Bitter Lake (film)  

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"Tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans would pass through the country over the next ten years - soldiers, diplomats, experts, political advisers and journalists. All of them trying to build this new society. But few of them stopped to think whether what had happened to the Russians twenty years before might also happen to them. That, in a strange way, Afghanistan has revealed to us the emptiness and hypocrisy of many our beliefs. And that we may be returning from there also haunted by mujaheddin ghosts, knowing that, underneath, we believe in nothing."--Bitter Lake (2015) by Adam Curtis


"In 1971, the King of Afghanistan had come on his first ever state visit to Britain but it was also his last, because his ambitious Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud, was already plotting against him. And in 1973, Daoud took power in a coup. He declared Afghanistan a republic, and sent the King into exile. Two months later, Egypt attacked Israel and a Middle East war started. To begin with, it looked as though Israel would be defeated. But the American government came to its rescue, airlifting arms on a massive scale to prevent the Israelis from being overwhelmed. The Israelis counterattacked and the Arabs faced a disaster. But then Saudi Arabia came to the rescue because King Faisal realised that his country had a weapon that could stop Israel. Overnight, Faisal raised the price of oil five times and threatened a complete embargo unless America forced Israel to pull back. It worked. A ceasefire was agreed. And everyone realised that the balance of power in the world had suddenly changed."--Bitter Lake (2015) by Adam Curtis


"In 1946, American engineers, along with their wives and families, began to arrive at a dusty airstrip in Helmand in southern Afghanistan. They worked for the biggest construction company in the world - called Morrison Knudsen - and the King of Afghanistan had brought them there to build a giant planned new world - a complex of dams, canals, roads, and even a new model city. The king's aim was to harness the power of the giant Helmand river and turn his country into a modern society - just like in the West."--Bitter Lake (2015) by Adam Curtis


"And in the 1980s, right-wing governments came to power in Britain and America who turned to radical new ways to create economic growth. To begin with, the new policies seemed to work. Inflation was squeezed out of the system and the economies began to stabilise. But then there were other unexpected consequences. Interest rates had risen massively - and this decimated manufacturing industry in both Britain and America. Factory after factory closed. High-paid skilled jobs were replaced by low-wage jobs in the service industries, and living standards began to fall. But then the politicians found a solution. If you couldn't make wages grow any longer, instead you would get the banks to lend people money. And in the mid-1980s, governments removed the restrictions on the banks' lending, and a wave of borrowing spread through Britain and America. Even if their wages were static, people felt wealthier, and had the money to buy things and keep the economy working."--Bitter Lake (2015) by Adam Curtis

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Bitter Lake is a 2015 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that Western politicians have manufactured a simplified story about militant Islam into a "good" vs. "evil" argument, informed by and a reaction to Western society's increasing chaos and disorder, which they neither grasp nor understand.

Clips from various films and television programmes are used to illustrate the documentary, especially from Carry On Up the Khyber (a 1968 British comedy film), and Solaris, a 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Contents

Narrative

The film attempts to explain several complex and interconnected narratives. One of the narratives is how past governments, including Russia and the West, with their continued, largely failing, interventions in Afghanistan, keep repeating such failures, without properly understanding the country's cultural background or its past political history and societal structure.

It also outlines the US's alliance with Saudi Arabia, especially the former's agreement to buy Saudi oil, for control of a key energy supplier during the cold-war era, with Saudi Arabia gaining wealth and security in return, with agreement withstanding provided it was allowed to continue its violent and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, uninhibited from external influence. This in turn has fed like a feedback loop back into the many troubles the world faces with regards to various militant Islamic forces spanning the 1970s to present day; be they the Mujahideen, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and into IS.

Curtis describes the film as an attempt to add an "emotional" dimension to the context of the historical narrative in order to draw its audience in – hence it's over two hours in length and availability exclusively through the BBC iPlayer – in order to give the viewer something beyond the disconnected news reports they're usually fed from most traditional broadcast journalism, along with putting historical facts in a truer broader context.

BBC iPlayer has given me the opportunity to do this - because it isn’t restrained by the rigid formats and schedules of network television. [...] I have got hold of the unedited rushes of almost everything the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan. It is thousands of hours - some of it is very dull, but large parts of it are extraordinary. Shots that record amazing moments, but also others that are touching, funny and sometimes very odd. These complicated, fragmentary and emotional images evoke the chaos of real experience. And out of them I have tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

The title is taken from the 1945 meeting of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, on a ship in the Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal, where much of the events to follow could be said to have originated.

The film was released on Sunday 25 January 2015 exclusively on the BBC iPlayer.

Reception

Sam Wollaston, writing in The Guardian, described the film as "distinctive, genuinely different. It’s also worrying, beautiful, funny (really), ambitious, serious, gripping and very possibly important." Wollaston commended Curtis for "at least taking a step back, to look at the modern world, then take it on," but admitted that the film was not completely successful in explaining the situation, leaving him with "confusion and uncertainty aplenty." While occasionally "infuriated" by Curtis's style - "all the wobbliness – at times I felt I was actually on a camel. And the sudden zooming in to people’s eyes, am I now riding a high-velocity high-explosive US bullet?" - Wollaston concluded that the film was "beautiful" and "television like no one else does".

Emma Graham-Harrison, also writing in The Guardian, noted that Curtis had done "a powerful job of conveying the sheer physical incongruity of Nato's heavy military presence in impoverished Afghanistan", and had captured "the strangeness of these heavily armoured soldiers wandering through superficially tranquil villages and pomegranate orchards, hunting an invisible enemy, and with it a deeper truth about how mismatched the soldiers were to their mission." While critical of some aspects of the film, particularly "of doing what he criticises politicians for: creating oversimplified stories to make sense of a complex world, and losing sight of the truth in the process", she felt that Curtis had managed to convey "the west’s terrible arrogance, the casual projection of foreign dreams and ideals on to a distant country and the readiness to walk away when it all starts going wrong".

Jasper Rees, for The Daily Telegraph, called the film "visually astonishing" and "an all-you-can-eat feast of impressionistic subtlety". Beyond the "extraordinary visuals", "the hypnotic jumble of footage", and the "insistent soundtrack pump[ing] out a manipulative pulse of music from East and West, telling you what to feel", Rees was less convinced by the film's narrative, describing it as "like being hectored by a dazzling know-all with x-ray vision who espies connections across the map of history." Rees was critical of the absence of fact-checking, and of the "only significant interview, with a Helmand veteran whose task is simply to repeat everything Curtis has already claimed. Mainly we are just invited to take his word for it". He concluded that "the egotism and grandiloquence are maddeningly at odds with the sustained brilliance of the spectacle", and "In the end, Adam Curtis sounds like just another prophet asking us to have faith in his vision. Which is an irony."

Peter Hitchens wrote that "the simple, devastating explanation of how and why Britain’s Helmand military intervention went so completely wrong from the beginning - despite its good intentions - is so good, so concise and so powerful that it alone justifies the film." Hitchens said that the film "surprises, captivates, creates in the mind a demand to know what is happening, and then answers it," and concluded his review with simply "See it, please."

Jon Boone, the Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian, was less impressed by the film in his review for The Spectator, calling it "as simplistic as anything told by 'those in power', [and] made to seem frightfully clever by his acid-trip filmmaking style, perfectly spoofed by Ben Woodham as the 'televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence'". He was critical of the film's omission of Pakistan's role in the conflict - "the TV equivalent of staging Hamlet without the prince" - and Curtis's failure to tackle the real complexity of the situation, writing "it's pretty clear Curtis is as uninterested in such 'complexity' as he is in Afghans, a people he really doesn't seem to like very much. His most insidious story is that they are irredeemable savages who will always reject, steal or subvert the help of the most well-meaning of outsiders."

Music

Music used at any stage or repeatedly, includes:


See also

Subtitles

Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow.

  1. Excuse me, I'm lost... #

This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense. And how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world. It is told through the prism of a country at the centre of the world. Afghanistan.

  1. Who are you? #

MUSIC: Come Down To Us by Burial

  1. Here we are
  2. I'm tired
  3. Break it down
  4. Break it down, to my eyes
  5. Baby, come on, come on
  6. And, girl, I know
  7. I know you want it
  8. I'm trusting you, I'm going
  9. Going
  10. Tonight, do you feel alive?
  11. Tonight, do you feel alive?
  12. Come down to us
  13. Come down
  14. Down... #

In 1946, American engineers, along with their wives and families, began to arrive at a dusty airstrip in Helmand in southern Afghanistan. They worked for the biggest construction company in the world - called Morrison Knudsen - and the King of Afghanistan had brought them there to build a giant planned new world - a complex of dams, canals, roads, and even a new model city. The king's aim was to harness the power of the giant Helmand river and turn his country into a modern society - just like in the West.

ARCHIVE: 'The Asiatic kingdom of Afghanistan is located 'roughly 10,000 miles from either coastline of the United States. 'Almost directly on the opposite side of the globe, westward from China, 'beyond the Himalayas. 'It is a landlocked country, bordered on the north by the Soviet Union, 'and on the east by Pakistan, and on the west by Iran.' The King was called Zahir Shah, and he often came to visit the project. Afghanistan was a deeply conservative country and he was determined to modernise it. What the King was trying to create in Helmand was a copy of what President Roosevelt had done in America in the 1930s. And the company he had hired - Morrison Knudsen - had worked back then for Roosevelt, building a new world of dams and power stations across America. Now they were going to do the same for Afghanistan. The engineers and their families lived in a complex of houses around the King's country palace in Helmand. It became known as Little America. INDISTINCT VOICES You got everything you need? Quite a lot of stuff lying around. There is a dead insurgent lying here. A man in his early 20s. Come on, let's go. Let's go. DIALOGUE IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE ALL SHOUTING AT ONCE OK, I'll follow you in. Off you go. OK. Good morning. Stand up. How are you? WOMEN: I'm fine, thanks. You are very good. How are your families? What will it take to stop the fighting? TRANSLATOR REPEATS HE ANSWERS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE MOBILE PHONE PLAYS SONG AS RINGTONE RINGTONE STOPS INDISTINCT VOICES MIX WITH MUSIC How long have you been with the Taliban, if you don't mind me asking? Chris, what's going on? All right, wow! LAUGHTER Wow. You look creepy up close. A little creepy from far away too! Yeah, that's true. What's going on? How are you feeling? I'm feeling pretty good right now. It's been a pretty exciting day. Yeah, getting kills out here. Today, just for documentation, today was the day we went against order and we shot anyway. We killed, like, a whole bunch of people. 24 unapproved rounds. 24 unapproved high-explosive mortar rounds. That's about 40,000 pounds of death right there. Yo. Yo. Fuck it, looks like a rave in here, almost. All I got to say... Actually, I do have something to say. Let's hear it. I love the fucking Marine Corp. LAUGHTER - I know many of you... - We got you on camera saying it! I know, I know many of you don't, but what we did today... Yeah, we need born killers, like you. Oh, we're all born killers. INDISTINCT VOICES At the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt travelled to the Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the Suez Canal. At the same time, he sent another American warship to pick up the King of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz. The meeting of King and President was to have powerful - and disastrous - consequences both for the West and, in a strange way, for Afghanistan. Roosevelt was dying, but over the last 13 years he had used his power on an epic scale to transform the world. After the Wall Street crash and the terrible depression that followed, Roosevelt had taken charge. He had passed laws that broke up the banks so they would never run out of control again. And he had rebuilt America with a series of giant dams that brought electrical power and employment to millions of people. And he had planned and fought a world war against Germany and Japan. Now, as Roosevelt sat waiting for Abdulaziz, no-one could possibly have imagined the consequences of this meeting. For it was going to unleash forces that in the future would undermine everything that Roosevelt had worked for - his belief that politicians should use their power in a planned way to reshape the world. But Roosevelt knew that to keep that power, America needed oil. And he wanted to forge an alliance with the King to make sure the vast Saudi oilfields remained under American control. In their conversation, the two men laid the foundations for an alliance that continues to the present day. America would get its oil - and in return, Saudi Arabia would receive wealth and security from America. But the King was well aware of the dangers of opening up his country to the influence of the modern West. And in the negotiations that followed, he laid down a condition. We will take your technology and your money, he said - but you must leave our faith alone. The Saudi faith was called Wahhabism. It was a radical, violent and extremely puritanical form of Islam, and its followers among the Bedouin tribes hated the modern world. Wahhabism was part of a wider movement in Islam that had risen up in reaction to the European empires. Another was the Deobandi movement in India. They all believed that modern imperialism was corrupting the true nature of Islam, and wanted to go back to a world based on the original teachings of the Islamic texts. Abdulaziz had harnessed this force in the 1920s to seize power. But he had unleashed something that didn't want to stop. The Wahhabists wanted to go on and create a caliphate across the whole of the Arab world - and to stop them, in 1929, Abdulaziz machine-gunned them. He ruthlessly killed the warriors who had made him King. But their belief - a violent, intolerant and, above all, backward-looking version of Islam - remained at the heart of Saudi Arabian society. And the deal made that day on the Great Bitter Lake meant that America would get its oil but it would also be protecting Wahhabism - a force that had its own global ambitions. Ambitions that were very different from America's. HARP PLAYS Who's the turban job on the throne? You mean the Khasi. That's Randy Lal. Who? Randy Lal, the Khasi of Kalabar. Ooh! How do you know he is, then? - How do I know he's what? - Randy. - That's his name! - Ooh! He's very good looking, isn't he? Yes, only the most richest and powerful rajah in northern India, that's all. - He's smiling at us. - Smile back. Coo-ee! You don't have to go raving mad. My father, who are those people? That, light of my darkness, is Sir Sidney Rough Diamond, a British governor whose benevolent rule and wise guidance we could well do without. By the mid-1950s, the American engineers had built the giant dams that were going to create what they called "a new wonderland of vegetation and power" in Helmand. But the project was running into problems and it was beginning to lose its innocence. As the giant dams were completed, they had an unexpected effect. They raised the level of the water table and started to bring salt to the surface. And one of the plants that thrived in this new soil were poppies. Some of those leading the project said they should stop. But the American government stepped in and insisted that they should continue because by now the dams had become a central part of the struggle with the Soviet Union. All sides in the Cold War began to compete to offer Afghanistan bigger and better schemes to modernise the country. Afghan politicians exploited this ruthlessly. The Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud, spent his time travelling the world playing the countries - Russia, America and China - off against each other. Daoud wanted to use the modernization as a way of consolidating his power. Afghanistan was a fragmented country. Power was divided between ethnic groups and tribes. Daoud was a Pashtun and he saw how the dam project in Helmand could be used to consolidate the Pashtun grip on the whole country. He persuaded the Americans to make the project even bigger, to turn it into a giant piece of social engineering. Thousands of Pashtun nomads, who spent their time roaming the border area with Pakistan, would be settled in the new farmland created by the dams. Daoud presented it as just another innocent piece of modernisation - and the Americans happily agreed. What they didn't realise was that they were unwittingly being sucked into Afghan power politics. Not only was Daoud increasing Pashtun power, but he was sowing the seeds of bitter rivalries over the division and ownership of land in Helmand. UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC PLAYS TRUMPET PLAYS AFGHAN FOLK MUSIC CROWD CLAPS ALONG FOLK DANCE MUSIC PLAYS BOYS CALL IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE GUNSHOTS BARRAGE OF GUNFIRE SHOUTING CAR HORN BEEPS MAN SHOUTS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE ALARM BLARES MEN TALK QUIETLY SHIP'S HORN BLARES CAMEL GRUNTS The British Board of Trade, in the booklet it gives out to visiting British businessmen, does try to be helpful, but this is what it says about Arabic time, and that's only one of them. "Sunset is taken as zero, when watches are set to 12. "A business appointment given for, say, two o'clock in the evening "will therefore be for two hours after sunset "and for five o'clock in the morning, seven hours before sunset. "It's important to remember that sunset should be regarded "as midnight. The time of sunrise is irrelevant." I don't know about you but I know sun time is roughly six hours, uh... plus five, in other words it's either 11 o'clock, morning or evening. - But which? - Well, it's 11 o'clock. But it must have some relevance to the time of day. - Yes. - How do you, as a businessman, make appointments? Um... I normally make them by my watch. I ask them personally whether they are conforming to either Arabic time, sun time or GMT plus three. They normally say the other two. I ask them to give me a time at GMT plus three. Now, sun time is six hours after this, roughly. Six hours after that? Six hours plus five, give or take an hour. Do you know what time it is now? Not really! In 1964, King Faisal became the new leader of Saudi Arabia. Faisal set out to modernise the country. He created western-style bureaucracies and a welfare system. He even allowed television for the first time. But he faced two threats. One was from the religious leaders inside Saudi Arabia. They were the Wahhabists, who had brought his family to power and gave his rule legitimacy. They distrusted any idea of modernising Saudi society. Faisal was also facing a dangerous situation abroad, from communism, that was spreading through the Arab world. His solution was simple. Faisal decided to use the religious leaders and their conservative beliefs as a force to counter the international threat of communism. But he knew that this would also divert their attention away from his domestic policies. Faisal used the growing oil money to set up hundreds of schools and institutes across the Islamic world - some as far away as Pakistan. Their job was to spread Wahhabist ideas and help to turn Islam into a unified international force strong enough to stand up to communism. What Faisal was doing was taking the dangerous and unstable fanaticism at the heart of Saudi society and directing it outwards, beyond its borders. It was a ruthless way of creating stability in his own country. America gave this tacit approval because it was part of the global struggle against communism. But in 1966, Faisal gave America a glimpse of how uncontrollable an ally Saudi Arabia could be. He went to New York and publicly attacked America's support for Israel. It caused an outrage. HE SPEAKS IN ARABIC The reasons are that unfortunately, the Jews throughout the world support Israel. They provide assistance to Israel and in our present situation, we consider those who provide assistance to our enemy as our own enemy. HE SPEAKS ARABIC I'd like to hire a photocopy machine. - OK. - For three months. That's OK. - Possibly for six months. - Yes, why not? Um... If you like it for one year, one for... What I need from you is, how many conditions and how much it will be. MAN SPEAKS HIS OWN LANGUAGE Ho, ho, ho, ho. Do you have a lot of... all that toner and the developer? Yeah, we want you to maintain it and service it. OK? MEN SPEAK IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE Sir, we buy paper from them, the colour from them, that's OK? Yeah. Can you give me a price for three months, possibly for six months? The contract must last for three months. OK. THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE 500 dollar per month. - 500 dollar per month. - Per month? - It's very expensive. - That is very expensive. What you have, if you're bringing in here, you can set them here, I will copy for you. No, no, we want to take the copier away. MUSIC: The Bewlay Brothers by David Bowie

