Sonali Kolhatkar
Sonali Kolhatkar addressing an anti-war protest in California
While President Barack Obama reviews his strategy on Afghanistan, a perfect moment to send a strong unified message to end the war is slipping through our fingers. Whether it's because we seem to have bought into the lies about the goals of this war or because we mistakenly feel that a Democratic president is going to come to the right conclusion on his own, one thing is clear: There's no debate within the Democratic Party or in the White House about whether to end the war. The only thing being debated is how to continue the war.
Similarly, there's little debate among progressives about how this is a bad war, and at the very least we need an exit strategy. Paralysis has set in on the particular manner of ending the war: whether to wait for some sort of "peace process," to pull out troops now versus later, to preserve troop levels until Afghanistan's women are safe, or some variation of these questions. We're in a bizarre situation: As Obama waffles on how to continue the war in Afghanistan, progressives are waffling on how to end the war.
Despite some major differences between the Afghan and Iraq wars, U.S. military operations and their consequences in both countries are the same. Similar to Iraq, this war kills civilians and soldiers causing misery on all sides. Similar to Iraq, this war has made women less safe. Similar to Iraq, this occupation has become unpopular on the ground. Similar to Iraq, our actions are leading to greater instability. And similar to Iraq, our tax dollars are being disappeared into a sinkhole of destruction rather than human needs. Yet, unlike Iraq, where progressives were clear right from the start on ending the war, Afghanistan seems to confuse our moral compass.
Our actions in Afghanistan have caused a perfect storm of untold numbers of civilian deaths, fundamentalist resurgence, and women's oppression. We're protecting a corrupt government with a puppet president and criminal warlords, and our deadly bombing raids have led to a devastated and rightly bitter population and a stronger Taliban. There's no promising indication that our military operations can improve the situation, no matter how many troops are added. If ever the Afghanistan war ever had any legitimacy, it's irreversibly gone.
Enabling Women's Oppression
One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they'll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement.
What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed the same men, now called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed government as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the judiciary, and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women's rights over eight long years.
Any token gains have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in Afghanistan's constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women's rights activists, the legalization of rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women's imprisonment for so-called honor crimes — all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are protecting against the Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children killed in U.S. bombing raids, which has also increased the Taliban's numbers and clout, and it makes the case that for eight years the United States has enabled the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their miseries.
This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their country. After eight years of American-enabled oppression, they would rather fight for their liberation without our help. The anti-fundamentalist progressive organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), has called for an immediate end to the war. Echoing their call is independent dissident member of Parliament Malalai Joya, who tells her story in her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords. The members of RAWA and women like Joya are openly targeted by the U.S.-backed Afghan government for their feminism and political activism. RAWA and Joya have worked on the ground, risking their lives for political change and echo the vast majority of poor and ordinary Afghan women. It's they whom we ought to listen to and express solidarity with. If American progressives think they know better than Afghanistan's brave feminist activists on how liberation can be achieved, we're just as guilty as the U.S. government for subjecting them to the mercy of women-hating criminals.
No Negotiations with Fundamentalist Criminals
Some on the left have made the case that the Afghanistan war can come to an end through a negotiated peace process where everyone has a seat at the table, including women. But this ensures that only those within the corrupt clique of Afghan politics remain involved in the future of Afghanistan — such as a few female allies of the fundamentalists who are plentiful in the current government.
Joya struggled her way into getting a "seat at the table" through the 2005 elections. For representing her people's views that war criminals ought to be brought to justice, she has been rewarded with death threats, assassination attempts, and the loss of her electoral title. Asking ordinary women and men to have a seat at a negotiating table with war criminals is akin to asking them to silence themselves or mark their foreheads with a target.
The reason why democratic forces in Afghanistan are completely underground and constantly living in fear of being killed is that time and again the U.S. government has insisted on bringing warlords and even Taliban leaders to the negotiating table. Asking the Obama administration to sponsor a "peace process" between civilian representatives and our warlord allies whose private militias we have armed, is the same as asking for exactly what President George W. Bush did eight years ago in Bonn, Germany after the fall of the Taliban.
That process predictably led to the establishment of today's corrupt government. In fact, the Obama administration is very likely to patch up the recent failed presidential elections in the same way: by creating a power-sharing deal between two corrupt sides and their proxies and claiming that all sides were represented at the negotiating table.
Given our violent role in Afghanistan over the past three decades, the United States has scant credibility in sponsoring any kind of "peace" process. The most responsible action the U.S. can take is to end its occupation immediately, and clean up its mess.
