Ten containers shipped from Afghanistan to Canada contained sand and rocks rather than military equipment. Whoever pilfered the goods replaced them with rocks and sand so that the containers would still have significant weight.
The good consisted of tires, tools, and tents. There were no weapons or uniforms included.
A.J. Maritime a Canadian company moves the materials from Afghanistan. The company president said that both in Afghanistan and Pakistan pilfering is a problem for other countries as well.
The Canadian Dept. of National Defence estimates the costs due to losses or property damage to be 4.7 million for 2010. Given the level of losses that work done by private contractors encounter perhaps it would actually be cheaper if such goods were moved by the military and properly guarded. For much more see this article.
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Friday, November 25, 2011
Afghanistan: Tim Horton's ends Afghan mission!
The iconic Canadian coffee and doughnut chain is closing down its one outlet in Afghanistan. The restaurant catered to troops located at a base near Kandahar. Canadian troops will be withdrawn except for around one thousand who will train Afghan forces.
The outlet sold 4 million cups of coffee, 3 million doughnuts as well as supplies. For almost a decade Horton's was part of the U.S. chain Wendy's International but Wendy's sold off the company in 2006 and it is now again headquartered in Canada.
While closing shop in Afghanistan Tim Horton's is rapidly expanding in the United Arab Emirates where it expanded this year. They plan to open over a hundred stores within five years in Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait. The busiest Tim Horton's is in the far north of Canada in Yellowknife Northwest Territories.
U.S. military will be able to continue enjoying Tim Horton's at outlets on bases in Fort Knox Kentucky and
Norfolk Virginia. Tim Horton's is named after its famous hockey star founder Tim Horton. For more see this article, and here.
The outlet sold 4 million cups of coffee, 3 million doughnuts as well as supplies. For almost a decade Horton's was part of the U.S. chain Wendy's International but Wendy's sold off the company in 2006 and it is now again headquartered in Canada.
While closing shop in Afghanistan Tim Horton's is rapidly expanding in the United Arab Emirates where it expanded this year. They plan to open over a hundred stores within five years in Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait. The busiest Tim Horton's is in the far north of Canada in Yellowknife Northwest Territories.
U.S. military will be able to continue enjoying Tim Horton's at outlets on bases in Fort Knox Kentucky and
Norfolk Virginia. Tim Horton's is named after its famous hockey star founder Tim Horton. For more see this article, and here.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Pakistan peace talks lead to more Afghan attacks: NATO
This is from wiredispatch.
Karzai and his western backers must face the fact that Pakistan is more concerned with achieving some kind of peace with the tribal areas and Al Qaeda rather than losing more and more troops and civilians from terror attacks and facing more civil strife. If this means that the Taliban mount more attacks in Afghanistan Pakistan will probably not be that concerned! Now that Musharraf is out of the picture U.S. policy of a gung-ho attacks in the tribal areas is being frustrated.
Pakistan talks lead to more Afghan attacks-NATO
Jon HemmingReuters North American News Service
May 25, 2008 08:22 EST
KABUL, May 25 (Reuters) - Peace talks between the Pakistani government and Taliban militants have already led to an increase in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, NATO said on Sunday.
Faced with a wave of suicide attacks, Pakistan has begun negotiations with Taliban militants who control much of the mountainous region on its side of the border with Afghanistan and thinned out the number of its troops in the area.
Whatever the results of the talks, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on Saturday vowed to carry on fighting Afghan and foreign forces in Afghanistan.
"We have seen increased activity in the eastern part of the country especially, which we believe can only be attributed to the de facto ceasefires and a reduction of Pakistani military activity," NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan Mark Laity told a news conference.
"We respect the sovereignty of Pakistan absolutely but it's important they take into account the need to ensure that any agreements they make do not lead to an increase in violence in Afghanistan," he said.
British Defence Minister Des Browne, on a visit to Afghanistan, said he understood the agreement between Pakistan and the Taliban included an undertaking that the militants would not export violence to Afghanistan.
"Now it's the Pakistan government's responsibility to ensure that that aspect of the agreement is enforced," he told reporters. "It might be very difficult on that part of the border to enforce it, but it is their responsibility."
AFGHANS CONCERNED
Afghanistan was sending a high-level delegation to Pakistan in the coming days to voice their concerns over peace deals, said Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zaher Azimi.
"The people of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan are concerned regarding the announcement of Baitullah Mehsud and we hope Pakistan territory is not used against the people of Afghanistan, isn't used to kill our innocent people," Azimi said.
Previous peace deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban all broke down in violence and merely gave the militants time to regroup, he said.
"The previous peace accords between the Pakistan government with insurgents were a golden age for the insurgents; they re-equipped, prepared and launched operations against both the government of Afghanistan and the government of Pakistan."
Afghan forces, backed by more than 60,000 foreign troops, are engaged in daily battles with Taliban militants, mostly in the south and east, the areas closest to the border with Pakistan.
Afghan officials have often accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban to use Pakistani territory as a safe haven from which to direct and launch attacks and also rest and regroup.
Forty-four troops from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, a spokesman said, compared to 42 in the first five months of last year.
The number of ISAF troops in Afghanistan has risen from 33,400 in January 2007 to 50,838 now, the spokesman said.
More than 12,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan since the Taliban relaunched their insurgency two years ago. (Editing by Myra MacDonald) (For a Reuters blog about Pakistan please see http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/)
Source: Reuters North American News Service
Karzai and his western backers must face the fact that Pakistan is more concerned with achieving some kind of peace with the tribal areas and Al Qaeda rather than losing more and more troops and civilians from terror attacks and facing more civil strife. If this means that the Taliban mount more attacks in Afghanistan Pakistan will probably not be that concerned! Now that Musharraf is out of the picture U.S. policy of a gung-ho attacks in the tribal areas is being frustrated.
Pakistan talks lead to more Afghan attacks-NATO
Jon HemmingReuters North American News Service
May 25, 2008 08:22 EST
KABUL, May 25 (Reuters) - Peace talks between the Pakistani government and Taliban militants have already led to an increase in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, NATO said on Sunday.
Faced with a wave of suicide attacks, Pakistan has begun negotiations with Taliban militants who control much of the mountainous region on its side of the border with Afghanistan and thinned out the number of its troops in the area.
Whatever the results of the talks, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on Saturday vowed to carry on fighting Afghan and foreign forces in Afghanistan.
"We have seen increased activity in the eastern part of the country especially, which we believe can only be attributed to the de facto ceasefires and a reduction of Pakistani military activity," NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan Mark Laity told a news conference.
"We respect the sovereignty of Pakistan absolutely but it's important they take into account the need to ensure that any agreements they make do not lead to an increase in violence in Afghanistan," he said.
British Defence Minister Des Browne, on a visit to Afghanistan, said he understood the agreement between Pakistan and the Taliban included an undertaking that the militants would not export violence to Afghanistan.
"Now it's the Pakistan government's responsibility to ensure that that aspect of the agreement is enforced," he told reporters. "It might be very difficult on that part of the border to enforce it, but it is their responsibility."
AFGHANS CONCERNED
Afghanistan was sending a high-level delegation to Pakistan in the coming days to voice their concerns over peace deals, said Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zaher Azimi.
"The people of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan are concerned regarding the announcement of Baitullah Mehsud and we hope Pakistan territory is not used against the people of Afghanistan, isn't used to kill our innocent people," Azimi said.
Previous peace deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban all broke down in violence and merely gave the militants time to regroup, he said.
"The previous peace accords between the Pakistan government with insurgents were a golden age for the insurgents; they re-equipped, prepared and launched operations against both the government of Afghanistan and the government of Pakistan."
Afghan forces, backed by more than 60,000 foreign troops, are engaged in daily battles with Taliban militants, mostly in the south and east, the areas closest to the border with Pakistan.
Afghan officials have often accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban to use Pakistani territory as a safe haven from which to direct and launch attacks and also rest and regroup.
Forty-four troops from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, a spokesman said, compared to 42 in the first five months of last year.
The number of ISAF troops in Afghanistan has risen from 33,400 in January 2007 to 50,838 now, the spokesman said.
More than 12,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan since the Taliban relaunched their insurgency two years ago. (Editing by Myra MacDonald) (For a Reuters blog about Pakistan please see http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/)
Source: Reuters North American News Service
Monday, February 11, 2008
Europeans see what America (and Canadians) cannot.
This is from the Toronto Sun. I notice that no one ever even questions why NATO of all organisations should be involved in Afghanistan. Usually no one ties our involvement in Afghanistan in with US foreign policy. Margolis is one of the few hard hitting analysts who can think outside the box and see through the rhetorical murk.
February 10, 2008
Europeans see what America cannot
By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN
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At this week's NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, an angry U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates accused some Europeans of not being prepared to "fight and die" in Afghanistan in the battle against the Taliban.
The undiplomatic Gates is quite right. Most Europeans regard the Afghan conflict as a. wrong and immoral; b. America's war; c. all about oil; or d. probably lost.
To many Europeans, the NATO alliance was created to deter the real threat of Soviet aggression, not to supply foot soldiers for George Bush's wars in the Muslim world.
While Gates and the Harper government were pleading for more troops, the commander of the 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, landed a bombshell. If proper U.S. military counter-insurgency doctrine were followed, McNeill admitted, the U.S. and NATO would need 400,000 troops to defeat Pashtun tribal resistance in Afghanistan.
When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, they deployed 160,000 troops and about 200,000 Afghan Communist troops -- yet failed to crush the mostly Pashtun resistance. Now, the U.S. and NATO are trying the same mission with only 66,000 troops, backed by local mercenaries grandly styled the Afghan National Army.
Canada's calls for 1,000 more NATO troops, and the U.S. decision to send 3,200 marines, will not alter the course of this war, which is turning increasingly against the western occupiers. In fact, the war is spreading into neighbouring Pakistan, a nation of 165 million, stretching U.S. and NATO forces ever thinner.
A primary reason for Gates' recent call for U.S. troops to begin attacking pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen inside Pakistan is due to their growing attacks on allied supply lines to Afghanistan.
As this column has reported, over 70% of U.S./NATO supplies come in by truck through Pakistan's tribal belt known as FATA, including all of their oil and gas. Attacks by pro-Taliban tribesmen against these vulnerable supply lines are jeopardizing western military operations inside Afghanistan.
HUNTERS NOW HUNTED
The hunters are becoming the hunted. Cutting off invaders' supply lines is a time-honoured Pashtun military tactic. They used it against Alexander the Great, the British, and Soviets, and are at it again.
What angry Sec. Gates fails to see is that by pushing NATO into a distant Asian war without political purpose or seeming end, he is endangering the very alliance that is the bedrock of U.S. power in Europe.
Europeans increasingly ask why they need the U.S.-dominated military alliance, a Cold War relic, in which they continue to play foot soldiers to America's atomic knights, to paraphrase the late German statesman, Franz Josef Strauss.
Why does the rich, powerful European Union even need NATO any more? The Soviet threat is gone -- at least for now. Nuclear-armed France and Britain are quite capable of defending Europe against outside threats. Why can't the new European Defence Force take over NATO's role of defending Europe and protecting EU interests?
In short, most Europeans see no benefit in playing junior members in an alliance whose historic time has passed and that serves primarily as an instrument of U.S. power. Washington's sharpest geopolitical thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls NATO a "stepping stone" the U.S. uses to project power into Europe.
By pushing NATO towards a bridge too far, the Bush administration may end up fatally undermining the alliance and encouraging anti-American forces in Europe.
In fact, it's becoming evident that the cash-strapped U.S. needs the EU more than the EU needs the U.S.
CONSCRIPTION
Final point. If impassioned claims by U.S. and Canadian politicians that the little Afghanistan war must by won at all costs, then why don't they stop orating, impose conscription, and send 400,000 soldiers, including their own sons, to fight in Afghanistan?
Of course they won't. They prefer to waste their own soldiers, and grind up Afghanistan, rather than admit this war against 40 million Pashtun tribesmen was a terrible mistake that will only get worse.
February 10, 2008
Europeans see what America cannot
By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN
fctAdTag("bigbox",MyGenericTagVar,1);
At this week's NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, an angry U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates accused some Europeans of not being prepared to "fight and die" in Afghanistan in the battle against the Taliban.
The undiplomatic Gates is quite right. Most Europeans regard the Afghan conflict as a. wrong and immoral; b. America's war; c. all about oil; or d. probably lost.
To many Europeans, the NATO alliance was created to deter the real threat of Soviet aggression, not to supply foot soldiers for George Bush's wars in the Muslim world.
While Gates and the Harper government were pleading for more troops, the commander of the 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, landed a bombshell. If proper U.S. military counter-insurgency doctrine were followed, McNeill admitted, the U.S. and NATO would need 400,000 troops to defeat Pashtun tribal resistance in Afghanistan.
When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, they deployed 160,000 troops and about 200,000 Afghan Communist troops -- yet failed to crush the mostly Pashtun resistance. Now, the U.S. and NATO are trying the same mission with only 66,000 troops, backed by local mercenaries grandly styled the Afghan National Army.
Canada's calls for 1,000 more NATO troops, and the U.S. decision to send 3,200 marines, will not alter the course of this war, which is turning increasingly against the western occupiers. In fact, the war is spreading into neighbouring Pakistan, a nation of 165 million, stretching U.S. and NATO forces ever thinner.
A primary reason for Gates' recent call for U.S. troops to begin attacking pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen inside Pakistan is due to their growing attacks on allied supply lines to Afghanistan.
As this column has reported, over 70% of U.S./NATO supplies come in by truck through Pakistan's tribal belt known as FATA, including all of their oil and gas. Attacks by pro-Taliban tribesmen against these vulnerable supply lines are jeopardizing western military operations inside Afghanistan.
HUNTERS NOW HUNTED
The hunters are becoming the hunted. Cutting off invaders' supply lines is a time-honoured Pashtun military tactic. They used it against Alexander the Great, the British, and Soviets, and are at it again.
What angry Sec. Gates fails to see is that by pushing NATO into a distant Asian war without political purpose or seeming end, he is endangering the very alliance that is the bedrock of U.S. power in Europe.
Europeans increasingly ask why they need the U.S.-dominated military alliance, a Cold War relic, in which they continue to play foot soldiers to America's atomic knights, to paraphrase the late German statesman, Franz Josef Strauss.
Why does the rich, powerful European Union even need NATO any more? The Soviet threat is gone -- at least for now. Nuclear-armed France and Britain are quite capable of defending Europe against outside threats. Why can't the new European Defence Force take over NATO's role of defending Europe and protecting EU interests?
In short, most Europeans see no benefit in playing junior members in an alliance whose historic time has passed and that serves primarily as an instrument of U.S. power. Washington's sharpest geopolitical thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls NATO a "stepping stone" the U.S. uses to project power into Europe.
By pushing NATO towards a bridge too far, the Bush administration may end up fatally undermining the alliance and encouraging anti-American forces in Europe.
In fact, it's becoming evident that the cash-strapped U.S. needs the EU more than the EU needs the U.S.
CONSCRIPTION
Final point. If impassioned claims by U.S. and Canadian politicians that the little Afghanistan war must by won at all costs, then why don't they stop orating, impose conscription, and send 400,000 soldiers, including their own sons, to fight in Afghanistan?
Of course they won't. They prefer to waste their own soldiers, and grind up Afghanistan, rather than admit this war against 40 million Pashtun tribesmen was a terrible mistake that will only get worse.
Friday, January 11, 2008
The "Good Good War" is a Bad War: John Pilger on Afghanistan
This seems a relevant article at this time since candidates such as Obama want to shift military resources to Afghanistan and the war against terror and out of Iraq. The Bush administration too seems bent on increasing the pressure on the Taliban and of course has been trying to get NATO to commit more forces and for a longer time to Afghanistan. To get a good snapshot of the neo-conservative global strategy I recommend their own website NACP.
Pilger doesn't bother to mention that the war was illegal and never covered by UN resolution until after the fact--as of course is the Iraq occupation! On US policy I commend the book by Gwynne Dyer, FUTURE:TENSE McLelland and Stewart 2006.
Canada likes to stress that we are helping the people of Afghanistan and building democracy. We do provide some aid but aid in this context is but the carrot part of the carrot and stick used to get Afghanistan to accept its role in the plans of U.S. hegemony. Canada is a compliant and complacent junior partner in this process.
