The incompetent auld miseryguts Seumas Milne is again making an utter fule of himself, I see, and again on a subject about which he knows nothing (Afghanistan), and again blaming acts of barbarism on everyone but the culprits, and again getting it all wrong.

“Insecurity is spreading to previously stable areas,” which of course isn’t the fault of the Islamic fascists who are preying upon the Afghan people and causing the mayhem, but is rather a “damning indictment of NATO.” This is squeezed right up against an allegation Milne makes of the very offence he himself commits: “British troops, who lost 13 soldiers in June alone, killed a woman and two children last weekend, which the high command naturally blamed on the Taliban,” but which Milne naturally blames on the British. This is followed immediately by the now-viral “It’s not the ‘good war’ certain people say it is” meme- cliché thingamajig, which is always a giveaway that the person employing it is thick as a post.

“And as mission creep has detached the Afghan war from its original declared target of al-Qaida. . .”

Mission creep. Now that’s rich.

The October, 2001 Let’s-Get-Al-Qaida mission had already crept, by December 5, 2001, to the mission articulated in the UN-brokered Bonn Agreement, which sets out in elaborate detail the road we’ve been on since, including the reconstruction of Afghan institutions, such as democratic elections, which Milne so idiotically misrepresents to the extent he is aware of any of this at all.

If this is “mission creep,” it continued with the popular uprising led by the Afghan Women’s Network and its demands that the UN and NATO extend the writ of law to every corner of the country. And then came the February 1, 2006 Afghanistan Compact [pdf], which was also “detached” from the “original” target, which Milne has apparently noticed only now, and which he blames for the recently rising death toll. That, and it’s because Afghanistan has undergone “its own Iraq-style surge of US and other NATO forces.”

Except no, it hasn’t. That’s false, not true, imaginary, invented, and wrong.

The death toll is rising because the Taliban, engorged with opium wealth, have decided to go all-out in their bloodcurdling campaign of terror against the Afghan people, whose crime is their persistence in defying the Taliban by their mere happiness with the reality [pdf] of more than 20,000 of their villages obtaining rural development projects, and 1,080 civil-military cooperation projects, and 4,000 kilometres of new roads where only50 kilometres’ worth existed in 2001, and the rehabilitation of electrical power systems, and the construction of schools over the past five years sufficient to enrol 6.4 million children, including 1.5 million girls, and the reduction in childhood mortality since 2001 by 26 per cent, and the provision of health-care access to 80 per cent of the population, up from eight per cent back when the Imperialist West was behaving the way Milne wanted.

This is to mention just a mere handful of the many things that would never have happened in Afghanistan had Milne and his dreary, drooling admirers among les maudits stoppistes gotten their way. And now they’re reduced to writing Chin Up, Lads memoranda to the Taliban in the pages of the Guardian, and pretending it’s journalism, all the while reiterating the same vile, stupid, reactionary position they began with, all those years ago, as Milne does, even now: “The only way to end the war is the withdrawal of foreign troops as part of a political settlement negotiated with all the significant players in the country, including the Taliban, and guaranteed by the regional powers and neighbouring states.”

Which is to say: 1. Cut a deal with the the slaughterers of the Afghan people. 2. Veil your foetid complicity in lies. 3. Cover your tracks with the footfalls of like-minded despots and cowards from Afghanistan’s “neighbouring states.” 4. Run away. 5. Run away. 6. Run away.