that climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity, fossil fuels therefore have to be phased out as quickly as feasible, and nuclear is then the best (or even only) means to fill the gap. This argument is deeply wrong-headed, as the figures irrefutably show. In 2010 the world demand for primary energy was equivalent to 12,000 million tons of oil (Mtoe), 87% of which was provided by oil, coal and gas. Nuclear power contributed 5%, renewables 8%. To reverse climate change, carbon emissions must be reduced to below their present level, let alone turnaround the current accelerating increase. Can nuclear do that? Suppose there is a (modest) 2% growth in primary energy demand per year for the next 35 years; demand will then double to 24,000 Mtoe. If nuclear power is to absorb all that growth and substitute (say) 4,000 Mtoe of coal, it will have to produce 16,000 Mtoe of energy per year. That is a 25-fold increase on its present level. That level is today provided globally by 440 nuclear reactors, so 25 times that means 11,000 reactors. That means building on average one a day over the next 35 years.

Since nuclear power generation has flatlined over the last decade and sharply declined in the last few years, that seems inconceivable. The economics of nuclear power are increasingly unattractive – from mounting construction costs (currently £6bn per reactor, and rising), long lead time (up to 10 years), uncertainty over future electricity pricing, political hazard (the decision of Germany, Austria, Switzerland to withdraw from nuclear after Fukushima), and vast long-term liabilities (no less that 86% of the current DECC budget goes towards decommissioning old nuclear power stations).

So is there an alternative? There is: non-hydro renewables are growing very fast, by 15% a year by 2010. During 2005-10 global solar hot water and wind power capacity both grew by 25% a year, and global solar PV capacity by 50% a year. If those growth rates were sustained, wind capacity would rise 6,300-fold to 1.25m GW, solar hot water to 1.15m GW, and solar PV to 1.6m GW – the latter alone producing over 1,000 times projected world’s primary energy demand in 25 years. Nuclear is dangerous and prohibitively costly, renewables are attractive with falling costs and a potential creator of millions of jobs worldwide.

Michael Meacher is a Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton (UK)
This article first appeared on Michael Meacher’s weblog on October 25, 2012

[1] UK’s Department of Energy & Climate Change (editor’s note)

[2] Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (editor’s note)

[3] British authors, journalists and environmental activists (editor’s note)     

Woolwich and Afghanistan: the connection

by Paul Rogers 23 May 2013

  A funeral for victims of a US drone strike.

An understanding of the link between the shocking murder of a young soldier on a London street and "remote-control" attacks by western states is essential.

In the London bombings of 7 July 2005 (“7/7”), explosions on three underground trains and a bus killed fifty-two people as well as the four bombers and injured hundreds. Soon afterwards it became clear that the four bombers came from Leeds and Dewsbury in west Yorkshire, 200 miles north of London, and the media quickly descended on the neighbourhoods. On a number of occasions newspaper and TV journalists asked young people of Pakistani origins for their reactions, and these were almost always of horror and condemnation of the bombers and what they had done.

Not infrequently, though, they also referred to Iraq, where the post-invasion violence was at its height. Fifty-two innocent people died in London on 7/7 but that was the average daily death-toll in Iraq - day after day and week after week. The connection was not difficult to make and was reinforced by one of the "suicide videos" released in the wake of the London attacks. It was also angrily and predictably denied by Tony Blair and his government, even if it struck something of a chord with many people in Britain.

Eight years on, British troops have long since left Iraq. That was one of Gordon Brown's less noticed decisions, but it also involved a quid pro quo for Barack Obama in the form of a greater UK commitment to Afghanistan. That war has scarcely been more popular in Britain than was the one in Iraq, but the media attention is far lower and any link between the Woolwich atrocity and Afghanistan is almost entirely discounted.

In part this is explainable by the sheer horror of the action and the immediate spread of appalling images through new social media and the main broadcast and print media. The shock is there, it is visceral, and surely needs no explaining.  It is sheer terrorism.

And yet this is not enough.

The new social media may provide vivid and grim dispersal of the Woolwich murder but that same media does the same for the numerous armed-drone attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan, including two drone-strikes in Yemen in the past week alone. These and their counterparts go virtually unreported in the establishment western press; indeed the public image in Britain is of a war rapidly winding down in Afghanistan and hardly observed in Yemen or Somalia, let alone Pakistan.