The "Good Good War" Is A Bad War
By John Pilger
10/01/08 "ICH" -- - In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the invasion of Afghanistan, which was widely supported in the West as a 'good war' and justifiable response to 9/11, was actually planned months before 9/11 and is the latest instalment of 'a great game'.
"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."
Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898
I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue.
Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.
Indeed, Rawa's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a "good war". When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands."
The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11". The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, [we have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region."
The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline". Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".
The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)
By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar. A tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not this would have happened, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan. According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs".
Acclaimed as the first "victory" in the "war on terror", the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra, his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. "Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are innocents," Gulam Rasul told me. "Was the killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt."
There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as "Taliban"; or, if they are children, they are said to be "partly to blame for being at a site used by militants" – according to the BBC, speaking to a US military spokesman.
The British military have played an important part in this violence, having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they took over command of Nato forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a contrived news event was the "fall" of a "Taliban stronghold", Musa Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to "liberate" rubble left by American B-52s.
What justifies this? Various fables have been spun – "building democracy" is one. "The war on drugs" is the most perverse. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they had one striking success. They brought to an abrupt end a historic ban on opium production that the Taliban regime had achieved. A UN official in Kabul described the ban to me as "a modern miracle". The miracle was quickly rescinded. As a reward for supporting the Karzai "democracy", the Americans allowed Northern Alliance warlords to replant the country's entire opium crop in 2002. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces instantly went under cultivation. Today, 90 per cent of world trade in opium originates in Afghanistan. In 2005, a British government report estimated that 35,000 children in this country were using heroin. While the British taxpayer pays for a £1bn military super-base in Helmand Province and the second-biggest British embassy in the world, in Kabul, peanuts are spent on drug rehabilitation at home.
Tony Blair once said memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away . . . [We will offer] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence." I thought about this as I watched children play in a destroyed cinema. They were illiterate and so could not read the poster warning that unexploded cluster bombs lay in the debris.
"After five years of engagement," reported James Fergusson in the London Independent on 16 December, "the [UK] Department for International Development had spent just £390m on Afghan projects." Unusually, Fergusson has had meetings with Taliban who are fighting the British. "They remained charming and courteous throughout," he wrote of one visit in February. "This is the beauty of malmastia, the Pashtun tradition of hospitality towards strangers. So long as he comes unarmed, even a mortal enemy can rely on a kind reception. The opportunity for dialogue that malmastia affords is unique."
This "opportunity for dialogue" is a far cry from the surrender-or-else offers made by the government of Gordon Brown. What Brown and his Foreign Office advisers wilfully fail to understand is that the tactical victory in Afghanistan in 2001, achieved with bombs, has become a strategic disaster in south Asia. Exacerbated by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the current turmoil in Pakistan has its contemporary roots in a Washington-contrived war in neighbouring Afghanistan that has alienated the Pashtuns who inhabit much of the long border area between the two countries. This is also true of most Pakistanis, who, according to opinion polls, want their government to negotiate a regional peace, rather than play a prescribed part in a rerun of Lord Curzon's Great Game.
www.johnpilger.com
Pilger doesn't bother to mention that the war was illegal and never covered by UN resolution until after the fact--as of course is the Iraq occupation! On US policy I commend the book by Gwynne Dyer, FUTURE:TENSE McLelland and Stewart 2006.
Canada likes to stress that we are helping the people of Afghanistan and building democracy. We do provide some aid but aid in this context is but the carrot part of the carrot and stick used to get Afghanistan to accept its role in the plans of U.S. hegemony. Canada is a compliant and complacent junior partner in this process.
The "Good Good War" Is A Bad War
By John Pilger
10/01/08 "ICH" -- - In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the invasion of Afghanistan, which was widely supported in the West as a 'good war' and justifiable response to 9/11, was actually planned months before 9/11 and is the latest instalment of 'a great game'.
"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."
Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898
I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue.
Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.
Indeed, Rawa's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a "good war". When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands."
The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11". The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, [we have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region."
The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline". Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".
The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)
By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar. A tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not this would have happened, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan. According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs".
Acclaimed as the first "victory" in the "war on terror", the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra, his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. "Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are innocents," Gulam Rasul told me. "Was the killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt."
There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as "Taliban"; or, if they are children, they are said to be "partly to blame for being at a site used by militants" – according to the BBC, speaking to a US military spokesman.
The British military have played an important part in this violence, having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they took over command of Nato forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a contrived news event was the "fall" of a "Taliban stronghold", Musa Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to "liberate" rubble left by American B-52s.
What justifies this? Various fables have been spun – "building democracy" is one. "The war on drugs" is the most perverse. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they had one striking success. They brought to an abrupt end a historic ban on opium production that the Taliban regime had achieved. A UN official in Kabul described the ban to me as "a modern miracle". The miracle was quickly rescinded. As a reward for supporting the Karzai "democracy", the Americans allowed Northern Alliance warlords to replant the country's entire opium crop in 2002. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces instantly went under cultivation. Today, 90 per cent of world trade in opium originates in Afghanistan. In 2005, a British government report estimated that 35,000 children in this country were using heroin. While the British taxpayer pays for a £1bn military super-base in Helmand Province and the second-biggest British embassy in the world, in Kabul, peanuts are spent on drug rehabilitation at home.
Tony Blair once said memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away . . . [We will offer] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence." I thought about this as I watched children play in a destroyed cinema. They were illiterate and so could not read the poster warning that unexploded cluster bombs lay in the debris.
"After five years of engagement," reported James Fergusson in the London Independent on 16 December, "the [UK] Department for International Development had spent just £390m on Afghan projects." Unusually, Fergusson has had meetings with Taliban who are fighting the British. "They remained charming and courteous throughout," he wrote of one visit in February. "This is the beauty of malmastia, the Pashtun tradition of hospitality towards strangers. So long as he comes unarmed, even a mortal enemy can rely on a kind reception. The opportunity for dialogue that malmastia affords is unique."
This "opportunity for dialogue" is a far cry from the surrender-or-else offers made by the government of Gordon Brown. What Brown and his Foreign Office advisers wilfully fail to understand is that the tactical victory in Afghanistan in 2001, achieved with bombs, has become a strategic disaster in south Asia. Exacerbated by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the current turmoil in Pakistan has its contemporary roots in a Washington-contrived war in neighbouring Afghanistan that has alienated the Pashtuns who inhabit much of the long border area between the two countries. This is also true of most Pakistanis, who, according to opinion polls, want their government to negotiate a regional peace, rather than play a prescribed part in a rerun of Lord Curzon's Great Game.
www.johnpilger.com
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Diplomats in Afghanistan expelled 'at behest of US'
This article gives rare insight into what is going on behind the scenes in Afghanistan and who calls the shots to a considerable extent. Don't expect to see this as a CBC headline, even though I see that some in the blogosphere have inhaled so much nitrous oxide that they call it the Communist Broadcasting Corporation!
The article notes that there is a close connection between the CIA and the Afghan NDS (National Directorate of Security) and that it was the US that asked the Karzai govt. to expel the diplomats. With actions like this the US may very well be endangering continued support for their misadventures. Bomber McNeil of the US is still the NATO commander in Afghanistan. Does someone still think that we have an independent mission in Afghanistan? There will be no independent mission as long as Harper and MacKay are around. We might as well have David Dinkins as our spokesperson.
Diplomats expelled 'at behest of the US'
By Eleanor Mayne
Last Updated: 2:05am GMT 30/12/2007
Two European diplomats accused of holding secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan were thrown out of the country following a complaint by the US, intelligence officials in Kabul have told The Sunday Telegraph.
Mervyn Patterson, who is British, and Irish-born Michael Semple were flown out of Kabul on Thursday after the Afghan government accused them of "threatening national security".
The pair had been working for the United Nations and the European Union respectively.
But according to a senior Afghan intelligence source, American officials had been unhappy about meetings between the men and high-level Taliban commanders in the volatile Helmand province.
The source claimed that the US alerted Afghan authorities after learning that the diplomats were providing direct financial and other support - including mobile phone cards - to the Taliban commanders, in the hope of persuading them to swap sides.
"This warning came from the Americans," he said. "They were not happy with the support being provided to the Taliban. They gave the information to our intelligence services, who ordered the arrests."
A government source in Kabul said there were close links between Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) and the US Central Intelligence Agency, adding:
"The Afghan government would never have acted alone to expel officials of such a senior level. This was information that was given to the NDS by the Americans.
" These claims will reinforce perceptions of a rift between the US and its international partners in Afghanistan, including Britain.
Last year, US commanders expressed frustration with the British decision to withdraw from Musa Qala and allow tribal elders to strike a deal with the Taliban, who quickly reoccupied the town.
The American embassy has strongly denied any involvement in the incident involving the two diplomats, saying it had "no knowledge" of their activities.
Afghan officials, speaking anonymously, have accused the men of giving support to the Taliban in the form of money, food and phone cards for 10 months.
The article notes that there is a close connection between the CIA and the Afghan NDS (National Directorate of Security) and that it was the US that asked the Karzai govt. to expel the diplomats. With actions like this the US may very well be endangering continued support for their misadventures. Bomber McNeil of the US is still the NATO commander in Afghanistan. Does someone still think that we have an independent mission in Afghanistan? There will be no independent mission as long as Harper and MacKay are around. We might as well have David Dinkins as our spokesperson.
Diplomats expelled 'at behest of the US'
By Eleanor Mayne
Last Updated: 2:05am GMT 30/12/2007
Two European diplomats accused of holding secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan were thrown out of the country following a complaint by the US, intelligence officials in Kabul have told The Sunday Telegraph.
Mervyn Patterson, who is British, and Irish-born Michael Semple were flown out of Kabul on Thursday after the Afghan government accused them of "threatening national security".
The pair had been working for the United Nations and the European Union respectively.
But according to a senior Afghan intelligence source, American officials had been unhappy about meetings between the men and high-level Taliban commanders in the volatile Helmand province.
The source claimed that the US alerted Afghan authorities after learning that the diplomats were providing direct financial and other support - including mobile phone cards - to the Taliban commanders, in the hope of persuading them to swap sides.
"This warning came from the Americans," he said. "They were not happy with the support being provided to the Taliban. They gave the information to our intelligence services, who ordered the arrests."
A government source in Kabul said there were close links between Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) and the US Central Intelligence Agency, adding:
"The Afghan government would never have acted alone to expel officials of such a senior level. This was information that was given to the NDS by the Americans.
" These claims will reinforce perceptions of a rift between the US and its international partners in Afghanistan, including Britain.
Last year, US commanders expressed frustration with the British decision to withdraw from Musa Qala and allow tribal elders to strike a deal with the Taliban, who quickly reoccupied the town.
The American embassy has strongly denied any involvement in the incident involving the two diplomats, saying it had "no knowledge" of their activities.
Afghan officials, speaking anonymously, have accused the men of giving support to the Taliban in the form of money, food and phone cards for 10 months.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Karzai and an Afghan history lesson
This is a completely different view of Karzai than the usual one presented in the press. It is harsher assessment than I would make for certain. THe article also has an interesting recent history of Afghanistan something that most western media simply ignore. This is from http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lohdi.php?articleid=12032
December 11, 2007
Karzai Discredits Democracy in Afghanistan
by Bahlol Lohdi
In a recent speech given at the American-Afghan business conference, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to the UN, and one of the enthusiastic proponents of using American "hard power" to reorder the Muslim world, finally admitted to the myriad problems facing the international community in its efforts to resolve the Afghan conflict. That these pronouncements were now trite, since they were well-known facts to all who had the misfortune to deal with the gangs of Afghanistan these past six years, didn't faze the speaker a jot.
"There is [a] serious problem of governance in Afghanistan," he asserted boldly.
"At the national level, corruption exists at unacceptable levels. At the provincial and district levels, especially in contested areas, government, particularly police, too often is weak, ineffective, sometimes nonexistent, and sometimes even predatory," he added.
To complete the list of woes, he said that there was "too much polarization" among Afghan political leaders, a growing opium economy, high unemployment, and the lackluster pace of reconstruction.
I am sure that members of the audience must have been nodding vigorously in agreement with Khalilzad's assessment of the current debacle in Afghanistan, waiting with bated breath for Dr. Khalilzad's prescription for curing the plague inflicted on the Afghan people by the good doctor's previous policy recommendations.
"Key reforms must include: making appointments based on merit, countering corruption, implementing programs for institutionalizing the rule of law, and working systematically to extend state authority and good governance to provincial and district levels," he continued, with appropriate gravitas.
By this time the audience must have been ecstatic – there might even have been shouts of "Zal, you're my man!" But wait: who was to take on the Herculean task of ordering Afghan society in accord with King Zal's new wishes?
"President Karzai has committed himself to this objective, he has promised to direct his government to advance these goals. We look forward to seeing the concrete steps that are needed to realizing this vision, and NOW," he thundered.
The sense of disappointment, at least among the Afghans who know all about the government of the Karzais, by the Karzais, and for the Karzais, must have been palpable – the Karzai mob and clean government? Either Zal needed the help of men in white coats, or American society had become so changed that it was possible to "fool all of the people all of the time."
On cue, Karzai parroted Khalilzad's charges against the congeries of his fellow scoundrels in the Afghan "government" and "parliament" in his next public speech.
"All politicians in this system have acquired everything – money, lots of money. God knows it is beyond the limit. The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen. The luxurious houses [built in Afghanistan in the past five years] belong to members of the government and parliament, not only in Kabul but here and there. Every one of them have three or four houses in different countries," he accused.
"With the support of the world community – money, aircraft, and their soldiers – and with full sympathy of the Afghan people, the Afghan politicians were able to return to their country. Unfortunately, I see now that they did not learn the lessons of the past. They should know that the Afghan people will rise against us. And this time, there will be no place [abroad] for us to flee," he lamented.
These Karzai statements revealed two things: First, that there's no honor among Afghan thieves, and second, that the reason for the Karzai gang's desperation to hang on to power, irrespective of the cost to the international community in blood and treasure, is because this time there will be no place for them to flee!
The chutzpah of Messrs. Khalilzad and Karzai is astounding – here are two people who've been responsible for so much death and destruction, all resulting from their own self-serving aims and actions, yet they address the resulting chaos as if it were somebody else's mess. It brings to mind a friend's old Labrador who used to fart and then get up and leave the area of his stench, looking accusingly at anyone else in the vicinity.
During the immediate aftermath of the "leftist" coup that brought down Prince Daud's government, I happened to be sitting and discussing the possible future course of events with an Afghan ambassador. He was one of the old breed of American-trained technocrats: he'd been sent abroad on an Afghan-funded scholarship to one of the Ivy League universities and had taken a degree in one of the "hard" subjects, unlike the subsequent "Khalilzad generation," who were given American government scholarships and shepherded and mentored through "soft" subjects like sociology essential to playing their future roles in Afghanistan.
The discussion ended with the ambassador saying: "You'll see. The semiliterate Khalqi and Parchami self-styled 'socialists,' through their brutality and stupidity, will inevitably cause the people to rise against them. In the process, they will not only cause endless strife but will also disgrace themselves and communism." And that is exactly what happened.
The "socialist" revolution was followed by Mullah Rabbani's "Islamic Republic." The long-suffering Afghan people soon found that these people followed neither Islam's tenets nor republican ideals – money and power were their motivating factors. As one of them was forced to admit recently, all of the people who stayed in obscene luxury in Peshawar, while they sent young men to their deaths in the jihad against the Soviet Union, were really interested in obtaining ya naam, ya naan, meaning "either status or livelihood."
The years of "Islamic clerical rule" of Rabbani & Co. added to the physical and moral destruction of Afghan society to such an extent that the people welcomed the advent of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban movement, because at least it brought peace and security to Afghanistan, albeit with the Afghan rural traditions and Islamic values so resented by the relatively small urban "educated" population.
One of the canards purposely propagated about the Pashtun Taliban, particularly by their Tajik opponents, is that they brought Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Afghanistan. All serious students of Afghan affairs know that this is the big lie that is continually repeated in the hope that it will be accepted as historical truth. The reality that Osama bin Laden first arrived on the scene during the time of U.S.-supported Afghan jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan is conveniently ignored by the Tajiks' foreign supporters and their allied corporate media.
The al-Qaeda network was expanded during Rabbani's tenure as president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In fact, it was Rabbani who in 1996 "allowed Osama bin Laden to shift from Khartoum [Sudan] to Jalalabad [Afghanistan]," as confirmed recently by B. Raman. Furthermore, Rabbani's Tajik government facilitated al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts by issuing visas and Afghan passports to hundreds of foreign extremists, all under the guise of "Islamic solidarity." And people conveniently forget that Rabbani and his associates started their political careers by joining the Muslim Brotherhood.
