There is no end to the centuries of savagery in Afghanistan

By Robert Fisk

"......and suggested that those who commit reprehensible acts see themselves as victims, that this then gives them the right to act savagely against their opponents. Certainly, this might apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, very definitely to the Serbs of Bosnia – I'm not so sure about Georgia – and quite definitely to the Taliban (not least when we've been bombing more wedding parties)......

There is nothing new in all this. At the Battle of Omdurman – where the British executed all the Arab wounded – the young Winston Churchill wrote of a sight which is familiar today in a land which was then called Mesopotamia and in another which was already called Afghanistan. He described "grisly apparitions", of "horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring...". To the men can now – this very week – be added the suicide-bombed schoolgirls of Baghdad.....

Yet it pays to remember that Afghan wars have always been dreadful. Sir Mortimer Durand – he who created the Durand line which masquerades as the Afghan-Pakistani border, crossed with such impunity today by Americans and Taliban warriors in order to kill each other – witnessed the cruelty of the Afghan war at first hand.....

Of course, it did Roberts no harm at all. In the age of "shock and awe" – when a Canadian general can call his Taliban opponents "scumbags" – it still doesn't seem to worry Nato officers. They should know better. Montgomery never cursed Rommel; he kept a photograph of the Afrika Korps commander in his caravan to remind him of the man he was fighting. But then again, didn't Montgomery fight in the age of the Holocaust, of industrial killing, of the Hamburg and Dresden firestorms? Indeed, the very Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 were supposed to end the mass destruction of human life. And President Bush has torn them up......

....Victimhood sits easily on all our shoulders. If Osama bin Laden had a conscience, it would be quickly eased by the destruction of the last Caliphate, the colonial occupation of the Muslim world, the deaths of millions of Arabs. And if we have a conscience, what do we say? Remember 9/11. And so on we go."