Let's Call for an Immediate End to the U.S. Occupation
Those who make the case that withdrawing U.S. troops will unleash another bloody civil war where Afghan women and men will be at the mercy of the Taliban and warlords, are raising the exact same justification made for the war in 2001: that it's our moral duty to protect Afghans from fundamentalist violence. This logic ignores the fact that we have nurtured and created the very fundamentalist violence that targets Afghans as explained above. By empowering war criminals and protecting a corrupt government that has forgiven the crimes of all sides including the Taliban, and that even includes some Taliban leaders, all we have done is complicate a war that was on-going. "A member of RAWA who goes by the pseudonym Zoya in a U.S. speaking tour last month made it clear that it's hard to imagine things getting worse if the U.S. does pull out immediately. The damage isn't being prevented by the United States — it's being carried out by the United States.
Instead of subjecting Afghans to the three oppressive forces of a stronger Taliban, a corrupt and criminal government, and a deadly foreign occupation, the first thing we Americans can control most directly is to end our occupation immediately. This alone won't address the Taliban and Northern Alliance. But it will reduce the oppressive forces at work, and potentially reduce the legitimacy of the warlords and the motives driving the Taliban.
How do we undo the damage we have subjected innocent Afghans to? Afghans themselves have the answers to that. Surveys have shown that a majority of Afghans want a complete disarmament of our warlord allies — essentially that the U.S. needs to take back the guns we put into the hands of the Northern Alliance and their private militias. Surveys have also shown that Afghans want war crimes tribunals to hold all the corrupt and criminal fundamentalists accountable in some sort of court, perhaps even the International Criminal Court (U.S. government officials shouldn't be exempt from this type of accountability either). With weapons, warlords, and U.S. troops gone, real democracy could potentially take root and pro-democracy forces could someday operate freely. Many have also called for a massive Marshall Plan for poverty-stricken Afghanistan, to flood the country with money in the hands of small groups, organizations, and civil society, and eventually to help rebuild the country with a strong, non-drug-based economy. With all the money freed up from military operations that would be fairly feasible.
As for the Taliban, even the U.S. government publicly admits that the Pakistani government's own agencies have long supported the renegade army as a tool for national and regional stability. With the U.S. troops gone, the Taliban's raison d'être inside Afghanistan would be greatly weakened. If the United States were to take the lead in regional talks between Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and China to address the Pakistani government's fears of a hostile regime in Afghanistan, it would go a very long way toward undermining the Taliban.
These measures are necessary but may not guarantee stability for Afghanistan. Still the current occupation only guarantees instability, so at the very least the time for a non-military solution is now. In other words, we can choose to repeat a failed experiment with predictably negative results by extending the war in any number of ways. Or we can implement the complex, constructive measures that could potentially help stabilize Afghanistan, undermine the fundamentalist misogynist criminals, help the Afghan people take back their country, and undermine the conditions for violence.
These are complex demands to make of the Obama administration. But it has taken a complex set of destructive American policies and many years to destroy Afghanistan. It will take a similar amount of time and complexity, as well as trial and error, to help rebuild Afghanistan for ordinary Afghans, and by extension make Americans safer. We can make these demands as secondary points in our call for an end to the war. But the primary demand easily fits on a protest placard: "End the U.S. War in Afghanistan NOW." Let's make that call loudly, clearly, and ubiquitously, as soon as possible, so that Obama and Congress can't ignore us any longer.
Sonali Kolhatkar, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission and co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. She has worked in solidarity with RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) for nearly 10 years. For more information about Afghan Women's Mission, RAWA, and how to support Afghan activists, visit www.afghanwomensmission.org. When you read this, please tell me: what is President Obama doing that is different than what GWBush did? My answer: nothing that makes women in Afghanistan more safe or more empowered. So why the hell doesn't he withdraw our troops?! What follows next is from
From the moment of introduction it became clear that Shazia, a name she uses for protection, is an insightful and determined woman. She takes a daily risk in her activism, aiding her fellow citizens in a country that often has women literally surrounded by threats ranging from warlords, U.S. soldiers and contractors, to religious fundamentalists and drug cartels.
RAWA was formed in 1977 during the initial phases of the Soviet invasion. Their mission is the true liberation of not just Afghan women, but Afghanistan as a whole, and they have maintained this work throughout the nine years of Soviet occupation, the subsequent civil war, and 20+ years of hard-line religious rule. They have suffered serious repression, most notably the 1987 assassination of RAWA founder and leader Mina by KHAN (Afghan KGB) agents.
