Page 45 Review by Stephen
Think you've been following the news pretty thoroughly and are totally clued up on the military action over there? Reckon you've got all the background you need to reach a considered opinion on its legitimacy, its effectiveness and its motivations? Do you trust the BBC to be honest, thorough, and objective? Think again. This book seared through my skull with more concussive force than a car full of fertilised semtex.
Well, no, obviously it didn't or Mark would've found this terminal splattered in a rainbow of head-jelly; but hyperbolae aside I wasn't remotely prepared for the revelations here, reported by cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall, who has a background in the surrounding region and was there on the frontline covering the initial conflict for the Village Voice and KFI radio in LA.
It's a tendentious piece of journalism, to be sure, but his arguments are persuasive, beginning with an assessment of just what can be accomplished (the escalating options he proposes still don't bring much light), why it's being attempted (Kazakhstan's oil, anyone? A pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports prevents the Russians helping themselves, and would avoid Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev from incurring the wrath of the US by negotiating with Iran), and a reminder that because it was politically expedient, it was the US with Pakistan who ushered in the Taliban with funds and ammunition, and that as late as 1999 US taxpayers were paying the annual salaries of each and every one of its officials.
As Ted moves into the heart of the action he witnesses entire Northern Alliance towns being obliterated when 5,000-pound precision-guided missiles hit precisely the wrong target, or the US simply throws its artillery around indiscriminately. The journalist death count escalates well beyond the reported figures as some are blown to pieces, have their skin ripped off them by prisoners or are murdered in their accommodation by opportunistic thieves. As the Taliban leave each area women sensibly leave their Burqas on (after a quick $1 shot for western television with them off) because they believed, often correctly, that their persecutors would return as the Afghans changed sides back and forth more often than they bothered to pray to Allah. And without the Taliban's order, Rall witnesses Afghanistan's society teetering on the brink of murderous, hedonistic anarchy. Having read his accounts, I'm surprised he got out alive; there's no help coming from the US if you're a journalist (or if you're a local, for Rall saw not one single drop of those much vaunted food parcels), only from the occasional act of unwarranted and barely affordable kindness on the part of poverty stricken Afghanis.
Half the book is prose, half of it sequential art with more than a nod to Groenig's style on AKBAR & JEFF, and if some of the sequences mirror each other, reading something twice gave me double the opportunity to absorb it - and I can tell you, it took some absorbing. I can't say I agree with absolutely all of Rall's conclusions, but this is certainly what he saw, and it's more worth watching than the sanitised, feel-good dross I just saw this morning on BBC Breakfast. After which "Some readers may find these images disturbing"…