The cardinal sin of the Pashtun Taliban was not any particular commitment to the al-Qaeda cause; it was their pride and stiff-necked resistance to U.S. demands that these people, who claimed sanctuary with them, should be handed over to the U.S. authorities for judgment. Pashtun honor codes made this impossible.
The events following 9/11 provided a renewed opportunity for three groups of people to play a decisive role in the ensuing Afghan tragedy:
Ahmad Shah Massoud's Northern Alliance of mujahedeen-cum-Communist ragtag militias, who were cowering in a small mountainous strip of northern Afghanistan.
The majority of the Afghan diaspora in the West, who were either living on welfare in European countries or eking out a modest living in the United States.
The royalists, who agitated on behalf of the politically sedentary ex-king in the hope of one day riding his coattails to high office in Kabul, if the Taliban relinquished power as part of a UN-negotiated settlement.
While everyone else joined or supported one of these three groups, the Karzai clan not only had a foot in each of these camps, but they also associated themselves for a time with the Taliban – that is until the association was terminated when Karzai's father was killed for allegedly misappropriating Taliban funds in Pakistan. Obviously, the Karzais subscribed to Bob Hope's precepts: when asked why Hope attended both Christian and Jewish religious functions, he quipped that he did not want to miss going to heaven on a technicality. The Karzais adapted the Hope theory to Afghan affairs, though they aimed to reach financial heaven.
The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan allowed all these disparate and bitterly opposed rival groups to occupy center stage on the Afghan political scene.
An analysis of the process leading to the Bonn Accords and subsequent political maneuverings would require the space of a tome. Suffice it to say that at every juncture, Khalilzad and his fellow sociologists either proposed and implemented ill-thought-out and dubious policies or were outsmarted by their opponents. Even ignoring the kleptocracy that they managed to install and foster in Kabul, it takes incompetence bordering on stupidity to be responsible for bringing a previously anti-Iranian country within Iran's sphere of influence. What were their assumptions and why?
Contrary to what people may think, politics in Afghanistan during Khalilzad and his contemporaries' time was restricted to Kabul. The population of Kabul at the time was perhaps half a million, if not less. Of these, fifty thousand or so were in government employ, the majority being the Tajiks living in Kabul. At the top of the pyramid sat the royal household. Consequently, Afghan politics consisted of trying to acquire or keep royal favor, or at least get near the centers of power, which emanated from the palace.
The rest of the country, making up almost 90 percent of the population, was content to be left alone to work their land and raise their crops – as far as they were concerned, the less government attention turned toward them, the better. To them, "government" meant taxes from which they saw no benefit and their sons being taken from them and conscripted into the Afghan army. This situation bred a total disconnect between the population of Kabul and those living in the rest of the country.
The divisions were so marked that the relatively small urban population and the majority rural population appeared almost to live in different countries. Crucially, the two populations' perceptions of government, and the limits of its power, differed.
The residents of Kabul, particularly those at the extreme edges of the circles of power, mostly the offspring of government employees, were ignorant of the limits of government power in Afghanistan. They wrongly assumed that just as they and their fathers were in awe of even minor government officials, the same fear pervaded the hearts of Afghanistan's rural population.
Consequently, Zalmay Khalilzad and others who espoused democratic ideals, and before them, the young urbanized officers who staged a coup espousing socialist ideals, were deluded – their acquisition and use of the government's "monopoly on violence" consistently failed to overawe and shock the rural population into submission. Instead, the "educated elite," flying the flags of convenience of either leftist or rightist ideology, and their foreign mentors have themselves been shocked and awed by the rural population's resistance to the imposition of imported political and social paradigms. In the process, the elites have succeeded in discrediting first socialist dictatorship, then "moderate" clerical rule, and now democratic capitalism in Afghanistan.
Some of Karzai's foreign supporters have been repeating ad nauseam that while Karzai has surrounded himself with base scoundrels, he himself is honest and of royal stock. The people in Afghanistan, particularly the Kandaharis, know this to be arrant nonsense.
Everyone at present on the Afghan political scene has been guilty of "social status inflation": a father who was a minor provincial official is metamorphosed by the son into an adviser to the king; a district magistrate father is turned into a high court judge; a minor bank employee father is claimed to have been a member of a bank governing board. These elevations are sad but harmless lies that do not affect Afghan affairs.
However, Karzai's case is different, because it explains why the Afghans view him and his family with contempt. His family's history demonstrates the malign and destructive roles that the Karzai clan has consistently played in Afghan society for the past 60 years.
December 11, 2007
Karzai Discredits Democracy in Afghanistan
by Bahlol Lohdi
In a recent speech given at the American-Afghan business conference, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to the UN, and one of the enthusiastic proponents of using American "hard power" to reorder the Muslim world, finally admitted to the myriad problems facing the international community in its efforts to resolve the Afghan conflict. That these pronouncements were now trite, since they were well-known facts to all who had the misfortune to deal with the gangs of Afghanistan these past six years, didn't faze the speaker a jot.
"There is [a] serious problem of governance in Afghanistan," he asserted boldly.
"At the national level, corruption exists at unacceptable levels. At the provincial and district levels, especially in contested areas, government, particularly police, too often is weak, ineffective, sometimes nonexistent, and sometimes even predatory," he added.
To complete the list of woes, he said that there was "too much polarization" among Afghan political leaders, a growing opium economy, high unemployment, and the lackluster pace of reconstruction.
I am sure that members of the audience must have been nodding vigorously in agreement with Khalilzad's assessment of the current debacle in Afghanistan, waiting with bated breath for Dr. Khalilzad's prescription for curing the plague inflicted on the Afghan people by the good doctor's previous policy recommendations.
"Key reforms must include: making appointments based on merit, countering corruption, implementing programs for institutionalizing the rule of law, and working systematically to extend state authority and good governance to provincial and district levels," he continued, with appropriate gravitas.
By this time the audience must have been ecstatic – there might even have been shouts of "Zal, you're my man!" But wait: who was to take on the Herculean task of ordering Afghan society in accord with King Zal's new wishes?
"President Karzai has committed himself to this objective, he has promised to direct his government to advance these goals. We look forward to seeing the concrete steps that are needed to realizing this vision, and NOW," he thundered.
The sense of disappointment, at least among the Afghans who know all about the government of the Karzais, by the Karzais, and for the Karzais, must have been palpable – the Karzai mob and clean government? Either Zal needed the help of men in white coats, or American society had become so changed that it was possible to "fool all of the people all of the time."
On cue, Karzai parroted Khalilzad's charges against the congeries of his fellow scoundrels in the Afghan "government" and "parliament" in his next public speech.
"All politicians in this system have acquired everything – money, lots of money. God knows it is beyond the limit. The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen. The luxurious houses [built in Afghanistan in the past five years] belong to members of the government and parliament, not only in Kabul but here and there. Every one of them have three or four houses in different countries," he accused.
"With the support of the world community – money, aircraft, and their soldiers – and with full sympathy of the Afghan people, the Afghan politicians were able to return to their country. Unfortunately, I see now that they did not learn the lessons of the past. They should know that the Afghan people will rise against us. And this time, there will be no place [abroad] for us to flee," he lamented.
These Karzai statements revealed two things: First, that there's no honor among Afghan thieves, and second, that the reason for the Karzai gang's desperation to hang on to power, irrespective of the cost to the international community in blood and treasure, is because this time there will be no place for them to flee!
The chutzpah of Messrs. Khalilzad and Karzai is astounding – here are two people who've been responsible for so much death and destruction, all resulting from their own self-serving aims and actions, yet they address the resulting chaos as if it were somebody else's mess. It brings to mind a friend's old Labrador who used to fart and then get up and leave the area of his stench, looking accusingly at anyone else in the vicinity.
During the immediate aftermath of the "leftist" coup that brought down Prince Daud's government, I happened to be sitting and discussing the possible future course of events with an Afghan ambassador. He was one of the old breed of American-trained technocrats: he'd been sent abroad on an Afghan-funded scholarship to one of the Ivy League universities and had taken a degree in one of the "hard" subjects, unlike the subsequent "Khalilzad generation," who were given American government scholarships and shepherded and mentored through "soft" subjects like sociology essential to playing their future roles in Afghanistan.
The discussion ended with the ambassador saying: "You'll see. The semiliterate Khalqi and Parchami self-styled 'socialists,' through their brutality and stupidity, will inevitably cause the people to rise against them. In the process, they will not only cause endless strife but will also disgrace themselves and communism." And that is exactly what happened.
The "socialist" revolution was followed by Mullah Rabbani's "Islamic Republic." The long-suffering Afghan people soon found that these people followed neither Islam's tenets nor republican ideals – money and power were their motivating factors. As one of them was forced to admit recently, all of the people who stayed in obscene luxury in Peshawar, while they sent young men to their deaths in the jihad against the Soviet Union, were really interested in obtaining ya naam, ya naan, meaning "either status or livelihood."
The years of "Islamic clerical rule" of Rabbani & Co. added to the physical and moral destruction of Afghan society to such an extent that the people welcomed the advent of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban movement, because at least it brought peace and security to Afghanistan, albeit with the Afghan rural traditions and Islamic values so resented by the relatively small urban "educated" population.
One of the canards purposely propagated about the Pashtun Taliban, particularly by their Tajik opponents, is that they brought Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Afghanistan. All serious students of Afghan affairs know that this is the big lie that is continually repeated in the hope that it will be accepted as historical truth. The reality that Osama bin Laden first arrived on the scene during the time of U.S.-supported Afghan jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan is conveniently ignored by the Tajiks' foreign supporters and their allied corporate media.
The al-Qaeda network was expanded during Rabbani's tenure as president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In fact, it was Rabbani who in 1996 "allowed Osama bin Laden to shift from Khartoum [Sudan] to Jalalabad [Afghanistan]," as confirmed recently by B. Raman. Furthermore, Rabbani's Tajik government facilitated al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts by issuing visas and Afghan passports to hundreds of foreign extremists, all under the guise of "Islamic solidarity." And people conveniently forget that Rabbani and his associates started their political careers by joining the Muslim Brotherhood.
The cardinal sin of the Pashtun Taliban was not any particular commitment to the al-Qaeda cause; it was their pride and stiff-necked resistance to U.S. demands that these people, who claimed sanctuary with them, should be handed over to the U.S. authorities for judgment. Pashtun honor codes made this impossible.
The events following 9/11 provided a renewed opportunity for three groups of people to play a decisive role in the ensuing Afghan tragedy:
Ahmad Shah Massoud's Northern Alliance of mujahedeen-cum-Communist ragtag militias, who were cowering in a small mountainous strip of northern Afghanistan.
The majority of the Afghan diaspora in the West, who were either living on welfare in European countries or eking out a modest living in the United States.
The royalists, who agitated on behalf of the politically sedentary ex-king in the hope of one day riding his coattails to high office in Kabul, if the Taliban relinquished power as part of a UN-negotiated settlement.
While everyone else joined or supported one of these three groups, the Karzai clan not only had a foot in each of these camps, but they also associated themselves for a time with the Taliban – that is until the association was terminated when Karzai's father was killed for allegedly misappropriating Taliban funds in Pakistan. Obviously, the Karzais subscribed to Bob Hope's precepts: when asked why Hope attended both Christian and Jewish religious functions, he quipped that he did not want to miss going to heaven on a technicality. The Karzais adapted the Hope theory to Afghan affairs, though they aimed to reach financial heaven.
The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan allowed all these disparate and bitterly opposed rival groups to occupy center stage on the Afghan political scene.
An analysis of the process leading to the Bonn Accords and subsequent political maneuverings would require the space of a tome. Suffice it to say that at every juncture, Khalilzad and his fellow sociologists either proposed and implemented ill-thought-out and dubious policies or were outsmarted by their opponents. Even ignoring the kleptocracy that they managed to install and foster in Kabul, it takes incompetence bordering on stupidity to be responsible for bringing a previously anti-Iranian country within Iran's sphere of influence. What were their assumptions and why?
Contrary to what people may think, politics in Afghanistan during Khalilzad and his contemporaries' time was restricted to Kabul. The population of Kabul at the time was perhaps half a million, if not less. Of these, fifty thousand or so were in government employ, the majority being the Tajiks living in Kabul. At the top of the pyramid sat the royal household. Consequently, Afghan politics consisted of trying to acquire or keep royal favor, or at least get near the centers of power, which emanated from the palace.
The rest of the country, making up almost 90 percent of the population, was content to be left alone to work their land and raise their crops – as far as they were concerned, the less government attention turned toward them, the better. To them, "government" meant taxes from which they saw no benefit and their sons being taken from them and conscripted into the Afghan army. This situation bred a total disconnect between the population of Kabul and those living in the rest of the country.
The divisions were so marked that the relatively small urban population and the majority rural population appeared almost to live in different countries. Crucially, the two populations' perceptions of government, and the limits of its power, differed.
The residents of Kabul, particularly those at the extreme edges of the circles of power, mostly the offspring of government employees, were ignorant of the limits of government power in Afghanistan. They wrongly assumed that just as they and their fathers were in awe of even minor government officials, the same fear pervaded the hearts of Afghanistan's rural population.
Consequently, Zalmay Khalilzad and others who espoused democratic ideals, and before them, the young urbanized officers who staged a coup espousing socialist ideals, were deluded – their acquisition and use of the government's "monopoly on violence" consistently failed to overawe and shock the rural population into submission. Instead, the "educated elite," flying the flags of convenience of either leftist or rightist ideology, and their foreign mentors have themselves been shocked and awed by the rural population's resistance to the imposition of imported political and social paradigms. In the process, the elites have succeeded in discrediting first socialist dictatorship, then "moderate" clerical rule, and now democratic capitalism in Afghanistan.
Some of Karzai's foreign supporters have been repeating ad nauseam that while Karzai has surrounded himself with base scoundrels, he himself is honest and of royal stock. The people in Afghanistan, particularly the Kandaharis, know this to be arrant nonsense.
Everyone at present on the Afghan political scene has been guilty of "social status inflation": a father who was a minor provincial official is metamorphosed by the son into an adviser to the king; a district magistrate father is turned into a high court judge; a minor bank employee father is claimed to have been a member of a bank governing board. These elevations are sad but harmless lies that do not affect Afghan affairs.
However, Karzai's case is different, because it explains why the Afghans view him and his family with contempt. His family's history demonstrates the malign and destructive roles that the Karzai clan has consistently played in Afghan society for the past 60 years.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Taliban leaders open to talks
I just wonder whether these are splinter groups or the main leaders of the insurgency. I doubt that the main group will negotiate unless there is some agreement that the foreign troops withdraw but who knows what sort of deal Karzai and they might be cooking up. What is so laughable about all this is that the Canadian and other western governments always cry out against negotiating with terrorists while Karzai is willing to take them into his government. Anyway it is probably a step up from some of the warlords that are already part of his government.
The Karzai government is already influenced considerably by Islamists even to the point of resurrecting a ministry of vice and virtue.
Taliban leaders open to talks
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
This is from the canoe site.
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that his government has had increasing contact with Taliban insurgents this year, including several talks this week with militant leaders living in exile.
Karzai said militants in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan have increasingly approached the government in the last eight months, even as the country goes through its most violent phase since the ouster of the Taliban after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
"Only this week I've had more than five or six major contacts, approaches, by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan," Karzai told reporters in Kabul after meeting NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
Karzai did not specify which leaders he had spoken to or where the discussions took place.
"We are willing to talk. Those of the Taliban who are not part of al-Qaida or the terrorist networks, who do not want to be violent against the Afghan people ... those elements are welcome," he said.
In the past Karzai has offered to hold talks with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and to give militants a position in government in exchange for peace. Omar rejected those offers.
Afghan and Western officials believe many Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are living and organizing militant activities from across the border in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan. Pakistan denies the allegation and says its doing its best to quell the insurgency.
More than 6,000 people have been killed in insurgency-related violence in 2007, according to an Associated Press count based on figures from Western and Afghan officials.
The Karzai government is already influenced considerably by Islamists even to the point of resurrecting a ministry of vice and virtue.
Taliban leaders open to talks
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
This is from the canoe site.
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that his government has had increasing contact with Taliban insurgents this year, including several talks this week with militant leaders living in exile.
