Another look at Afghanistan

[morgan_dhu]

As Canadians consider whether we want to extend our involvement in the NATO military mission in Afghanistan for another two years, and possibly longer, it may be instructive for us to consider the words of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) on just what's happening with the mission so many of us think is all about restoring peace, security and democracy to Afghanistan. In a communique entitled "The US and Her Fundamentalist Stooges are the Main Human Rights Violators in Afghanistan," issued December 10, 2007 (Universal Human Rights Day), RAWA states, among other things, that:

After about seven years, there is no peace, human rights, democracy and reconstruction in Afghanistan. On the contrary, the destitution and suffering of our people has doubled everyday. Our people, and even our unfortunate children, fall victim to the Jehadis’ infighting (Baghlan incident), the Taliban’s untargeted blasts and the US/NATO’s non-stop bombardments. The Northern Alliance blood-suckers, who are part of Karzai’s team and have key government posts, continue to be the main and the most serious obstacle towards the establishment of peace and democracy in Afghanistan. The existence of tens of illegal private security companies run by these mafia bands are enough to realize their sinister intentions and the danger they pose.

Human rights violations, crime, and corruption have reached their peak, so much so that Mr. Karzai is forced to make friendly pleas to the ministers and members of the parliament, asking them to “keep some limits”! Accusations about women being raped in prisons were so numerous that even a pro-warlord woman in the parliament had no choice but to acknowledge them.

Of course, RAWA spent years trying to get the world to pay attention to what the Taliban was doing to the Afghan people, particularly the women, and no one really thought anything about it until Americans were attacked by some people, primarily Saudi Arabians, who had some tenuous connections with the Taliban. At which time the West responded by bombing the Afghan people, who couldn't even be "bombed into the stone age" because decades of invasions and civil collapse had already done that for them - and claiming that it wasn't just revenge, it was for women's rights. Remember all those pretty speeches about schools for girls and getting rid of burqas?

So I'm thinking that no one's going to pay much attention now when RAWA tries to tell us that we're doing exactly the same thing that the Taliban, and the warlords, and the Russians, were doing before. Because it's never really about the people, especially the women, and what they think, need or want.

Comments

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of an anecdote about Frederick Douglass. When someone pointed out that white people were fighting the American Civil War (1861-1865) to preserve the union rather than to free the Negro, he replied that the white people could fight for their cause, while the black people fought for their cause.

Now, what is the story over there in Canada? First, the Canadian government says that it will pull out of Afghanistan unless NATO coughs up more troops. Our Prime Minister told the canadian Prime Minister that he will provide them. (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080214/canada/canada_afghanistan_autralia_military) Apparently, though, this is not good enough.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Setting aside all questions of whether we (Canadians, Westerners, NATO, etc.) should be there or are actually doing any real good there, the problem Harper faces is that the Afghanistan mission is not popular in Canada and there is an election in the air.

On those other pesky questions, I know something has to be done in Afghanistan, and I think that the developed nations bear some responsibility for making it happen because over the past 30 years we (and thanks to the shifts of international politics, that we now supposedly includes russia) have either done things directly to totally destabilise Afghanistan, or sat by while others did. Or both.

I'm just not sure what should be done, or who should be doing it, in order to make some sort of success in getting a country that's almost been destroyed back in some kind of working order. I do believe that the West should be paying for it, but I'm not sure the West should be carrying it out - whatever it is.

I do suspect that what we're doing isn't working very well. I think part of the problem is that not much has been done to deal with Pakistan, which is where much of the Taliban strength seems to be based. I have no idea what's going to happen in Monday's election - the People's Party is supposedly polling ahead of all the others, but what happens if the military and/or the fundamentalists don't like the election results? As I write this, there's just been an explosion near the People's Party offices.

I don't know the politics well enough to know - but I don't trust most of the people who are currently running the show to actually care whether Afghanistan is rebuilt in the way that is best for its own people.

So I think it's important to listen to what those people are saying about what thye think of what we're doing. This is one of those voices.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

What election? There was an election in Canada back in 2006. The next one shouldn't be due until 2009.