Where the disconnect lies is in the near-universal lack of knowledge of the intensity of the armed-drone operations as these replace “boots on the ground”. This lack of knowledge has two elements. The first is that the attacks have been numerous. The United States may be the major user of armed-drones in Afghanistan, with over a thousand operations through to the end of 2012, but the UK follows quite closely behind with 349.

The second is the absence of any information on casualties, except for the occasional naming of middle-ranking commanders who may die. This “we don't do body-counts” policy is persistent and was practised to remarkable effect in the air war in Libya in 2011.

At that time, Britain's ministry of defence would - day after day - release details of targets hit by bombs and missiles. These might be rocket-launchers, tank-transporters, anti-aircraft radars or psychological-warfare centres; but the remarkable thing was that no mention was made of people ever getting killed - and this was despite the ready availability of high-resolution bomb-damage assessment (essential in case of the need for retargeting). It was as if every time a bomb or missile was about to strike, the clever people around the target could jump out of the way in a matter of microseconds and escape entirely unharmed.  The end result of this was that, to all intents and purposes, no one was getting killed or injured - at least as far as most of the UK media was concerned.

The same applies to Britain's armed-drone attacks in Afghanistan, with one difference: that the new social media, linked to the work of Islamist propagandists, is assiduously used to spread the reality of the strikes in a way that simply did not happen in Libya.

The appalling nature and the open shock of the Woolwich murder are such that it is expecting far too much for this Afghan connection to have any traction with public opinion. Yet there is a connection and the full picture is incomplete without it.

The steady move from boots-on-the-ground to "remote control" has created an apparent assumption that people in the west are safely anaesthetised from the impact - whether it be in Afghanistan, Yemen or, perhaps in the near future, Nigeria as well as Mali

We are not.

It is understandable that the murder of the young soldier is too grim and violent for that to be seen. But perhaps we will somehow have to make that imaginative leap if, in the longer term, we are to avoid further instances of such extreme violence on our streets.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 23 May 2013.

An arms craze: drones to lasers

by Paul Rogers

 

Scud B. A tactical, mobile, ballistic missile, it could deliver a conventional, nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads to a target about 320 kilometers (200 miles) away.

(Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Author: Dennis Mosher, 1978).

The United States, Israel and other military powers continue to seek the perfect weapon - from "unmanned aerial vehicles" to "directed energy". They forget how the story ends.

The occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in August 1990 was followed by the United States-led assault of January 1991 which expelled the Iraqi forces. The coalition assembled by Washington enjoyed great military superiority, but among the problems it faced was Iraq's ability to fire Scud missiles, initially against Israel and later against coalition forces in Saudi Arabia. The Scuds, based on crude Soviet missile technology of the 1950s, were highly inaccurate, but when aimed at large enough targets such as military bases or ports still had some potential to do damage.

This was shown when a Scud hit a US marines’ depot in Saudi Arabia, killing twenty-eight soldiers - the worst loss of life for the Americans in the war. And in another incident which did not enter the public domain at the time, a Scud landed in the sea within 300 metres of a US navy support-ship moored at the Saudi port of Al-Jubayl alongside a large jetty laden with munitions and fuel. It was a narrow miss; if the military depot had been hit the effects would have been calamitous.

This incident was among the factors that prompted the Pentagon to invest heavily in missile defences, with missiles such as the Scud prominent in its thinking at the time. An early centrepiece of this effort, which continued to develop even amid the winding down of the cold war, was a weapon that seemed to come from the realms of science fiction: the airborne-laser (ABL) (see "Directed energy: a new kind of weapon”, 31 July 2002).

This project consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in the late 1990s, and by early in the new century was moving into the testing phase. At its centre was a modified Boeing 747 housing a powerful three-megawatt chemical oxygen-iodine laser with a highly accurate optical system, which could be aimed at missiles soon after their launch. The laser, travelling at the speed of light, had a reported range of up to around 650 kilometres; thus it could patrol outside the airspace of an opponent such as Iran or North Korea. It was calculated that the casing of these missiles, under gravitational stresses as they rapidly accelerated in the boost phase of their flight-path, would be subject to the intense heat of the laser - and thus crumple and collapse.