Karzai said militants in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan have increasingly approached the government in the last eight months, even as the country goes through its most violent phase since the ouster of the Taliban after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
"Only this week I've had more than five or six major contacts, approaches, by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan," Karzai told reporters in Kabul after meeting NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
Karzai did not specify which leaders he had spoken to or where the discussions took place.
"We are willing to talk. Those of the Taliban who are not part of al-Qaida or the terrorist networks, who do not want to be violent against the Afghan people ... those elements are welcome," he said.
In the past Karzai has offered to hold talks with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and to give militants a position in government in exchange for peace. Omar rejected those offers.
Afghan and Western officials believe many Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are living and organizing militant activities from across the border in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan. Pakistan denies the allegation and says its doing its best to quell the insurgency.
More than 6,000 people have been killed in insurgency-related violence in 2007, according to an Associated Press count based on figures from Western and Afghan officials.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Malalai Joya: Warlords no better than Taliban
It seems a strange democracy where one is thrown out of parliament for criticising other parliamentarians! We are propping up corrupt warlords all in the name of "democracy". Fundamentalists still are predominant as Joya points out. Not too long ago a Muslim convert to Christianity was condemned to death but managed to be spirited out to safety in Italy.
Warlords no better than Taliban, says Afghan MP
Updated Wed. Nov. 7 2007 5:42 PM ET
Michael Stittle, CTV.ca News
As Afghan police scrambled to the scene of a bomb blast Tuesday that killed five lawmakers and dozens of children, Malalai Joya, haunted by death threats and assassination attempts in Afghanistan, sat on the other side of the world, clutching a cup of tea with her eyes cast downward.
"This is not the first suicide bomb in Afghanistan and it will not be the last," she warned. "The problem is that the victims are always innocent victims -- especially children."
She was seated in a cafeteria at the University of Toronto, dressed in a thick black coat and white scarf, far removed from the burqa she's forced to wear in Afghanistan to protect her identity and her life.
Joya, 29, came to Canada this week to speak about the two issues that have put her life in jeopardy: the plight of women in Afghanistan and the role of the warlords in President Hamid Karzai's government.
In 2005, Joya was the youngest person to win a seat in the Afghan parliament's lower house, the Wolesi Jirga (House of the People).
Her foes in parliament belong to the Northern Alliance, a faction of warlords and ethnic groups who have historically fought against the Taliban. She criticizes the warlords for being no better than their rivals -- "a photocopy," she says -- and claims they committed atrocities after the former Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1992.
Until 1996, the ensuing power vacuum sparked infighting amongst the warlords at the cost of thousands of lives. In Kabul alone, she said, the bloodshed killed 65,000 people. Her own father, a doctor, was injured in the fighting and lost part of his leg.
"The Northern Alliance fundamentalists are mentally similar to the Taliban, but superficially they have changed to suit their power by talking about democracy and the 9/11 tragedy," Joya told CTV.ca.
"Today, they control Afghanistan. Some of them are ministers, governors, commanders or ambassadors. They control Afghanistan and our people are like hostages. The Taliban make use of the situation and become powerful. And also countries like Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan make use of the situation, by either supporting the Taliban or the Northern Alliance. This is the reason why the situation becomes worse day by day."
Earlier this year she bluntly told a journalist that the Afghan parliament was worse than a barn, "because at least donkeys and cows are somewhat useful."
Footage of the interview was played before her fellow MPs. On May 21, they angrily voted her out under Article 70 of the Afghan parliament's Rules and Regulations. The rule, apparently under revision at the time, states that lawmakers must not publicly criticize one another.
Joya is suspended from parliament until after the current session ends in 2010. The country's supreme court is reviewing the decision, but in the meantime, she continues to speak out against her enemies in the lower house.
"Day by day, my life has become more risky, because I don't compromise with them and I expose their mask of democracy," she said.
She claimed that demonstrations to overturn her suspension, many led by journalists in the country, were quashed by the Northern Alliance.
The best way to remove them from power, she said, is to end the U.S.-led combat operations in Afghanistan, which are protecting the current government.
"The international community will not succeed in Afghanistan, because the U.S. and its allies attacked Afghanistan under the name of liberating the country and the Afghan women, but they fought against the Taliban by supporting another bunch of terrorists," she said.
'Our people are the victims'
Joya described the situation as two giants fighting -- with the Afghan people trapped in the middle. More than 5,700 Afghans have died this year alone, according to an estimate by The Associated Press. It's the worst death toll since the Taliban were removed from power.
"On one side we have the Northern Alliance, who are pro-U.S. terrorists, and on the other side the Taliban, who are anti-U.S. terrorists. Our people are the victims," she said.
Joya has pleaded with Canada to follow a different path in Afghanistan, one that does not emphasize combat operations. She wants Ottawa to give financial help and security to democratic parties that are unable to promote themselves.
"The main message of our people for the Canadian government is this: if you really want to help the Afghan people, please act independently," she said. "Do not follow the policies of the U.S., which are the wrong policies. Please support democratic-minded people and parties. They are able to fight against fundamentalism and they are the future of Afghanistan."
Women still the big issue for Joya
On Tuesday evening, she spoke at a conference called "Women and War in Afghanistan," organized by Toronto members of the Stop the War Coalition. She sat at a table beside New Democrat MP Peggy Nash, with a bright yellow banner on the wall behind them that declared in red: "END THE OCCUPATION."
The room was about the size of a tennis court and organizers ran out of seats. A dozen young Afghan-Canadians sat on the floor next to three or four television cameras.
Joya told the audience that the situation for women in Afghanistan has yet to improve. Their life expectancy is just 45. And in the first six months of 2007, she said 250 women committed suicide.
She read out a list of the dead, sketching out how some took their lives. An 18-year-old girl hung herself because she was forced to marry a 60-year-old man.
"They see suicide as the only way to get rid of their misery," she told the crowd.
Joya read aloud an article from The New York Times dated from 1959. It was a profile of Afghanistan and described women freely leaving their homes to go to work, living independent lives from their husbands. It was written during the last period of stability in the country, when Mohammed Zahir Shah ruled as king from 1933 to 1973.
Now, Joya told the audience, most women are forced into arranged marriages, they have little access to education and almost no hope to improve their lives.
When it was time for questions from the audience, a woman asked what would happen if Canadian troops leave. Who would monitor and protect the money she had donated to schools for Afghan girls, the woman asked, calling them "my children." A man in the front interrupted her, shouting: "They are not your children, they are Afghani children!"
It was unclear whether Joya completely understood the question and a translator stepped in to help. Joya nodded her head, took the microphone and stood up. But she repeated what she had said earlier: Afghan women are no better off now than when the Taliban were removed from power, and both the Taliban and warlords must be brought to justice if there is any chance for lasting change.
It's a message Joya will continue to voice when she returns to Afghanistan, even at the cost of her life.
"If we have a democratic government, and if we have security, food and water, our people will rebuild their country," she said.
The debate was over. Joya may not get another chance to visit Canada. The majority of MPs in the Afghan parliament have asked the interior ministry to restrict her movements outside the country, and she may never be able to leave again.
Warlords no better than Taliban, says Afghan MP
Updated Wed. Nov. 7 2007 5:42 PM ET
Michael Stittle, CTV.ca News
As Afghan police scrambled to the scene of a bomb blast Tuesday that killed five lawmakers and dozens of children, Malalai Joya, haunted by death threats and assassination attempts in Afghanistan, sat on the other side of the world, clutching a cup of tea with her eyes cast downward.
"This is not the first suicide bomb in Afghanistan and it will not be the last," she warned. "The problem is that the victims are always innocent victims -- especially children."
She was seated in a cafeteria at the University of Toronto, dressed in a thick black coat and white scarf, far removed from the burqa she's forced to wear in Afghanistan to protect her identity and her life.
Joya, 29, came to Canada this week to speak about the two issues that have put her life in jeopardy: the plight of women in Afghanistan and the role of the warlords in President Hamid Karzai's government.
In 2005, Joya was the youngest person to win a seat in the Afghan parliament's lower house, the Wolesi Jirga (House of the People).
Her foes in parliament belong to the Northern Alliance, a faction of warlords and ethnic groups who have historically fought against the Taliban. She criticizes the warlords for being no better than their rivals -- "a photocopy," she says -- and claims they committed atrocities after the former Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1992.
Until 1996, the ensuing power vacuum sparked infighting amongst the warlords at the cost of thousands of lives. In Kabul alone, she said, the bloodshed killed 65,000 people. Her own father, a doctor, was injured in the fighting and lost part of his leg.
"The Northern Alliance fundamentalists are mentally similar to the Taliban, but superficially they have changed to suit their power by talking about democracy and the 9/11 tragedy," Joya told CTV.ca.
"Today, they control Afghanistan. Some of them are ministers, governors, commanders or ambassadors. They control Afghanistan and our people are like hostages. The Taliban make use of the situation and become powerful. And also countries like Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan make use of the situation, by either supporting the Taliban or the Northern Alliance. This is the reason why the situation becomes worse day by day."
Earlier this year she bluntly told a journalist that the Afghan parliament was worse than a barn, "because at least donkeys and cows are somewhat useful."
Footage of the interview was played before her fellow MPs. On May 21, they angrily voted her out under Article 70 of the Afghan parliament's Rules and Regulations. The rule, apparently under revision at the time, states that lawmakers must not publicly criticize one another.
Joya is suspended from parliament until after the current session ends in 2010. The country's supreme court is reviewing the decision, but in the meantime, she continues to speak out against her enemies in the lower house.
"Day by day, my life has become more risky, because I don't compromise with them and I expose their mask of democracy," she said.
She claimed that demonstrations to overturn her suspension, many led by journalists in the country, were quashed by the Northern Alliance.
The best way to remove them from power, she said, is to end the U.S.-led combat operations in Afghanistan, which are protecting the current government.
"The international community will not succeed in Afghanistan, because the U.S. and its allies attacked Afghanistan under the name of liberating the country and the Afghan women, but they fought against the Taliban by supporting another bunch of terrorists," she said.
'Our people are the victims'
Joya described the situation as two giants fighting -- with the Afghan people trapped in the middle. More than 5,700 Afghans have died this year alone, according to an estimate by The Associated Press. It's the worst death toll since the Taliban were removed from power.
"On one side we have the Northern Alliance, who are pro-U.S. terrorists, and on the other side the Taliban, who are anti-U.S. terrorists. Our people are the victims," she said.
Joya has pleaded with Canada to follow a different path in Afghanistan, one that does not emphasize combat operations. She wants Ottawa to give financial help and security to democratic parties that are unable to promote themselves.
"The main message of our people for the Canadian government is this: if you really want to help the Afghan people, please act independently," she said. "Do not follow the policies of the U.S., which are the wrong policies. Please support democratic-minded people and parties. They are able to fight against fundamentalism and they are the future of Afghanistan."
Women still the big issue for Joya
On Tuesday evening, she spoke at a conference called "Women and War in Afghanistan," organized by Toronto members of the Stop the War Coalition. She sat at a table beside New Democrat MP Peggy Nash, with a bright yellow banner on the wall behind them that declared in red: "END THE OCCUPATION."
The room was about the size of a tennis court and organizers ran out of seats. A dozen young Afghan-Canadians sat on the floor next to three or four television cameras.
Joya told the audience that the situation for women in Afghanistan has yet to improve. Their life expectancy is just 45. And in the first six months of 2007, she said 250 women committed suicide.
She read out a list of the dead, sketching out how some took their lives. An 18-year-old girl hung herself because she was forced to marry a 60-year-old man.
"They see suicide as the only way to get rid of their misery," she told the crowd.
Joya read aloud an article from The New York Times dated from 1959. It was a profile of Afghanistan and described women freely leaving their homes to go to work, living independent lives from their husbands. It was written during the last period of stability in the country, when Mohammed Zahir Shah ruled as king from 1933 to 1973.
Now, Joya told the audience, most women are forced into arranged marriages, they have little access to education and almost no hope to improve their lives.
When it was time for questions from the audience, a woman asked what would happen if Canadian troops leave. Who would monitor and protect the money she had donated to schools for Afghan girls, the woman asked, calling them "my children." A man in the front interrupted her, shouting: "They are not your children, they are Afghani children!"
It was unclear whether Joya completely understood the question and a translator stepped in to help. Joya nodded her head, took the microphone and stood up. But she repeated what she had said earlier: Afghan women are no better off now than when the Taliban were removed from power, and both the Taliban and warlords must be brought to justice if there is any chance for lasting change.
It's a message Joya will continue to voice when she returns to Afghanistan, even at the cost of her life.
"If we have a democratic government, and if we have security, food and water, our people will rebuild their country," she said.
The debate was over. Joya may not get another chance to visit Canada. The majority of MPs in the Afghan parliament have asked the interior ministry to restrict her movements outside the country, and she may never be able to leave again.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
James Laxer: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq
This is from Laxer's website. There is a Messianic strain in Bush's foreign policy that is somewhat akin to a crusade. But there was the same crusading against communism and the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. While Bush as a fundamentalist Christian may also personally believe in this crusade Bush is not alone in determining policy. The neo-con cabal many associated with the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) set out their aims before 9/11. The terror attacks and the war on terror provided an ideal vehicle by which to set their dreams of US hegemony in motion and gain US and even global support for these aims.
I think that the faith based aspect of the invasions was a buttressing factor but not likely a determining one. There was huge support for making sure that Afghanistan did not continue as a terrorist training ground. Certainly this did not justify an invasion and regime change in Afghanistan but it was great enough that the US had many allies in invading Afghanistan and being instrumental in overthrowing the Taliban. The Taliban by the way never directly attacked any other country and the US had been involved in aiding the Taliban to stop poppy production. Allies simply agreed with the US that Afghanistan needed to be neutralised as a haven for jihadists.
The Iraq case is actually quite different. There is no way that it could be convincingly tied in with terrorism although some pundits tried to link Hussein with terrorism. The main ties of Hussein with terrorism were with the Palestinians not Al Qaeda terrorism directed against the US but terror used as resistance against Israel.
In fact the Iraq invasion was justified primarily in terms of Hussein posing a threat to the US through getting weapons of mass destruction. It is true that Hussein's brutal rule was often used as a butressing argument it only became a key reason after it was shown that there were no WMD.
Laxer is certainly right about US policy makers not considering the longer term results of their actions. The US view is saturated with hubris. Policy makers think that US might and rightness will make everything come out all right. If it doesn't it can be easily fixed since the US has the largest and most effective military machine in the world that can subdue any opposition. As Laxer shows it has not at all worked out this way.
While Harper may also think that allied with the US it can remake Afghanistan this is not the main part of Harper's realism. It is just part of his selling of the mission that we will make Afghan a viable democracy with the rule of law and the beginnings of a prosperous market economy. Another aspect of his "realism" is closer alignment with the US. This fits in with his increase in military spending. Co-operating more closely in realizing US foreign policy aims will he thinks give us greater clout and some of the spoils associated with being hegemon.
On the 6th Anniversary of September 11: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq
The US-led invasions that followed the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan and Iraq were nothing less than vainglorious attempts to remake countries in ways they could not be remade. These have been latter-day crusades, just as much the product of apocalyptic religious fervour as those undertaken in the Middle Ages. They will end just as badly.
The September 11 attacks provoked a wave of messianic thinking of the sort that previous crises have generated at other times in American history. The Bush administration responded with the idea that to counter an act of such evil, a war must be declared whose purpose was to banish evil itself. A year after the attacks, George W. Bush declared: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, Bush focused on the positive side of the determination to rid the world of evil: “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.”
It is not that the US did not have material objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oil, the transportation routes to oil and natural gas and the quest for strategic military advantage in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia mattered. But the language of the President was apocalyptic and absolute.
To understand the invasions, Bush’s words need to be taken seriously. The most important motive for the military missions was to transform Afghanistan and Iraq in America’s image. Without the messianism, the idea that it was America’s God given task to remake the world, these invasions would have been unthinkable. Following the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”
Certainly the president was reaching out to the religious right with these statements. But it is a mistake to think that Bush and his advisers are not subject to the messianism they express.
Hard as it is four years after the assault on Iraq to remember this, the invasion was undertaken in the last flush of the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the brief era of the End of History and the Borderless World when the notion reigned supreme that liberal capitalism was the way ahead for all of humanity. The architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom actually believed that American forces would be met by cheering crowds and feted with bouquets of flowers.