  1. And so the story goes,

they wore the clothes

  1. They said the things

to make it seem improbable

  1. Whale of a lie

like they hope it was

  1. And the good men tomorrow

had their feet in the wallow

  1. And their heads of brawn

were nicer shorn

  1. And how they bought their positions

with saccharin and trust

  1. And the world was asleep

to our latent fuss

  1. Sighings swirl through the streets

like the crust of the sun

  1. The Bewlay Brothers
  2. In our wings that bark
  3. Flashing teeth of brass
  4. Standing tall in the dark
  5. Oh, and we were gone... #

Your Excellency, your presence enriches my humble home. May the benevolence of the god Shivu bring blessings on your house. And on yours. And may his wisdom bring success in all your undertakings. And in yours. And may his radiance light up your life. And up yours. - Do you ever... - It really angers me. Do you ever feel frustrated at perhaps, I mean, you've spoken about corruption and certainly in the past you've made very strong views against officials, for example, who are corrupt, but many of those officials haven't left their jobs, they haven't obeyed your orders. No, they have all left their jobs. Certainly. In the past few days, the 28 that you have sacked, 19, our information is that 19 of them are still in their positions. No, that's not true. They have all gone. They have all gone. - OK. - Definitely. Definitely. So you're confident, then, that your power is building in terms of being able to enact, to make sure that your orders are obeyed. I'm... I'm building a new administration for Afghanistan. I'm working on a clean, efficient administration. Back! Back off! Back the fuck off! Get the fuck out of the way. Get the fuck out! MUSIC RESUMES: The Bewlay Brothers by David Bowie

  1. I was stone, he was wax
  2. So he could scream and still relax,

unbelievable

  1. And we frightened

the small children away

  1. And our talk was old

and dust would flow through our veins

  1. And though it was midnight

back at the kitchen door

  1. Like the grim face

on the cathedral floor

  1. The solid book we wrote

cannot be found today

  1. And it was stalking time for

the moon boys, the Bewlay Brothers

  1. With our backs on the arch
  2. And the Devil may be here
  3. But he can't sing about that
  4. Oh, and we were gone
  5. Real cool traders
  6. We were so turned on... #

MUSIC DISTORTS, FADES

  1. You thought we were fakers... #

DOG BARKS The other day, a friend of Blue Peter's, Angela Mulliner, invited me to help her groom some dogs with very shaggy coats indeed, a pair of Afghan hounds. This should be a good spot. 'You need plenty of space to groom dogs this size, 'so we picked the park. 'Their names were Kingsley and Cleo and I said I'd do Cleo.' How often is one supposed to do this? - Very frequently. - Oh, gosh. Don't sit down, Cleo, there's a good girl. 'Angela and I wanted the dogs to look their very best 'because we were taking them out on a special assignment. 'We were all going off to The Mall 'and we had to be there by 12 o'clock.' - Come on, then, dogs. - Come on. 'We felt very proud of Kingsley and Cleo because they had been invited 'to join a guard of honour.' 'Afghan hounds were going to salute their king, because 'for the first time ever, the King of Afghanistan was coming to London.' MARCHING BAND PLAYS 'About 20 members of the Southern Afghan Hound Society 'had brought their dogs along to line the route 'and there were Afghans of all colours and sizes.' 'And when the Queen pointed us out, 'the King of Afghanistan seemed delighted to see us. CHEERING 'For the first time in their lives, 'British Afghan hounds were seeing people from their own country 'because in the carriages that followed the Queen, 'there were more people from the Royal Court of Afghanistan.' ADAM CURTIS: But the ordered world, where kings and queens ruled and dogs behaved obediently, was about to collapse. In 1971, the King of Afghanistan had come on his first ever state visit to Britain but it was also his last, because his ambitious Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud, was already plotting against him. And in 1973, Daoud took power in a coup. He declared Afghanistan a republic, and sent the King into exile.

DOGS BARK

Two months later, Egypt attacked Israel and a Middle East war started. To begin with, it looked as though Israel would be defeated. But the American government came to its rescue, airlifting arms on a massive scale to prevent the Israelis from being overwhelmed. The Israelis counterattacked and the Arabs faced a disaster. But then Saudi Arabia came to the rescue because King Faisal realised that his country had a weapon that could stop Israel. Overnight, Faisal raised the price of oil five times and threatened a complete embargo unless America forced Israel to pull back. It worked. A ceasefire was agreed. And everyone realised that the balance of power in the world had suddenly changed.

"What we want is the complete withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the occupied Arab territories and then you will have the oil at the same level of September '73."

