ON October 7 2001, 20 years ago, the US/British assault on Afghanistan commenced with bombing.

The enemy at this point was not just Sheikh Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida granted hospitality by the Taliban government, but the Taliban government itself. 

Tony Benn wrote in his diary: “There are no clear war aims … it could go on for 10 years.” 

Yet the Taliban were out of power before the year’s end, with their leaders decamped to Pakistan, and bin Laden had vanished too.  

Ten years later, Sherard Cowper-Coles, British ambassador and later “special representative” in Kabul from 2007-10, published his memoir, Cables from Kabul. 

This contained generous comments about colleagues and higher-ups, but was soberly objective about the original intervention.  

Cowper-Coles wrote: “It is unarguable that the West got into Afghanistan in October 2001 without a clear idea of what it was getting into or of how it was going to get out.” 

His mission followed the renewal of Taliban insurgency, and its access not only to sanctuary areas across the 1,600-mile border with Pakistan, but to Pakistan army support.  

Independent newspaper journalist Patrick Cockburn observed in July 2010: “The US leadership is clearly divided on the merits of staying in Afghanistan, but cannot work out how to withdraw without too great a loss of face.” 

Underlying the West’s difficulty, as Cockburn pointed out in The Rise of Islamic State (2015), was its alliance with the two countries which had been chief creators and promoters of the Sunni jihadist ideology and movement via al-Qaida and the Taliban: Saudi Arabia (to whose elite bin Laden belonged) and Pakistan. 

Although Pakistan initially distanced itself under US pressure from its jihadist creation, after 2003 it resumed its former backing for the Taliban. 

The hijacked airliners’ suicide attacks by 19 al-Qaida militants on September 11 had produced a massive revenge reaction by the US administration under president George Bush, backed by Britain’s Labour prime minister Tony Blair. 

Blair declared: “This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today.”

But it wasn’t new. The Taliban’s reluctance to arrest and hand bin Laden over became the case for war, without actual evidence of his direct complicity in the massacre.

When his arrest in Pakistan became possible in 2011 he was, instead, executed by US special forces on the spot.

On September 20 Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

But those “with us” in Afghanistan were to include the warlords of the “Northern Alliance,” terrorisers of an acceptable brand.

The September 11 attacks, causing almost 3,000 innocent people to lose their lives, were horrific — but as Cockburn’s colleague on the Independent, Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk, wrote three days after the attack, there would be “inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday’s firestorms.” 

Ignoring these we would, he said, be told about “mindless terrorism,” and that Arabs would ask why “we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.”

On September 16 eminent Columbia University Professor Edward Said wrote in the Observer: “Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating … to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes.”

On September 17, Jonathan Steele in the Guardian made the point that if the Taliban refused the US demand to hand over bin Laden, it would be wrong to use force in response, that giving into the “desire for revenge, and for a dramatic flexing of military muscle … will only exacerbate the wider problem of international terror.”  

One small deviation from the Blair government’s message had come from international development secretary Clare Short.  

Speaking on BBC radio, she said it “would be unbearable if the response was a lot more people losing their lives and inflaming the atmosphere.” She was reprimanded.  

On September 23, independent-minded Conservative Peter Oborne declared in the Observer: “Clumsy reprisals will simply inflame Muslim opinion and that is precisely bin Laden’s objective … it is clear that his real aim is not the destruction of America but the eviction of the pro-Western regimes in Saudi Arabia and neighbouring countries.”

But the dominant media message celebrated the aggressiveness of Bush and Blair and retailed a distorted version of the context behind the murderous hijackings. Opponents of war were labelled appeasers and fifth columnists.  

On the last day of September an Independent on Sunday investigative duo produced an account — that relied on FBI-supplied information — of the background to the September 11 events.  

The planning, by a group of the hijackers with money supplied from Middle Eastern bank accounts, took place in a Hamburg apartment. 

There was no mastermind, almost half of the group were Saudi Arabian nationals (in fact the proportion was larger), and there was no evidence of bin Laden’s direct participation.   

On October 2, Blair spoke soulfully at the Labour Party conference “as if he was president and as if Bush was vice-president,” observed Tony Benn.  

Darting from country to country to enlist support, Blair was depicted by the Wall Street Journal as “America’s newest ambassador.”  

He was to retain that role, while British military action proceeded without a House of Commons vote.

In his memoir, My Journey (2010), he claimed that “the battle” was for “the mind and heart of Islam,” insisting that “the only course is to follow instinct and belief,” adding: “That is what I did.”

Seamas Milne considered the consequences of the war in his Guardian feature on October 11: “Large-scale refugee movements, and interrupting food supplies … Bush and Blair have turned themselves into recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida and militant Islamism — and increased the likelihood of a cycle of revenge and military violence.”

Detail of recorded civilian deaths in Afghanistan following October 7 was listed in Fisk’s The Conquest of Civilisation.

First came the missile deaths of four UN employees in Kabul on October 9, and between 160 and 200 dead when US bombs destroyed the village of Karam two days later.

He quoted Professor Marc Herold of New Hampshire University that between 3,000 and 3,400 civilians were killed between October 7 and December 7 — more than those killed by the hijackers on September 9.   

US and British forces (plus US contractors) between them were to suffer many more deaths than that figure too.

Over the years Afghan civilian deaths have increased enormously.  

Granted a visa in late November 2001, when Taliban control of Afghanistan  was almost gone, Fisk interviewed  a senior Kandahar Taliban official, who told him: “When the Americans go home, we’ll have the land back.” 

Within 24 hours of the September 11 attacks, White House discussion pondered an attack on Iraq as well as one on Afghanistan, but it was settled that Iraq could wait. 

On October 14 the Observer reported that Pentagon strategists had discussed plans for US air strike support for armed insurrections against the Saddam Hussein government by rebel Kurds in the north and Shia Muslims in the south with a promise of US ground troops to protect the Basra oilfields.

The headline, however, was “US hawks accuse Iraq over anthrax.”  

Outbreaks of anthrax in the US were blamed on terrorists, but no evidence ever emerged that Iraq or any other national state had anything to do with this.  

The accusation was good practice, though, for false allegations as to an Iraqi link to the September 11 terrorism and as to mass destruction weaponry supposedly in the hands of Saddam Hussein.   

The Afghanistan venture was in defiance of the interests of the peoples of the attacking countries (including their armed forces personnel), was a much larger crime against the Afghan people than the al-Qaida attack on the US, and was soon to be supplemented by the monstrous invasion of Iraq.