Those who launched the invasions did almost no serious thinking about long-term consequences. In Iraq, the invasion unleashed chaos and suffering---four million people have become refugees. It gave Al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq which it had never had before and it handed enormous power to Shiite theocrats with strong links to Iran. The report by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, that there has been modest military progress in the country as a consequence of the surge in American troop strength there, has been treated by observers as little more than a political message to improve the position of the US for its endgame in a failed war. In war, it is a rule of thumb that statements by a commanding general are aimed at winning the propaganda struggle, and are not exercises in truth telling.
In Afghanistan, the invaders have wandered into a thicket of long-existing struggles between the Pashtun in the south---from whom most of the Taliban emerged---and other tribal groups in the north and other parts of the country. Without being sufficiently aware of what they were doing, the western invaders became embroiled in tribal and factional struggles that extend from Afghanistan into neighbouring regions of Pakistan.
The Harper government and other proponents of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan like to portray their approach as one of hard-headed realism. They are sailing under false colours. From the start, the idea that the West could successfully conquer Afghanistan and impose a western style government on that country has been a utopian fantasy.
The Taliban has had the tactical wit to align itself with the poppy growers and drug warlords they formerly opposed when they ran the country. That has drawn the US, Canada and other western powers into an opium war so that many Afghans now believe the West threatens their livelihood and that the Taliban is their protector.
The government of Hamid Karzai has begun quiet negotiations with elements of the Taliban. A deal in the not distant future is entirely possible. The result of such a deal would not be democracy, the rule of law and equal rights for women. It would mean an altered configuration of power in Afghanistan, with new Pashtun and Taliban elements in the government and some former Northern Alliance factions out of it. It would not bring peace, but rather a continued armed struggle, with a different list of players on the opposing sides.
The US and NATO could well seize on a deal with parts of the Taliban to declare victory and pull most of their troops out.
In the meantime, Canadian soldiers are fighting and too many are dying in campaigns to retake terrain they have previously taken only to have the Taliban reoccupy it later. Small gains are made building and opening schools, but these are often nullified by an insurgency that remains potent.
The Harper government and other backers of the war have resorted to hiding behind the soldiers to escape their own responsibility for the mess we are in. The exhortation that we must all “Support Our Troops”---something, which if meant literally virtually all Canadians do---is being used to silence critics of the mission.
The preposterous result is that a Canadian government that calls itself “conservative” is floundering in a failing crusade. Meanwhile those who want our troops brought home are the ones who adhere to the traditional conservative idea that wars should only be fought when they are unavoidable and that they should never be fought in aid of messianic missions to reconstruct the world.
Our politics has been turned inside out in ways that are deeply puzzling to almost everyone. Conservatives have become utopians, even if at times they are embarrassed by the rhetoric of George W. Bush. Meanwhile those in other parts of the political spectrum have become the skeptics, those who warn that the world cannot and should not be subjected to violent campaigns to transform it in the name of liberation, campaigns whose tangible results are death and dislocation on an enormous scale.
I think that the faith based aspect of the invasions was a buttressing factor but not likely a determining one. There was huge support for making sure that Afghanistan did not continue as a terrorist training ground. Certainly this did not justify an invasion and regime change in Afghanistan but it was great enough that the US had many allies in invading Afghanistan and being instrumental in overthrowing the Taliban. The Taliban by the way never directly attacked any other country and the US had been involved in aiding the Taliban to stop poppy production. Allies simply agreed with the US that Afghanistan needed to be neutralised as a haven for jihadists.
The Iraq case is actually quite different. There is no way that it could be convincingly tied in with terrorism although some pundits tried to link Hussein with terrorism. The main ties of Hussein with terrorism were with the Palestinians not Al Qaeda terrorism directed against the US but terror used as resistance against Israel.
In fact the Iraq invasion was justified primarily in terms of Hussein posing a threat to the US through getting weapons of mass destruction. It is true that Hussein's brutal rule was often used as a butressing argument it only became a key reason after it was shown that there were no WMD.
Laxer is certainly right about US policy makers not considering the longer term results of their actions. The US view is saturated with hubris. Policy makers think that US might and rightness will make everything come out all right. If it doesn't it can be easily fixed since the US has the largest and most effective military machine in the world that can subdue any opposition. As Laxer shows it has not at all worked out this way.
While Harper may also think that allied with the US it can remake Afghanistan this is not the main part of Harper's realism. It is just part of his selling of the mission that we will make Afghan a viable democracy with the rule of law and the beginnings of a prosperous market economy. Another aspect of his "realism" is closer alignment with the US. This fits in with his increase in military spending. Co-operating more closely in realizing US foreign policy aims will he thinks give us greater clout and some of the spoils associated with being hegemon.
On the 6th Anniversary of September 11: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq
The US-led invasions that followed the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan and Iraq were nothing less than vainglorious attempts to remake countries in ways they could not be remade. These have been latter-day crusades, just as much the product of apocalyptic religious fervour as those undertaken in the Middle Ages. They will end just as badly.
The September 11 attacks provoked a wave of messianic thinking of the sort that previous crises have generated at other times in American history. The Bush administration responded with the idea that to counter an act of such evil, a war must be declared whose purpose was to banish evil itself. A year after the attacks, George W. Bush declared: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, Bush focused on the positive side of the determination to rid the world of evil: “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.”
It is not that the US did not have material objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oil, the transportation routes to oil and natural gas and the quest for strategic military advantage in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia mattered. But the language of the President was apocalyptic and absolute.
To understand the invasions, Bush’s words need to be taken seriously. The most important motive for the military missions was to transform Afghanistan and Iraq in America’s image. Without the messianism, the idea that it was America’s God given task to remake the world, these invasions would have been unthinkable. Following the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”
Certainly the president was reaching out to the religious right with these statements. But it is a mistake to think that Bush and his advisers are not subject to the messianism they express.
Hard as it is four years after the assault on Iraq to remember this, the invasion was undertaken in the last flush of the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the brief era of the End of History and the Borderless World when the notion reigned supreme that liberal capitalism was the way ahead for all of humanity. The architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom actually believed that American forces would be met by cheering crowds and feted with bouquets of flowers.
Those who launched the invasions did almost no serious thinking about long-term consequences. In Iraq, the invasion unleashed chaos and suffering---four million people have become refugees. It gave Al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq which it had never had before and it handed enormous power to Shiite theocrats with strong links to Iran. The report by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, that there has been modest military progress in the country as a consequence of the surge in American troop strength there, has been treated by observers as little more than a political message to improve the position of the US for its endgame in a failed war. In war, it is a rule of thumb that statements by a commanding general are aimed at winning the propaganda struggle, and are not exercises in truth telling.
In Afghanistan, the invaders have wandered into a thicket of long-existing struggles between the Pashtun in the south---from whom most of the Taliban emerged---and other tribal groups in the north and other parts of the country. Without being sufficiently aware of what they were doing, the western invaders became embroiled in tribal and factional struggles that extend from Afghanistan into neighbouring regions of Pakistan.
The Harper government and other proponents of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan like to portray their approach as one of hard-headed realism. They are sailing under false colours. From the start, the idea that the West could successfully conquer Afghanistan and impose a western style government on that country has been a utopian fantasy.
The Taliban has had the tactical wit to align itself with the poppy growers and drug warlords they formerly opposed when they ran the country. That has drawn the US, Canada and other western powers into an opium war so that many Afghans now believe the West threatens their livelihood and that the Taliban is their protector.
The government of Hamid Karzai has begun quiet negotiations with elements of the Taliban. A deal in the not distant future is entirely possible. The result of such a deal would not be democracy, the rule of law and equal rights for women. It would mean an altered configuration of power in Afghanistan, with new Pashtun and Taliban elements in the government and some former Northern Alliance factions out of it. It would not bring peace, but rather a continued armed struggle, with a different list of players on the opposing sides.
The US and NATO could well seize on a deal with parts of the Taliban to declare victory and pull most of their troops out.
In the meantime, Canadian soldiers are fighting and too many are dying in campaigns to retake terrain they have previously taken only to have the Taliban reoccupy it later. Small gains are made building and opening schools, but these are often nullified by an insurgency that remains potent.
The Harper government and other backers of the war have resorted to hiding behind the soldiers to escape their own responsibility for the mess we are in. The exhortation that we must all “Support Our Troops”---something, which if meant literally virtually all Canadians do---is being used to silence critics of the mission.
The preposterous result is that a Canadian government that calls itself “conservative” is floundering in a failing crusade. Meanwhile those who want our troops brought home are the ones who adhere to the traditional conservative idea that wars should only be fought when they are unavoidable and that they should never be fought in aid of messianic missions to reconstruct the world.
Our politics has been turned inside out in ways that are deeply puzzling to almost everyone. Conservatives have become utopians, even if at times they are embarrassed by the rhetoric of George W. Bush. Meanwhile those in other parts of the political spectrum have become the skeptics, those who warn that the world cannot and should not be subjected to violent campaigns to transform it in the name of liberation, campaigns whose tangible results are death and dislocation on an enormous scale.
Monday, August 27, 2007
UN horrified by expansion of opium production in Afghanistan.
The article leaves out some important facts. Although production may be most in the south certainly the drug trade is also in the north. No doubt many who profit from the trade are also in the government or "former" warlords. While Taliban no doubt are involved there are countless others including many supporters of the Karzai government. Another fact that is left out is that during the Taliban era they were paid to stop production and did so. Colin Powell presented them a check for their good work not all that long before everything turned sour and after 9/11 of course there was no more dealing with the Taliban. The Taliban never did completely stop drug dealing.
Anyway the mission in Afghanistan can at least record one outstanding economic success.
UN horrified by surge in opium trade in Helmand
Despite 7,000 UK troops, Taliban-backed production up 48%
Declan Walsh
Tuesday August 28, 2007
The Guardian
Britain's drug policy in Afghanistan's Helmand province lay in tatters yesterday as the UN declared a "frightening" explosion in opium production across the country, led by Taliban-backed farmers in the volatile south. Opium production soared by 34% to 8,200 tonnes, accounting for 93% of world supply and most of the heroin sold in Britain and Europe, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported.
The record crop was fuelled by Helmand, where, despite the deployment of 7,000 British soldiers and millions of pounds in development spending, opium cultivation surged by 48%.
------------------------------------------
The sprawling and violent province is now the world's single largest source of illegal drugs - greater than coca from Colombia, cannabis from Morocco or heroin from Burma, countries with populations up to 20 times greater.
A despondent UNODC noted that no other country has produced illegal narcotics on such a scale since China in the 19th century. "The situation is dramatic and getting worse by the day," said its director general, Antonio Maria Costa.
The sole bright spot was a sharp fall in poppy cultivation in the north, where the number of drug-free provinces doubled from six to 13. Balkh province, which produced 7,200 tonnes last year, eliminated poppy cultivation entirely. The disparity highlights a widening gap between relatively stable northern Afghanistan, where the Kabul government enjoys some authority, and the insurgency-racked south, where it has virtually none.
Favourable weather, Taliban insurgents and corrupt government officials all contributed to this year's record poppy haul, which has edged Afghanistan perilously close to becoming a full narco-state. The opium trade involves 3.3 million of Afghanistan's 23 million population, according to the UNODC, and accounts for more than half of its estimated $7.5bn (£3.7bn) gross domestic product.
Western countries, led by the US, have spent several billion pounds trying to eradicate the trade since 2001. But it has only grown stronger, and this year's dismal results are likely to revive a controversial debate on aerial crop spraying that pits America against the UK.
The US ambassador, William Wood, who was previously posted to Colombia, advocates dispatching squadrons of pesticide-filled crop duster planes to spray the poppy fields. Ground-based eradication destroyed 19,000 hectares this year, or one tenth of the total crop. But British and Afghan officials are trenchantly opposed to aerial spraying, arguing that it would only anger Afghan farmers and drive their families into the arms of the Taliban.
The Taliban have firmly entrenched themselves in the trade. Having vehemently opposed opium as "un-Islamic" in 2000, when the crop was virtually eliminated, the insurgents are now among its greatest champions. In Helmand, Taliban fighters protect poppy-growing farmers in exchange for a slice of their profits, and some commanders help to smuggle drugs. Their profits pay for arms, logistics and militia wages, the UN said.
Embarrassingly for the British, the Taliban have also linked poppy growing with military strategy. The town of Musa Qala, which the British military ceded to Taliban control last February, has become a major drugs hub. Opium is traded openly in the town bazaar and heroin processing labs have moved to the area.
The drug barons run little risk of being caught. No major smuggler has been arrested in Afghanistan since 2001. Yesterday Mr Costa urged President Hamid Karzai to submit a dozen major traffickers - whom he did not name - to the UN Security Council for inclusion on a Taliban sanctions list.
Frustrated western anti-narcotics specialists are also searching for fresh ideas that work. A senior British official said the UK will spend £10m on development projects in Helmand and contribute to a £13m "good performance" fund that rewards drug-free provinces.
Nato may also take a more aggressive role. Although western soldiers will not slash through fields of poppy - something British soldiers have always avoided - their commanders may start to target insurgents who double as drug smugglers. "There will be an overlap between counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency targets. We want people who are big in the insurgency and drugs to realise they don't enjoy impunity," said the British official.
But, he admitted, there was no silver bullet to kill the trade: "I expect it will be a long time before this problem is solved."
Anyway the mission in Afghanistan can at least record one outstanding economic success.
UN horrified by surge in opium trade in Helmand
Despite 7,000 UK troops, Taliban-backed production up 48%
Declan Walsh
Tuesday August 28, 2007
The Guardian
Britain's drug policy in Afghanistan's Helmand province lay in tatters yesterday as the UN declared a "frightening" explosion in opium production across the country, led by Taliban-backed farmers in the volatile south. Opium production soared by 34% to 8,200 tonnes, accounting for 93% of world supply and most of the heroin sold in Britain and Europe, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported.
The record crop was fuelled by Helmand, where, despite the deployment of 7,000 British soldiers and millions of pounds in development spending, opium cultivation surged by 48%.
------------------------------------------
The sprawling and violent province is now the world's single largest source of illegal drugs - greater than coca from Colombia, cannabis from Morocco or heroin from Burma, countries with populations up to 20 times greater.
A despondent UNODC noted that no other country has produced illegal narcotics on such a scale since China in the 19th century. "The situation is dramatic and getting worse by the day," said its director general, Antonio Maria Costa.
The sole bright spot was a sharp fall in poppy cultivation in the north, where the number of drug-free provinces doubled from six to 13. Balkh province, which produced 7,200 tonnes last year, eliminated poppy cultivation entirely. The disparity highlights a widening gap between relatively stable northern Afghanistan, where the Kabul government enjoys some authority, and the insurgency-racked south, where it has virtually none.
Favourable weather, Taliban insurgents and corrupt government officials all contributed to this year's record poppy haul, which has edged Afghanistan perilously close to becoming a full narco-state. The opium trade involves 3.3 million of Afghanistan's 23 million population, according to the UNODC, and accounts for more than half of its estimated $7.5bn (£3.7bn) gross domestic product.
Western countries, led by the US, have spent several billion pounds trying to eradicate the trade since 2001. But it has only grown stronger, and this year's dismal results are likely to revive a controversial debate on aerial crop spraying that pits America against the UK.
The US ambassador, William Wood, who was previously posted to Colombia, advocates dispatching squadrons of pesticide-filled crop duster planes to spray the poppy fields. Ground-based eradication destroyed 19,000 hectares this year, or one tenth of the total crop. But British and Afghan officials are trenchantly opposed to aerial spraying, arguing that it would only anger Afghan farmers and drive their families into the arms of the Taliban.
The Taliban have firmly entrenched themselves in the trade. Having vehemently opposed opium as "un-Islamic" in 2000, when the crop was virtually eliminated, the insurgents are now among its greatest champions. In Helmand, Taliban fighters protect poppy-growing farmers in exchange for a slice of their profits, and some commanders help to smuggle drugs. Their profits pay for arms, logistics and militia wages, the UN said.
Embarrassingly for the British, the Taliban have also linked poppy growing with military strategy. The town of Musa Qala, which the British military ceded to Taliban control last February, has become a major drugs hub. Opium is traded openly in the town bazaar and heroin processing labs have moved to the area.
The drug barons run little risk of being caught. No major smuggler has been arrested in Afghanistan since 2001. Yesterday Mr Costa urged President Hamid Karzai to submit a dozen major traffickers - whom he did not name - to the UN Security Council for inclusion on a Taliban sanctions list.
