Another look at Afghanistan
Feb. 15th, 2008 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morgan_dhuAs 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.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?
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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-16 05:28 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 12:15 am (UTC)http://eatthestate.org/06-05/PrecisionMyAss.htm
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 12:31 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 01:37 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 01:47 am (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 02:08 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 08:46 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 09:28 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 07:37 am (UTC)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."