Is this demand absolute and rigid or is this just a negotiating position? Definitely. Definitely. We won't give up any inch of these lands. Doesn't this new massive increase in the price of oil mean a change in the world balance of power between the developing nations like you, the producers, and us, the developed industrialised nations? Yes, it will. And what do you think arises from that? Well, a new type of relationship. You have to adjust yourself to the new circumstances and I think you have to sit down and talk seriously with us about this new era. When Saudi Arabia raised the price of oil, they did it to change the political balance of power in the world. But it also had another, unexpected, effect because it allowed the men who ran the banks and the financial system in America and Britain to begin to break free of political control. Billions of dollars flooded from the West into Saudi Arabia - most of which the Saudis didn't know what to do with. So they gave them to the Western banks to invest. The banks then made a crucial decision - they kept many of those dollars free from control by the American government and they became a vast pool of wealth, known as petrodollars, that could be lent and traded anywhere around the world without political control. As western politicians struggled to deal with the economic and social chaos that had been created by the oil price rise, their bankers were building a new global financial system based on recycling the Saudi billions. And the banks began to become rich and powerful again. DISTANT MUFFLED SHOUTING Does he know where the Taliban are? The biggest Taliban shelter... Taliban... THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE - Marjah? - Marjah. He said Taliban is in Marjah. LAUGHING: Uh-huh, Marjah. Marjah. THEY SPEAK THEIR OWN LANGUAGE They use his compound as... MAN SPEAKS HIS OWN LANGUAGE - Assalamu alaikum. - Assalamu alaikum. Right. Are we in Kushal Kalay just now? Is this Kushal Kalay? What is the name of this village? MAN TRANSLATES This is the edge of Kushal Kalay. Have the Taliban gone now or are they still in Kushal Kalay? HE TRANSLATES OK. Where... Sh, sh, sh. Where has he seen Taliban? Where? THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE Sure, sure. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE How far? HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Here, the Taliban? HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE There, there, there! Right, sir - sir! THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE This guy's ID-ing these here and saying they're Taliban. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Yeah. Two men. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Yeah, there. Taliban, yeah? HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE KIDS SHOUT THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE WIND HOWLS As western countries collapsed economically in the 1970s, students from Europe and America fled from the chaos. They came to Afghanistan as a land of dreams. A different, innocent world, free of the corruption of politics and money in the West. MAN: Then you see some Afghan come dozing out of the sand, hardly give you a look, and carry on past. You long to ask, "Where are you going? Where have you come from?" But he just disappears into the murk, going about his everyday business. A traveller is someone who proceeds through a country under his own initiative, with a certain internal drive to learn, to find out something more than the superficial. To me, an Afghan was some figure from a woodblock print in a book about India. The reality of an Afghan was so beyond that, their strength of character which comes through in their most simple action. This is a long jacket. For men. For generation. It goes from mother to daughter. A possum. This is antelope. Look at this coat. But Afghan students still believed in the idea of revolution. Back in the 1960s, many students from Kabul University had been sent to universities in America. It had been part of the modernisation project. And they brought back with them radical ideas from the American student left. Back in Kabul, those ideas then got mixed up with other left-wing theories that the Afghan students found in badly-translated Russian books about Marxism. And in 1978 they decided to have a revolution. One of the leaders was Hafizullah Amin, and after the revolution he ordered a film to be made about the role he had played. Amin also starred in the film, playing himself. It shows policemen coming to Amin's house to arrest him. He tries to hide some secret papers. But the policemen take him to jail, leaving his wife and daughter. Amin is then shown directing the revolution from his prison cell. And then riding on a tank to the president's palace. REPORTER: Tanks loyal to young communist army officers now guard the palace where President Daoud ruled. Inside, he and his family, including his young grandchildren, are shot dead when his palace guard lost their courageous battle to defend him. Men from the different tribes who live in this backward country swarm all over tanks knocked out in the battle. They seem pleased to see the end of the old, feudal regime. ADAM CURTIS: The revolutionaries gave a press conference. Amin, it was announced, would become Foreign Minister. And the president of the revolutionary council was another ex-student - Mohammed Taraki. Our relationship with all the countries, including Soviet Union, and all our neighbours and throughout the world will be peace, will depend on the amount of their support to our government in political, economical field. Does this mean, Mr President, that you will be following a strict policy of non-alignment? This is quite correct. The aim of the revolution was to create a new Afghanistan, and parades were held in Kabul to celebrate the radical vision. One of the main aims was to redistribute land fairly, to get rid of a feudal system of landowners and peasants. Every farmer was to be allowed to own their own land. And young revolutionaries from Kabul were filmed going out into the countryside to measure out the new plots, followed by the grateful farmers kissing their new land certificates. But in reality, the land reforms set the seeds for a bitter conflict in Helmand. It made the divisions that had begun with President Daoud's reforms in the 1960s much worse. As the land was parcelled out, families accused each other of stealing the best bits. And all sorts of hatreds and rivalries were born in Afghan rural society, rivalries that would set village against village, tribe against tribe. And in Kabul, the revolutionaries started to hate each other, too. Hafizullah Amin decided that he should be in charge, and he arranged for his rival, Taraki, to be killed. Taraki was smothered with a cushion. Amin ordered that anyone who opposed the reforms should be thrown in jail or killed. In Helmand, 100 political prisoners were taken up in a plane and thrown into the giant lake created by the American dam. The Soviet leaders in Moscow became terrified that Afghanistan was falling apart and they decided to intervene. They rang Amin to tell him that they were sending Russian troops to help his revolution. And at the end of 1979, the troops began to arrive at Kabul Airport. What the Russians didn't tell Amin was that the troops were also coming to kill him. The Russians put a sniper on one of the main roads in Kabul. But Amin's convoy drove too fast and the sniper missed. GUNSHOT THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE They tried again. This time they put poison in Amin's can of Pepsi in the presidential palace. But his nephew drank it instead... and died. Amin gave a banquet in a palace outside Kabul. The Soviets smuggled in a chef who poisoned the food. This time it worked - all the guests, and Amin, fell on the floor, writhing in agony. But the Afghan servants rang for help and two Russian doctors turned up who knew nothing of the plot. They pumped Amin's stomach and he revived. So the Russian troops attacked the palace, threw a grenade at Amin, and shot him. SHOUTING IN OWN LANGUAGE INDISTINCT VOICES ON RADIO INDISTINCT VOICES ON RADIO Couldn't be happier. And I'm particularly happy today. Why? We had a very good election last night and the people came out in huge numbers to vote. And voted a new president, which is the people's choice, and that's democracy in action. And I'm very proud of the people of the United States. Oh, I was thrilled. I think the stock market will go up, everyone will be happy, the economy is going to level off, our international relations will become much more stable. I've worked very, very hard on the election in some of the phone banks and all of my friends did. Thrilled to pieces about it. I, uh, always have voted, uh, Democrat. So, you know, times have changed now so, I'm not a baby any more so I had to make a change and I made a change. And so the right man won. President Reagan simplified everything for America. For ten years, the country had been battered and torn apart by waves of economic and social chaos. Reagan set out to give the country a new sense of purpose. He took all the problems, even the most complex, and turned them into reassuring moral fables. And abroad, the world he depicted was one where, although good might struggle with evil for a while, in the end, goodness and innocence would triumph. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. APPLAUSE It was a vision of the world that, over the next 20 years, would rise up to possess all of us in the West, both left and right. Conflicts that, in the past, would have been seen as political struggles were redefined. They became instead battles against dark, demonic forces that threatened innocent people. And the role of we, the good people of the West, was to intervene to save those innocents. One of the places this dream began was Afghanistan. America was already helping the rebels who were fighting the Russians, but Reagan increased the aid massively and made it the symbol of his new vision. He even dedicated the space shuttle to the Afghan freedom fighters. Just as the Columbia we think represents man's finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so, too, does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man's highest aspirations for freedom. Accordingly, I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March 22nd launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan. But right from the beginning there was a dangerous, destructive force at the very heart of this project. This was because Reagan's partner in the battle to bring freedom to Afghanistan was Saudi Arabia. The Saudi intelligence agencies worked with the CIA to ship arms and money to the Afghan rebels. On the surface, the Saudis did this because a fellow Muslim country had been invaded by communists. But it was also part of their attempt to export the dangerous fundamentalism at the heart of their own society. In 1979, a group of Saudi radicals had taken over the Grand Mosque in Mecca. For two weeks, the authorities had fought running battles with the insurgents. They discovered that a number of the attackers had been taught by the most senior religious leader in the country. It made the ruling family realise just how fragile their grip on power was. So as well as sending the money and the weapons, they encouraged young radicals to go and fight in Afghanistan. One of them was a young Osama bin Laden. The aim was to divert their anger. But it meant that with the arms would also come the pessimistic and intolerant version of Islam - Wahhabism. To begin with, these ideas would have little influence in Afghanistan. But they would take hold there and mutate into a dark and violent force that was completely at odds with Reagan's vision of freedom. At the beginning, though, no-one knew who to give the weapons to, and an odd group of adventurers went into Afghanistan to find out. One of the first was a Texan socialite called Joanne Herring. When I went in to Afghanistan - I don't even know how I got in - the president of Pakistan flew me to the border, you know, the no man's land that the British created - very wisely - between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we boarded a truck - I put on men's clothing - and we got on this truck and went somewhere. And we went into these camps and there would be these men with beards and turbans... in rags, really. They had nothing. And with their 1918 Enfield rifles, they would stand there and they'd say, "To the last drop of blood!" And your heart would just burst. But I thought, "What will they do with an unveiled woman coming in here?" And I thought, you know, they really may kill me because they might not understand why I'm here. But they did. They were so grateful. So grateful. They said, "The world doesn't know. Thank you for coming." PLANES PASS OVERHEAD EXPLOSION My...heart was given immediately to these people who believed so much in their god, and I think it's the same god... ..as I worship. Just in another way. And they would come back and, of course, completely exhausted and almost dead - those who were still alive - and then this new group would say, "I can't wait to go out and kill Russians." MAN: 'This is Radio Afghanistan calling Europe.' This is Radio Afghanistan, Kabul, and here is the news. 43 cases of bullets for 300 3-bore guns, an Egyptian Kalashnikov, 11,300 other bullets of various types, including rocket launchers and mines, and 170 various types of weapons, 45 mortar shells, light and heavy machine guns, typewriters and cameras, have recently been seized from the counter revolutionary bandits... MALE REPORTER: Ask him to speak to the daughter. MAN TRANSLATES FEMALE REPORTER: Can he give her the flower? Give her the flower. MEN SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE MALE REPORTER: Karen, please. It is better if he gives her flower than if Karen gives her the flower. MEN TALK OWN LANGUAGE Sorry. Can you do it? Ask him to do it while I'm filming. Just ask him to put it down... MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK. MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE EXPLOSION MAN COUGHS GUITAR PLAYS MAN SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling apart. The attempt to create a planned socialist society had failed. It had become a stagnant world where the shops were half empty, criminal gangs looted the factories, and no-one believed in the system any longer. The ageing Soviet leaders knew that Russian society was collapsing but they had no idea what to do. And in the face of this, Afghanistan became, for them, a last desperate attempt to create a model version of their original communist ideal. Faced with a growing rebellion in the countryside, the Russians took over Afghanistan and installed another student revolutionary as president. He was called Babrak Karmal and he did what he was told. And as well as the Russian troops, thousands of teachers and doctors came to set up programmes and hospitals that were going to transform the lives of the Afghan people. SHE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE ..it was 151...in the right arm in sitting position. Why did you come to Afghanistan? Was it compulsory posting or was it of your own free choice? Why...I did come to Afghanistan? OK, I will tell you. I'm doctor. I want to help people. Patient. It is the main reason I come to Afghanistan. Do you say this right? But it was your free choice that you came here, you were not sent here? Only free choice. Only free choice. And Afghan women were taught to be independent so they could free themselves from the repression of what the Soviets saw as a backward religion. You know, after the revolution, the woman in Afghanistan will be same, like man, yes? They're the same. You know what I mean? You know, in society and also in economy and everything. But outside the cities, the mujaheddin rebels increased their attacks. They were becoming more confident and powerful. Using weapons supplied by the Americans and the Saudis, they ambushed Russian convoys. GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS The mujaheddin treatment of their Russian prisoners was ruthless and cruel. ..and we captured two Russians alive. Then we took them to our commander. And then the commander told us to stone them into death. And we took them and we stoned them into death. - They stoned them to death? Yes. Have many people here stoned Russians or Afghan communists to death? MAN TRANSLATES MURMURS OF AGREEMENT In response, the Russians launched search and destroy missions, often bombing whole villages, massacring hundreds of civilians. The war became a vicious struggle, with the mujaheddin using equally brutal tactics. And any idea of transforming Afghanistan began to slip away, and the Russians retreated into the cities. INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER Comrade General, what is the military situation in the country? But the rebels came into the cities and began to kill the Russian civilians. They hid bombs in everyday objects that exploded the moment anyone used them. Everything around the Russians became frightening and unstable. The forces that they had unleashed were pursuing them and as they did so they began to eat away at the very foundations of Soviet communism. One of the bravest and most honest of the Russian journalists in Afghanistan was Artyom Borovik. He wrote, "We thought that we were civilising a backwards country "by exposing it to television, to modern bombers, to schools, "to the latest models of tanks, "to books, to long-range artillery, "to newspapers, to economic aid, to AK-47s. "But we rarely stopped to think how Afghanistan would influence us, "despite the hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers, diplomats, "journalists and political advisers who passed through it. "They were thrown into a country where bribery, corruption, "profiteering and drugs were no less common "than the long lines in Soviet stores. "These diseases can be far more infectious and dangerous "than hepatitis, particularly when they reach epidemic proportions." HE LAUGHS Borovik said the Russians resembled the astronauts in a famous Soviet science fiction film called Solaris. The astronauts find a planet covered with a giant ocean that seems to be conscious. And to try and influence the ocean, they bombard it with X-rays. What they don't realise is that the ocean is irradiating them. It is playing back, in the astronauts' minds, memories of the past, but in such a vivid way that they begin not to trust anything that they think or believe. Afghanistan, Borovik said, was doing the same to the Russians. It had led them to distrust the very basis of everything they believed in. And they were taking that distrust back with them into the heart of Russia. APPLAUSE ON TV 'Could Labour have managed a rally like this?' AUDIENCE: 'No!' 'In the old days, perhaps, but not now. 'For they are the party of yesterday, 'and tomorrow is ours.' APPLAUSE ON TV The massive increase in the price of oil imposed by the Saudis had caused economic and social chaos in the West. Governments had struggled to deal with it, but they had failed. And in the 1980s, right-wing governments came to power in Britain and America who turned to radical new ways to create economic growth. To begin with, the new policies seemed to work. Inflation was squeezed out of the system and the economies began to stabilise. But then there were other unexpected consequences. Interest rates had risen massively - and this decimated manufacturing industry in both Britain and America. Factory after factory closed. High-paid skilled jobs were replaced by low-wage jobs in the service industries, and living standards began to fall. But then the politicians found a solution. If you couldn't make wages grow any longer, instead you would get the banks to lend people money. And in the mid-1980s, governments removed the restrictions on the banks' lending, and a wave of borrowing spread through Britain and America. Even if their wages were static, people felt wealthier, and had the money to buy things and keep the economy working. And the power to manage society began to move even more from politics to the financial system. Weapons free, battle stations. Weapons free, weapons free. But there was one industry in Britain that had survived and, in fact, was growing. It was the arms industry and its vast trade with Saudi Arabia. But rather than strengthening the politicians' power, it undermined it further, through corruption. REPORTER: The King's train was 20 minutes late arriving at Victoria Station. It was delayed while a suspicious box on a bridge over the track was checked, and found to be harmless. When he eventually stepped on to the platform, it was to a full royal welcome. ADAM CURTIS: Through the 1970s, British arms companies had signed more and more contracts with the Saudis, and they became a central part of a new industry that was run from the very heart of the British government. We're in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. Behind these doors there's a room. A room which few people apart from Arab Sheiks and other potential foreign customers have ever set eyes on before. This way, please. This is it, the permanent Defence Equipment Exhibition, the supermarket of the sales organisation which this year will sell nearly ?600 million worth of British military hardware to foreign governments. Week in, week out, overseas service chiefs come here discreetly to shop for anything from guided missile destroyers and aircraft to a pair of army boots. And they've got quite a choice. There are hundreds of individual British manufacturers in this business. Glossy coloured brochures in every language, including, of course, Arabic. Everywhere in this amazing exhibition there are models showing the hardware in action, showing what the hardware can do. Big missiles, little missiles - here's the short blowpipe surface-to-air missile with which one soldier can bring an aircraft out of the sky, straight from the shoulder. More missiles here, the short Tigercat missile, simple in operation, recommended for its high lethality at low cost. Aircraft are very expensive these days and so you don't want them to have just one... ADAM CURTIS: By the 1980s, the giant orders from Saudi Arabia had become essential to Britain. While much of British industry had closed, the arms business kept growing. ..from air to ground. No, no, no, I'm the Prime Minister. I have to see the super saleswomen do their job. ADAM CURTIS: And in 1985 Mrs Thatcher announced what was going to be the biggest arms deal in history. The extraordinary arms deal, which has impressed military experts throughout the world. It emerged today that Britain and Saudi Arabia have signed what's thought to be one of the biggest arms agreements. The deal will mean Saudi Arabia will get many more combat planes, training aircraft, new mine hunters, two new airbases, and much training and support. It means Britain is pulling level with, if not overtaking, the United States as the biggest military supplier to the Saudis. ADAM CURTIS: The Al-Yamamah deal was presented as a triumph of British ingenuity and skill. But ever since, there have been allegations that really it was secured by vast bribes to key members of the Saudi establishment. British Aerospace admit that there were payments, but insist they were not bribes. But then, in 1990, it became clear that all the arms trade with Saudi Arabia had been a complete charade. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the leaders of Saudi Arabia realised that, despite all this hardware - all the planes, the missiles, the bombs and the radar systems - that their country was incapable of using it properly to defend itself against Saddam Hussein. So they had to turn to America and its military might for help. At my direction, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, as well as key units of the United States Air Force, are arriving today to take up defensive positions in Saudi Arabia. I took this action to assist the Saudi Arabian government in the defence of its homeland. Osama bin Laden had returned from Afghanistan and he went to see the Saudi Defence Minister and pleaded with him not to let the Americans come. He offered to raise a force of mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan and bring them to defend Saudi Arabia instead. But the Defence Minister turned him down. And within weeks, over half a million American soldiers had arrived in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden saw it as the corrupt takeover by the West of the very heart of Islam. Cameraman, please show them what's going on, if you could. Show the street, if nothing else. ADAM CURTIS: And he decided that America, although it had been his ally in Afghanistan, was the real enemy. Show them the sky, if you could. GENTLE CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS No, wait, what strange noise is that? MUSIC CONTINUES What trickery is this? You, up there, what is this noise? Can you see what is happening? Oh, yes, they are sitting down to dinner. Sitting down to dinner? Are they stark raving bonkers? These people, sometimes, they infuriate me! Oh, they come out here with their starched uniforms and their stiff upper lips and their dirty great flags hanging out. - Think they own the place! - They do. Well, they won't much longer. Start the attack! By the time I've finished with them, their stiff upper lips will be so limp they'll be hanging down to their navels. I will kill the pigs! Fire! GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS INDISTINCT SHOUTING Fuckin' hell! GUNFIRE INDISTINCT SHOUTING EXPLOSION - Jesus, fucking target... - Right! GUNFIRE CONTINUES SHOUTING CONTINUES I'm not denying that I'm not a mullah, I'm a mullah in a mosque. - Not with the Taliban. - Right, yeah. So, I mean, they arrest me and they brought me here... Did he say they were... Did he say they beat him? Beat him and electrocution, yeah. Signed a false confession? Does he say they forced him to sign a confession? No, no, he didn't say that. THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR: Yeah, I mean, they force me, they beat me and they put my stamp, saying that you are talib. Does he know... Does he know - are there lots of Taliban here? HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR: Well, I mean, as I have told you before, it's 90% of the people who are here, they came by the name of Taliban here but they are not actually Taliban. They arrest them and they brought them here. When the Russians left Afghanistan, the different mujaheddin groups turned on each other and began a vicious struggle for power. Kabul was completely destroyed as the different groups fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately into the heart of the city. And Kabul became a living hell. PEOPLE SHOUT SHE SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE EXPLOSION MAN: Jesus Christ. The mujaheddin leaders transformed. They became brutal warlords, tearing the country apart. The Americans had stopped sending any money or arms, so to fund themselves, the warlords turned to the heroin trade, and they began to export more and more opium to the West. The poppy fields of Helmand became the centre of a multimillion-dollar business, irrigated by the dams and canals built 40 years before by the American government. Out of the chaos came two extreme and violent reactions. Both ruthlessly simplified the world and both, although they were completely contradictory, were rooted in Wahhabism, the intolerant fundamentalism that came from Saudi Arabia. One was the Taliban. They started as a group of students in religious schools in Pakistan called madrassas, where many Afghan children had gone to study. They became the core of a revolution that spread rapidly through Afghanistan. Although they were in Pakistan, most of the madrassas had been created over the previous 20 years by money from Saudi Arabia. They were part of the massive effort that had been started by King Faisal to spread fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. And the ideas that the madrassas taught were very close to Saudi Wahhabism. When the Taliban swept into Kabul, they went to the Presidential Palace and tore out all painted images of living things, even removing the faces off the stone lions. The society the Taliban built was based on an imagined idea of the past, a re-creation of how they thought Islamic society had been run in the 7th century. All modernization was swept away. Women were not to be educated, and all film and music was banned. And even the bodies of dead communists were dug up and burnt - to cleanse and purify the land. The other reaction came from Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had come back to Afghanistan determined to lead an Islamist revolution. But his ideas were very different from the Taliban. He wanted to use Islamic principles in a new way - to make it a revolutionary force in the modern world, to go forwards, not backwards. But the problem was that these ideas had failed to capture the public imagination, not just in Afghanistan but throughout most of the Islamic world. Bin Laden was convinced that what was stopping this revolution was America. He had seen how American money had corrupted Saudi Arabia. Now he believed that America was corrupting the minds of Muslim people everywhere, and preventing them from rising up and liberating themselves. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Bin Laden's Islamist ideas began to mutate and become mixed with the intolerant and anti-modern anger of Wahhabism. Out of it came a dark and apocalyptic jihadism. It said that the only way to create a revolution would be to attack what he called "the far enemy" directly. The dramatic shock would somehow liberate the masses, but all discussion of what kind of society would result dropped away, and was replaced by stark vision of the coming battle between good and evil. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE CROWD CHANTS America and the coalition forces invaded Afghanistan not just to find those behind the attacks on America but also to transform Afghanistan into a modern democracy. It was a grand plan but the logic behind it was simple. If the innocent people of Afghanistan could be liberated from the evil forces that had terrorised them, then they would become free individuals. And out of that, a democracy, like those in the West, would grow naturally. Tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans would pass through the country over the next ten years - soldiers, diplomats, experts, political advisers and journalists. All of them trying to build this new society. But few of them stopped to think whether what had happened to the Russians 20 years before might also happen to them. That, in a strange way, Afghanistan has revealed to us the emptiness and hypocrisy of many our beliefs. And that we may be returning from there also haunted by mujaheddin ghosts, knowing that, underneath, we believe in nothing. After the shock of the attacks in September 2001, the greatest fear was that the American economy might collapse as well. In response, the politicians, advised by their economic experts, cut interest rates to almost zero. This allowed cheap money to flood through the system and avoid disaster. The banks lent money to anyone and everyone. It was the politicians looking to the financial system to stabilise the country. SHE TALKS IN OWN LANGUAGE At the same time, thousands of experts and advisers flooded into Afghanistan. Their aim was to transform the country into a modern democracy. This optimistic vision of a future Afghanistan was celebrated in the Kabul Stadium. It was the same stadium where the Russians had celebrated their new model for Afghanistan 20 years before. Last year we think that we can never can be alive again, we will die. But now we are...we are thinking that we are alive again, and we are too happy. And also, from America, that they help a lot, we are very appreciative of them. Thanks a lot. I think now everything is normal. The man and woman can work in one place and no any different between them, and I think everything is going to...good day by day. - And this is our school... - That's your school board. - Yeah. - OK. Actually, can I just... Hello? Hello? ADAM CURTIS: All kinds of groups came to Kabul to help the project. It was like a snapshot of what those in power in America and Britain believed made democracy work. As well as the obvious lessons in how to organise elections and conferences on how to stop the narcotics trade, young Afghan students were also given lessons in how to make conceptual art. So, this is, in some ways, often called the first piece of conceptual art. MAN TRANSLATES Does anyone know what it is? MAN TRANSLATES I don't expect the ladies to know. MAN TRANSLATES MAN: Toilets. - Exactly. An artist called Marcel Duchamp, who's very important in Western art, put this toilet in an art gallery about 100 years ago. It was a huge revolution. Are you ready to see how it is used? Underlying it all was a belief that the battle was to create a good society, one that would be strong enough to stand against the bad, anti-democratic forces that had overwhelmed Afghanistan. But then it began to get confusing. The Americans discovered that was it was very difficult to know exactly who was good and who was bad. When they had invaded, they had been helped by Afghans who were already fighting the Taliban. The Americans had assumed they would help to create the new democracy, and appointed many of them to run the country. But now it turned out that many of them were actually the very same corrupt and violent warlords who the Taliban had overthrown. And they were using their new power to terrorise the country all over again. Gul Agha Sherzai had been made Governor of Kandahar. But he was also alleged to be making a million dollars a week from running the opium trade, while at the same time siphoning off millions from the Americans in inflated contracts. When President Karzai was persuaded to remove Sherzai, he simply made him governor of another province. But he was not alone. Throughout much of Afghanistan, the warlords had returned to power. But this time it was worse. The massive influx of American money allowed them to extend their networks of bribery and corruption to every corner of Afghan society. But the money was not just corrupting individuals. It was undermining the whole structure of society, above all the police. Rather than enforcing the law, the police had become transformed into violent militias who worked for the warlords. They organised a massive expansion of the drug trade. And they also terrorised the local people. Ordinary Afghans came to hate the police and they saw them as the enemy. And the Americans also weren't as good as they appeared. Jack Idema had been portrayed as a hero, working with the US Special Forces to hunt down bin Laden. He had arrived in Kabul three years before and become a legendary figure. CBS television had made an hour-long special about the secret world of terror that Idema had discovered in the mountains. It showed a tape that he said he had found of the Al-Qaeda group training. But then Idema was arrested. The Americans said that he was a fake. He had nothing to do with them, and had conned CBS. They alleged that Idema had a dungeon, hidden underneath his house in Kabul, where he tortured innocent Afghans. Tell him, basically I'm tired of the lies. Where's his village? In three minutes...he'll be dead. MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Idema was put on trial in Kabul. He insisted, though, he had been working with the highest levels of the US military and government. I know what's wrong with you... Jack, who are you working for? Uh, we were working for the US Counter-Terrorist Group and working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies. So you were working with US knowledge, with US government knowledge? We were in touch with the Pentagon sometimes five times a day, at the highest level, every day. How do you feel about being sort of let go by the Americans? Fucked. You can't use that quote. Well, there you go, that's the quote, my dear. This government and our government knew every single thing we were doing. ADAM CURTIS: Jack Idema was found guilty and sent to jail. But then it got even more confusing. Because reports emerged that the real American military had been doing exactly the same as Jack Idema. They had set up a special torture centre in an old Soviet hangar at Bagram Air Base. Ordinary Afghans were shackled to the ceiling and subjected to all kinds of violent abuse. But they went further than Jack Idema. The reports said that two of the victims had been tortured to death. Of course, it was very provocative. People were very angry, and I think it's important to understand that when this kind of art emerged it was partly political. It was to fight against the system and say, "What is art is what I think it is." One of the biggest concerns we have is about the casualties that took place because of the result of cluster bombs. OK, that's fine. - OK, is that fly going to...? - That fly. - You can hear it, actually. - You can, can't you? FLY BUZZES It's a blowie. - It'll land. - It's a blowie. Fuck off. It's a bug. Ah... THUMP! LAUGHING: This is an interview about casualties. There's going to be one more. Ah! Jesus. On the whole, I think everyone finds it a very important event and even more so, the fact we're abroad and not able to celebrate it at home. Hence we're very happy to, uh, do some small token towards the Queen's celebrations. And why, why a beacon here in Kabul? I have absolutely no idea. By 2006, the British and the Americans realised that their project to bring democracy to Afghanistan was failing, and large parts of the country were descending into anarchy. In Helmand, in Southern Afghanistan, armed groups had risen up and there was constant fighting. The coalition were convinced that this was the return of the Taliban, and British troops were sent there to restore order and to help protect the regional government. But when the British commanders asked the Ministry of Defence for information about what was happening in Helmand, there was none. There weren't even any satellites looking at it. They had all been moved to look at Iraq. The one thing they did know was that they were going to the very heartland of the tribe that had decisively defeated the British 125 years before at the Battle of Maiwand. The British commander called a meeting with the local elders. It was in the very same town that the American engineers had built, 50 years before, when they were constructing the dam across the Helmand River. All three of us, the security, governance, and for development. We are the three who work together as the British. I know you've seen many foreigners arriving in your country. ADAM CURTIS: The commander reassured the elders that the British were there to defeat the Taliban and support the regional government. COMMANDER: ..my forefathers were even here before. ADAM CURTIS: Next door, his officers were preparing to entertain the elders with a showing of David Attenborough's series The Blue Planet. But the elders thought that the British had completely misunderstood the problem. The real enemy was not the Taliban, but the corrupt and vicious government that President Karzai had installed in Helmand and was doing nothing to stop. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE And tell Mr President Karzai if he bring a good governance, the security situation will be the same. If you are here for 100 years, it will be not good. Once he brought good governance, good people to the government, then we have hope that the security will be change. The elders left without watching The Blue Planet. Before they came to Helmand, the British had forced President Karzai to get rid of its governor. But they didn't realise that he had left behind him a completely corrupted society. And nothing was what it seemed. When the British went into towns like Sangin, they tried to support the police. But the police were really the armed militia for the sacked governor. To the locals, this meant that the western troops were supporting their oppressors. So they started to attack the British. Get inside! Shit the bed. That's close, that one, out the back there. It was. Right, mate, get under it. - Shit. - Shit. - They're overshooting on us. - Stay down, lads, stay down. - Is that incoming or outcoming? - Fucking incoming now. ADAM CURTIS: The British thought that this must mean they were Taliban. So in response they dropped giant bombs on them. Fuckin' hell. MAN LAUGHS - Did you get that, did you? - Yes, I did. Fucking hell. MAN LAUGHS LAUGHING: Holy shit. But this then devastated the town centres, which made even more local people join in the attacks. Seeing their chance, the real ideological Taliban, who were now based in Pakistan, flooded back in and they started attacking the British, too. GUNFIRE At the same time the corrupt militias who worked for the local government also turned against the British. Faced by the chaos, the British still clung to their simple narrative of good and evil. They - the Western forces - were good. And all the different groups who were attacking them were Taliban, and were bad. But this extraordinary simplification had terrible consequences. Because if you were an Afghan and wanted to kill a rival, all you had to do was go to the British and tell them that he was a Taliban and the British would obediently wipe him out. INCOMING ROCKET - Fuck! - Fuckin' hell! - Yeah! - Whoo! The British were being used. The terrible truth was that the British presence did not contain the war. It did the very opposite. It escalated it so much that it ran out of control. And the bodies - Afghan and British - piled up. The dynamic was one of manipulation. They understood how we saw the conflict. They presented their local group conflict, their civil war between groups that had been going on for 35 years. They presented everything in that dynamic. So they came to us and said, "Those people over there are Taliban." And we went, "OK." And we went off and dealt with them. But, actually, we were dealing with their previous enemies. So we were just creating more enemies for ourselves. And you ended up in a downward spiral where, because everyone was manipulating us, we ended up fighting everyone. And then, in return, everyone who fought us immediately became Taliban. The way that we decided whether you were Taliban or not was whether you were firing at us. SPORADIC GUNFIRE Post 2001, whereas we've understood the conflict as good/bad, black/white, government/Taliban, they've understood it as a shifting mosaic of different groups and leaders fighting each other, effectively over power. And the currency of power in Helmand is opium. That's largely what the conflict's about. So what you're saying is that the...what we thought were the Taliban was actually an allergic reaction to us turning up into the middle of a complex civil war? Correct. - We made things worse? - Yes. EXPLOSION - Where was that? - That's over there on the left. Oh, for fuck's sakes. But then the British and the Americans had to face up to the fact that they might not be as good and innocent as they thought they were. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE In 2009, the Presidential elections were held. Hamid Karzai stood and allied himself with some of the most powerful warlords. But there were allegations that the warlords rigged the vote on a massive scale. This was backed up with videos that seemed to show the warlords' followers stuffing the ballot boxes with hundreds of fake voting papers. The coalition tried to rerun the election. But Karzai's main opponent refused because he said it would be even more corrupt. So the British and Americans had no choice but to abandon their great dream of a real democracy in Afghanistan. They gave in and allowed Karzai to become president again. I still don't trust that fella. Things look rather bad, sir. What are we going to do? Do, Captain? We're British, we won't do anything. - Till it's too late. - Precisely. That's the first sensible thing you've said today. - Thank you, sir. - No, gentlemen, as always, we will carry on as if nothing was going to happen. This morning... the Federal Reserve, with support of the Treasury Department, took additional actions to mitigate disruptions to our financial markets. Today's events are fast moving. But the chairman of the Federal Reserve and the secretary of the Treasury are on top of them, and will take the appropriate steps to promote stability in our markets. ADAM CURTIS: And at the very same time as their simple plan was falling apart in Afghanistan, the politicians had to face a crisis at home. They had given power to the banks because the bankers and the financial technocrats had promised that they could hold the economy stable. But in 2008, the whole intricate system of credit and loans that the banks had created collapsed, and there was growing panic as giant financial institutions faced bankruptcy. The politicians in America and Britain stepped in and rescued the banks. As they did so, they began to discover that most of the major financial institutions were also riddled with corruption. But unlike President Roosevelt in the 1930s, they didn't then try and reform the system. Instead they simply propped it up by literally pouring billions more pounds and dollars into the banks, hoping that this would somehow spread through the economies. They had no other idea. GUNFIRE CHILDREN CRY And, faced by disaster in Afghanistan, the politicians did exactly the same there, too. The Americans knew that the idea of democracy was failing. In desperation, they poured even more money into the Afghan economy. The idea was that this would somehow create a simpler, economic form of democracy and that the free market would liberate people. They would become model consumers following their own rational self-interest, just like in the economies of the west. And in an odd way, it worked. Many of those in charge of the money did behave in their own rational self-interest. They simply stole the money, smuggled it out through Kabul Airport, and used it to buy luxury properties in Dubai. During this period it was estimated that 10 million a day was being taken out of Afghanistan this way. SHOUTING IN OWN LANGUAGE The scandal seemed to confirm for many Afghans that the United States had not brought democracy or free markets to their country, but instead a corrupt crony capitalism that had taken over Afghanistan and its government. Which was the very same allegation that as being made against politicians at home, in America and in Britain. At the end of 2014, British soldiers left Afghanistan. All the bases were wiped out as if nothing had been there. Even the war memorials were packed up and taken back to Staffordshire. But they weren't the only fighters who had left Afghanistan. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets back in the 1980s. Then he had stayed on to work with Osama bin Laden. And in 2003 he went to Iraq and set up a jihadist group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq to fight the American invasion. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Al Zarqawi was powerfully influenced by bin Laden's ideas. But he took them much further. He and his group killed anyone who they decided did not believe in their fundamentalist ideas and deserved to die. Even the original founders of Al-Qaeda were shocked, and they sent him a letter telling him to stop killing civilians. But al-Zarqawi ignored them. He was convinced that the insurgency in Iraq could be used to spread an Islamist revolution throughout the Arab world. HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE But before he could do this, the Americans found al-Zarqawi and dropped a large bomb on him. But it didn't stop the spread of the idea. Despite al-Zarqarwi's death his organisation survived, and began to mutate into something even more ferocious and ambitious. But as it did so, it was possessed by ghosts from the past. What re-emerged was the fierce, intolerant vision of Wahhabism that had survived from the 1920s. It had spread outwards through Afghanistan in the 1980s and '90s where it had become mixed with modern Islamist ideas. But now, faced by the nihilistic horror in post-invasion Iraq, any ideas of building a new revolutionary future disappeared, and, instead, the conservative and backward-looking Wahhabism became the dominating influence, with its desire to retreat to an imagined past. In 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was formed. Known as ISIS in the West. Its aim is to create a unified caliphate throughout the Islamic world. And although it uses the techniques of modern media it is, at heart, the same violent dream that had driven the Bedouins who had created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. Back then, the King of Saudi Arabia had found it necessary to try and exterminate them because they, too, wanted to go on and conquer the whole of the Islamic world. He machine-gunned them in the bleak sands of the Arabian Peninsula. And now the Saudis, along with the British and Americans, are trying to do the same thing again - to kill the jihadists and their ideas in the sand dunes of Northern Iraq and Syria. But it is an uncertain war. Western politicians are having to accept that the simple division between good and evil doesn't exist. By bombing ISIS, they are helping the evil President Assad to remain in power. And those in charge don't even know how big a threat ISIS really is. Is it a dark, existential threat? Or is it really a front, being used in an ongoing complex power struggle inside Iraq? We just don't know. At the end of the Soviet science fiction film Solaris, the astronaut returns home. Everything seems real and normal. But somehow he doesn't trust in anything any longer. Although we have the returned from Afghanistan, our leaders also seem to have lost faith in anything. And the simple stories they tell us don't make sense any longer. The experience of Afghanistan has made us begin to realise that there is something else out there but we just don't have the apparatus to see it. What is needed is a new story. And one that we can believe in.