Afghanistan isn't at the forefront of the public's mind here, despite the recent casualties. Just last week we had to rush troops to East Timor again.

Our nation building efforts there are not working either, so no one is expecting much from Afghanistan, after all the fighting there during the 19th century.

Islamic fundamentalists do not like election results in general. Elections push the idea that government comes from the people rather than from God. Elections are therefore immoral.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

What election? There was an election in Canada back in 2006. The next one shouldn't be due until 2009.

The last election ended in a minority government. Historically, minority governments only last about two years in Canada, sometimes less.

The Conservatives seem to want an election now, probably because with the U.S. already in a recession, our economy will start to head into the toilet sometime this year, and they don't want to have to call an election during a recession, because the incumbent governemnt rarely wins an election in hard times.

Some of the Liberals also want an election, and the indications are that the Party Leader is one of them.

What's funny is that the Conservatives recently passed an electoral reform law that no longer allows the Prime Minister to dissolve Parliament and call an election at a time of his choosing - now we're supposed to have elections every four years, unless the governemnt falls on a no confidence motion.

So the government is trying very hard to force the Opposition defeat them on a confidence motion. It's led to some hilarious moves of late. For instance, the Government brought in a motion - and made it a confidence motion - censuring the Senate for not immediately passing the government's crime bill (alreeady passed through the House of commons) even though (1) the Senate does not answer to the House of Commons (2) the crime bill has not been in the Senate for any longer than any other bill normally is and (3) the bill is flawed, and the Senate is performing its constitutional responsibility as the chambre of "sober second thought."

Obviously the government hoped that the House would fall on this motion and they would be able to paint the Liberals as "soft on crime," crime being a major issue here these days. The Liberals instead rose and walked out of the House when the vote was called, which was fun. Obviously the motion passed, but as the Senate is not answerable to the House, it's meaningless.

So right now we're watching our politicians play a peculiar game of "chicken" as each party tries to figure out which issue it's best to bring down the house on, for them anyway, with of course the caveat that anything could change if the polls shift and someone decides that an election right now is too dangerous.

Sometimes politics is the best show in town.

[(Anonymous)]

We are in that strange inter-regnum where a new government has been elected and the new lower house has taken their seats but the Senate does not change until 1 July, bringing back all the old problems of one party controlling the lower house and another the upper. So there is thought once again to fixing the terms. The Senate here has three months to pass any bill - but failure to do so can only lead to a double dissolution which is just not going to happen. (Can this happen in Canada?)

So there is once again interest in the idea of fixing terms - which will require a constitutional change. This is normally popular because elections are unpopular. If however, the idea is not working in Canada then that will cause a re-think here.

I take it that the polls in Canada favour the Conservatives at the moment.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

The defeat of a bill in our Senate does not affect the standing of the House because our Senate is appointed and thus confidence votes are not allowed.

The polls slightly favour the Conservatives - the gap is anywhere from five to ten points on any given day. But the numbers aren't high enough to suggest they would gain a majority. However, Harper (Conservative leader and PM) does consistently out-poll Dion (Liberal leader) as best person for PM. Like I said, it's crazy time here.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Our nation building efforts there are not working either, so no one is expecting much from Afghanistan, after all the fighting there during the 19th century.

The situation in Canada is that we still have this notion that if we're sending troops somewhere, it should be for something "good." (Mind you, I have the same opinion myself, but the general population is in general a bit more sentimental and naive about the whole thing.) If the populace becomes firmly convinced that what we're doing in Afghanistan is not doing "good" then any government trying to extend the mission further is going to have big problems.

On the other hand, if they can be convinced that we really are saving the Afghan people, whoever is in government will probably be OK with keeping troops there for at least another two years.

Me, I just wish I knew what might have some actual positive and lasting effect.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

Oh. After the China War, Boer War, Egyptian Rebellion etc, we don't require too much "good". Australians are generally scornful of idealism. On the other hand, we are wary of using force when the consequences are unclear. The world's largest Muslim country is right next door after all.