From the beginning, RAWA has demanded the withdrawal of foreign armies from their country while also challenging oppressive threats within Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, different factions within the Mujahideen, a loose-coalition of Muslim resistance groups largely based in Pakistan and allied against the Soviets, vied for power. The dominant groups that emerged in the ensuing civil war, due in large part to the disproportionate amount of secret U.S. aid given to these smaller, far-extremist factions during the occupation, were the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. RAWA maintained a general opposition to both of these groups, as their interests were not in support of the freedom of the women of Afghanistan, but in the interests of their own political and business ventures.
The United States joins the Soviet Union, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban on this list, of unpopular military forces producing hardship for the Afghan people. From 1979 through the 1990’s, covert operations (like one involving Osama Bin Laden’s Makhtab al Khadimat, which after the war would become Al Qaida) resulted in the Taliban’s rise to power. Today, after 8 years, the NATO-led American occupation continues bringing hardship, death, and corruption to their war-torn and desperately poor country.
RAWA’s work continues at present through a conjunction of political and social activities including literacy classes for women, educational craft centers, refugee relief aid, orphanages, and medical services. Their political activism ranges from helping organize mass rallies to speaking engagements for small gatherings, often in secret, in an effort to reach out to those most oppressed. Internationally, RAWA’s trips to share their experiences and understandings with allies all over the world have helped forge alliances where a media-wall often prevents the development of real knowledge and cooperation.
When the U.S. invaded, “people were hopeful” because people were fed up with the Taliban’s harsh rule. But when the U.S. “brought Karzai as their puppet” they “shunned the trust and demands of the Afghan people”, Shazia tells us. It quickly became obvious that the White House “relied on and shared power with those fundamentalist extremists who were in power before the Taliban”; with many of their key political and social stances sharing the same ideas.
Afghan MP Malalai Joya, who has survived three assassination attempts and was recently suspended from the Afghan parliament for speaking out publicly against other members of the government, states it directly: “Our country is being run by a mafia, and while it is in power there is no hope for freedom for the people of Afghanistan.”
“If democrats take power (in Afghanistan), then there’s no need for the U.S. to be in Afghanistan” Shazia added. “That’s why they never rely on democrats.”
Perhaps the occupation’s hypocrisy can be summed up best by the empty, rhetorical responses Western politicians offered in response to the Karzai administration’s passing of the Shi’a Personal Status Law. The law, introduced and supported by hard line Shi’a clerics and signed with no public announcement by Hamid Karzai earlier this month, allows Shi’a men to deprive their wives of food and basic necessities if they refuse to fulfill sexual demands. It goes on to require permission from one’s husband before applying for work, and effectively legalizes rape by requiring that “blood money” be paid to the victim’s family.
Though President Obama called the law “abhorrent”, he did nothing in his power to push Karzai to repeal it. France threatened to withdraw only its female troops, but nothing else has been done. Alone, as is so often the case, Afghan women took to the streets in protest, risking their lives to voice their opposition. “The government was not democratically elected, and it is now trying to use the country’s Islamic law as a tool with which to limit women’s rights”, Malalai Joya contends.
“In 2007 more women killed themselves in Afghanistan than ever before”, she continued. Shazia told us of a terrifying increase of self-immolations, with hundreds of women setting themselves on fire in the last few years. Malalai, Shazia, and millions of other women in Afghanistan live amongst this nightmare, struggling to make sense of the horrors of war while dealing with their immediate safety. “We have a lot of different enemies in Afghanistan”, Shazia explains.
THE WAR CONTINUES
While the West grapples to understand a fraction of what is happening in Afghanistan, its citizens are dying. Western media reports censor, mis-construe, or conceal facts, in large part due to the American media often reporting events after they have been carefully processed through a Pentagon filter, part of a Bush “War on Terror” program first developed in 2002 by the Office of Strategic Influence. The Pentagon’s efforts to undermine reality continue to this day, with reports on U.S. air raids and predator strikes always assuring us of ‘suspected militants’ or ‘Taliban fighters’ being killed, with the gross majority of civilian casualties hidden from view. Take a bombing incident in July, 2002 where after a U.S. plane bombed a wedding killing upwards of 40 civilians, U.S. Central Command released the following response: “Close air support from U.S. Air Force B-52 and AC-130 aircraft struck several ground targets, including anti-aircraft artillery sites that were engaging the aircraft.”
Since then, funding for these ‘strategic’ communications programs has grown at a staggering rate, with the Washington Post last month finding funding for such programs growing from $9 million in 2005 to nearly $1 billion dollars for fiscal year 2010. Quite frankly, it is passed the point where the existence of such programs should be considered shocking.
