Maintaining support for the permanent occupation of Afghanistan on the extraordinary grounds that it protects us from terrorism at home is difficult enough, but made harder by the absence of any credible Islamic terrorist incidents in the West in recent years.
The 2,000 Islamic extremists in the UK of whom Jonathan Evans warned us in 2007 that they posed “a grave threat to national security” have in the ensuing three years managed to kill a grand total of, umm, nobody.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/nov/06/alqaida.politics
Now if I were a vicious extremist suicide bomber, careless of my own life, indeed anxious to die in a glorious cause, I would undoubtedly over three years have managed to kill somebody, somewhere. If there were two thousand of me, at least someone positively must have succeeded in killing somebody. Lone nutters like the neo-Nazi who bombed gays a decade ago can wreak havoc, so 2,000 people, many of them in cells and networks? The UK should be littered with bodies. Yet not one.
The only possible conclusion is that Jonathan Evans was talking scaremongering bullshit. For which you and I pay him £165,000 a year plus accommodation and car and index-linked pension.
Anyway, fortunately for support for the war, the State Department has been able to issue a warning that there is definitely an active plot to do something, somewhere in Europe.
Old news, you may scoff. Indeed. But I can reveal to you from my own sources that this again depends in large part on information from the Uzbek secret service torture chambers, passed to the German security services. Germany continues to occupy the Termez airbase in Uzbekistan for NATO supply into Afghanistan, and continues to receive Uzbek natural gas via Gazprom.
The US has opened negotiations in Tashkent to increase still further the “Northern supply route” into Afghanistan through Uzbekistan, using Gulnara Karimova, the dictator’s daughter, as the supply contractor. This is in light of continuing disruption to supply convoys through the Khyber Pass.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11489955
As usual, lack of interest by western media and public in Uzbekistan enables British, German and American government collusion with Uzbekistan’s vicious totalitarian regime to pass unremarked – even though yet another dissident journalist, Abdulmalik Boboyev, faces a long hell in one of Uzbekistan’s notorious gulags. Not a word of protest from the West, despite the fact that his crime is working for the Voice of America.
This from Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Journalist Abdulmalik Boboyev is facing a possible five-year jail sentence for working for the US-funded Voice of America radio station in the trial that began today in Tashkent, the capital of one of Central Asia’s most repressive countries, Uzbekistan.
He is one of Uzbekistan’s few remaining independent reporters and his trial could signal the start of a new offensive against journalists who persist in gathering and disseminating news and information that is not controlled by President Islam Karimov’s government.
Everything about the case is political, from the defendant to the charges and the probable outcome. The trial will almost certainly be a sham. Boboyev has fallen prey to a dictatorial regime that has been reinforcing its control over the media for the past five years and constantly violates human rights.
But the international community had decided that it is in its interest to look the other way and support this appalling regime. If Boboyev become Uzbekistan’s 12th imprisoned journalist, it will constitute another serious failure of this policy of rapprochement.
The Uzbek authorities could still change course in this case if they want to embark on a real dialogue with their partners, above all the European Union and the United States. We urge them to do so.
A total of four charges were brought against Boboyev on 13 September. Three of them relate to his work as a journalist: defamation (article 139 of the criminal code), insult (article 140) and “preparing and disseminating material constituting a threat to public order and security” (article 244-1). The fourth is a trumped-up charge of “illegal entry into the country” (article 223). He was banned from leaving Uzbekistan the same day.
@ Alfred,
Your entire post reads as a defence of militarism – maybe you fooled me….
“Suhayl, thank you for responding to my invitation for suggestions on alternatives to killing people in the name of fighting terrorism.
You say Britain should get out of the wars and decomission Trident. Getting out of the wars is certainly the primary objective of any alternative policy, and if Britain were to do that she would have to decommission Trident. Trident is an American system and the Americans don’t lend their military technology to people who are not “with us” and who by definition are therefore “against us.” With the Americans, neutrality is not an unacceptable option.
But if you decommission Trident, you lose a great many high tech jobs in engineering, software, etc. And what will you do with Britain’s nuclear warheads? Build an independent delivery system, which would create new high tech jobs, or dismantle them? Abandoning the nukes means abandoning Britain’s great power status. Britain would be less significant millitarily than Pakistan, inferior in international clout even than France, with no means to deter nuclear blackmail.
