Afghanistan: militarism, mutilation and minerals

by IaraLee

When I was in Afghanistan, I had the honor of interviewing renowned activist, former parliamentarian, and feminist Malalai Joya. Her work and courage to denounce Afghan government's corruption and US occupation of her country have been an inspiration to many throughout the world. Knowing this, I was greatly dismayed but not surprised when the U.S. State Department denied Joya a visa to enter the United States for a speaking tour. Fortunately, after a campaign of public pressure, the U.S. government has relented, and Joya is now in the U.S. to share her story. Thanks to all who campaigned on her behalf! In conjunction with Joya's travels in the U.S., I am pleased to announce our short film "MILITARISM, MUTILATION, AND MINERALS: UNDERSTANDING THE OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN". I urge you to watch, share the video, and stay involved with these important issues:http://www.culturesofresistance.org/malalai-joya

IARA LEE * CulturesOfResistance.orghttp://www.facebook.com/iara.lee.filmmaker.activist
http://www.facebook.com/CulturesOfResistance
www.huffingtonpost.com/iara-lee 

Tariq Ali: Obama, the US hegemony and New Labour

As the United States of America loses its economic hold on the planet and tries to replace it with franchised military presences, including the British Government and Admiralty, Tariq Ali gives an up-to-date precis of The Way Things Are:

America's Nation-Destroying Mission

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, America’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible — making the situation in Afghanistan even worse. The worst aspect of events post-2001 is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the world now sees the U.S. as the leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth. Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, not counting those who died after the impact of an explosive. To understand the enormity of America’s invasion, it is vital to know something of Afghanistan’s recent history, for which we must thank James Lucas:

America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan

by James Lucas, March 06, 2010

Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons, and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deteriorated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

Read this in its entirety at:

http://original.antiwar.com/james-lucas/2010/03/05/americas-nation-destroying-mission-in-afghanistan/

When the enemy vanishes - kill civilians!

Afghan refugees - BBC News

Nato's current offensive in the town of Marjah is being portrayed as a low casualty mission in the "good war" to get rid of the Taliban.
If you were to believe the news broadcasts, it's already a success.

Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media have snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases.
The truth is, most of the few hundred Taliban fighters in Marjah vanished well before the much touted offensive began, not being stupid enough to face up to 15,000 of the most heavily armed troops on the planet.

Much of what we've seen on the TV screens looks like random firing into empty space to give the cameras footage for the evening news bulletins.
But with very few enemy to engage it wasn't long -- two days in fact-- before tragedy struck when a missile attack looking for Taliban to kill managed to slaughter 12 civilians, five of them children -- the very people this war was supposedly tailored to keep out of harm's way.

The attack on Marjah is no different from the numerous other Nato "clear, hold and build" missions -- except in the amount of media ballyhoo.
And there's no reason why this should be different in the outcome, with the Taliban withdrawing tactically and biding its time, before infiltrating back into the town, once the overblown Operation Moshtarak, and its accompanying media circus, has moved on to some other flashpoint of resistance to foreign occupation.

The only reason the invading armies continue fighting a war that cannot be won is in the hope that some escape route can be found, from Obama and Brown's "war of necessity", which
will leave intact the credibility of the Western powers' ability to invade other countries with impunity.

The deaths of the 12 civilians this weekend is a brutal reminder of the heavy price many Afghans will pay in the months and years to come to save the face of those responsible
for prosecuting a futile and unjustifiable war.


[The current fuss about twelve civilians being killed is obviously a PR stunt, weighed against, for instance, the previous wiping-out of an entire wedding party and a delegation of churchmen and politicians en route to a peace conference.]

First published by Stop The War Coalition, 15 February 2010

The hell of life for women in 'liberated' Afghanistan

By Malalai Joya, member of the Afghan parliament

As an elected representative for Farah, Afghanistan, I add my voice to those condemning the NATO bombing that claimed over 150 civilian lives in my province earlier this month. This latest massacre offers the world a glimpse of the horrors faced by our people.
The US military authorities do not want you to see this reality. As usual, they have tried to downplay the number of civilian casualties, but I have information that as many as 164 civilians were killed in the bombings. One grief-stricken man from the village of Geranai said he lost 20 members of his family in the massacre.
The Afghan government commission, furthermore, appears to have failed to list infants under the age of three who were killed. The government commission that went to the village after three days — when all the victims had been buried in mass graves by the villagers — is not willing to make their list public. How can the precious lives of Afghans be treated with such disrespect?

A trick to deceive our people
The news is that the US has replaced its top military commander in Afghanistan. I think this is just a trick to deceive our people and put responsibility for their disastrous strategy on the shoulders of one person.
The Afghan ambassador to the US said in an Al Jazeera interview that if a proper apology is made, then people will understand the civilian deaths. But the Afghan people do not just want to hear “sorry”. We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.
The demonstrations by students and others against these latest air strikes, like the April protests by hundreds of Afghan women in Kabul, show the world the way forward for real democracy in Afghanistan.
In the face of harassment and threats, women took to the streets to demand the scrapping of the law that would legalise rape within marriage and codify the oppression of our country’s Shia women. Just as the US air strikes have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite.
This now infamous law is but the tip of the iceberg of the women’s rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism. In Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with impunity.
Rates of abduction, gang rape, and domestic violence are as high as ever, and so is the number of women’s self-immolation and other forms of suicide. Tragically, women would rather set themselves on fire than endure the hell of life in our liberated country.

