Collateral nonsense

The world has failed to assess the social damage long war cycles have caused to the Pak-Afghan region.

Afghanistan’s thirty years war and its multiple, local, regional and international cycles have gravely affected the social stability, political order and national security of Pakistan. That is perhaps the price of being situated close to a complex war zone that has dragged into its deadly play a variety of state and non-state actors and stimulated regional rivalries and which has shaped aggressive, extended security doctrines for every power wanting to ride on the conquest highway.

We, and the world at large, have failed to really assess the social damage the long war cycles have caused to this region, the most important of which is a growing number of angry young men and women who don’t care about the values of peace and stability. They reject the official reasoning of the war as defensive, for building nations for securing peoples. For Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the evidence of the war is in stark conflict with its stated objectives. And there is a growing and deep sympathy for them, in other regions of Pakistan and abroad. Being in the war zones, the tribal Pashtun are caught in the crossfire between militants and foreign and national forces.

True, modern wars and their effects extend beyond borders and adversely affect peoples; this is truer of insurrections and counter-insurgency operations. As the insurrectionists live and hide among the often-supportive populations, it is always difficult to separate them for arrest or encounter.

All wars are wrapped in moral dilemmas because innocent civilians, who, in war language are reduced to collateral damage, lose lives. Seen on a humanist plane or on neutral ground, collateral is a civilian killed in an effort to hit an adversarial target and not merely physical objects, houses and compounds.

The aerial bombardments by Nato forces in Afghanistan, which may include tens of thousands of sorties and hundreds, if not thousands, of drone attacks both in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions, have killed and wounded thousands of civilians. They include children, women, old and young, all with zest of life and aspirations to live a normal life, to enjoy and self-actualise. Sadly, the war, whose objectives remain a mystery and those fighting it remain confused about why they in such a desolate place, has destroyed so many such lives.

Unfortunately, war managers who use every piece of modern science and technology in the development and use of weapons in this region, appear blind to the suffering of the tribal populations. Being part of professional armies or leading them, the soldier is trained and socialised to an insensitive culture of kill and destroy, with little regard to civilians in the populated battleground.

The most notorious weapons among those tried and tested are the drones. We will perhaps know their real story a decade later, perhaps sooner, if those bent on making the governments transparent such as WikiLeaks survive the retribution of the states. They are neither precise, nor can they discriminate between a civilian and a wanted person. It is a low-risk, cheap way of fighting complex wars, more by spreading fear and a sense of insecurity among the local populations than anything else. That is not helping win the hearts and minds game, far from it.

The effects are quite in the opposite direction. We see a culture of armed resistance evolving. Alienation, revenge, and a culture of militancy may keep this region on the boil. That may be the bitter inheritance of the collateral effects of this prolonged no-holds-barred war.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2010.