When Kevin Rudd tells your PM that we are in for the "long haul", he means a lot longer than two years.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's going to take much longer than two years to do anything in Afghanistan - but the big question for me is what do "we" actually want to do (help the people or just keep on playing The Great Game?), and is what we're doing now the best way to achieve it?

Is ongoing military action in Afghanistan going to have any positive effect, or is it just a stopgap to try to keep another radiacal Islamist governemnt from forming there - and what do "we" do about Pakistan? Iran? What if Indonesia does become Islamist rather than just a Muslim-majority republic?

Do we just go on invading countries that are Islamist, and watch as each succeeding military action makes more Islamist converts?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

At which time the West responded by bombing the Afghan people,

No.

We didn't.

We sent special forces in and called down extremely well-targeted airstrikes on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, with collateral damage percentages well below those in previous wars, which enabled our allies in Afghanistan to win. "Bombing the Afghan people" implies that we punitively bombed random Afghanis, which would have been an entirely different sort of strategy.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

As always, unless you were there, it depends on who you listen to.

http://eatthestate.org/06-05/PrecisionMyAss.htm

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Read the article. It indicated that American bombs sometimes killed civilians, which I alredy knew. This is unavoidable in any war: arguing that it is always immoral to do anything that may kill some civilians in war is really an argument that war is always immoral.

If we'd been "bombing the Afghan people," in the sense of targeting them, we would have been destroying whole cities and towns, and the civilian death toll from our bombing alone would now be in the low millions, even assuming that we didn't use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (if we did that it would be in the high millions to low tens of millions), out of a population of 31 million people. We know this because of the history of deliberate attacks against civilian populations in World War II.

Using "bombing the people" as a synonym for "going to war with a regime" thus creates a false mental image. I'm not saying you're doing that deliberately, but the tactic dates back to at least the Vietnam War, in which the Communists falsely accused us of deliberately targeting their civilian population. And the willingness to believe this statement, when faced with the obvious fact that we haven't killed millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of Afghan civilians, implies a certain ignorance of military history.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I'll stand by my words.

We chose to bomb large sections of a country that had been through decades of hell already, knowing full well that civilians would die, because their leaders had allowed people whose terrorist acts we disapproved of (as opposed to all those terrorists whose acts we in the West have either approved of or at least tolerated) to set up camp there.

We bombed people who might have been terrorists - but weren't. We bombed people who happened to live near terrorists - or near where we thought terrorists might be. And sometimes we bombed all sorts of other things, like Al-Jazeera and the International Red Cross.

Hell, we've even bombed each other - at least five Canadian soldiers have died from American bombs. Wouldn't surprise me if members of other national forces have died in the bombing, too.

Why did we do it? We had the time to explore other options, up to and including assassination attempts. WE could have negotiated with the Taliban - they sent out fellers of being willing to deal. We could have treated the whole thing at a police/intelligence level - and maybe gotten better results with less damage.

But no, we wanted to bomb Afghanistan. And in doing so, we killed a lot of innocent Afghans. And you know, I don't really care if we have actually killed fewer innocent civilians that we usually do when we bomb countries and people.

Because we didn't even make an attempt to see if we could do something about the situation without killing any civilians at all.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

We chose to bomb large sections of a country ...

This is untrue. Our attacks were intentionally targeted against enemy troops, not against people at random nor against landforms at random. Are you explicitly arguing that we intentionally targeted civilians?

... knowing full well that civilians would die ...

Always the case in warfare.

... because their leaders had allowed people whose terrorist acts we disapproved of (as opposed to all those terrorists whose acts we in the West have either approved of or at least tolerated) to set up camp there.

Necessarily, because after 9-11 we could no longer accept other countries providing sanctuary to our enemies. The price of inaction had proven too high for us to tolerate.

We bombed people who might have been terrorists - but weren't. We bombed people who happened to live near terrorists - or near where we thought terrorists might be. And sometimes we bombed all sorts of other things, like Al-Jazeera and the International Red Cross.

Hell, we've even bombed each other - at least five Canadian soldiers have died from American bombs. Wouldn't surprise me if members of other national forces have died in the bombing, too.