Transcript

Bitter Lake Adam Curtis, 2015 [Narration (Curtis):] Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power [tell stories to help us]

1 make sense of the complexity

of reality; but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense; and how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world. It is told through the prism of a country at the centre of the world: Afghanistan.


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] HELMAND PROVINCE ¶ AFGHANISTAN ¶ 1953 LONDON ¶ The same time UKRAINE ¶ 1989 RIYADH ¶ SAUDI ARABIA ¶ 1974 WALL STREET ¶ NEW YORK ¶ 1993 THE PLANET SOLARIS ¶ 1972


[Caption:] BITTER ¶ LAKE [Caption:] Lashkar Gah airstrip 1946 [Narration:] In 1946, American engineers, along with their wives and families, began to arrive at a dusty airstrip in + [the] Helmand [region of] southern Afghanistan. They worked for the biggest construction company in the world – [] Morrison Knudsen – and the King of Afghanistan had brought them there to build a giant planned new world: a complex of dams, canals, roads and even a new model city. The King's aim was to harness the power of the giant Helmand River and turn his country into a modern society, just like [] the West. [Clip from period (colour) promotional-type film about Afghanistan, billed as presented by (the) Morrison–Knudsen (Company, Inc.)] [Narration:] The King was +[Mohammed] Zahir Shah; and he often came to visit the project. Afghanistan was a deeply conservative country and he was determined to modernise it. What the King was trying to create in Helmand was a copy of what +[US] President Roosevelt had done in America in the 1930s; and the company he had hired, Morrison Knudsen, had +[also] worked back then for Roosevelt, building a new world of dams and power stations across America. Now they were going to do the same for Afghanistan. The engineers and their families lived in a complex of houses around the King's country palace in Helmand. It became known as "Little America".


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] Afghan version of ¶ The Thick of It2 Biometric data collection ¶ of Afghan villagers Retinal scanning


[Narration:] At the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt travelled +[on board the cruiser USS Quincy] to the Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the Suez Canal. At the same time, he sent another American warship to pick up the King of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz +[ibn Saud]. The meeting of King and President was to have powerful and disastrous consequences both for the West and, in a strange way, for Afghanistan. Roosevelt was dying; but over the last thirteen years, he had used his power on an epic scale to transform the world. After the Wall Street crash and the terrible depression that followed, Roosevelt had taken charge. He had passed laws that broke up the banks, so they would never run out of control again; and he had rebuilt America with a series of giant dams that brought electrical power and employment to millions of people; and he had planned and fought a world war against Germany and Japan. Now, as Roosevelt sat waiting for Abdul-Aziz, no-one could

possibly have imagined the consequences of this meeting[. I]t was going to unleash forces that [] would undermine everything that Roosevelt had worked for: his belief that politicians should use their power in a planned way to reshape the world. [] Roosevelt knew that to keep that power, America needed oil; and he wanted to forge an alliance with the King to make sure that the vast Saudi oilfields remained under American control. In their conversation, the two men laid the foundations for an alliance that continues to the present day. America would get its oil; and in return, Saudi Arabia would receive wealth and security from America. But the King was well aware of the dangers of opening up his country to the influence of the modern West; and in the negotiations that followed, he laid down a condition. We will take your technology and your money, he said, but you must leave our faith alone. The Saudi faith was

3 called Wahhabism. It was

3 a radical[,] violent and extremely puritanical form of Islam; and its followers among the Bedouin tribes hated the modern world. [It] was part of a wider movement in Islam that had risen up in reaction to the European empires; another was the Deobandi movement in India. They all believed that modern imperialism was corrupting the [] nature of Islam; and +[they] wanted to go back to a world based on the original teachings of the Islamic texts. Abdul-Aziz had harnessed this force in the 1920s to seize power, but he had unleashed something that didn't want to stop. The Wahhabists wanted to go on and create a caliphate across the whole of the Arab world; and [in 1929,] <>[to stop them,] Abdul-Aziz +[had] [them]<>[machine-gunned]. He ruthlessly killed the warriors who had made him king. But their belief – a violent, intolerant and, above all, backward-looking version of Islam – remained at the heart of Saudi Arabian society; and the deal made that day on the Great Bitter Lake meant that America would get its oil, but [] would also be protecting Wahhabism – a force that had its own global ambitions [] that were very different from +[those of] America[].


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] Ahmad Shah Massoud had been ¶ the great hope for a future Afghanistan But he had been killed by ¶ Osama [sic] bin Laden in 2001 Massoud had ¶ become ¶ a national hero


[Caption:] The King's Palace ¶ Helmand 1955 [Narration:] By the mid-1950s, the American engineers had built the giant dams that were going to create what they called a new wonderland of vegetation and power in Helmand. But the project was running into problems and it was beginning to lose its innocence. As the giant dams were completed, they had an unexpected effect: they raised the level of the water table and started to bring salt to the surface – and one of the plants that thrived in this new soil [was the] popp[y]. Some of those leading the project said they should stop; but the American government stepped in and insisted that they [] continue – because by now, the dams had become a central part of the struggle with the Soviet Union. All sides in the Cold War began to compete to offer Afghanistan bigger and better schemes to modernise the country. Afghan politicians exploited this ruthlessly; the Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud +[Khan], spent his time travelling the world, playing [the USSR], America and China off against each other. Daoud wanted to use the modernisation as a way of consolidating his power. Afghanistan was a fragmented country: power was divided between ethnic groups and tribes. Daoud was a Pashtun; and he saw how the dam[s] in Helmand could be used to consolidate the Pashtun grip on the whole country. He persuaded the Americans to make the project even bigger: to turn it into a giant piece of social engineering. Thousands of Pashtun nomads, who spent their time roaming the border [] with Pakistan, would be settled in the new farmland created by the dams. Daoud presented [this] as just another innocent piece of modernisation; and the Americans happily agreed. What they didn't realise is that they were unwittingly being sucked into Afghan power politics. Not only was Daoud increasing Pashtun power; [] he was sowing the seeds of bitter rivalries over the division and ownership of land in Helmand.


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] The Day Spa and Beauty Shop ¶ Bagram [A]irbase 2005 President Karzai's motorcade IN 1964 ¶ ¶ IN THE KINGDOM ¶ OF SAUDI ARABIA THE MONEY FROM ¶ THE WEST ¶ FLOODED IN TO BUY ¶ THE OIL AND SO DID ¶ BRITISH BUSINESSMEN

WHO WANTED TO ¶ GET SOME OF IT BACK


[Narration:] In 1964, King Faisal became the new leader of Saudi Arabia. Faisal set out to modernise the country. He created Western-style bureauracies and a welfare system [and] even allowed television for the first time. But he faced two threats. One was from the religious leaders inside Saudi Arabia – [] the Wahhabists who had brought his family to power and +[who] gave his rule legitimacy. They distrusted any idea of modernising Saudi society. Faisal was also facing a dangerous situation abroad: from +[the] communism that was spreading through the Arab world. His solution was simple: [he] decided to use the religious leaders and their conservative beliefs as a force to counter the [communist threat]4

[and] he knew that this would also divert their attention away from his domestic

policies. Faisal used the growing +[amounts of] oil money to set up hundreds of schools and institutes across the Islamic world – some as far away as Pakistan. Their job was to spread Wahhabist ideas and help [] turn Islam into a unified, international force strong enough to stand up to communism. What [he] was doing was taking the dangerous and unstable fanaticism at the heart of Saudi society and directing it outwards, beyond its borders. It was a ruthless [sic] way of creating stability in his own country. America gave this tacit approval, [seeing it as]5 part of the global struggle against communism. But in 1966, Faisal gave America a glimpse of how uncontrollable an ally Saudi Arabia could be: he went to New York and publicly attacked America's support for Israel. It caused an outrage. [From footage (b&w) of King Faisal's address; Faisal speaks (in Arabic) followed by a translator/interpreter] [(Translator/interpreter after Faisal has spoken:)] "The [?reasons are] that unfortunately, the Jews [..?..] support Israel – they provide assistance to Israel – and in our present situation, we consider those who [] [?provide] assistance to our enemy as our own enemy." [Further footage of Faisal speaking]


[Clip sequence]


Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan [Interviewer (off-camera):] "Do you ever feel fustrated at, perhaps, [..?..] spoken about corruption; and certainly, in the past, you've [?made] [sic] very strong views against officials, for example, who are corrupt – but, but many of those officials haven't, haven't left their jobs; they haven't obeyed your orders..?" [Karzai:] "No, they have all left their jobs. ... Certainly." [Interviewer:] "In the past few days, of the twenty-eight that you have sacked, nineteen – our information is that nineteen of them are still in their positions..?" [Karzai, smiling:] "No, that's not true..! They've all gone; they've all gone – " [Interviewer:] " 'kay..." [Karzai:] " – definitely; definitely." [Interviewer:] "So, you th– you're, you're confident, then, that your power is building, in terms of being able to enact... [] to make sure that your orders are obeyed..?" [Karzai:] "I would – I'm, I'm building... a new administration for Afghanistan. I'm working on a clean, efficient administration."


[Clip sequence (ending with excerpt from (caption:) "1971" episode of the BBC TV children's magazine programme Blue Peter featuring the grooming and then presentation of Afghan Hounds along London's Mall while the then-King of Afghanistan travels past in a carriage)]


[Narration:] But the ordered world, where kings and queens ruled – and dogs behaved obediently – was about to collapse. In 1971, the King of Afghanistan had come on his first ever state visit to Britain – but it was also his last, because his ambitious Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud, was already plotting against him; and in 1973, Daoud took power in a coup. He declared Afghanistan a republic and sent the King into exile. Two months later, Egypt attacked Israel and a Middle-East war started. To begin with, it looked as though Israel would be defeated; but the American government came to its rescue, airlifting arms on a massive scale to prevent the Israelis from being overwhelmed. The Israelis counterattacked; and the Arabs faced a disaster.