Frustrated western anti-narcotics specialists are also searching for fresh ideas that work. A senior British official said the UK will spend £10m on development projects in Helmand and contribute to a £13m "good performance" fund that rewards drug-free provinces.
Nato may also take a more aggressive role. Although western soldiers will not slash through fields of poppy - something British soldiers have always avoided - their commanders may start to target insurgents who double as drug smugglers. "There will be an overlap between counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency targets. We want people who are big in the insurgency and drugs to realise they don't enjoy impunity," said the British official.
But, he admitted, there was no silver bullet to kill the trade: "I expect it will be a long time before this problem is solved."
Thursday, July 5, 2007
I think the indications are quite opposite. The US is gearing up for keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq for a lengthy period. Bush is talking of victory and success as taking patience and a long time.
In Afghanistan Bomber McNeil is busy trying to show Afghans that even if they give shelter to the Taliban involuntarily they will be blown to smithereens. Karzai's complaints are ignored.
The military industrial complex is not worried about long term commitments. As long as the Democratic party refuses to force Bush to withdraw nothing will happen. Add to this the fact that many in the US and other administrations want to neutralise Iran's nuclear facilities and so you have a recipe for a renewed attack game. Harper may distance himself from more involvement if he fears the polls enough but otherwise Canada will tag along with the US.
In the longer term there may be some type of accomodation in Afghanistan. However, there are already "reformed" Taliban in the government--and clerics asking for greater use of Sharia law. There are also warlords as a femal member of the legislature pointed out earning suspension as a reward for her forthrightness.
This post is from James Laxer's website. There is a lot of good material there including a great analytical article on NDP strategy.
Endgame in Iraq and Afghanistan
The endgame has begun for American and other western military involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decisions in Washington and London are being taken that will dramatically transform both of these conflicts.
Here are some straws in the wind:
* Today Gordon Brown, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer, replaced Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister. The Scottish politician, who made a famous deal in 1994 not to oppose Tony Blair’s run for the leadership of the Labour Party, now takes charge of Britain’s foreign engagements. The war in Iraq, and to a lesser extent the mission in Afghanistan, has been intensely unpopular with the British people, especially with Labour Party members and supporters.
While Brown endorsed Blair’s support for the U.S. initiated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his priorities as he prepared to take over as Prime Minister have been on domestic policy. Brown is certainly pro-American, but he has no intention of developing a close personal relationship with George W. Bush of the kind that Blair had. Brown knows that to win the next British general election---it must be held by 2010, but Brown could call it as early as the summer of 2008---he must not be labeled “Bush’s New Poodle”. There have been stories in the British media speculating that Brown intends to bring most British troops home from Iraq over the next twelve months. While he is unlikely to castigate Blair’s wars, in which he is also implicated, winding down the mission in Iraq would send a very clear message to the British electorate and to the beleaguered Bush administration in Washington.
* In Washington, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday that was harshly critical of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq. The Senator, who has been a staunch Bush loyalist said: “The costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved….Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”
Lugar told reporters that President Bush had limited time to change the course of the war because of the 2008 presidential campaign.
“We’re heading into a very partisan era,” he said. “The president has the opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy. I don’t think he’ll have that option very long.”
Lugar’s message was abundantly clear even though the White House is publicly ignoring it: it is time to make a deal in Iraq and to start bringing American troops home. When someone like Richard Lugar abandons his support for the Bush stay-the-course strategy in Iraq it means that the American political establishment has reached a consensus that the war has failed and has to be brought to an end.
* A few days ago, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai blasted the U.S. and NATO forces for their indiscriminate killings of civilians and demanded a change in military tactics. Karzai, who has long insisted that a deal needs to be made with the factions of the Taliban that are made up of Afghans as opposed to those tied to Al Qaeda, is as good at reading the tea leaves as anyone else. He knows that Western missions in Afghanistan don’t enjoy much public support in their own countries. He wants a deal, and he wants it soon.
* Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper mused that for Canada to continue its mission in Afghanistan after February 2009, there would have to be a broad political consensus in favour of the refitted mission. Harper knows that Canadians have no appetite for a continuation of their military role in southern Afghanistan beyond February 2009. He’s been on the wrong side of public opinion on the war from day one, which is a major reason his party is stuck with about 33 per cent of voters telling pollsters they would vote Conservative. Harper is softening the message so he can get back on track to the 40 per cent range he needs to win a majority of seats in the next election. If a conservative spear-carrier like Harper has figured out that change is in the wind, it is a sure sign that even those in the lower ranks of decision-making within the Anglo Sphere have been brought into the picture.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been sold to the public as struggles in the world-wide War on Terror and as theatres in the combat between freedom and the enemies of freedom. In fact, both struggles have been imperial wars, launched by Washington, with the support of the coalition of the willing in Iraq and NATO in Afghanistan, to secure control of strategic resources and territory. In both cases, the Bush administration’s strategy has imperiled the U.S. position in the region and in the world. The American political establishment has had enough. For the sake of the ability of U.S. petroleum companies to operate in the Middle East, and to sustain the U.S. strategic position in the region, the war in Iraq has to be wound up. In Afghanistan similarly, the U.S. establishment has concluded that the war is not worth the risk of a showdown with Pakistan, which would be needed to defeat the Taliban. The Pakistani regime of Pervez Musharraf is already imperiled for domestic reasons and Washington cares much more about Pakistan than it does about Afghanistan.
The U.S. is likely to wind down its operations in Iraq following a political deal with Iraqi and non-Iraqi players that will allow the Americans to save face and to pull out most of their troops. That does not mean that armed struggle over the future shape of Iraq will end, just that the American military occupation will conclude, perhaps with U.S. military bases left behind in the country, and certainly in neighbouring Kuwait.
In Afghanistan, the likeliest outcome is a deal between the Karzai regime, regional warlords, and elements of the Taliban to create a more broadly based government. With this, the American, NATO and Canadian missions in Afghanistan will be transformed and most western troops will go home. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the end of the Western missions will not terminate armed struggle over the future shape of the country.
For the sake of Western pride, the settlements in both wars can be expected to include a few undertakings about human rights, the rights of women in particular, commitments almost certainly not worth the paper they will be written on.
In Afghanistan Bomber McNeil is busy trying to show Afghans that even if they give shelter to the Taliban involuntarily they will be blown to smithereens. Karzai's complaints are ignored.
The military industrial complex is not worried about long term commitments. As long as the Democratic party refuses to force Bush to withdraw nothing will happen. Add to this the fact that many in the US and other administrations want to neutralise Iran's nuclear facilities and so you have a recipe for a renewed attack game. Harper may distance himself from more involvement if he fears the polls enough but otherwise Canada will tag along with the US.
In the longer term there may be some type of accomodation in Afghanistan. However, there are already "reformed" Taliban in the government--and clerics asking for greater use of Sharia law. There are also warlords as a femal member of the legislature pointed out earning suspension as a reward for her forthrightness.
This post is from James Laxer's website. There is a lot of good material there including a great analytical article on NDP strategy.
Endgame in Iraq and Afghanistan
The endgame has begun for American and other western military involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decisions in Washington and London are being taken that will dramatically transform both of these conflicts.
Here are some straws in the wind:
* Today Gordon Brown, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer, replaced Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister. The Scottish politician, who made a famous deal in 1994 not to oppose Tony Blair’s run for the leadership of the Labour Party, now takes charge of Britain’s foreign engagements. The war in Iraq, and to a lesser extent the mission in Afghanistan, has been intensely unpopular with the British people, especially with Labour Party members and supporters.
While Brown endorsed Blair’s support for the U.S. initiated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his priorities as he prepared to take over as Prime Minister have been on domestic policy. Brown is certainly pro-American, but he has no intention of developing a close personal relationship with George W. Bush of the kind that Blair had. Brown knows that to win the next British general election---it must be held by 2010, but Brown could call it as early as the summer of 2008---he must not be labeled “Bush’s New Poodle”. There have been stories in the British media speculating that Brown intends to bring most British troops home from Iraq over the next twelve months. While he is unlikely to castigate Blair’s wars, in which he is also implicated, winding down the mission in Iraq would send a very clear message to the British electorate and to the beleaguered Bush administration in Washington.
* In Washington, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday that was harshly critical of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq. The Senator, who has been a staunch Bush loyalist said: “The costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved….Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”
Lugar told reporters that President Bush had limited time to change the course of the war because of the 2008 presidential campaign.
“We’re heading into a very partisan era,” he said. “The president has the opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy. I don’t think he’ll have that option very long.”
Lugar’s message was abundantly clear even though the White House is publicly ignoring it: it is time to make a deal in Iraq and to start bringing American troops home. When someone like Richard Lugar abandons his support for the Bush stay-the-course strategy in Iraq it means that the American political establishment has reached a consensus that the war has failed and has to be brought to an end.
* A few days ago, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai blasted the U.S. and NATO forces for their indiscriminate killings of civilians and demanded a change in military tactics. Karzai, who has long insisted that a deal needs to be made with the factions of the Taliban that are made up of Afghans as opposed to those tied to Al Qaeda, is as good at reading the tea leaves as anyone else. He knows that Western missions in Afghanistan don’t enjoy much public support in their own countries. He wants a deal, and he wants it soon.
* Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper mused that for Canada to continue its mission in Afghanistan after February 2009, there would have to be a broad political consensus in favour of the refitted mission. Harper knows that Canadians have no appetite for a continuation of their military role in southern Afghanistan beyond February 2009. He’s been on the wrong side of public opinion on the war from day one, which is a major reason his party is stuck with about 33 per cent of voters telling pollsters they would vote Conservative. Harper is softening the message so he can get back on track to the 40 per cent range he needs to win a majority of seats in the next election. If a conservative spear-carrier like Harper has figured out that change is in the wind, it is a sure sign that even those in the lower ranks of decision-making within the Anglo Sphere have been brought into the picture.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been sold to the public as struggles in the world-wide War on Terror and as theatres in the combat between freedom and the enemies of freedom. In fact, both struggles have been imperial wars, launched by Washington, with the support of the coalition of the willing in Iraq and NATO in Afghanistan, to secure control of strategic resources and territory. In both cases, the Bush administration’s strategy has imperiled the U.S. position in the region and in the world. The American political establishment has had enough. For the sake of the ability of U.S. petroleum companies to operate in the Middle East, and to sustain the U.S. strategic position in the region, the war in Iraq has to be wound up. In Afghanistan similarly, the U.S. establishment has concluded that the war is not worth the risk of a showdown with Pakistan, which would be needed to defeat the Taliban. The Pakistani regime of Pervez Musharraf is already imperiled for domestic reasons and Washington cares much more about Pakistan than it does about Afghanistan.
The U.S. is likely to wind down its operations in Iraq following a political deal with Iraqi and non-Iraqi players that will allow the Americans to save face and to pull out most of their troops. That does not mean that armed struggle over the future shape of Iraq will end, just that the American military occupation will conclude, perhaps with U.S. military bases left behind in the country, and certainly in neighbouring Kuwait.
In Afghanistan, the likeliest outcome is a deal between the Karzai regime, regional warlords, and elements of the Taliban to create a more broadly based government. With this, the American, NATO and Canadian missions in Afghanistan will be transformed and most western troops will go home. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the end of the Western missions will not terminate armed struggle over the future shape of the country.
For the sake of Western pride, the settlements in both wars can be expected to include a few undertakings about human rights, the rights of women in particular, commitments almost certainly not worth the paper they will be written on.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
What we never hear about Afghanistan: Bomber McNeill
Lost in all our news stories about Canadian casualties and praise for troops and sanctimonious rhetoric about our lofty purposes is the fact that a new US commander, Dan McNeill(Bomber McNeill) has taken over command of the forces and initiated a new policy of bombarding the Taliban from the air at times even when they take cover in civilian occupied buildings. Of course our news media simply barf up the comments of the NATO commander blaming the Taliban etc. This is not Canadian news but at least it gives Canadians a different slant on the situation in Afghanistan. If this policy continues there will most likely be more not less support for the Taliban.
This change in policy is not just unreported in the American media. As far as I am aware it is certainly under-reported if reported at all in Canadian media. I stand to be corrected.
Published on Monday, July 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan No Coincidence
by Ira Chernus
NATO bombs killed at least 45 civilians in Afghanistan the other day. If you get your news from the front pages of the U.S. mainstream media, you wouldn’t know it. The New York Times did run news from Afghanistan on its front page the next day — a rather ghoulish piece about Muslims refusing to give Taliban suicide bombers a religious burial, because suicide bombing is morally reprehensible. And so it is.
But what about pushing a button in an airplane to drop bombs that fall on people’s homes? Not so reprehensible, apparently. The Times buried its report on the slaughter in Helmand province back on an inside page, as did the Washington Post. The LA Times relegated to a “World in Brief” notice.
If you take the time to read those back-page articles, they all tell you that NATO faces a dilemma: not a moral dilemma — when Westerners kill Afghans, the moral issue does not seem to arise — but a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, “our boys” have to kill Taliban. That’s a given. On the other hand, if we kill too many civilians in the process, we’ll alienate the locals and send them over to the Taliban side. All the mainstream reports agree that the string of recent bombings, killing sizeable numbers of civilians, is already creating a growing problem for NATO’s effort to win hearts and minds.
So what’s a poor NATO commander to do? American General Dan McNeill, who took control of all NATO forces in Afghanistan this spring, seems to have an answer: Bombs away, and let hearts and minds fall where they may. The spike in civilian deaths from NATO bombs is no coincidence. It reflects a major change in strategy, which has gone totally unreported in the American media.
The British public knows about it. Journalists Jason Burke and Robert Fox think it’s a story the Brits need to know, because it could well put the lives of British — as well as American — NATO troops in greater danger. And it will put British — as well as American — tax dollars to work paying for more bombs that kill more innocent civilians.
Senior British officers told these journalists that Gen. McNeill, with too few troops on the ground to hold off the Taliban offensive, plans to rely on massive aerial bombing to do the job. “Bomber McNeill,” the Brits call him bitterly, because they know that his heavy-handed strategy will be counter-productive in the long run. “Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,” a British officer recently returned from southern Afghanistan told Jason Burke. “This could lose the entire south of the country to the Taliban, alienating them permanently from the Karzai government and its international supporters,” Robert Fox adds. “In that case, the future of Hamid Karzai and his nemesis in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, looks dim.”
The British are unhappy because they are losing too — losing control of the Afghan war effort. Before McNeill took command of NATO forces, they were headed by a British General, David Richards. He focused more on economic reconstruction and building good relations with the Afghan people. But the Americans and Karzai criticized him for being too soft. Now they’ve got the tough guy they want in charge.
The British saw it coming long ago. Back in December Robert Fox reported that Karzai had removed Gen. Richards’ local protégé in Helmand, provincial governor Mohammed Daud. British intelligence officers and military commanders “blamed pressure from the CIA. … The Americans knew Daud was a main British ally, yet they deliberately undermined him and told Karzai to sack him.” Gen. Richards had also come in for American criticism as “too political,” Fox added. “The American supreme commander of NATO, General Jim Jones, has let it be known, according to sources, that General Richards ‘would have been sacked if he had been an American officer.’”
Now he’s been sacked. So now our tax dollars, and the Brits’, will be used not to win hearts and minds, but to drop bombs that destroy hearts and minds and lives.
In the U.S., the mainstream media agree that it’s all the fault of those evil Taliban, who attack NATO forces then scurry for cover inside local villages. The Taliban actually want to get more civilians kill, we are told, because it helps turn the locals against NATO and its puppet government in Kabul. It may be true. There is plenty about the Taliban that is reprehensible. It would be tragic if they returned to power.
But “Bomber McNeill” would be the first to tell you that, when you are at war, you use whatever tactics work best. The Taliban are guerilla fighters. Of course they live and hide among the people. Do we expect them to fight only in open fields, far away from villages, where NATO bombers can pick them off effortlessly?
If we want to keep the Taliban out of power, Gen. Richards’ “soft” strategy is the only one that has a chance. Richards and his supporters say that his strategy was working, that the Taliban made few real gains last year. Perhaps the Americans, who call the shots, are afraid of appearing (or feeling) too “soft.” Perhaps they are impatient.
