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

[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.