Attempts by democratic governments to ban books rarely work out well.\u00a0 If the book is banned on grounds of public morality (Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover, Tropic of Cancer<\/em>), then the writer nearly always wins in the end and the government that tried to suppress their work is likely to end up looking puritanical, cloven-footed and often pig-ignorant.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If,\u00a0 like Peter Wright\u2019s Spycatcher,<\/em> the book is banned on \u2018political\u2019 or national security grounds then it is immediately going to attract a great deal more media interest than it might otherwise have done, so that if one publisher drops it another is likely to pick it up. When the Thatcher government tried to ban Spycatcher<\/em> under the Official Secrets it ended up looking ridiculous and impotent when the book was published abroad \u2013 even in Scotland \u2013 for three years before the ban was lifted, so that anyone who wanted to know what was in it could find out.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Rather than silencing books, such efforts tend to generate more curiosity about them than they might otherwise have done. And attempts at censorship and prohibition are almost guaranteed to attract attention when a government tries to ban a book that it has commissioned itself, as was the case last week, when the Ministry of Defense attempted to block the <\/strong><\/span>publication<\/strong><\/span><\/a> of An Intimate War \u2013 An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2013, <\/em>on the grounds that it breached the Official Secrets Act.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n What makes this effort so extraordinary was the fact that the book was written by Dr. Mike Martin, a former captain in the Territorial Army, who was commissioned three years ago by the army to write a study of British military operations in Helmand.\u00a0\u00a0 That study became a Phd dissertation, which the MoD has had in its possession for 14 months.\u00a0Yet it is only in February that it raised objections to its content, to the point when Martin resigned his ten-year commission in order to be able to publish the book.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n To its credit, Martin\u2019s publisher Hurst & Co has gone ahead with publication, even though it was reduced to handing out flyers instead of hardbacks at the presentation of his book at Kings College London last Thursday.\u00a0I should confess at this point that I have a dog in this hunt.\u00a0Hurst is also my publisher, and I am proud to be associated with a company that has refused to buckle in the face of such idiotic and ham-fisted official pressure,\u00a0 which shames the army and the British government.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I was also curious as to why the MoD would feel the need to go to such lengths, and undertake an effort that was bound to backfire.\u00a0The news about Martin\u2019s book broke the day after I appeared in a BBC documentary about the Sergeant Blackman\/Marine A case.\u00a0One of the recurring themes in that program was that the Marines in Helmand were in Afghanistan in order to protect the population against \u2018the\u00a0Taliban\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Martin\u2019s effectively destroys these simplistic representations.\u00a0His meticulous study, based on 150 interviews conducted over four years,\u00a0 and his own experience as a serving officer in Helmand, presents a view of the war that is radically different from the one the British public has been hearing ever since Tony Blair ordered British troops to deploy in Helmand in 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n At various times over the last eight years we have heard from politicians and army spokesmen that British troops were engaged in counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, that they were building democracy, providing security to the local population, ensuring development and protecting women\u2019s rights, or \u2013 most fatuously of all \u2013 that they were there \u2018to keep us safe.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This last trope rested on the assumption that our troops were fighting \u2018Taliban insurgents\u2019,\u00a0allied to al Qaeda, who needed to be defeated in order to ensure that Helmand did not become a \u2018terrorist base\u2019 or a \u2018springboard\u2019 for 9\/11 attacks.\u00a0\u00a0 During those years it was rarely, if ever,\u00a0explained who the Taliban were or where they came from or why they were fighting.\u00a0We simply assumed, as so many soldiers did, that they were killable \u2018terrorists\u2019 and \u2018bad guys\u2019 motivated by fanaticism and evil.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It is therefore astonishing and even breathtaking to see these representations blown out of the water by one of the army\u2019s own. Like US Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis\u2019s searing\u00a0 2012 report Dereliction of <\/strong><\/span>Duty<\/strong><\/span>, <\/a>Martin shows the Afghan war as it is, rather than how our political and military leaders would like us to see it, and the picture that he paints is often jaw-dropping.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n What Martin reveals, in painstaking \u2013 and from the military\u2019s point of view \u2013 painful detail,\u00a0 is that British politicians and army officers did not have the remotest idea what they were doing in Helmand, and that the war was conducted with staggering naivete and ignorance.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Martin shows again and again that neither Britain, the United States, nor the various international institutions involved in the Afghan war really understood Afghanistan\u2019s complex local politics, and that this incomprehension resulted in a series of mistakes and misjudgements that made the conflict worse.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In Helmand, it meant that the British were often manipulated by local warlords and politicians, to the point when they did not actually know who they were fighting against and on whose behalf. In some cases, British troops took part in opium eradication programs only to find that they had been steered by opium growers connected to the Afghan police towards the destruction of crops owned by their rivals.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n At other times air strikes or raids were carried out on \u2018Taliban\u2019 villages on the basis of intelligence supplied by elements within the Afghan police who were using the \u2018Angrez\u2019 \u2013 as Helmandis call the British \u2013 as instruments of an inter-tribal feud or clan vendetta.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Rather than protecting the population, the British army effectively became allies of a predatory Afghan police that was despised and feared by the local population, and whose depredations were instrumental in driving Helmandis to seek support from the various \u2018Talibans\u2019 in the province.\u00a0 Rather than making things better, providing security, or reducing violence, Martin argues, the presence of the British army actually increased the level of violence from the moment it was deployed.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It is a military truism that armies should understand the nature of the enemy they are fighting.\u00a0If Martin\u2019s analysis is correct, then the\u00a0 British army did not understand the enemy it was fighting in Afghanistan.\u00a0It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is the main \u2018secret\u2019\u00a0 that the government is now clumsily attempting to conceal from the British public.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n So Hurst should be congratulated and supported for holding firm and seeking to ensure that these efforts fail.\u00a0And anyone interested in the truth, rather than propaganda,\u00a0about the disastrous and misconceived campaign that has killed more than 400 British troops and thousands of Afghans,\u00a0should get hold of this compelling and absolutely essential account of the war, and drink its bitter but salutary antidote to the dangerous delusions of the last eight years.<\/span><\/p>\n Source: Matt Carr’s Infernal Machi<\/span><\/span>ne<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/uk_soldiers_wounded_460.jpg\" "\\"uk_soldiers_wounded_460\\"")
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