Robert Fisk's World: There is no end to the centuries of savagery in Afghanistan

Geneva Conventions were supposed to end the mass destruction of human life

Saturday, 15 November 2008

Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave. The torture and killing of prisoners in this pitiful place – the American variety in Bagram and the Taliban variety in Helmand – is a kind of routine of history. Even execution has to be made more painful. A knife is more terrible than a bullet. The cult of the suicide bomber in the Middle East began its life in Lebanon, moved to "Palestine", arrived in Iraq, leached over the border here to Afghanistan and passed effortlessly through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. And New York. And Washington. And London...

Are human beings at war – any kind of war – by definition bound to commit atrocities? The International Committee of the Red Cross tried to answer this question in a report four years ago. Were combatants unaware of international humanitarian law? Unlikely, I would think. They just don't care. The Red Cross enquiry interviewed hundreds of fighters in Colombia, Bosnia, Georgia – a bit of real prescience, there, on the part of the ICRC – and the Congo, and suggested that those who commit reprehensible acts see themselves as victims, that this then gives them the right to act savagely against their opponents. Certainly, this might apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, very definitely to the Serbs of Bosnia – I'm not so sure about Georgia – and quite definitely to the Taliban (not least when we've been bombing more wedding parties).