Christina Lamb Famous Quotes
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Surely if men are sufficient masters of things to build a howitzer
they ought to know better than to destroy each other with it.
- Stewart Gore-Browne, from Arras, 1916.
At a dinner party in north London, I listened to friends bragging about buying Porsches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no one else had seen.
By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion's share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as 'the ABC of Jihad', which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet
However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. 'There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,' complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. 'There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term.