The system was soon attracting considerable interest. By 2003, the US air force was thinking about the possible use of airborne lasers to hit ground-targets such as barracks, depots or fuel-tankers. Indeed, the very idea of “directed-energy” weapons seemed, for military planners, to amount almost to a perfect weapon. For if, the planners thought, the function of a weapon is to deliver energy to disrupt a target, then ideally it should be very long-range, ultra-fast and impeccably accurate.

Yet even at that stage there were signs that the dream was beginning to turn sour. The entire programme was proving far more difficult to execute and much more costly than anticipated, with too many of the technologies simply too experimental. A couple of successful tests were finally carried out in 2010. But by then support in Congress was slipping; funding was cut at the end of that year, and the whole project was cancelled in late 2011.

That might have been the end of the story: an “ideal” weapon that was just too difficult to develop. But there is a sequel. In mid-April 2013 the US navy announced that a fully operational laser-weapon is to be mounted on a command-ship, the USS Ponce, deployed in the Persian Gulf. Its main purpose is to provide defence against armed drones and small speedboats (see Grace Jean, ”USN to deploy solid-state laser weapon on USS Ponce”, Jane's Defence Weekly, 17 April 2013).

This laser-weapon system (LaWS) is on a much smaller scale than the airborne laser; it has kilowatt power rather than megawatt, and uses commercially available components. But it is part of a much wider move to develop tactical directed-energy weapons, with this time the US navy at the forefront (see Richard Scott, “Rays of light: can shipborne laser weapons deliver”, Jane's International Defence Review, March 2011).

Moreover, the idea is still very much alive beyond the United States. Israel and China are among other countries getting in on the act, and there is every indication that a number of new directed-energy weapons will be fielded in the coming decade. The airborne laser may have been a technological step too far, but for militaries around the world the overall concept retains great appeal.

The drone link

There is, though, a catch. What works for the military may also work for the paramilitary, especially as the widespread use of quite powerful lasers in industry means that civil laser technologies can readily be modified by sub-state actors.

There is an analogy here with the development of armed-drones. In this area the United States and Israel are in the lead, several years ahead of western European countries as well as Russia and China. But others, including Iran, are following suit (Israel said on 25 April 2013 that it had shot down yet another drone, launched from southern Lebanon - presumably by Iran's ally Hizbollah). So too, with directed-energy weapons. For now, the United States and Israel are in the front rank; but within a few years there will be a proliferation, first to middle-ranking powers and then to non-state actors (see "An asymmetrical drone war", 19 August 2010).

What links armed-drones and directed-energy weapons is that neither is subject to any kind of international arms-control process. Nor is one envisaged. Once again, the armourers are way ahead of the arms controllers. That will almost certainly remain the case, which reinforces the significant of the USS Ponce's deployment. Almost without noticing it, the world is creeping into yet another era of warfare. The outcomes of this new era are unpredictable, though one thing is almost certain: it will involve proliferation to multiple actors - both states and paramilitaries alike.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 2 May 2013.

Het failliet van Obama’s Midden-Oostenpolitiek

“Elke poging om tot een dialoog te komen is welkom. Maar het heeft er alle schijn van dat het Westen het geweld enkel wil aanwakkeren om mij ten val te brengen.” Dat zegt de Syrische president Bashar al-Assad in een interview met de Argentijnse krant Clarín, zie de bovenstaande videoclip. Sinds maart 2011 liggen Moskou en Washington met elkaar overhoop over Syrië, maar proberen nu via een internationale conferentie een eind te maken aan het bloedvergieten. “Zo’n politieke conferentie kan het terrorisme niet stoppen. De rebellengroepen zijn hopeloos verdeeld. Wie spreek ik aan over een wapenstilstand?” aldus de president, die het gebruik van chemische wapens ontkent en de geruchten afdoet als pogingen om een buitenlandse militaire interventie uit te lokken. En over de eis dat hij moet aftreden zegt hij: “Het zijn Syriërs die beslissen over hervormingen in Syrië. Daar hebben de VS of eender welke andere mogendheid geen zaken mee.”