But then, Saudi Arabia came to the[+ir?] rescue – because King Faisal realised that his country had a weapon that could stop Israel. Overnight, Faisal raised the price of oil [by?] five times and threatened a complete embargo unless America forced Israel to pull back. It worked – a ceasefire was agreed – and everyone realised that the balance of power in the world had suddenly changed. Sheikh [Ahmed] Zaki Yamani, Saudi Minister for Oil [1962–86] "What we want is the complete withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the occupied Arab territories... and then you'll have the oil at the same level of [sic] September '73." [Interviewer (off-camera):] "Is this demand absolute and rigid, or is this just a – " [Yamani:] "Def–" [(Interviewer:)] " – negotiating position?" [Yamani:] "Definitely. We won't give up an[] inch of these lands." [Interviewer (on-camera):] "Doesn't this new, massive increase in the price of oil mean a change in the world['s] balance of power, between the developing nations like you[rs] – the producers – and [ours], the developed, industrialised nations?" [Yamani:] "Yes, it will." [Interviewer (off-camera):] "And what do you think arises from that..?" [Yamani:] "Well, a new type of relationship; you['ll] have to adjust yoursel[ves] to the new circumstances... and I think you['ll] have to sit down and talk seriously with us about this new era." [Narration:] [] Saudi Arabia raised the price of oil [in order] to change the political balance of power in the world. But it also had another, unexpected effect: [] it allowed the men who ran the banks and the financial system[s] in America and Britain to begin to break free of political control. Billions of dollars flooded from the West into Saudi Arabia, most of which the Saudis didn't know what to do with; so they gave them to the Western banks to invest. The banks then made a crucial decision: they kept many of those dollars free from [governmental control, creating]6 a vast pool of wealth known as "petrodollars" that could be lent and traded anywhere around the world without political control. As Western politicians struggled to deal with the economic and social chaos [] created by the oil-price rise, their bankers were building a new, global financial system based on recycling the Saudi billions; and the banks began to become rich and powerful again.


[Clip sequence]


[Caption:] Afghanistan 1977 [Narration:] As Western countries collapsed economically in the 1970s, students from Europe and America fled from the chaos. They came to Afghanistan as a land of dreams: a different, innocent world, free of the +[West's] corruption of politics and money []. [Unidentified (male) voice] "When you see some Afghan come [?dozing] out of the sand... hardly giv[ing] you a look and carry[ing] on past, you, you long to ask "Where are you going? Where have you come from?"... but – he just disappears into the murk, going about his everyday business... "A traveller is someone who... proceeds through a country under his own initiative, with a certain internal drive to learn, to find out something more than the superficial [...] To me, an Afghan was... some figure from a woodblock print in a book about India... The reality of an Afghan was so beyond that: their strength of character, which comes through in their most simple action..." [Two clips from period (i.e. ?1970s) footage of young Westerners visiting Afghanistan] [Caption:] Kabul University [Narration:] But Afghan students still believed in the idea of revolution. Back in the 1960s, many students from Kabul University had been sent to universities in America. It had been part of the modernisation project; and they brought back with them radical ideas from the American student left. Back in Kabul, those ideas then got mixed up with other left-wing theories that the Afghan students found in badly-translated Russian books about Marxism; and in 1978, they decided to have a revolution. [Caption (on blackscreen):] THE STORY OF ¶ HAFIZULLAH AMIN [Narration:] One of the +[revolution's] leaders was Hafizullah Amin; and after the revolution, he ordered a film to be made about the role he had played. Amin [] starred in the film, playing himself. It shows policemen coming to [his] house to arrest him; he tries to hide some secret papers, but the policemen take him to jail, leaving his wife and daughter +[behind]. [He] is then shown directing the revolution from his prison cell; and then riding [in] a tank to the President's palace.

[News reportage clip] [Voiceover:] "Tanks loyal to young communist army officers now guard the palace where President Daoud ruled. Inside, he and his family, including his young grandchildren, were shot dead when his palace guard lost their courageous battle to defend him. Men from the different tribes who live in this backward country swarm all over tanks knocked out in the battle; they seem pleased to see the end of the old, feudal regime." [Narration:] The revolutionaries gave a press conference. Amin, it was announced, would become Foreign Minister; and the President of the Revolutionary Council was another ex-student, +[Nur] Muhammad Taraki. Muhammad Taraki [during the press conference?] [sic:] "Our relationship with all the countries – including Soviet Union and all our neighbours and throughout the world – will be [peace/based/?] and depend on the amount of their support to our [..?..] government in political, economical field."

[Question from floor:] "Does this mean, Mr President, that you will be following a strict policy of non- alignment?"

[Taraki:] "This is quite correct." [Narration:] The +[overall] aim of the revolution was to create a new Afghanistan; and parades were held in Kabul to celebrate the radical vision. One of [its corollaries]7 was to redistribute land fairly: to get rid of a feudal system of landowners and peasants. Every farmer was to be allowed to own their own land; and young revolutionaries from Kabul were filmed [] in[] the countryside [] measur[ing] out the new plots, followed by [] grateful farmers kissing their new land certificates. But in reality, the land reforms set the seeds for a bitter conflict []8

[they] made the divisions that had begun with

President Daoud's reforms in the 1960s much worse. As the land was parcelled out, families accused each other of stealing the best bits and all sorts of hatreds and rivalries were born []9

that would set village against village +[and] tribe against tribe. And in Kabul, the revolutionaries started to hate each other too. Hafizullah Amin decided that he should be in charge; and he arranged for his rival Taraki to be killed[,] smothered with a cushion. [He] ordered that anyone who opposed the reforms should be thrown in jail or killed. In Helmand, a hundred political prisoners were taken up in a plane and thrown into the giant lake created by the American dam. The Soviet leaders in Moscow became terrified that Afghanistan was falling apart; [so] they decided to intervene. They rang Amin to tell him that they were sending [Soviet] troops to help his revolution; and at the end of 1979, the troops began to arrive at Kabul Airport. What the [Soviets] didn't tell Amin was that the troops were also coming to kill him. [Caption (on blackscreen):] ATTEMPT ONE [Narration:] The [Soviets] put a sniper on one of the main roads in Kabul; but Amin's convoy drove too fast and the sniper missed. [Caption (on blackscreen):] ATTEMPT TWO [Narration:] They tried again. This time, they put poison in [a] can of Pepsi in the Presidential Palace; but [Amin's] nephew drank it instead – and died. [Caption (on blackscreen):] ATTEMPT THREE [Narration:] Amin gave a banquet in a palace outside Kabul. The Soviets smuggled in a chef who poisoned the food. This time, it worked: all the guests – and Amin – fell on the floor, writhing in agony. But the [] servants rang for help and two [Soviet] doctors turned up who knew nothing of the plot. They pumped Amin's stomach; and he revived. So the [Soviet] troops attacked the palace, threw a grenade at Amin and shot him.


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] Riot after the Americans accidentally ¶ bombed an Afghan village Because of false information [on blackscreen:] Nov 4th 1980 [on blackscreen:] Ronald Reagan is told he ¶ has been elected President


[Narration:] President Reagan simplified everything for America. For ten years, the country had been battered and torn apart by waves of economic and social chaos. Reagan set out to give the country a new sense of purpose[,

taking] all the problems – even the most complex – and turn[ing] them into reassuring moral fables; and abroad, the world he depicted was one where – []though good might struggle with evil for a while – in the end, goodness and innocence would triumph. [Brief clip of Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine:] "We have it in our power... to begin the world over again." [Narration:] It was a vision of the world that [would],<>[over the next twenty years], [come]10

to possess all of us in the

West []11 . Conflicts that in the past would've been seen as political struggles were redefined; they became instead battles against dark, demonic forces that threatened innocent people – and the role of we, the good people of the West, was to intervene [and] save those innocents. One of [the places +[where] this dream]

12 began was Afghanistan. America was already helping the rebels who were fighting the [Soviets]; but Reagan increased the aid massively and made it the symbol of his new vision. He even dedicated [a] Space Shuttle +[launch] to the Afghan freedom fighters. [From Ronald Reagan's address before instituting "Afghanistan Day" in March 1982] "Just as the Columbia, we think, represents man's finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so too does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man's highest aspirations for freedom. [...] Accordingly, I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March-22nd launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan." [Narration:] But right from the beginning, there was a dangerous, destructive force at the [] heart of this project. This was because Reagan's partner in the battle to bring freedom to Afghanistan was Saudi Arabia. The Saudi intelligence agencies worked with the CIA 13 to ship arms and money to the Afghan rebels. On the surface, the Saudis did this because a fellow Muslim country had been invaded by communists; but it was also part of their attempt to export the dangerous fundamentalism at the heart of their own society. In 1979, a group of Saudi radicals had taken over the Grand Mosque in Mecca. For two weeks, the authorities had fought running battles with the insurgents [and had] discovered that a number of the attackers had been taught by the most senior religious leader in the country. It made the ruling +[Saud] family realise just how fragile their grip on power was; so as well as sending the money and the weapons, they encouraged young radicals to [] fight in Afghanistan. One of them was a young Usama bin Laden. The aim was to divert [the young radicals']14 anger; but it meant that with the arms would also come [a] pessimistic and intolerant version of Islam: Wahhabism. [Initially]15

, these ideas would have little influence in Afghanistan, but they would take hold there and mutate into a dark and violent force that was completely at odds with Reagan's vision of freedom. At the beginning, though, no-one knew who to give the weapons to; and an odd group of adventurers went into Afghanistan to find out. One of the first was a Texan socialite called Joanne Herring. Joanne Herring When I went in to Afghanistan – I don't even know how I got in – [] the President [] of Pakistan flew me to the border – you know, the no-man's-land that the British created – very wisely – between Afghanistan and Pakistan – and we borded a truck. I put on men's clothing; and we got on this truck and went somewhere ... ... and we went into these camps; and there would be these men with beards and turbans in rags – they had... nothing – and there with their 1918 Enfield rifles and... they would stand there and they'd say "To the last drop of blood!" and your heart would just burst – but I thought "What will they do with an unveiled woman coming in here..?" – and I thought "You know, they, they really may kill me, because they might not understand why I'm here..." – but they did. They were so grateful, so grateful – they, they said the world doesn't know; thank you for coming. My... heart was given immediately to these people, who believed so much in their god – and I think it's the same god... as I worship; just in another way – ... and they would come back; and, of course, completely exhausted and almost dead – those who were still alive – and then this new group would say: "I can't wait to go out and kill Russians!" –


[Clip sequence]


[Caption:] MOSCOW 1981 [Narration:] In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling apart. The attempt to create a planned socialist society

had failed+[; and i]t had become a stagnant world, where [] shops were half-empty, criminal gangs looted [] factories and no-one believed in the system any longer. The aging Soviet leaders knew that [Soviet] society was collapsing, but they had no idea what to do; and in the face of this, Afghanistan became [their]16

last, desperate attempt to create a model version of their original communist ideal. Faced with a growing rebellion in the countryside, the [Soviets] took over Afghanistan and installed another + [former-]student revolutionary as President. He was [] Babrak Karmal; and he did what he was told. And as well as the [] troops, thousands of teachers and doctors came to set up programmes and hospitals that were going to transform the lives of the Afghan people. Dr Zobaref, Soviet medical consultant [Interviewer (off-camera):] "Why did you come to Afghanistan – was it, was it +[a] compulsory posting or was it of your own free choice – ?" [Zobaref (sic):] "Why... I did come to Afghanistan... Okay, I will... tell you. I'm doctor; I want to help people... patient[s]; it is the main reason why I come [..?..]. [?Do you see this threat?]" [Interviewer:] "But it was your own free choice that you came – " [Another voice:] "Yes, [..?..]" [(Interviewer:)] " – that you were not s[..?..]" [Zobaref:] "Only free, only free choice. Only free choice; [? nothing... nothing...]" [Narration:] And Afghan women were taught to be independent, so they could free themselves [from the repression of what the Soviets saw as a backward religion] 17 .

[Soviet/Russian (presumably) woman] [sic:] "You know, after the revolution, the woman in Afghanistan will be same... like man, yes? They are the same – you know... what I mean? [...] You know, in... society; and also in economy; and everything" – [Narration:] But outside the cities, the mujahideen rebels increased their attacks. They were becoming more confident and powerful+[; and u]sing weapons supplied by the Americans and the Saudis, they ambushed [Soviet] convoys. The mujahideen['s] treatment of their [Soviet] prisoners was ruthless and cruel. [ (...English-speaking member (mujahid) of a group of (presumably) mujahideen standing around somewhere in Afghanistan...) ] "... and we captured the two Russians alive. Then we took them to our commander [...] and then the commander told us to stone... them []to death; and we took them and we stoned them []to death." [(He smiles)] [Reporter:] "[You]18 stoned them to death?" – [Mujahid:] "Yeah, yes." [Reporter, addressing group:] "Have many people here stoned Russians or Afghan communists to death..?" [After hearing translation, group members nod heads and murmur positive-sounding responses] [Narration:] In response, the [Soviets] launched search-and-destroy missions, often bombing whole villages +[and] massacring hundreds of civilians. The war became a vicious struggle, with the mujahideen using equally brutal tactics; and any idea of transforming Afghanistan began to slip away. [T]he [Soviets] retreated into the cities. [Caption (on blackscreen):] TAPE ERASED BY SOVIET CENSOR [Narration:] But the rebels came into the cities and began to kill [Soviet] civilians. They hid bombs in everyday objects that exploded the moment anyone used them+[; and e]verything around the [Soviets] became frightening and unstable. The forces that they had unleashed were pursuing them; and as they did so, they began to eat away at the [] foundations of Soviet communism. One of the bravest and most honest of the [Soviet] journalists in Afghanistan was Artyom Borovik. He wrote: "We thought that we were civilising a backwards country by exposing it to television, to modern bombers, to schools, to the latest models of tanks, to books, to long-range artillery, to newspapers, [...] to economic aid, to AK-47s 19 . But we rarely stopped to think how Afghanistan would influence us – despite the hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers [...] diplomats, journalists [...] and political advisers who passed through it. [...] [T]hey were thrown into a country where bribery, corruption, profiteering and drugs were no less common than the long lines in Soviet stores. These diseases can be far more infectious and dangerous than hepatitis, particularly when they reach epidemic proportions." 20

[ (Clip of subtitled wheelchair-bound veteran raving on (Moscow?) underground (actual/acted?) ] Borovik said that the [Soviets] resembled the [cosmo]nauts in a famous Soviet science-fiction film called Solaris

[(Caption: 'Solaris' ¶ Mosfilm/Andrey Tarkovskiy 1972)]. The [cosmo]nauts find a planet covered with a giant ocean that seems to be conscious; and to try [to] influence the ocean, they bombard it with X-rays. What they don't realise is that the ocean is irradiating them: it is playing back, in the [cosmo]nauts' minds, memories of the past – but in such a vivid way that they begin not to trust anything that they think or believe. Afghanistan, Borovik said, was doing the same to the [Soviets]. It had led them to distrust the [] basis of everything they believed; and they were taking that distrust back with them into the heart of [the Soviet Union].