Meanwhile, atrocities continue. Shazia described a U.S. bombing earlier this year in Farah province, where over 150 people were killed. “They massacred more than 150 Afghans. I personally saw the lists of the people who were killed. 12 people were killed from one family. I saw the name of a child of one year, of two years who were killed. This is a massacre. This is a mockery of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.”
After the invasion, the U.S. “almost removed the Taliban in one month”, she continues, “then they brought Karzai”. Since then, coalition deaths have increased every year except 2003, where they fell from 67 to 57, then back to 59 in 2004. Halfway through 2009, coalition deaths (overwhelmingly American and British) have almost surpassed last year’s record of 294, with July being the bloodiest month on record.
All the while, Taliban forces have steadily grown more powerful. “It shows that they don’t want to remove them from Afghanistan, because they need a justification to be in Afghanistan, to fulfill their demands and interests in Afghanistan” Shazia says. “Through Afghanistan they can easily control Pakistan, Iran and the Middle East countries.” Furthermore, “more than 92 percent of the world’s opium is cultivated in Afghanistan, and it’s a big drug business for the Westerners to control that.”
Last week, captured Afghan militants led British forces to a stash of “several tons” of raw opium on one of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s farms (United Press International, August 13, 2009). Ahmed, head of the provincial council of Kandahar, is President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother. Ahmed, of course, was not arrested. Shazia told us about Ahmed Wali Karzai’s drug activities right before this story broke.
Our conversation soon illuminates the America that Afghans know, the one so many here don’t want to recognize. Under the Taliban, opium production was banned and the export of opium dropped dramatically. Under Karzai, business is booming. “They encouraged farmers to grow. If Karzai encourages, the U.S. encourages.” Shazia also told us about the new Minister of Anti-Narcotics, General Khodaidad, “the biggest, biggest drug lord” in her country.
As we write this, thousands of U.S. Marines and British soldiers are knee-deep in an offensive in the opium-rich Helmand Province, supposedly to tackle this “Taliban stronghold” and fight the poppy industry. The role has seemed to shift lately towards more anti-narcotics operations, supposedly to take away the financial base of terrorists and Taliban militants. But one can’t help but wonder whose crops they will be destroying if they are following the lead of an anti-drug policy being written and directed by one of the countries largest drug-dealers. Thousands of villagers, as well as hundreds of U.S., British and Afghan soldiers and many Taliban-affiliated fighters have been killed in the Helmand in the last two months.
Aside from the opium-trade, this “surge” also came at a time when Hamid Karzai feared he would lose this election. Attempts to “weaken the Taliban” could well have been a tactic of scaring people into voting for the current government, or keeping Taliban-supporters scared of going to the polls. This form of political bullying grew even more explicit this week, with Karzai announcing a ban on reports of violence or “opposition” during the voting process, which has been quickly condemned by human rights groups and the UN. Perhaps Karzai took a tip from the Americans here, with Tom Ridge’s recent admission that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed him to raise terror alert levels during the 2004 elections.
The U.S. and Karzai insist that low-voter turnout is the result of Taliban-led attempts to disrupt the elections, which they did through bombings, an attempted bank robbery and multiple instance of murder. However, it’s more likely that low-voter turnout is the result of a general feeling of mistrust amongst the Afghan population. “Like millions of Afghans, I have no hope in the results of this week’s election”, Malalai Joya said in a recent online post. “In a country ruled by warlords, occupation forces, Taliban insurgency, drug money and guns, no one can expect a legitimate or fair vote.”
Shazia adds; “I don’t think that people will go to vote… Because these elections, these laws that are being passed, are just for show, to show to the world that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and now Afghan women are free, and now they have democracy and they are living in peace, it’s just a show to the world.”
Last Thursday’s election has since been heralded as a beacon of democracy and freedom, despite low turn out reported in several, but not all, provinces (though hardly any turnout in the Helmand, Kandahar, and Logar provinces), and 26 Afghans dead, four of them children. Karzai sounded very obliged in the Washington Post, “We regret the loss of civilian lives, but we are grateful for the sacrifices people made. It went very, very well.”
And though the White House’s public justification for the surge and ongoing occupation has received little criticism from its constituents, Shazia, along with a large portion of her country and an increasing number of U.S. service-members, does not agree with the common American rhetoric that troops need to stay to prevent a civil war. “Now there is a civil war”, she says. “If the troops leave Afghanistan, of course for a few years there will be wars… Years and years of struggle is needed. After World War Two, the European and Western countries all struggled. Women and men, they, together, struggled to better their own countries. We will also do that. We will give sacrifices. But we will do that ourselves. Because history has shown that no country can grant peace and security to another country as a gift. This is the responsibility of that country, that people, to gain those values.… by their resistance and by their struggle.”
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