This is a long-winded way of saying "We fought a war." These things always happen in wars. There is no avoiding them, save by avoiding wars in general.

Why did we do it? We had the time to explore other options, up to and including assassination attempts.

ROFLMAO!!!

Hah, that was funny. Unfortunately, real life doesn't follow the rules of thriller fiction. The Taliban regime was guarding the Al Qaeda leadership and camps with its own military forces: expecting small bands of assassins to successfully penetrate these defenses and kill the Al Qaeda leadership would have been at best naive, and it probably would have led to the futile deaths of some of our best troops in the attempt.

WE could have negotiated with the Taliban - they sent out fellers of being willing to deal.

What concessions or reparations were they offering us along with the extradition of the Al Qaeda leadership, by way of apology for having based them in the first place?

I suspect you mean that they were "willing to deal" if we offered them concessions. Sorry, after 9-11 we weren't willing to play that sort of sucker's game anymore.

We could have treated the whole thing at a police/intelligence level - and maybe gotten better results with less damage.

Given that "intelligence" gives you nothing but information, and that the only "police" operating in Afghanistan were those of the Taliban, this strikes me as a rather faint hope. If you mean, "stayed home and kept our guard up," this would have meant that the Al Qaeda leadership would have been completely safe, with only their poor dupes exposed to any danger.

But no, we wanted to bomb Afghanistan. And in doing so, we killed a lot of innocent Afghans. And you know, I don't really care if we have actually killed fewer innocent civilians that we usually do when we bomb countries and people.

Ah, so your criticism is completely detached from reality. If so, why should anyone pay any attention to it?

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

For me, military action should always be the last option rather than the first. I have not been convinced that a military attack on Afghanistan - or on Iraq, for that matter - was ever the appropriate thing to do.

Do you remember that after 9/11 almost everyone in the world - including most Islamic nations - were willing to help in some way? The invasion of Afghanistan destroyed a lot of that good will. We'll never know what diplomacy could have achieved.

What we do know is that Islamic fundamentalism is stronger now than it was before the invasions, and another generaltion of Muslims is growing up hating the West.

This is blowback. We keep doing it to ourselves.

And no one has asked you to pay attention to my opinions - you chose to read my journal. You're free to stop whenever you want to.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

WE could have negotiated with the Taliban - they sent out feelers of being willing to deal.

What concessions or reparations were they offering us along with the extradition of the Al Qaeda leadership, by way of apology for having based them in the first place?

Actually, this was attempted. The US was willing to offer concessions. There was no demand for apologies or reparations. Negotiations fell apart over NATO's sole demand - the extradition of Al Qaeda leadership. In the end, the Sheik Omar would not agree to this.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, their counteroffer was surrendering Al-Qaeda leadership for trial in a Muslim court.

It's certainly possible that a Muslim court would have been as biased as an American court, but it's also true that many Muslim governments in the Middle East and elsewhere did oppose and continue to oppose bin Laden's agenda, which was to draw the U.S. into war with the world-wide Islamic community in order to polarise the two sides, strengthen support for the extreme wing of Islamist fundamentalism, and destroy American capacity to interfere with his other agenda, which includes reforming the Islamic world in conformity with his personal view of Islam.

So far, he's has some success in two out of three of his goals, and he may have made some progress with the third.

War was what he wanted. Diplomacy and/or operating from a police/criminalistic/law and justice paradigm rather than a military paradigm might have worked out better, and probably couldn't have worked out worse.

After all, bin Laden (or his successors), Al Qaeda and the various radical Islamist groups it supported remain out there, decentralised and still capable of planning and executing terrorist acts wherever in the world they happen to be.

That hasn't changed, and that was supposedly why the war was started in the first place.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Actually, this was attempted. The US was willing to offer concessions. There was no demand for apologies or reparations. Negotiations fell apart over NATO's sole demand - the extradition of Al Qaeda leadership. In the end, the Sheik Omar would not agree to this.

And that's a pretty minimal sort of demand. "Turn over the guys who attacked us, to prove that you aren't on their side."