Or perhaps something else is going on, too. This week Robert Fox reported that, in addition to stepped up bombing, “there is also to be a US-led campaign of indiscriminate aerial spraying of poppy fields, triggered by the UN report that last year’s poppy yield was 60 per cent higher than the year before..” But back in December, when Mohammed Daud was sacked, he wrote: “Governor Daud was appointed to replace a man the British accused of involvement in opium trafficking … Mr. Daud, who had survived several Taliban assassination attempts, was seen as a key player in Britain’s anti-drugs campaign in Helmand.” Will the poppy spraying really be “indiscriminate”? The CIA’s notorious record in poppy-growing regions should make us wonder.
Helmand is Afghanistan’s richest opium-producing province. Opium is at the heart of its economy, and its tangled politics. To get just a taste of how tangled, check out this long analysis by “Zmarial,” a resident of Helmand — not necessarily a very objective observer, but an insider who knows how many different interests are playing against, and with, each other in the province.
Though Daud was supposedly a key player in the British anti-drug campaign, this writer notes, “poppy production hit a record level in 2006 while Daud was governor of the province and enjoyed the full support of Britain.” What’s more, he cites one source claiming that “260 million dollars have been exchanged as bribery between locals and governmental officials. This is the figure which is tracked, but the untracked amount is unclear. The survey shows 58% of people who are anti-government are so because of domestic corruption.” All that money goes mainly to cover up and protect the opium trade. Can we really believe that the CIA, so determined to take control from the British in Helmand, is uninvolved?
It’s unlikely that even the best journalist can see the whole picture in Helmand, much less in all of Afghanistan. It’s way too complex. But NATO bombardiers thousands of feet above the ground certainly don’t know anything about the reality of the towns and villages — and human lives — they are destroying. They are just following “Bomber McNeill’s” simplistic “good guys” versus “bad guys” script, which the British find so typically American — with good reason. It’s the only story we are told in our mainstream media.
If we ever have journalists who tell the story in a more complex realistic way, we’ll see that it’s the same old story: the more we take sides in a civil war, the more harm we do, especially when we rely on massive aerial bombing as our main weapon. A heavy-handed U.S. intervention in the 1980s helped to create the Taliban. Now another heavy-handed intervention seems likely to help bring them back to power — and kill countless civilians along the way. All that (and perhaps opium too) paid for with our tax dollars.
And as the Afghans bury their dead, the whole story is buried in the back pages of our newspapers, as if the people our tax dollars killed just didn’t matter very much. While we rightly denounce the immorality of the Taliban, let’s take a moment to look in the mirror.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Email: chernus@colorado.edu
This change in policy is not just unreported in the American media. As far as I am aware it is certainly under-reported if reported at all in Canadian media. I stand to be corrected.
Published on Monday, July 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan No Coincidence
by Ira Chernus
NATO bombs killed at least 45 civilians in Afghanistan the other day. If you get your news from the front pages of the U.S. mainstream media, you wouldn’t know it. The New York Times did run news from Afghanistan on its front page the next day — a rather ghoulish piece about Muslims refusing to give Taliban suicide bombers a religious burial, because suicide bombing is morally reprehensible. And so it is.
But what about pushing a button in an airplane to drop bombs that fall on people’s homes? Not so reprehensible, apparently. The Times buried its report on the slaughter in Helmand province back on an inside page, as did the Washington Post. The LA Times relegated to a “World in Brief” notice.
If you take the time to read those back-page articles, they all tell you that NATO faces a dilemma: not a moral dilemma — when Westerners kill Afghans, the moral issue does not seem to arise — but a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, “our boys” have to kill Taliban. That’s a given. On the other hand, if we kill too many civilians in the process, we’ll alienate the locals and send them over to the Taliban side. All the mainstream reports agree that the string of recent bombings, killing sizeable numbers of civilians, is already creating a growing problem for NATO’s effort to win hearts and minds.
So what’s a poor NATO commander to do? American General Dan McNeill, who took control of all NATO forces in Afghanistan this spring, seems to have an answer: Bombs away, and let hearts and minds fall where they may. The spike in civilian deaths from NATO bombs is no coincidence. It reflects a major change in strategy, which has gone totally unreported in the American media.
The British public knows about it. Journalists Jason Burke and Robert Fox think it’s a story the Brits need to know, because it could well put the lives of British — as well as American — NATO troops in greater danger. And it will put British — as well as American — tax dollars to work paying for more bombs that kill more innocent civilians.
Senior British officers told these journalists that Gen. McNeill, with too few troops on the ground to hold off the Taliban offensive, plans to rely on massive aerial bombing to do the job. “Bomber McNeill,” the Brits call him bitterly, because they know that his heavy-handed strategy will be counter-productive in the long run. “Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,” a British officer recently returned from southern Afghanistan told Jason Burke. “This could lose the entire south of the country to the Taliban, alienating them permanently from the Karzai government and its international supporters,” Robert Fox adds. “In that case, the future of Hamid Karzai and his nemesis in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, looks dim.”
The British are unhappy because they are losing too — losing control of the Afghan war effort. Before McNeill took command of NATO forces, they were headed by a British General, David Richards. He focused more on economic reconstruction and building good relations with the Afghan people. But the Americans and Karzai criticized him for being too soft. Now they’ve got the tough guy they want in charge.
The British saw it coming long ago. Back in December Robert Fox reported that Karzai had removed Gen. Richards’ local protégé in Helmand, provincial governor Mohammed Daud. British intelligence officers and military commanders “blamed pressure from the CIA. … The Americans knew Daud was a main British ally, yet they deliberately undermined him and told Karzai to sack him.” Gen. Richards had also come in for American criticism as “too political,” Fox added. “The American supreme commander of NATO, General Jim Jones, has let it be known, according to sources, that General Richards ‘would have been sacked if he had been an American officer.’”
Now he’s been sacked. So now our tax dollars, and the Brits’, will be used not to win hearts and minds, but to drop bombs that destroy hearts and minds and lives.
In the U.S., the mainstream media agree that it’s all the fault of those evil Taliban, who attack NATO forces then scurry for cover inside local villages. The Taliban actually want to get more civilians kill, we are told, because it helps turn the locals against NATO and its puppet government in Kabul. It may be true. There is plenty about the Taliban that is reprehensible. It would be tragic if they returned to power.
But “Bomber McNeill” would be the first to tell you that, when you are at war, you use whatever tactics work best. The Taliban are guerilla fighters. Of course they live and hide among the people. Do we expect them to fight only in open fields, far away from villages, where NATO bombers can pick them off effortlessly?
If we want to keep the Taliban out of power, Gen. Richards’ “soft” strategy is the only one that has a chance. Richards and his supporters say that his strategy was working, that the Taliban made few real gains last year. Perhaps the Americans, who call the shots, are afraid of appearing (or feeling) too “soft.” Perhaps they are impatient.
Or perhaps something else is going on, too. This week Robert Fox reported that, in addition to stepped up bombing, “there is also to be a US-led campaign of indiscriminate aerial spraying of poppy fields, triggered by the UN report that last year’s poppy yield was 60 per cent higher than the year before..” But back in December, when Mohammed Daud was sacked, he wrote: “Governor Daud was appointed to replace a man the British accused of involvement in opium trafficking … Mr. Daud, who had survived several Taliban assassination attempts, was seen as a key player in Britain’s anti-drugs campaign in Helmand.” Will the poppy spraying really be “indiscriminate”? The CIA’s notorious record in poppy-growing regions should make us wonder.
Helmand is Afghanistan’s richest opium-producing province. Opium is at the heart of its economy, and its tangled politics. To get just a taste of how tangled, check out this long analysis by “Zmarial,” a resident of Helmand — not necessarily a very objective observer, but an insider who knows how many different interests are playing against, and with, each other in the province.
Though Daud was supposedly a key player in the British anti-drug campaign, this writer notes, “poppy production hit a record level in 2006 while Daud was governor of the province and enjoyed the full support of Britain.” What’s more, he cites one source claiming that “260 million dollars have been exchanged as bribery between locals and governmental officials. This is the figure which is tracked, but the untracked amount is unclear. The survey shows 58% of people who are anti-government are so because of domestic corruption.” All that money goes mainly to cover up and protect the opium trade. Can we really believe that the CIA, so determined to take control from the British in Helmand, is uninvolved?
It’s unlikely that even the best journalist can see the whole picture in Helmand, much less in all of Afghanistan. It’s way too complex. But NATO bombardiers thousands of feet above the ground certainly don’t know anything about the reality of the towns and villages — and human lives — they are destroying. They are just following “Bomber McNeill’s” simplistic “good guys” versus “bad guys” script, which the British find so typically American — with good reason. It’s the only story we are told in our mainstream media.
If we ever have journalists who tell the story in a more complex realistic way, we’ll see that it’s the same old story: the more we take sides in a civil war, the more harm we do, especially when we rely on massive aerial bombing as our main weapon. A heavy-handed U.S. intervention in the 1980s helped to create the Taliban. Now another heavy-handed intervention seems likely to help bring them back to power — and kill countless civilians along the way. All that (and perhaps opium too) paid for with our tax dollars.
And as the Afghans bury their dead, the whole story is buried in the back pages of our newspapers, as if the people our tax dollars killed just didn’t matter very much. While we rightly denounce the immorality of the Taliban, let’s take a moment to look in the mirror.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Email: chernus@colorado.edu
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Afghanistan: The Dept. for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice
A little less than a year ago this progressive step towards democracy was taken in Afghanistan to lure the fundamentalists into supporting the Karzai government.
Of course this did not lead the western occupiers to cut off aid or indeed do anything but grumble a bit and carry on with building the new free and democratic Afghanistan. Of course these departments are also found in other countries such as Saudi Arabia another shining example of democracy, freedom and human rights.
The Return of Afghanistan's Vice Squad?
Thursday, Jul. 20, 2006 By RACHEL MORARJEE/KABUL Under the Taliban, officials from the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue struck fear into women's hearts, beating those who let a glimpse of wrist or ankle peek out from beneath their burqas. The hated religious police were disbanded when the hard-line Islamic regime fell in 2001. But President Hamid Karzai is planning to resurrect them, much to the alarm of human rights groups, parliamentarians and Western diplomats.
During the Taliban's reign, the religious police would beat women who were seen on the street without a male relative — an impossible demand to meet for the millions of women widowed by the civil war — and would thrash men who did not pray five times a day or keep their beard at the proper length. Afghan officials have said the new department — which was approved by the cabinet last month and is pending approval by parliament — would be a kinder, softer version of its Taliban predecessor and would not enforce such harsh penalties for moral transgressions. Instead, the organization would mirror those in other Islamic countries that aim to "promote morality in society," Presidential spokesman Mohammad Karim Rahimi said.
However, many fear it could open the door for conservative clerics to abuse women and ethnic minorities and to quash free speech using loose definitions of virtue. Hard-liner clerics have been flexing their muscles in recent months. In March, an Afghan man charged with converting from Islam to Christianity was forced to flee the country after he faced a possible death penalty in the Afghan court system. Sam Zia Zarifi, director of research of the Asia division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, warns that the new vice and virtue cops could be "an instrument for politically oppressing critical voices and vulnerable groups under the guise of protecting poorly defined ideas of virtue." Zarifi said this would be especially true of women, who often find their basic human rights infringed in Afghanistan under the cover of morality.
Indeed, it remains murky what the department's powers would be, and where the money would come from to fund its workings. Nematullah Shahrani, the minister of Haj and Religious offices, has said it would focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption, but those issues are already addressed by the country's criminal laws.
Many in the country's fledgling parliament are also up in arms and say President Karzai has resurrected the department to placate conservative mujahedin warlords and fundamentalist clerics. With a violent insurgency in the south and riots in Kabul highlighting the government's unpopularity, Karzai is seeking to shore up his support base by courting conservative Islamists. Most girls' schools have already closed in the south and southeast under spiraling threats, and groups like Human Rights Watch are concerned that policing public morals could divert attention from the bigger battle to stem unrest in the volatile southern provinces.
Shukria Barakzai, a Member of Parliament and analyst, said the new department is a "symbol of the past" and worries that even if it is staffed by competent people, it would be difficult to monitor in coming years. "The president could appoint people who are good today, but what about tomorrow?" she said. "It could be the same as the Taliban, and allow people to deliver violence against women, against freedom of speech."
Of course this did not lead the western occupiers to cut off aid or indeed do anything but grumble a bit and carry on with building the new free and democratic Afghanistan. Of course these departments are also found in other countries such as Saudi Arabia another shining example of democracy, freedom and human rights.
The Return of Afghanistan's Vice Squad?
Thursday, Jul. 20, 2006 By RACHEL MORARJEE/KABUL Under the Taliban, officials from the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue struck fear into women's hearts, beating those who let a glimpse of wrist or ankle peek out from beneath their burqas. The hated religious police were disbanded when the hard-line Islamic regime fell in 2001. But President Hamid Karzai is planning to resurrect them, much to the alarm of human rights groups, parliamentarians and Western diplomats.
During the Taliban's reign, the religious police would beat women who were seen on the street without a male relative — an impossible demand to meet for the millions of women widowed by the civil war — and would thrash men who did not pray five times a day or keep their beard at the proper length. Afghan officials have said the new department — which was approved by the cabinet last month and is pending approval by parliament — would be a kinder, softer version of its Taliban predecessor and would not enforce such harsh penalties for moral transgressions. Instead, the organization would mirror those in other Islamic countries that aim to "promote morality in society," Presidential spokesman Mohammad Karim Rahimi said.
However, many fear it could open the door for conservative clerics to abuse women and ethnic minorities and to quash free speech using loose definitions of virtue. Hard-liner clerics have been flexing their muscles in recent months. In March, an Afghan man charged with converting from Islam to Christianity was forced to flee the country after he faced a possible death penalty in the Afghan court system. Sam Zia Zarifi, director of research of the Asia division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, warns that the new vice and virtue cops could be "an instrument for politically oppressing critical voices and vulnerable groups under the guise of protecting poorly defined ideas of virtue." Zarifi said this would be especially true of women, who often find their basic human rights infringed in Afghanistan under the cover of morality.
Indeed, it remains murky what the department's powers would be, and where the money would come from to fund its workings. Nematullah Shahrani, the minister of Haj and Religious offices, has said it would focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption, but those issues are already addressed by the country's criminal laws.
Many in the country's fledgling parliament are also up in arms and say President Karzai has resurrected the department to placate conservative mujahedin warlords and fundamentalist clerics. With a violent insurgency in the south and riots in Kabul highlighting the government's unpopularity, Karzai is seeking to shore up his support base by courting conservative Islamists. Most girls' schools have already closed in the south and southeast under spiraling threats, and groups like Human Rights Watch are concerned that policing public morals could divert attention from the bigger battle to stem unrest in the volatile southern provinces.
Shukria Barakzai, a Member of Parliament and analyst, said the new department is a "symbol of the past" and worries that even if it is staffed by competent people, it would be difficult to monitor in coming years. "The president could appoint people who are good today, but what about tomorrow?" she said. "It could be the same as the Taliban, and allow people to deliver violence against women, against freedom of speech."
Abdul Rahman and the rule of law in Afghanistan
A longer entry on Rahman is at Wikipedia. Although a limited religious freedom is granted by the Afghan constitution in this case the courts applied a type of Sharia law that demands the death penalty for apostasy. That this type of law is obviously at loggerheads with anything one might consider as falling under the rubric Canadian values one wonders why we are defending such a law. This is the sort of law that the Taliban could applaud. Officials who blather on about democracy and the rule of law of course ignore these matters. Recognising them might cause cognitive dissonance.