Women’s rights
The Afghan constitution does include provisions for women’s rights. I was one of many female delegates to the 2003 Loya Jirga who pushed hard to include them. But this founding document of the new Afghanistan was also scarred by the heavy influence of fundamentalists and warlords, with whom President Hamid Karzai and the West have been compromising from the beginning.
In fact, I was not really surprised by this latest law against women. When the US and its allies replaced the Taliban with the old notorious warlords and fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance, I could see that the only change would be from the frying pan to the fire.
There have been a whole series of outrageous laws and court decisions in recent years. For instance, there was the disgusting law passed on the pretext of national reconciliation that provided immunity from prosecution to warlords and notorious war criminals, many of whom sit in the Afghan parliament. At that time, the world media and governments turned a blind eye to it.
My opposition to this law was one of the reasons that I, as an elected MP from Farah province, was expelled from parliament in May 2007. More recently, there was the outrageous 20-year sentence handed down against Parvez Kambakhsh, a young man whose only crime was to allegedly distribute a dissenting article at his university.
We are told that additional US and NATO troops are coming to Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But frankly, the Afghan people have no hope in this election. We know that there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug-trafficking mafia and foreign occupation. We know that one puppet can be replaced by another puppet, and that the winner of this election will most certainly be selected behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon. I must conclude that this presidential election is merely a drama to legitimise the future US puppet.

Pawns in the Great Game of empire
Just like in Iraq, war has not brought liberation to Afghanistan. Neither war was really about democracy or justice or uprooting terrorist groups; rather they were and are about US strategic interests in the region. We Afghans have never liked being pawns in the Great Game of empire, as the British and the Soviets learned in the past century. It is a shame that so much of Afghanistan’s reality has been kept veiled by a Western media consensus in support of the good war.
Perhaps if the citizens of North America had been better informed about my country, Obama would not have dared to send more troops and spend taxpayers money on a war that is only adding to the suffering of our people and pushing the region into deeper conflicts.
A troop surge in Afghanistan, and continued air strikes, will do nothing to help the liberation of Afghan women. The only thing it will do is increase the number of civilian casualties and increase the resistance to occupation. To really help Afghan women, citizens in the US and elsewhere must tell their government to stop propping up and covering for a regime of warlords and extremists. If these thugs were finally brought to justice, Afghan women and men would prove quite capable of helping ourselves.

Malalai Joya is the youngest elected representative in Afghan’s parliament. In 2007, she was absurdly suspended for “insulting” other members of the parliament. Joya is an opponent of the US-led occupation and a strong supporter of women’s rights. She opposes the brutal, misogynistic polices of both the Taliban and the fundamentalist puppet forces the US have installed. Her memoir, ‘Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice’, should be published later this year, 2009.

Poisoning a Subcontinent

Originally posted: November 22nd 2008.

"The error of Afghanistan is far more serious than the error of Iraq. If the resulting insurgency is now exported to Pakistan, both errors will seem peccadilloes. Pakistan is the sixth largest state in the world, and nuclear-armed. The awful prospect is that Obama and Brown may feel too weak to learn from Iraq and pull back. They will blunder on, not to a clean defeat but to something far worse, a war of attrition whose poison will spread across a subcontinent."
http://tinyurl.com/5rrwrg
Thus spake Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins. This explains the urgency of the case the Stop The War Coalition put in a letter delivered to Gordon Brown on Thursday 20 November, the seventh anniversary of the attack on Afhganistan, planned some three months before the Twin Towers bombing. The text of the letter, reprinted in The Guardian, is:
"Seven years after the supposed liberation of Afghanistan, there is now conclusive evidence that the Nato occupation is a disaster. The civilian death toll is mounting. The level of violence is higher than at any time since the invasion in 2001. The UN reports that, under occupation, life expectancy has fallen to 43 years and one in five children die before they reach their fifth birthday. Afghanistan is now fourth from bottom of the UN's league table of development. The mounting violence has caused a refugee crisis and, according to Acbar, the umbrella group of Afghan NGOs, it is making the delivery of aid to the majority of the country impossible. The NGOs warn that there is a very real danger that thousands of Aghans will starve this winter. The end of the Bush era should be a moment to reassess our foreign policy: 68% of the British public now believe the troops should leave Afghanistan within a year; and 125 British soldiers have already lost their lives in a war that even the UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, has said is unwinnable. We urge Gordon Brown to recognise the facts, respect public opinion and order the withdrawal of British troops."
The letter was signed by Nazir Ahmed- House of Lords, Julie Bowman- Military Families Against The War, Louise Christian human rights lawyer, Jeremy Corbyn MP, George Galloway MP, Lindsey German- Convener: Stop The War Coalition, Elfyn Llwyd MP- Plaid Cymru UK parliamentary group leader, Rachael Massey- Military Families Against The War, Andrew Murray- Chair:Stop The War Coalition, Michael Rosen- poet & broadcaster, Nitin Sawhney- musician and Walter Wolfgang- Labour CND.
GUARDIAN, 21.11.08, http://tinyurl.com/6pj8a7