And once disarmed, how does Britain get America to remove their nukes, bombers, missiles and military manpower located at over 100 establishments in Britain and on the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia? The Japs, I believe, asked the Americans to vacate Okinawa. how successful was that? The last I heard was that the Prime Minister had resigned. And would Britain become the first totally unarmed nation? If so, what happens if Spanish trawlers take all your fish, the Argies take the Malvinas, Sweden takes the Shetlands, France takes back the Channel Isles, and Ireland takes the Isle of Man?
And if Britain opts out of the wars, it means withdrawing from or being kicked out of NATO. And if Britian is out of NATO would it not necessarily have to get out the EU? Getting out of the EU would certainly be popular. It would rstore British national sovereignty, and securing Britain’s borders against both EU-mandated and illegal immigration.
If Britain were to retain a defense establishment of any kind, in what will it consist? What would it take to make British territory not worth the risk of invading?”
“Otherwise we’d all be viruses, with only RNA.”
I’m up for it..
Re: “There was a radio program (or was it TV?) once where they located a few people who were intensely proud of their unspotted English pedigree and tested their DNA. ”
When John Buchan was at Oxford, some of the English fellows got fed up with the Scotch students with their kilts and their Hibernian society antics so they decided to form a soociety for those of pure English descent. However, when they got to check credentials they couldn’t find anyone without at least some Scotch blood.
As for the DNA, it has been widely sampled now and it clearly shows that the students of John Buchan’s Oxford were representative of the indigenous English as a whole who are for the most part Picti, just like the Irish the Welsh and the Scots. There is a Viking contribution of about 20% along the eastern border, a tiny Roman (mainly ME slave) component, a smallish Anglo-Saxon element (the teutonic invaders must, therefore, have established themselves as a ruling elite while the celts made up the peasantry) and an even smaller Norman element (2-3%). So, yes, the current African/Asian/Polish/whatever influx is almost certainly having a greater genetic impact on the population of England than any other migration in the last 9000 years.
My impression is that many here really do not want to know the facts. But if any do, they will find them nicely summarized in in the book by Bryan Sykes, Oxford’s professor of human genetics, which I mentioned above.
Suhayl asked:
” Btw, ‘Pakistan’ has nothing to do with equation – why did you bring it up in this context?”
Surely, Suhayl, one has only to see the context to understand the allusion?
I said:
“Abandoning the nukes means abandoning Britain’s great power status. Britain would be less significant millitarily than Pakistan, inferior in international clout even than France.”
Is that hard to understand? Is the elaboration of the point not effective?
In the context of England’s history, abandoning the nuclear force would represent a historic event. My reference to Pakistan and France put that into perspective.
In 1815 Britain defeated France, then the greatest power on earth, becoming as a result the world’s hegemon. Abandoning nukes while France retains her Force de Frappe would mean that England was once again inferior in military power to her most longstanding rival and frequent enemy.
The magnitude of England’s decline is emphasized by the comparison with Pakistan. In 1918, when the British Empire reached its zenith in territorial extent, Pakistan, formerly Sindh Province, was in the imperial scheme of things a triviality whose acquisition in 1842 is remembered chiefly because of a joke by the conquering general, Sir Charles James Napier who, in a despatch to his superiors wrote simply “peccavi” (I have sinned). Now that “triviality,” has an expanding arsenal of nuclear warheads and missiles to deliver them, as Britain contemplates abandoning the nuclear weapons that enabled her, at the end of WWII to retain her status as a member of the “big five” and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. So does not the comparison with Pakistan not vividly illustrate an remarkable reversal in fortune?
Now, suhayl, tell me, why did you feel the need to ask?
Courtenay, why do you think that by reposting my post you prove that I am advocating British militarism. The inference seems daft. I asked a series of questions. Basically, how do you get from here to there (the disarmed and independent state advocated by Suhayl). That I was asking not asserting should have been clear from the fact that there are nine question marks in the piece you quote.
No, Alfred, it illustrates the lack of imagination and bankruptcy of argument inherent when the only reason you can muster for nuclear proliferation is that someone else in the world has them. So, then, every single country should have them. Good. The fastest route to ‘MAD’ I’ve heard of!
We should’ve got rid of them decades ago. Our country is imploding! And you want us to keep the nukes based on fear of France? Now that does remind me of Pakistan, right enough! Two wrongs do not make a right. On this matter, Pakistan is wrong and so is the UK, for the same general reasons, though perhaps for different (precise) reasons.
Alfred, I’m afraid you do sound like a militarist now. In fact, you sound just like a Pakistani General.