Abdul Rahman (Persian: عبدالرØمن) (born 1965) is an Afghan citizen who was arrested in February 2006 and threatened with the death penalty for Apostasy from Islam when he converted to Christianity. [2] On March 26, 2006, under heavy pressure from foreign governments, the court returned his case to prosecutors, citing "investigative gaps."[3] He was released from prison to his family on the night of March 27.[4] On March 29, Abdul Rahman arrived in Italy after the Italian government offered him asylum.[5]
Abdul Rahman's arrest and trial brought international attention to an apparent contradiction in the Constitution of Afghanistan, which recognizes both a limited form of freedom of religion and the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which mandates the death penalty for an apostate. The case attracted widespread international condemnation, notably from the United Kingdom and the United States, both of whom led the campaign to remove the fundamentalist Taliban regime in 2001 and are the main donors to Afghanistan.[6]
[edit] Arrest and trial
In February 2006, after a custody dispute concerning Abdul Rahman's daughters, members of his family reported him to the police.[12] He was arrested after police discovered that he possessed a Bible.[13]
Legal experts say Abdul Rahman's case existed because of contradictory laws in the Afghan Constitution recognizing both freedom of religion and the Hanafi school of sharia law. Article 130 of the Constitution of Afghanistan enables prosecutors to charge him for apostasy "in accordance with the Hanafi jurisprudence." The text of the article says:
In cases under consideration, the courts shall apply provisions of this Constitution as well as other laws. If there is no provision in the Constitution or other laws about a case, the courts shall, in pursuance of Hanafi jurisprudence, and, within the limits set by this Constitution, rule in a way that attains justice in the best manner.[14]
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty for Abdul Rahman, calling him a "microbe."[12] Prosecutor Abdul Wasi demanded his repentance and called him a traitor: "He should be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society and should be killed." The Afghan Attorney General was quoted as saying that Abdul Rahman should be hanged.[15]
Afghan judge Ansarullah Mawlawizadah holds the Bible found with Abdul Rahman.Abdul Rahman's judicial proceedings, which began on March 16 and became widely known in the international press on March 19, were overseen by three judges in the public security tribunal of Kabul's primary court. Ansarullah Mawlawizadah, the chief judge in the case, said that Abdul Rahman would be asked to reconsider his conversion: "We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him." [16]
Ansarullah Mawlafizada also said "the Prophet Muhammad has said several times that those who convert from Islam should be killed if they refuse to come back, Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told him if he regrets what he did, then we will forgive him".[17]
The judge added more: "If [he] does not repent, you will all be witness to the sort of punishment he will face."[18]
When facing a possible death sentence, Abdul Rahman held firm to his convictions: "They want to sentence me to death and I accept it… I am a Christian, which means I believe in the Trinity… I believe in Jesus Christ." [19]
After his arrest, authorities barred attempts by the Associated Press news agency to see him, and he was unable to find a lawyer in Kabul willing to represent him.[8]
Abdul Rahman (Persian: عبدالرØمن) (born 1965) is an Afghan citizen who was arrested in February 2006 and threatened with the death penalty for Apostasy from Islam when he converted to Christianity. [2] On March 26, 2006, under heavy pressure from foreign governments, the court returned his case to prosecutors, citing "investigative gaps."[3] He was released from prison to his family on the night of March 27.[4] On March 29, Abdul Rahman arrived in Italy after the Italian government offered him asylum.[5]
Abdul Rahman's arrest and trial brought international attention to an apparent contradiction in the Constitution of Afghanistan, which recognizes both a limited form of freedom of religion and the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which mandates the death penalty for an apostate. The case attracted widespread international condemnation, notably from the United Kingdom and the United States, both of whom led the campaign to remove the fundamentalist Taliban regime in 2001 and are the main donors to Afghanistan.[6]
[edit] Arrest and trial
In February 2006, after a custody dispute concerning Abdul Rahman's daughters, members of his family reported him to the police.[12] He was arrested after police discovered that he possessed a Bible.[13]
Legal experts say Abdul Rahman's case existed because of contradictory laws in the Afghan Constitution recognizing both freedom of religion and the Hanafi school of sharia law. Article 130 of the Constitution of Afghanistan enables prosecutors to charge him for apostasy "in accordance with the Hanafi jurisprudence." The text of the article says:
In cases under consideration, the courts shall apply provisions of this Constitution as well as other laws. If there is no provision in the Constitution or other laws about a case, the courts shall, in pursuance of Hanafi jurisprudence, and, within the limits set by this Constitution, rule in a way that attains justice in the best manner.[14]
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty for Abdul Rahman, calling him a "microbe."[12] Prosecutor Abdul Wasi demanded his repentance and called him a traitor: "He should be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society and should be killed." The Afghan Attorney General was quoted as saying that Abdul Rahman should be hanged.[15]
Afghan judge Ansarullah Mawlawizadah holds the Bible found with Abdul Rahman.Abdul Rahman's judicial proceedings, which began on March 16 and became widely known in the international press on March 19, were overseen by three judges in the public security tribunal of Kabul's primary court. Ansarullah Mawlawizadah, the chief judge in the case, said that Abdul Rahman would be asked to reconsider his conversion: "We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him." [16]
Ansarullah Mawlafizada also said "the Prophet Muhammad has said several times that those who convert from Islam should be killed if they refuse to come back, Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told him if he regrets what he did, then we will forgive him".[17]
The judge added more: "If [he] does not repent, you will all be witness to the sort of punishment he will face."[18]
When facing a possible death sentence, Abdul Rahman held firm to his convictions: "They want to sentence me to death and I accept it… I am a Christian, which means I believe in the Trinity… I believe in Jesus Christ." [19]
After his arrest, authorities barred attempts by the Associated Press news agency to see him, and he was unable to find a lawyer in Kabul willing to represent him.[8]
Dewmonstrations Against Suspension of Female Legislator
Parliament's rules prohibit legislators from criticising one another! What sort of idiotic rule is that! If Canada's legislators were suspended each time they criticised another legislator then parliament would be empty!
New protest against suspension of Afghan female MP
May 30, 2007
KABUL -- About 300 people marched through the Afghan capital Kabul Wednesday in the latest in a series of countrywide demonstrations against parliament's removal this month of an outspoken woman legislator.
Men and women, a handful of them hidden beneath blue burqas, shouted slogans in support of Malalai Joya and praised her criticism of fellow MPs who played a role in the 1992-96 civil war that left 80,000 dead in Kabul alone.
Marchers chanted "Down with fundamentalists, down with criminals who are in parliament" as they marched past offices of the United Nations and government ministries.
"She is the only person who is fighting against the warlords - these people who had killed Afghan people during their war," said one protestor, a bearded and elderly farmer named Shah Hussein, from the southern province of Kandahar.
The lower house of parliament suspended Joya, 28, May 21 until parliament is dissolved before the 2010 parliamentary elections after she was shown in a television interview comparing parliament to a stable.
Human Rights Watch said days later that while parliament's rules forbid lawmakers from criticizing one another, MPs had regularly done so without anyone else having been suspended.
Many seats of the parliament elected in 2005 are filled by former heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance accused of rights abuses and war crimes in the subsequent civil war. They are still powerful.
"Some people in parliament are against peace in Afghanistan," said a young teacher, Aria Ahmad. "She says things as they are."
A declaration distributed by organizers of the march said that parliament's "unjust action" had caused "nationwide anger."
Joya, who was elected in her home province of Farah in the 2005 parliamentary polls, was "the rightful representative of her people and no person or organization has the right to suspend her," it said.
There have been a series of small demonstrations in support of Joya in a handful of towns across the country.
New protest against suspension of Afghan female MP
May 30, 2007
KABUL -- About 300 people marched through the Afghan capital Kabul Wednesday in the latest in a series of countrywide demonstrations against parliament's removal this month of an outspoken woman legislator.
Men and women, a handful of them hidden beneath blue burqas, shouted slogans in support of Malalai Joya and praised her criticism of fellow MPs who played a role in the 1992-96 civil war that left 80,000 dead in Kabul alone.
Marchers chanted "Down with fundamentalists, down with criminals who are in parliament" as they marched past offices of the United Nations and government ministries.
"She is the only person who is fighting against the warlords - these people who had killed Afghan people during their war," said one protestor, a bearded and elderly farmer named Shah Hussein, from the southern province of Kandahar.
The lower house of parliament suspended Joya, 28, May 21 until parliament is dissolved before the 2010 parliamentary elections after she was shown in a television interview comparing parliament to a stable.
Human Rights Watch said days later that while parliament's rules forbid lawmakers from criticizing one another, MPs had regularly done so without anyone else having been suspended.
Many seats of the parliament elected in 2005 are filled by former heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance accused of rights abuses and war crimes in the subsequent civil war. They are still powerful.
"Some people in parliament are against peace in Afghanistan," said a young teacher, Aria Ahmad. "She says things as they are."
A declaration distributed by organizers of the march said that parliament's "unjust action" had caused "nationwide anger."
Joya, who was elected in her home province of Farah in the 2005 parliamentary polls, was "the rightful representative of her people and no person or organization has the right to suspend her," it said.
There have been a series of small demonstrations in support of Joya in a handful of towns across the country.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Wars (usually) do not have noble meaning
Not surprisingly the author does not include the Second World War, the one that the US only joined after being attacked at Pearl Harbour. I think that each war has to be judged on the specific facts but certainly I agree with the author about the Afghanistan war. Although the Taliban had many faults and did serve as host for Al Qaeda operatives this did not justify the invasion and overthrow of their government and in effect allowing some of the very worst warlords to share in the victory.
Living the lie that wars have noble meaning
There is no good reason for Canada to be involved in Afghanistan or in support of the American war for world domination.
>by Jerry West
April 13, 2007
Two pieces of news this past week on the war front: The Prime Minister went to France to celebrate the butchery at Vimy Ridge, and eight more Canadian soldiers had their lives needlessly wasted supporting the Americans in the Afghanistan theatre of their war for global domination.
Some people call the battle at Vimy the birth of Canada as a nation. Mr. Harper called it “a coming of age.” To celebrate such a bloody engagement in a terrible war that Canada should have never got involved in as the birth of the nation is obscene, particularly for a country that has made a point of being known as a nation that believes in peace.
Bloody battles like Vimy in wars like the First World War that had no justification for being fought save greed and pride, are measures of failure, not something to be proud of. And, if Vimy represents a coming of age, our foolish foray into Afghanistan to please the Americans shows that aged or not, we haven't learned much yet.
What is really obscene in the celebration of battles and commemorations for the dead is the lie that these things have noble meaning, that it is the price of freedom and democracy. With limited exceptions that is pure BS. With few exceptions not many soldiers have died fighting for freedom and democracy except in their delusion. On the other hand many protesters and revolutionaries have.
It is sad that Canada lost over 60,000 soldiers on the killing fields of the First World War. They should be remembered, not as champions of freedom, but as victims of a system that used them and abused them. And, when we remember those who were so wantonly sacrificed, we should revile and spit upon the memory of those politicians who sent them there.
The patriotic card is popular with politicians, and from an early age, society conditions most of us to respond well to it. And what is better for playing on patriotic sympathies than historic battles inflated to mythical, even religious, proportions, except maybe a few current deaths now and then in some mission like Afghanistan?
In the past week the Prime Minister got both: photo ops at Vimy and a few more casualties outside of Kandahar. Premier Gordon Campbell even jumped on the Vimy bandwagon proclaiming April 9 as Vimy Ridge Day in BC.
Dead soldiers are bad news for the soldiers, their friends and their families. But they can be good news for a government as long as people believe they are dying for a just cause and the resulting patriotic anger moves in the government's favour.
And deaths add to another justification, one almost as phony as the fighting for freedom one; the one that says we can't quit now, it would betray those who have fallen. It would dishonour their memory, it would BS, BS and more BS. In other words, it doesn't matter if we are right or wrong, if we are winning or losing, the more who die, the more we have to stick with it. By such idiocy, the lives of soldiers are foolishly wasted.
To date 53 Canadians have been sacrificed in Afghanistan, their lives squandered by the people who sent them and keep them there. One wonders how many it will take before the patriotism wears off and Canadians demand an end to our role as spear carriers for the Americans, as IED fodder. Perhaps the Prime Minister owes his soldiers and the country his thoughts on exactly how many deaths the Afghan mission is worth. It's to be hoped not as many as the more than 11,000 who died in vain at Vimy Ridge.
The American war for global domination is in trouble. The situation in Iraq gets worse every week and the U.S. military is stretched to the breaking point. The recruiting age limit has been raised, recruit standards have been lowered, and people who thought they had completed their service obligation are being kept active and headed back to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, too, is no prize with insurgents in control of large parts of the country, a corrupt and despised puppet government, and Pakistan next door playing both sides of the street. Oh, and did we mention a growing drug trade?
There is no good reason for Canada to be involved in Afghanistan or in support of the American war for world domination. No reason if we stand for democracy and human rights as military occupation of the country and the ongoing civil war only delay their development. Plenty of reason though if we want Canadian industries to profit from war expenditures.
All of the myth making, commemorations and dead soldiers are no good reason to be there, despite what Mr. Harper and others would have us believe. Instead it is time to really come of age and see the past for what it was and the present for what it is.
Involvement in the First World War and Afghanistan, like in most wars, were and are mistakes.
Jerry West is the editor of The Record, an independent, progressive newspaper published every other Wednesday in Gold River, British Columbia. His columns regularly appear in rabble.ca.
Living the lie that wars have noble meaning
There is no good reason for Canada to be involved in Afghanistan or in support of the American war for world domination.
>by Jerry West
April 13, 2007
Two pieces of news this past week on the war front: The Prime Minister went to France to celebrate the butchery at Vimy Ridge, and eight more Canadian soldiers had their lives needlessly wasted supporting the Americans in the Afghanistan theatre of their war for global domination.
Some people call the battle at Vimy the birth of Canada as a nation. Mr. Harper called it “a coming of age.” To celebrate such a bloody engagement in a terrible war that Canada should have never got involved in as the birth of the nation is obscene, particularly for a country that has made a point of being known as a nation that believes in peace.
Bloody battles like Vimy in wars like the First World War that had no justification for being fought save greed and pride, are measures of failure, not something to be proud of. And, if Vimy represents a coming of age, our foolish foray into Afghanistan to please the Americans shows that aged or not, we haven't learned much yet.
What is really obscene in the celebration of battles and commemorations for the dead is the lie that these things have noble meaning, that it is the price of freedom and democracy. With limited exceptions that is pure BS. With few exceptions not many soldiers have died fighting for freedom and democracy except in their delusion. On the other hand many protesters and revolutionaries have.
It is sad that Canada lost over 60,000 soldiers on the killing fields of the First World War. They should be remembered, not as champions of freedom, but as victims of a system that used them and abused them. And, when we remember those who were so wantonly sacrificed, we should revile and spit upon the memory of those politicians who sent them there.
The patriotic card is popular with politicians, and from an early age, society conditions most of us to respond well to it. And what is better for playing on patriotic sympathies than historic battles inflated to mythical, even religious, proportions, except maybe a few current deaths now and then in some mission like Afghanistan?
In the past week the Prime Minister got both: photo ops at Vimy and a few more casualties outside of Kandahar. Premier Gordon Campbell even jumped on the Vimy bandwagon proclaiming April 9 as Vimy Ridge Day in BC.
Dead soldiers are bad news for the soldiers, their friends and their families. But they can be good news for a government as long as people believe they are dying for a just cause and the resulting patriotic anger moves in the government's favour.
And deaths add to another justification, one almost as phony as the fighting for freedom one; the one that says we can't quit now, it would betray those who have fallen. It would dishonour their memory, it would BS, BS and more BS. In other words, it doesn't matter if we are right or wrong, if we are winning or losing, the more who die, the more we have to stick with it. By such idiocy, the lives of soldiers are foolishly wasted.
To date 53 Canadians have been sacrificed in Afghanistan, their lives squandered by the people who sent them and keep them there. One wonders how many it will take before the patriotism wears off and Canadians demand an end to our role as spear carriers for the Americans, as IED fodder. Perhaps the Prime Minister owes his soldiers and the country his thoughts on exactly how many deaths the Afghan mission is worth. It's to be hoped not as many as the more than 11,000 who died in vain at Vimy Ridge.
The American war for global domination is in trouble. The situation in Iraq gets worse every week and the U.S. military is stretched to the breaking point. The recruiting age limit has been raised, recruit standards have been lowered, and people who thought they had completed their service obligation are being kept active and headed back to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, too, is no prize with insurgents in control of large parts of the country, a corrupt and despised puppet government, and Pakistan next door playing both sides of the street. Oh, and did we mention a growing drug trade?
There is no good reason for Canada to be involved in Afghanistan or in support of the American war for world domination. No reason if we stand for democracy and human rights as military occupation of the country and the ongoing civil war only delay their development. Plenty of reason though if we want Canadian industries to profit from war expenditures.
All of the myth making, commemorations and dead soldiers are no good reason to be there, despite what Mr. Harper and others would have us believe. Instead it is time to really come of age and see the past for what it was and the present for what it is.
Involvement in the First World War and Afghanistan, like in most wars, were and are mistakes.
Jerry West is the editor of The Record, an independent, progressive newspaper published every other Wednesday in Gold River, British Columbia. His columns regularly appear in rabble.ca.
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