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] We say to the Britishers it is not ¶ the Taliban who are fighting you If you don't know this ¶ take a look at your history It is the Afghan land which ¶ is fighting against you Because you Britishers have come back ¶ the Afghans have all got angry We will defeat you once again ¶ the way we did before See all these men? They are Taliban ¶ But they haven't come from abroad They are Mujahideen who will take ¶ the Britishers out of our country And if all Afghans die, the soil of ¶ Afghanistan will haunt you and destroy all of you


[Narration:] The massive increase in the price of oil imposed by the Saudis had caused economic and social chaos in the West. Governments had struggled to deal with it, but they had failed; and in the 1980s, right-wing governments came to power in Britain and America [that] turned to radical new ways to create economic growth. To begin with, the new policies seemed to work: inflation was squeezed out of the system and the economies began to stabilise. But then, there were other unexpected consequences. Interest rates had risen massively; and this decimated manufacturing industry in both Britain and America. Factory after factory closed; high-paid skilled jobs were replaced by low-wage jobs in the service industries; and living standards began to fall. But then, the politicians found a solution. If you c[a]n't make wages grow[,]21 get the banks to lend people money – and +[so] in the mid-1980s, governments removed the restrictions on the banks' lending; and a wave of borrowing spread through Britain and America. Even if their wages were static, people felt wealthier and had the money to buy things – and to keep the economy working. And the power to manage society began to move even more from politics to the financial system. But there was one industry in Britain that had survived; and, in fact, was growing. It was the arms industry and its vast trade with Saudi Arabia. But rather than strengthening the politicians' power, it undermined it further: through corruption. Through the 1970s, British arms companies had signed more and more contracts with the Saudis; and they became a central part of a new industry that was run from the [] heart of the British government. [Clip from ?(1970s British TV current-affairs programme)] [Reporter/presenter:] "We're in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. Behind these doors, there's a room; a room which few people apart from Arab sheikhs and other potential foreign customers have ever set eyes on before. [(He pushes the doors open and walks in)] "This is it: the permanent defence equipment exhibition – the supermarket of the sales organisation which this year will sell nearly six-hundred-million-pounds worth of British military hardware to foreign governments. Week in, week out, overseas service chiefs come here discreetly to shop for anything from guided-missile destroyers and aircraft to a pair of army boots – and they've got quite a choice: there are hundreds of individual British manufacturers in this business. [(While strolling past displays:)] "Glossy coloured brochures in every language – including, of course, Arabic – +[and] everywhere in this amazing exhibition there are models showing the hardware in action; showing what the hardware can do. Big missiles; little missiles – here's the Shorts Blowpipe surface-to-air missile, with which one soldier can bring an aircraft out of the sky straight from the shoulder. More missiles here – the Short[s] Tigercat missile: simple in operation +[and] recommended for its "high lethality" at low cost." [Narration:] By the 1980s, the giant +[arms] orders from Saudi Arabia had become essential to Britain. While much of British industry had closed, the arms business kept growing; and in 1985, Mrs Thatcher

22 announced what was

going to be the biggest arms deal in history. [Clip from 1980s BBC TV news bulletin] [Newscaster (Gavin Esler):] "... the extraordinary arms deal, which has impressed military experts throughout the world. It emerged today that Britain and Saudi Arabia have signed what's thought to be one of the world's biggest arms agreements. The deal will mean Saudi Arabia will get many more combat planes, training aircraft, new minehunters, two new airbases and much training and support

[...] It means Britain is pulling level with – if not overtaking – the United States as the biggest military supplier to the Saudis." [Narration:] The al-Yamamah deal was presented as a triumph of British ingenuity and skill – but []23

there have been

allegations that []24

it was +[actually] secured by vast bribes to key members of the Saudi establishment. British

Aerospace admit that there were payments, but insists they were not bribes. But then, in 1990, it became clear that all the arms trade[s] with Saudi Arabia had been a complete charade. Saddam Hussein 25 invaded Kuwait; and the leaders of Saudi Arabia realised that despite all this hardware – all the planes, the missiles, the bombs and the radar systems – [] their country was incapable of using it properly to defend itself against [him]. So they []26

turn[ed] to America and its military might for help. [From TV announcement made by President George H. W. Bush, August 1990] "At my direction, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, as well as key units of the United States Air Force, are arriving today to take up defensive positions in Saudi Arabia. I took this action to assist the Saudi Arabian government in the defence of its homeland." [Narration:] Usama bin Laden had returned +[to Saudi Arabia] from Afghanistan; and he went to see the Saudi defence minister 27 [to] plead[] with him not to let the Americans come. He offered to raise a force of mujahideen

fighters in Afghanistan and bring them to defend Saudi Arabia instead. But the defence minister 27 turned him down; and within weeks, over half a million American soldiers had arrived in Saudi Arabia. bin Laden saw it as the corrupt takeover by the West of the [] heart of Islam; and he decided that America, []though it had been his ally in Afghanistan, was the real enemy.


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] Maiwand, Afghanistan ¶ 2007 Troops find themselves ¶ travelling across the site ¶ of an ancient battlefield In 1880[,] men of the Alizai tribe from ¶ [n]orthern Helmand killed nearly a ¶ thousand British soldiers at Maiwand The British were ¶ overwhelmingly defeated June 2006 ¶ Sangin Base Taliban wing ¶ Pul-e-Charki prison ¶ Kabul


[Caption:] Kabul ¶ 1995 [Narration:] When the [Soviets] left Afghanistan, the different mujahideen groups turned on each other and began a vicious struggle for power. Kabul was completely destroyed as [they] fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately into the heart of the city; and [it] became a living hell. [Clips from footage taken in Kabul/Afghanistan during rocket-attacks] The mujahideen leaders +[were] transformed. They became brutal warlords, tearing the country apart. The Americans had stopped sending any money or arms, so to fund themselves, the warlords turned to the heroin trade and [] began to export more and more opium to the West. The poppy fields of Helmand became the centre of a multimillion-dollar business, irrigated by the dams and canals built forty years before by the American government. Out of the chaos came two extreme and violent reactions. Both ruthlessly simplified the world; and both, []though [] completely contradictory, were rooted in Wahhabism, the intolerant fundamentalism [] from Saudi Arabia. One was the Taliban. They started as a group of students in religious schools in Pakistan called "madrasah"s, where many Afghan children had gone to study. They became the core of a revolution that spread rapidly through Afghanistan. Although they were in Pakistan, most of the madrasahs had been created over the previous twenty years by money from Saudi Arabia. They were part of the massive effort [] started by King Faisal to spread fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world; and the ideas that the madrasahs taught were very close to Saudi Wahhabism. When the Taliban swept into Kabul, they went to the Presidential Palace and tore out all []28

images of living things – even removing the faces [from] the stone lion[] +[statues there]. The society the Taliban +[then] built was based on an imagined idea of the past: a recreation of how they thought Islamic society had been run in the seventh century. All modernisation was swept away: women were not to be educated and all film and music was banned; and even the bodies of dead communists were dug up and burned to cleanse and purify the land. The other reaction came from Usama bin Laden. bin Laden had come back to Afghanistan determined to lead an Islamist revolution; but his ideas were very different from +[those of] the Taliban. He wanted to use Islamic principles

in a new way: to make it a revolutionary force in the modern world – to go forwards, not backwards. But the problem was that these ideas had failed to capture [Muslims']29

imagination, not just in Afghanistan but throughout

most of the Islamic world. bin Laden was convinced that what was stopping this revolution was America. He had seen how American money had corrupted Saudi Arabia; now, he believed that America was corrupting the minds of Muslim people everywhere[,]30 preventing them from rising up and liberating themselves. bin Laden's Islamist ideas began to mutate and become mixed with the intolerant and anti-modern anger of Wahhabism. Out of it came a dark and apocalyptic jihadism [which] said that the only way to create a revolution would be to attack what he called "the far enemy" directly. The dramatic shock +[of such an attack] would somehow liberate the masses; but all discussion of what kind of society would result dropped away[,] replaced by a stark vision of the coming battle between good and evil.


[Clip sequence that includes the following captions:] At the end of the twentieth century Faced with a complex ¶ and chaotic world Politicians retreated into ¶ simple stories of right and wrong Moral fables of ¶ good versus evil Politicians in Britain and America ¶ gave even more of their power away To the banks The financial technocrats ¶ promised they could manage ¶ the new complexities But the politicians still ¶ wanted to change the world So they did what ¶ President Reagan ¶ had done They ruthlessly simplified the ¶ complex struggles around the world Into simple stories of ¶ good versus evil Kosovo 1999 And intervened to protect ¶ the innocent victims Osama [sic] bin Laden sent a team ¶ of jihadists to attack the far enemy The majority were Saudis ¶ They could get US visas easily Because of the special relationship ¶ between America and Saudi Arabia The fall of Kabul ¶ November 13th 2001 Images recorded by fleeing Taliban


[Caption:] Kabul [Narration:] America and the +[other] Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan not just to +[try to] find those behind the + [September 2001] attacks [] but also to +[try to] transform Afghanistan into a modern democracy. It was a grand plan, but the logic behind it was simple: if the innocent people of Afghanistan could be liberated from the evil forces that had terrorised them, [] they would become free individuals; and out of that a democracy, like those in the West, would grow naturally. Tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans would pass through the country over the next ten years – soldiers, diplomats, experts, political advisers and journalists – all [] trying to build this new society. But few of them stopped to think whether what had happened to the [Soviets] twenty years before might also happen to them; that, in a strange way, Afghanistan has revealed []31

the emptiness and hypocrisy of many of our beliefs; and that [they]32 [too] <>[may be returning from there] haunted by mujahideen ghosts, knowing that underneath, [the West]32 believe[s] in nothing. After the shock of the attacks in September 2001, the +[West's] greatest fear was that the American economy might collapse as well. In response, the politicians, advised by their economic experts, cut interest rates to almost zero. This allowed cheap money to flood through the system and [prevent] [sic; was "avoid"] disaster: the banks lent money to anyone and everyone. It was the politicians looking to the financial system to stabilise the [West]33 .

At the same time, thousands of experts and advisers flooded into Afghanistan. Their aim was to +[try to] transform the country into a modern democracy. This optimistic vision of a future Afghanistan was celebrated in [] Kabul['s] stadium. It was the same stadium where the [Soviets] had celebrated their new model for Afghanistan twenty years before. [Vox pop from (presumably) the stadium celebration, featuring a young, well-groomed, English-speaking Afghan (presumably) woman] [sic:] "Last year we think that we can never [] be alive again; we will die – but now, we are... we are thinking that we are alive again; and we are too happy – and also, from America, that they help a lot;

we... we are very appreciative of them – thanks a lot..! "I think now everything is normal; the man and woman can work in one place and no [?other] different between them; and I think everything is going to... good, day by day. "And this is our school's – " [(Camera focuses on a school entrance-like sign featuring some ? Pashto/Dari/Arabic text)] [Reporter (off-camera):] "That's your school board; okay..." [Narration:] All kinds of groups came to Kabul to +[try to] help the project. It was like a snapshot of what those in power in America and Britain believed made democracy work. As well as []34

lessons in how to organise elections and conferences on how to stop the narcotics trade, young Afghan students were [] given lessons in how to make conceptual art. [From footage of a lecture/tutorial given by young British/English woman; she is standing beside an overhead-projection of a photo of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain] [Tutor, with interpreter (off-camera) translating between each statement quoted:] "So, this is []35 often called the first piece of conceptual art..." "Does anyone know what it is?" "I don't expect the ladies to know..." [Male student (off-camera, in English) after the translation:] "Toilet." [Tutor, while at least one female student looks on disconcertedly:] "Exactly. An artist called Marcel Duchamp – who's very important in Western art – put this... toilet in an art gallery about a hundred years ago [...] It was a... huge revolution" – [(Cuts to start of a (conference) demonstration of voting by fingerprint)] [Narration:] Underlying it all was a belief that the battle was to create a good society; one that would be strong enough to stand [up to] the bad, anti-democratic forces that had overwhelmed [the country]. But then it began to get confusing. The Americans discovered that it was very difficult to know exactly who was good and who was bad. When they had invaded, they had been helped by Afghans who were already fighting the Taliban; +[and] [they] assumed that [these Afghans] would then help to create the new democracy, [so they] appointed many of them to run the country. But now, it turned out that many of [these Afghans] were [] the very same corrupt and violent warlords that the Taliban had overthrown; and they were using their new power to terrorise the country all over again. Gul Agha Sherzai had been made Governor of Kandahar; but he was also alleged to be making a million dollars a week from running the [sic] opium trade, while at the same time siphoning off millions from the Americans in inflated contracts. When President Karzai was persuaded to remove Sherzai, he simply made him governor of another province. 36 But he was not alone: throughout much of Afghanistan, the warlords had returned to power. But this time, it was worse: the massive influx of American money allowed them to extend their networks of bribery and corruption to every corner of Afghan society. [Sequence of various vox-pop clips featuring angry/frustrated (male) Afghans (subtitled translations)] "No one even asks us about our problems. I have come here every day for one month; they don't accept my paper[s] and they continue to ask for money from me!" "Everyone [in the offices]<>[wants money from us]. No-one tells the truth. There isn't any justice in this country!" "No-one does anything for you, in any offices, without taking some money from you." "They are so cruel. They do whatever they want." "They told me directly that if I pay them 18,000 US dollars [] they will release me from [] prison." "Before, they were taking bribes in afghani[s]37

but now they want us to pay them in US dollars.