De media in het Westen slagen er maar niet in om een genuanceerd beeld te geven van wat er werkelijk in Syrië aan de hand is. Na ruim twee jaar geweld en inmiddels 80.000 doden is het nog altijd “het regime” dat de schuld krijgt en Assad die moet opstappen. Maar ook een mensenrechtenorganisatie als Amnesty International doet mee aan de valse beeldvervorming: men bagatelliseert het gewapend verzet en zwijgt over de bemoeienis van het buitenland in het conflict, dat onder andere op Geopolitiek in perspectief uitvoerig is gedocumenteerd.[i] Dat de werkelijkheid toch wel heel anders is komt nog eens haarfijn aan de orde in de onderstaande video van het discussieprogramma CrossTalk van 11 mei op het Russische satellietkanaal RT onder de titel “Manufacturing deception?” waar Peter Lavelle praat met Judith Kipper, Director Middle East Programs aan het Institute of World Affairs en Flynt Leverett, professor of International Affairs aan de Penn State University.



Judith Kipper houdt het bij de versleten neoconservatieve retoriek. De VS hebben twee problemen met Iran: het nucleaire programma en de steun aan het Syrische “regime.” In de onderhandelingen moeten we hen duidelijk maken dat er een pakket op tafel ligt dat kan resulteren in de geleidelijke opheffing van de sancties. De VS hebben helemaal geen Midden-Oostenpolitiek, we kunnen gewoon niet de zaken naar onze hand zetten. In het Syrië-dossier moeten Rusland, China en Iran aandringen op een einde aan het geweld door het regime. Twee jaar geleden kwamen de Syriërs op straat om vreedzaam te protesteren. Het was de regering die met schieten begon. De regering heeft de meeste van de 70.000 doden op zijn geweten. Intussen heeft de wereld Assad laten vallen, behalve dan Rusland, China en Iran. Assad is niet in staat om zijn land re regeren en moet verdwijnen. De VS zijn absoluut niet verantwoordelijk voor het geweld, dat is vanzelf ontstaan toen Assad probeerde de protesten gewapenderhand de kop in te drukken, aldus Kipper.

Leverett meent dat de VS na de Koude Oorlog proberen de landen in het Midden-Oosten hun wil op te leggen, maar daarbij het probleem ervaren dat Iran niet meespeelt. Iran wil wel betrekkingen met de VS, maar op basis van gelijkheid en mits aanvaarding van de Islamitische Republiek. Daar wringt het schoentje. Het opgeklopte nucleaire dossier kan langs diplomatieke weg in enkele weken worden opgelost, mits de VS aanvaarden dat Iran net als elk ander land het recht heeft om uranium te verrijken onder internationaal toezicht. Maar de VS eisen dat Iran dat recht opgeeft alvorens er kan worden gepraat. En voor wat het Syrië-dossier betreft lijkt de tussen de Amerikaanse en Russische ministers van buitenlandse zaken afgesproken internationale conferentie een doodgeboren kindje te worden nu de VS Iran niet over Syrië willen laten meepraten. Dat is diplomatiek niet serieus, aldus Leverett.

“Rusland, China en Iran, en zelfs de Syrische regering, stonden vanaf het begin open voor overleg met de oppositie, gericht op een politieke oplossing met de mogelijkheid van een andere politieke orde in Syrië. Maar de door de VS gesteunde oppositie kwam niet alleen met voorwaarden vooraf, maar zelfs met een voorgekookt resultaat: Assad moest hoe dan ook van het toneel verdwijnen. Dat is niet serieus. Wie een einde aan het geweld wil moet met alle betrokkenen rond de tafel. Rusland, China en Iran hebben zich harder ingespannen dan de VS voor een onderhandelde oplossing, maar voor de VS was er geen weg terug. Het verhaal in het Westen dat het in het Syrië-dossier fundamenteel ging over vreedzaam protest van burgers dat met harde hand werd beantwoord en waar na anderhalf jaar wel met geweld op moest worden gereageerd klopt niet. Vanaf het begin was er sprake van gewapend verzet, gesteund en gefinancierd door het buitenland.”

