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Remember Afghanistan? Remember, that was the place where the Talaban
lived who sheltered al Qaeda? Remember how we invaded, to wide national
approval and pushed them off? And Afghanistan held an assembly and chose
a president. So it's all OK, right? Iraq might be falling apart, but no
one has written anything about Afghanistan, so that must be a success.
Darn liberal press never gives the president any credit.
Then consider this summary conclusion:
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Two and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan
is once more lapsing into bloody chaos. Although President Hamid
Karzai is strong on paper, he is weak in fact. The drug trade is
surging, the Taliban are creeping back, and real power rests in
the hands of the country's many warlords. Instead of disarming the
militias, Washington is using them to hunt the remnants of al Qaeda
and the Taliban. But ordinary Afghans are paying the price.
-- Abstract of: Kathy Gannon, Afghanistan
Unbound, Foreign Affairs, May / June 2004, p. 35
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Or perhaps, this headline
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Suspected Taliban fighters have carried out their most lethal attack
yet in a widening campaign to derail Afghan national elections,
executing at least 14 unarmed men because they had registered to
vote.
-- New York Time, June 28, p. A3.
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Or this
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Kabul, 28 July 2004 – With a deep feeling of sadness and anger,
the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without
Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announces today
the closure of all medical programs in Afghanistan. MSF is taking
this decision in the aftermath of the killing of five MSF aid workers
in a deliberate attack on June 2, 2004, when a clearly marked MSF
vehicle was ambushed in the northwestern province of Badghis. Five
of our colleagues were mercilessly shot in the attack. This targeted
killing of five of its aid workers is unprecedented in the history
of MSF, which has been delivering medical humanitarian assistance
in some of the most violent conflicts around the world over the
last 30 years.
MSF
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MSF does go to 'some of the most violent conflicts' and their workers
take great risks, going unarmed into danger equal that experienced by
most soldiers. But they've had to pull out of Afghanistan. In part their
issue is also with the U.S. using army personnel to distribute aid - and
thus blurring the distinction between humanitarian workers and the military.
So the US has also alienated the NGO community as well.
How much more do you need:
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A British parliamentary committee has warned that Afghanistan is
likely to "implode, with terrible consequences" unless
more troops and resources are sent to calm the country. ...
"We conclude that there is little, if any, sign of the war
on drugs being won, and every indication that the situation is likely
to deteriorate, at least in the short term," the report says.
Reported on the website of Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan
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The same contempt of other cultures and refusal to listen that has plagued
our foreign policy for decades is still in effect. A National Geographic
writer observes this:
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Pelton believes the United States has squandered the goodwill that
it generated after toppling the strict Taliban, which many Afghans
despised. One of the problems, he says, is that experienced US military
personnel who understood Pashtun cultural nuances have been rotated
out of Afghanistan and replaced with people less in tune with the
local customs.
"We stopped listening to what the Afghans were telling us,
and we started imposing our own sense of law and order," Pelton
said. "We shifted our system away from cultivating relationships
with people who are in a position to help us to a system of payoffs
and informants."
Pelton believes raising the US government's bounty on Osama bin
Laden from 25 to 50 million dollars illustrates cultural ignorance
of the Pashtun people.
"If bin Laden is a criminal, and he killed thousands of people,
why do we need to pay someone 50 million dollars to turn him in?"
Pelton asked. "To the Pashtuns, that's an insult."
National
Geographic
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It's not just Iraq dissolving in chaos, in Afghanistan we have not just
chaos, but the active return of the Taliban and al Qaeda, the active return
of organized drug smuggling and the active return of the suppression of
women. It's not just falling apart, it is going back to the terrorist
haven it was before we invaded. In a year or three it will be as if we
were never there.
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