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Devils in the Detail

The Media and War Conference run at Goldsmiths in association with Stop the War was a magnificent event. The speakers were varied and brilliant; Peter Oborne’s microphone-snatching misogyny aside.

The media-war nexus was covered in relation to Islamophobia and racist portrayals of the Muslim national ‘enemy’, as well as the mainstream media as it pertains to the anti-war movement. The opening and closing sessions had quality speakers in abundance. Naturally, the lamentably biased coverage of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza and the BBC crisis were recurring topics.

John Pilger’s characterisation of imperial whipping boy du jour (aka ‘Pantsdown’ Petraeus) as ‘a crap general’ had the room rolling in the last speech of the day.

Another topic which ran through it the day was that of propaganda and the use of words and rhetoric to obscure important truth. One of the speakers brought up John Reid’s optimistic prediction of some years ago that Afghanistan could be conquered without a single bullet being expended and I was struck again by how the PR has again and again evaporated on contact with reality.

I was among the first off the plane into the country that year, alongside a company of marines, and by the end of it the British military had fired not one or two or ten but over a million bullets. In fact, one of the best books on that period is James Fergusson’s painful and brilliant book titled A Million Bullets which lays out the unravelling of the British campaign in Helmand. I recall very well the rapid use of ammunition stocks at that time; I was assigned to the ammunition section and virtually all of the small-arms ammunition and a lot of the bigger bangs passed through our hands.

The labelling of Operation Herrick as a humanitarian gig also crumble when you set it against the facts. I recall that during the early stages of this ‘liberal, peace-keeping’ intervention the battle-group fired so many 105mm high-explosive shells that the supply chain could not keep up and we ran out of everything except the illuminating rounds used to light up the battlefield. 105mm shells are many things; indiscriminate is one of them.

Such was the demand for these that at one point we were pulling pallets of these shells off planes from the UK and sending them immediately onto other aircraft to be flown forward. The theatre stocks had been eaten through completely. Not exactly in tune with the political branding of the day, these kinds of statistics were also absent from the media at the time.

An aside, but arguably of public interest, is the limited life of the Hellfire missiles which are slung below Apache’s and drones. At £100,000 a go, these missiles are limited in the hours they can spend on or attached to an aircraft – this includes the flight from the UK. By the time they arrived in theatre they only had around eight hours of use left in them before they became a hazard. The unfired ones would be returned to us by the Army Air Corps loaders and armourers scrawled with graffiti which ranged from blackly humorous messages for ‘Terry Taliban’ to outrightly Islamophobic mini-commentaries laced with ‘Pakis’ references.

Also missing was any reference to the mission being so ineptly planned that the .50 calibre rounds which were brought into theatre would not fire from the vehicle-mounted guns. This was eventually resolved by haggling with one of the other national contingents – I forget if it was the Dutch or the Danes – for rounds which would function.

It is true that the devil is in the details and it’s for this reason that details and facts are omitted and obscured in the top-down version of the Afghan narrative. As is the case with Petraeus and the US military, the British still do a sweet line in brass hats and blundering.

Joey Glenton

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