[P]eople don't have dollars." [Narration:] But the money was not just corrupting individuals; it was undermining the whole structure of +[the] society – above all, the police. Rather than enforcing the law, the police had become transformed into violent militias who worked for the warlords. They organised a massive expansion of the drug trade and [] terrorised [] local people. Ordinary Afghans came to hate the police[, seeing] them as the enemy. [Caption:] Kabul Central Court ¶ video evidence ¶ 2004 [Narration:] And the Americans also weren't as good as they appeared. Jack Idema had been portrayed as a hero working with the US Special Forces [] hunt[ing] down bin Laden. He had arrived in Kabul three years before

38 and become a legendary figure. CBS Television had made an hour-long special about the secret world of terror that Idema had +[said he had?] discovered in the mountains. It showed a tape that he said he had found of [an] al-Qaeda group training.

But then Idema was arrested. The Americans said that he was a fake: he had nothing to do with them and had conned CBS. They alleged that Idema had a dungeon hidden underneath his house in Kabul where he tortured innocent Afghans. [Excerpt from a video recording appearing to show Idema interrogating and preparing/beginning to torture a bound and blindfolded man] [Narration:] Idema was put on trial in Kabul. He insisted, though, that he had been working with the highest levels of the US military and government. [From footage of Idema responding to reporters' questions inside ?(the courthouse)] [Reporter:] "Jack – who, who are you working for, man?" [Idema:] "We were working for the US counterterrorist group [sic] and working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies – " [Reporter:] "So you were working... you were working with US knowledge – with US government knowledge – ?" [Idema:] "We were in touch with the Pentagon sometimes five times a day, at the highest level, every day." [Another reporter:] "How, how d'you feel about being... sort-of let go by the Americans?" [Idema:] "F--ked." [A third reporter:] "...You can't use that word..!" [Idema:] "Well, there you go: that's the quote, my dear..." [Idema, as he is about to be taken away:] "This government and our government do every single thing we were doing – " [Narration:] Jack Idema was found guilty

39 and sent to jail. But then it got even more confusing – because reports

emerged that the real American military had been doing []40

the same []. They had set up a special torture centre in an old Soviet hangar at Bagram Airbase. Ordinary Afghans were shackled to [its] ceiling and subjected to all kinds of violent abuse – but they went further than Jack Idema: the reports said that two of the victims had been tortured to death. [Back to the lecture/tutorial on conceptual art] [Tutor:] "Of course, it [(Duchamp's Fountain)] was very provocative – people were very angry – and I think it's important to understand that when this kind of art emerged, it was partly political; it was to fight against the system and say [...] "[] [A]rt is what I think it is."


[Clip sequence that includes the following caption:] Celebration of the Queen's birthday


[Narration:] By 2006, the British and the Americans realised that their project to bring democracy to Afghanistan was failing; and large parts of the country were descending into anarchy. In Helmand, []41 armed groups had risen up and there was constant fighting. The Coalition was convinced that this was the return of the Taliban; and British troops were sent there to restore order and to help protect the regional government. But when the British commanders asked the Ministry of Defence for information about what was happening in Helmand, there was none. There weren't even any satellites looking at it; they had all been [configured]42

to look at Iraq. The one thing they did know was that they were going to the [] heartland of the tribe that had decisively defeated the British one-hundred and twenty-five years before at the Battle of Maiwand. [One of t?]he British commander[s?] called a meeting of the local elders. It [took place] in the [town]43

the American engineers had built fifty years before when they were constructing the dam across the Helmand River. The commander reassured the elders that the British were there to defeat the Taliban and support the regional government. Next door, his officers were preparing to entertain the elders with a showing of [an episode from?] David Attenborough's series The Blue Planet. But the elders thought that the British had completely misunderstood the problem: the real enemy was not the Taliban but the corrupt and vicious government that President Karzai had installed in Helmand and was doing nothing to stop. [From footage of ?(the commander and elders' meeting)] [Interpreter (off-camera) translating statement made by elder:] "[?Under] Mr President Karzai [..?..] a good governance... the security situation will be the same if you were here for a hundred years[?; it would be] not good. Once he brought

44 good governance – good people to the government – then we +[will?]

have hope that security [..?..] be changed."

[Narration:] The elders left without watching The Blue Planet. Before they came to Helmand, the British had forced President Karzai to get rid of its governor.

45 But they didn't realise that he had left [a completely corrupted society]<>[behind him] and +[that] nothing was what it seemed. When [they] went into towns like Sangin, they tried to support the police; but the police were [] [the sacked governor] ['s]<>[armed militia]. To the locals, this meant that the [British] troops were supporting their oppressors – so they started to attack [them]. The British thought that this must mean [the attackers] were Taliban; so in response, they dropped giant bombs on them. [] This [] devastated [] town centres, which made even more local people join in the attacks. Seeing their chance, the []46 Taliban – [] now based in Pakistan – flooded back in+[to Helmand] and [also] started +[to] attack[] the British[; and, a]t the same time, the corrupt militias [working] for the local government also turned against [them]47 .

Faced by the chaos, the British still clung to their simple narrative of good and [bad]48

. They – the Western forces – were good; and all the [various] groups [that] were attacking them were Taliban and +[so] were bad. [] This []49 simplification had terrible consequences, because if you were an Afghan and wanted to kill a rival, all you had to do was go to the British and tell them that he was [] Taliban – and the British would obediently wipe him out. 50 The British were being used. The terrible truth was that the British presence did not contain the war – it did the very opposite. It escalated it so much that it ran out of control; and the bodies – Afghan and British – piled up. Dr Mike Martin, Captain, British Army, Helmand 2008–2009 The [context]51 was one of manipulation. They understood how we saw the conflict; they presented their local [] conflict – their civil war between groups that'd been going on for thirty-five years – []52 in

that [context]51

. So they came to us and said "Those people over there are Taliban"; and we went "Okay" and [] went off and dealt with them – but actually we were dealing with their previous enemies, so we were just creating more enemies for ourselves; and you ended up in a downward spiral, where because everyone was manipulating us, we ended up fighting everyone – and then in return, everyone who fought us immediately became Taliban; the way that we decided whether you were Taliban or not was whether you were firing at us. Post 2001, whereas we've understood the conflict as good/bad, black/white, government/Taliban, [Afghans] have understood it as a shifting mosaic of different groups and leaders fighting each other, effectively over power; and... the currency of power in Helmand is opium [...] That's largely what the conflict's about. [Curtis (off-camera):] So what you're saying is that the... what we thought were the Taliban was actually an allergic reaction to [our] turning up in[] the middle of a complex civil war..? [Martin:] Correct. [Curtis:] We made things worse..? [Martin:] Yes. [Narration:] But then the British and the Americans had to face up to the fact that they might not be as good and innocent as they thought they were. In 2009, the +[Afghan] presidential election[] [was] held. Hamid Karzai stood and allied himself with some of the most powerful warlords. [T]here were allegations that the warlords rigged the vote on a massive scale[,] backed up with videos that seemed to show the warlords' followers stuffing [] ballot boxes with hundreds of fake voting papers. The Coalition tried to rerun the election, but Karzai's main opponent refused +[to take part], [saying] it would be even more corrupt. So the British and the Americans had no choice but to abandon their great dream of a real democracy in Afghanistan: they gave in and allowed Karzai to become President again. [From an announcement made by President George W. Bush in] March 2008 "This morning... the Federal Reserve, with the support of the Treasury Department, took additional actions to mitigate disruptions to our financial markets. Today's events are fast-moving, but the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury are on top of them and will take the appropriate steps to promote stability []" [Narration:] And at the [] same time as their simple plan was falling apart in Afghanistan, [Western] politicians [were] fac[ing] a crisis at home. They had given power to the banks because the bankers and the financial technocrats had promised that they could hold the economy stable – but in 2008, the whole intricate system of credit and loans that the banks had created collapsed; and there was growing panic as giant financial institutions faced bankruptcy. The politicians []53 stepped in and rescued the banks. As they did so, they began to discover that most of the major financial institutions were [] riddled with corruption. But unlike President Roosevelt in the 1930s, they didn't then try [to] reform the system; instead, they simply propped it up by [] pouring billions more pounds and dollars into the

banks, hoping that this would somehow spread through the economies. They +[seemed to] ha[ve] no other idea + [what to do]. And faced by disaster in Afghanistan, the politicians did [] the same there too. The Americans knew that the idea of democracy was failing; +[and] in desperation, they poured even more money into the Afghan economy. The idea was that this would somehow create a simpler, economic form of democracy; and that the free market would liberate people[, making them] model consumers following their own, rational self-interest[s] – just [as] in the economies of the West – and, in an odd way, it worked. Many of those in charge of the money did behave in their own, rational self-interest: they simply stole the money, smuggled it out through Kabul Airport and used it to buy luxury properties in Dubai. During this period, it was estimated that ten-million dollars a day [were] being taken out of Afghanistan in this way. [[F]or many Afghans],<>[[t]he scandal seemed to confirm] that the [Coalition]54 had not brought democracy or free markets to their country but [] a corrupt, crony capitalism that had taken over Afghanistan and its government – which was the [] same allegation that was being made against politicians at home [in the West]53 .

At the end of 2014, British soldiers left Afghanistan. All the[ir] bases were [removed], as if nothing had been there; [and] the war memorials were packed up and taken [] to Staffordshire. But [the British soldiers]18 weren't the only fighters who had left Afghanistan. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets back in the 1980s. [[H]e had]<>[then] stayed on to work with Usama bin Laden; and in 2003, he went to Iraq and set up [the] jihadist group [] "al-Qaeda in Iraq" to fight the [Coalition]55

invasion. al-Zarqawi was powerfully influenced by bin Laden's ideas [and] took them much further: [anyone]<>[he and his group] [] decided did not believe in their fundamentalist ideas [] deserved to die. Even

the original founders of al-Qaeda were shocked and [] sent him a letter telling him to stop killing civilians. But al- Zarqawi ignored them. He was convinced that the insurgency in Iraq could be used to spread an Islamist revolution

throughout the Arab world. But before he could do this, the Americans found al-Zarqawi and dropped a large bomb on him. [This] didn't stop the spread of [his] idea+[s, though; and d]espite [his] death, his organisation survived and began to mutate into something

even more ferocious and ambitious. [A]s it did so, it was possessed by ghosts from the past; +[and] what re- emerged was the fierce, intolerant vision of Wahhabism that had survived from the 1920s. It had spread outwards

through Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s, where it had become mixed with modern Islamist ideas – but now, faced [with] the nihilistic horror of post-invasion Iraq, any idea of building a new, revolutionary future +[had] disappeared; and [Wahhabism,]<>[with its]<>[[] conservative and backward-looking] [[] desire to retreat to an imagined past],<> [became the dominating influence]. In 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [– known as "ISIS" in the West –]<>[was formed]. Its aim is to create a unified caliphate throughout the Islamic world; and although it uses [modern technologies and techniques]56 , it

[has] at +[its] heart the same violent dream +[as] that [which drove] the Bedouins [to create]57

the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. Back then, the King of Saudi Arabia had found it necessary to try [to] exterminate them, because they too wanted to [try to]58 conquer the whole of the Islamic world. He +[had] [them]<>[machine-gunned] in the bleak sands of the Arabian Peninsula. [N]ow, the Saudis, along with the British and the Americans, are trying to do the same thing again: to kill the jihadists and their ideas in the sand-dunes of northern Iraq and Syria. But it is an uncertain war+[; and] Western politicians are having to accept that [a] simple division between "good" and "evil" doesn't exist. By bombing ISIS, +[for example,] they are helping []59 President Assad +[of Syria] remain in power; and those in charge don't [] know how big a threat ISIS [] is – is it a dark, existential threat, or is it [] a front [] in an ongoing [] power struggle inside Iraq?

60 We just don't know.

At the end of the Soviet science-fiction film Solaris, the +[visiting] [cosmo]naut returns home. Everything seems real and normal, but somehow he doesn't trust [] anything any longer. Although we have returned from Afghanistan, our leaders also seem to've lost faith in anything; and the simple stories they tell us don't make sense any longer. The experience of Afghanistan has made us begin to realise that there is "something else" out there – but we just don't have the apparatus to see it. What is needed is a new story – and one we can believe in.

________________________________________ 1 Or "tell stories we're supposed to believe are meant to help us"..? 2 BBC TV contemporary political-satire series. 3 sic; "is"? 4 "threat of communism". 5 "because it was". 6 "control by the American government; and they became". 7 "the main aims".

8 "in Helmand". 9 "in Afghan rural society; rivalries". 10 "rise up". 11 "both left and right". 12 Or "the places where the attempt to realise this dream"..? 13 (the US's) Central Intelligence Agency. 14 "their". 15 "To begin with". 16 "for them a". 17 Or "from what the Soviets saw as the repression of a backward religion"..? 18 "They"/"they". 19 World's most abundant/produced/popular assault rifle. 20 From The Hidden War: A Russian journalist's account of the Soviet war in Afghanistan by Artyom Borovik, first published 1990. 21 "any longer, instead you would". 22 Then British Prime Minister. 23 "ever since". 24 "really". 25 Then President of Iraq. 26 "had to". 27 Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud..? 28 "painted". 29 "the public". 30 (cue Sayyid Qutb.) 31 "to us". 32 "we". 33 "country". 34 "the obvious". 35 "in some ways". 36 Nangarhar. 37 Afghanistan's currency. 38 i.e. in (November?) 2001. 39 Of illegal entry, illegal detention and adminstering torture. 40 "exactly". 41 "in southern Afghanistan,". 42 "moved". 43 "very same town that". 44 sic; "brings"? 45 Sher Mohammad Akhundzada? 46 "real, ideological". 47 "the British". 48 "evil". 49 "extraordinary". 50 (Surely this itself is oversimplified here..?) 51 "dynamic". 52 "they presented everything". 53 "in America and Britain". 54 "United States". 55 "American". 56 "the techniques of modern media". 57 "who created". 58 "go on and". 59 "the evil". 60 (Or both, or...)



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