“Ongeveer de helft van de Syrische bevolking staat nog altijd achter Assad. Het doel van het Westen was helemaal niet om democratie te brengen in Syrie. Daar malen de VS niet om, en Saudi Arabië al helemaal niet. De Westerse strategie om Assad ten val te brengen heeft gefaald. De VS en zijn bondgenoten in dit kwaad staan nu voor de keuze: ze kunnen ofwel een serieus diplomatiek proces op gang brengen dat een politieke oplossing en een eind aan het geweld kan brengen, ofwel hun pogingen voortzetten en de oppositie blijven steunen. In het laatste scenario kijken we aan tegen letterlijk nog eens jaren aanslepend geweld en wie weet hoeveel meer tienduizenden dode Syriërs. Na de Libië-resolutie om de bevolking te beschermen die door het Westen werd misbruikt om Gaddafi ten val te brengen moet men zich niet verbazen over de veto’s van Rusland en China tegen de Syrië-resoluties.”

“Er is nog zoiets als soevereiniteit, of internationaal recht, dat het gebruik van geweld enkel toestaat na een mandaat van de Veiligheidsraad, of op basis van een heel nauwkeurig gedefinieerde interpretatie van zelfverdediging zoals voorzien in het Handvest van de VN. De VS hebben niet het recht om no-fly zones op te leggen aan soevereine staten met als oogmerk een leider van zo’n land die hen niet aanstaat ten val te brengen. Bij elke Amerikaanse interventie is tenminste gedeeltelijk sprake van een agenda om een andere leider aan de macht te brengen. Kijk maar naar de Balkan, Irak, Libië, en nu Syrië. In elk van die gevallen lag in het argument voor een humanitaire interventie wel het echte motief verscholen: regime change,” aldus besluit Leverett.

Met Israel in hun kielzog kijken de VS aan tegen een mislukte Midden-Oostenpolitiek. Het lukt maar niet de as Iran-Syrië-Hezbolla te doorbreken. Israel boet in aan geloofwaardigheid over de “rode lijn” voor het Iraanse nucleaire programma en voor het jarenlang herhaalde maar niet hard gemaakte dreigement om het land militair aan te vallen. Op het VN-spreekgestoelte legde Netanyahu met rode viltstift de grens voor Iran bij 20% uraniumverrijking. Een ex-hoofd van de Israëlische inlichtingendienst zegt dat Iran die uitdaging vakkundig heeft omzeild, en anderen menen dat Israel vandaag niet meer Iran kan aanvallen zonder steun van de VS. Israel is dus afhankelijk van Amerikaanse besluitvorming. Maar ook de VS hebben Iran niet op de knieën kunnen krijgen. En in het Syrië-dossier moeten de VS inbinden nu de - overigens door Syrië betwiste - inzet van chemische wapens die als game changer was aangemerkt zonder gevolg is gebleven.

Obama dreigt de Amerikaanse president te worden die ofwel toekijkt hoe Iran een kernwapenmogendheid wordt, de eerste president die bommen afwerpt op het land, of de man die een deal sluit met de zo verfoeide mullah’s. Hoe hij de geschiedenis ingaat ligt in handen van twee van zijn lastigste tegenstanders, de Syrische president Bashar al-Assad en de hoogste leider van Iran, grootayatollah Ali Khamenei, en dat onder het toeziend oog van een derde speler van formaat, een man met wie Obama het nooit goed kon vinden: de Israëlische premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Want Obama wordt ongetwijfeld ook de president die de stille dood van de twee-staten oplossing in het conflict tussen Israëli’s en Palestijnen op zijn palmares mag schrijven. Van de Arabische Lente tot Syrie, van Iran tot het “vredesproces,” de president moet nog altijd zijn mooie retoriek waarmaken.

---

[i] De virtuele castratie van Syrië, prijs voor energie-geopolitiek gewin
Hoe Amnesty Vlaanderen de radioluisteraar op het verkeerde been zet
VN secretaris-generaal Ban Ki-moon en het Syrië-dossier
Syria, Iraq, and al-Qaida's opportunity
NATO vs. Syria
League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria
CIA, MI6 en Mossad operatie “regimewissel Syrië”: om Iran te bedwingen
Het harde machtsspel tussen de grootmachten rond Syrië
De Syrische opstand: gekaapt voor fundamentele geopolitieke verschuivingen
CIA, MI6 en Mossad operatie “regimewissel Syrië”: om Iran te bedwingen
Het harde machtsspel tussen de grootmachten rond Syrië
De Syrische opstand: gekaapt voor fundamentele geopolitieke verschuivingen
Raw Intelligence Report : A View from Syria

