The fruits of war

I heard this on the world service this morning (insomnia bites), regarding Afghanistan:

...officially, unemployment is about 40%, though it is probably far higher than that; of those who do have a job in Parwan, 45% earn less than one dollar a day; chronic malnutrition for children under five across Afghanistan is 54%.

Now, I tried to find out what the time series on malnutrition is in Afghanistan, but find there are no recent stats. Over half of children are severely malnourished. 1 in 5 will die before reaching five years.

Stats for the whole world can be found here (just found this Excel file which indicates Afghan child mortality is barely unchanged since 1990). The world stats are a tale of misery, with many of the neighbouring countries reaching rates of over 50% under nourishment.

The BBC though, presents us with this factoid:

And perhaps most surprising of all, on a UN scale of human development indicators, Afghanistan has slipped from 117th in the world, to 181st - second from the bottom - since the Taliban were ousted.

Dangerous

Well, I was flicking through Tom Barry's Guerilla War In Ireland on the bog this morning, because parts of the news reminded me of some details from that tale - viz the attacks on police stations by insurgents in Pakistan.

This is bad, if they are strong enough and feel they have enough support to be able to attack their opponents civil forces of social control, they are well on their way to full scale insurgency (and maybe further than that). It's especially worrying as.

They recently attacked the army (with no come back from their own support base - and the army is a central pillar of what is Pakistan).

There appears to be no civil force to counteract them, no labour movement, or anything on the streets.

This is bad on a stick. Meanwhile the efforts to get to a plausible victory condition in Afghanistan are redoubling, while the chances of just plunging the whole region into chaos continue to grow. British ministers try and say that the war was fought to stop planning, preparation and training of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan/Pakistan - but in reality they have turned the whole area into one vast training camp for guerillas - it was a hot war like this that trained Bin Laden, lets not forget. The veterans of this war will haunt the battle fields of Earth for thirty years to come.

Crazy Driver, Crazy Dancer

My home Ken Loach season continued this week with Carla's Song. Not his best, I don't think, but worthy enough.

I was struck, however, by the clear denunciation of the COntra's tactic of blowing up schools and hospitals. It sounded familiar.

Like the Taleban, maybe? Or the Iraqi insurgency? Obviously, maybe they learned from the same fount of knowledge, then again, maybe it's common sense in a strategy of mayhem. Either way, I think as a film it is good for challenging simplistic notions of "Victory to the Resistance" etc. we hear from the likes of Loony.

The commentary was telling. Apparently the scene's in the hospital (after a supposed bus bombing) featured real survivors of the contra war, including amputees, reliving their trauma so that it would be recorded. Nicaragua only has a populatuion of a few million, I wonder how many scarred and wounded people there are after the war in iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, this is in no sense a note of supporting the West's actions in these countries, but drawing attention to a film that problematises easy support for resistance, and questions what we can and should think/do?