Iraq war a decade on

by Michael Meacher

George W. Bush and Tony Blair at a press meeting availability in the East Room of the White House July 28, 2006.
White House photo by Paul Morse

At the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, it is said that the US won the war, Iran won the peace, and Turkey won the contracts. But did the US win the war? At a cost of £1.1 trillion and a death toll of 4,500 US troops, 32,000 wounded and with thousands of survivors still struck down with post-traumatic stress disorder, the US completely failed to anticipate the insurgency which eventually forced them out, and left in place a Shia autocracy closely allied with a resurgent Shia Iran. Iraq remains a bitterly divided and violent country, and even the US goal of securing control of the enormous Iraqi oil reserves (second only to Saudi Arabia’s) they were forced to forego. If one had to pinpoint the moment when the US lost unipolar power as the world’s hegemon, it must surely be the comprehensive disaster of the Iraq war.

Compounded with that of course is the mendacious, illegal and devious manner in which the US-UK claimed authority in launching the war at all. Saddam had no involvement whatever in 9/11, there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (as was widely suspected by Western intelligence agencies at the time, but suppressed by the politicians), and the ways used by Bush and Blair to take their countries to war were, as is now know, brazenly deceitful. Apart from the canard of WMD, Bush used the purchase of yellowcake (a component for nuclear weapons) from Niger to prove his case, which his own ambassador had proved to be false. Blair used the dodgy dossier and the fantasy of 45 minute deployment of WMD, as well as ignoring the explicit witness of Saddam’s own son-in-law who had defected that all Iraqi nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons had been demolished after the first Gulf War in 1991. Both Bush and Blair deliberately breached UN Resolution 1441, yet neither, after an illegal invasion which killed probably half a million Iraqis (estimates vary between 100,000 and 1 million), the vast majority of them civilians, has yet been called to account.

What did the war achieve long-term? It undermined the moral standing of the US-UK, it generated an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq and beyond that had not been there before, and it sent a clear message (which has emboldened Iran and North Korea) that the only way to deter US blackmail and attack was indeed to acquire WMD. Indeed it could be said that the greatest WMD were those wielded by the Americans – the demolition of Fallujah, the US led massacres at Haditha, Mahmudiyah and Balad, and the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

And 10 years on we still haven’t been told the secret pledges that Blair made to Bush at his Crawford ranch in Texas some ten months before the war began, and before consulting the cabinet, parliament or the people of Britain. Chilcot, who still hasn’t reported, has seen this evidence, but is being prevented from publishing it, even though Blair himself, Powell and Campbell have disclosed privileged information when it suited their cause. Being told ‘it is not in the public interest’ is the strongest possible indication that it is very much in the public interest that it be revealed.

Michael Meacher is a Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton (UK)
This article first appeared on Michael Meacher’s weblog on March 17, 2013

Afghanistan, the day after

by Paul Rogers

SANGIN, Afghanistan - A US Army Special Operation Force Soldier, assigned to the Combined Joint Special Operation Task Force -

Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A), mans a 50. Cal during a 96 vehicle, 172 kilometer convoy from Kandahar Army Air Field to the Sangin

District Center area to rid the area of Taliban fighters 6 April 2007. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Keith Henning) www.army.mil

There are intense efforts to portray western policy in Afghanistan in a benign light. But evidence from the country itself, and the experiences of Iraq and Libya, suggest that hard questions should be asked about what is really happening.

The main United States response to 9/11 was a “war on terror” that began with the termination of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of the al-Qaida movement in late 2001. It appeared to work in a matter of weeks, though almost immediately the George W Bush administration became fixated on Iraq, leaving the Europeans to pick up the pieces. The United Nations and other experts soon issued warnings that Afghanistan needed immediate aid to fill a security vacuum; too little was offered, though, and the new International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) lacked enough personnel to ensure security outside Kabul and a few towns.

This vacuum persisted until 2005 and was then slowly filled by the return of the Taliban and other armed opposition groups (AOGs), leading to what amounted to Nato's reoccupation of the country. The Taliban was, if anything, energised by this; they saw the foreign troops as occupiers who in addition were keeping in power a corrupt and inefficient government.

By 2009, the incoming Barack Obama team had decided that the war was unwinnable, but drew the conclusion that the injection of a 30,000-strong “surge” of extra troops would create a position of strength and thus make possible a negotiated withdrawal. When this didn’t work, the US decided instead on a timetabled withdrawal. Soon, Afghanistan was becoming almost as unpopular as the Iraq war had been.

By the end of 2013, nearly half of the remaining 100,000 troops will have left Afghanistan, and by the end of 2014 all regular combat-troops will be out. “Regular”, since the US’s intention is that special forces and support-personnel for drones will remain, their role being to prevent any re-emergence of transnational jihadist elements (and perhaps also limit the extent of the Taliban’s role in Afghanistan’s post-occupation governance).

Behind the screen

The fundamental issue here is that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is being decided not by success in the war but by domestic politics, especially in the United States but also in Britain. This is not something talked about in polite circles; it follows that there has to be a single-minded propaganda offensive to convince people that the withdrawal is made possible only because there can now be an ordered handover to the Afghan security forces.

The reality, however, is highlighted by two themes in a new report from the UK House of Commons select committee on defence, Securing the Future of Afghanistan (10 April 2013). The first is that there is deeply conflicting evidence as to whether the Taliban are actually in retreat; the second is that the committee has faced great difficulty in trying to find out how Britain plans to aid Afghanistan after the withdrawal.

These points are well taken. It is almost impossible to get an accurate picture of developments across the whole of Afghanistan, especially when western military sources produce a stream of stories about successes against the Taliban and about these forces’ ability to hand over to the Afghan national army (ANA).

There is, though, much evidence of continuing conflict, especially in the south and east of the country. The recent examples include a bomb-attack against a United States convoy on 6 April that killed state-department officials, and a Nato air-raid in support of an ANA operation on 7 April which mistakenly killed many children.

It is probable that there genuinely has been some progress on issues like health and education in much of north and west Afghanistan. That is hugely welcome and comes at a time when Taliban/AOG activity in these areas is low, but it may well be that they are simply biding their time as the deadline for withdrawal approaches. After all, why fight an occupier who is already preparing to depart?

In much of south and east Afghanistan the Taliban/AOG combination is very much in evidence, and maintains control of significant territory. Moreover, there is huge corruption in and around government, with senior politicians and officials attempting to store as much as they can (and while they can) in foreign bank-accounts so that they will be able to relocate in Dubai and points west if chaos ensues after 2014.

In all this it is appropriate to remember what has happened in Iraq and even more in Libya, both of which (unlike Afghanistan) have huge oil resources. Iraq remains very insecure as the Nouri al-Maliki government remains determined to minimise the role of the Sunni minority, while working increasingly closely with the Iranians. His exclusion of the Sunnis is doing much to aid support for radical Islamist paramilitaries; these often embrace the al-Qaida outlook, and some are linking with the al-Nusra front in Syria in its fight against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Thus, Iraqi Islamist groups are bonding with the Syrian rebels just as the al-Maliki government helps arm the Assad regime by allowing transit of Iranian supplies from the east. Iraq is now involved in both sides of the Syrian civil war, carrying the huge risk that Iraqi insecurity and the Syrian war slowly meld into a single conflict with implications that stretch across the region.

Where Libya is concerned, two years after the start of the Nato air campaign to oust Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s major towns and cities are plagued with competing militias that owe little or no allegiance to central government. Yet there is scarcely any reporting of Libya’s widespread insecurities (the conscientious reporting of Patrick Cockburn apart), and even less of the relationship between Libya and the evolving paramilitary insurgency to the south in Mali.

In Iraq and now Libya, then, the outcomes of external military intervention have been radically different to what was expected in official circles. It looks all too likely that the same will be true of Afghanistan.

In the British parliamentary system, select committees are (with a few exceptions) not particularly effective at calling governments to account - and usually this is even more true for the defence committee. Its Afghanistan report is different: a welcome sign that at least one part of the political system is trying to get a stronger focus on what is really happening in Afghanistan, and whether the UK and other governments should be replacing their “boots on the ground” with much greater efforts to help Afghans rebuild their own country.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 12 April 2013.