TWENTY YEARS OF DEATH, MAIMING AND BEREAVEMENT, hundreds of billions, two trillion dollars, I heard, PAYING THE SALARY OF THE AFGHAN ARMY! and the Afghan government and Army were the primary agents of the immediate take-over of the Taliban in Afghanistan, they pre-arranged it.
The part that the Afghani men play in the horrific consequences OF THEIR INACTION AND ACTION for the women and other targeted groups in Afghanistan is not being discussed nearly enough as Republicans, the pundit class of talking heads and others here blame Joe Biden and his still young administration for the situation that Trump and Pompeo and others during the Trump regime negotiated to happen pretty much on the time-table it did and for the consequences in a place the American government never ruled - if it had I'd guess that less theft by government officials in Afghanistan would have happened - in places which were hardly under the control of even the official Afghani government even at the . . . "height" of its power?
Showbiz and cheap novels and cabloid and tabloid "journalism" some of the hagiographic ersatz school "history lie us into these situations. Americans are sold a load of bullshit that we can go anywhere, defeat anyone and determine that they are going to have a functioning, Western style government, maybe even a quasi-democracy when that has happened exactly nowhere I'm aware of. If you want to count post-war Germany, they had a head start on the Western part and they did, actually, choose to become one of the best and most serious of European socieities as a lesson in facing both the Nazi period and its evils and the fine example of having communism imposed on East Germany with all its own inherent evils. Japan is somewhat democratic in a more ersatz sense, though it, too, I think made a choice to modernize without imperial ambitions this time and with the, as well, good example of how bad things can go under the level of gangster rule that they could see in China and North Korea. If it worked anywhere else as a consequence of American intervention, give me a list to consider.
As I think everyone should be forced to remember, there were lots of people who pointed to the British Empire, the Soviet Empire as warnings of what happens to great powers who try to do what the Bush II regime peddled its wars with, imposing democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq from half way around the world. It was especially ridiculous and, I maintain, racist for them to claim it could be done in Afghanistan with the example of the Soviet Union, right next door and trying to impose modernism through communist dictatorship failing disastrously to do so. The American part in foiling the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan was a warning of disaster of a different kind, in how arming gangsters, thugs and fanatics to turn them into your tool will come back to bite you badly, not to mention the women who never and and never will have a good life under anything but egalitarian democracy.
It was especially ironic in the case of the Bush II regime because Saddam Hussein had, in fact, tried to impose a modern, Western regime of more equality for Women than almost any of the large countries in the area and that ended with Western determination to impose democracy from abroad.
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It is surreal and heart-breaking to read someone like Vrinda Narain Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism; Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, proposing a list of what we can do to help the Women of Afghanistan from the perspective of August 15th.
The UN must now act decisively to prevent further atrocities against women in Afghanistan.
I propose four policy actions for the international community to bring about sustainable peace. They’re guided by Resolution 1820 that underscores the importance of including women as equal participants in the peace process and condemns all forms of gendered violence against civilians in armed conflict
1. Calling for an immediate ceasefire to ensure the peace process can proceed in good faith.
2. Ensuring that women’s rights — enshrined in Afghanistan’s Constitution, national legislation and international law — are respected.
3. Insisting that peace negotiations continue with meaningful participation of Afghan women. Currently, there are only four women peace negotiators on the Afghan government’s team and none on the Taliban’s.
4. Lifting sanctions against the Taliban must be conditional on their commitment to uphold women’s rights. The European Union and the United States, currently the largest donors to Afghanistan, must make aid conditional upon women’s rights and their access to education and employment.
Of those the only one I think might possibly have any chance of doing anything is the one on sanctions and you'd have to get those who have backed the Taliban to do it and those who have backed them are not likely to care a bit what happens to the Women of the country.
It is entirely understandable that someone like her, or me, would want to do something seeing the enslavement imposed on the Woman of Afghanistan, as the article notes, their sexual enslavement as recruiting inducements for men to join the "religious" cult. It is terrible to watch and terrible to feel that there is nothing that we can do that has any guarantee to work. But that's not in our power to do it anymore than it is in the power of Americans who favor equality to force it to happen here. The struggle for Women's equality in Afghanistan will take generations AND THERE IS NO POPULATION IN WHICH THAT STRUGGLE CAN HAPPEN EXCEPT IN THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN. If there is any group of people who can have a clue as to how to make that happen it will be people there who know what they're talking about.
In the list I gave yesterday of the options for blame in the origin of this disaster, the Bush II decision to respond to 9-11 with a disastrous nation building fable (mostly told to sell the war to Americans), the Reagan administration that armed the war-lords and the origins of the Taliban, the Soviet invasion and attempt at its own style of nation building, etc. I left out the Pakistani government which were some of the biggest promoters of the Taliban through the university of such ideology maintained in Pakistan. And it was not alone in creating this evil in the region.
We in the West, through our arrogance and, yes, our racism, both earn blame through our idiotic and criminal actions but we also presume to take all of the blame because we are kept in ignorance of the reality of such places, substituting the most dead-headed ignorance and bigoted stereotyping possible. The idiot congressman who associated Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban was merely typical of that kind of idiocy.
I think there is a need for us to blame ourselves for what we actually did in Afghanistan, we allowed American governments, Bush II, Reagan, to get us involved in building, not a nation but a catastrophe. That blame is on those who did it, it's not even on all Americans.
Steven Biko, the martyred South African freedom fighter reached the point, in response to the brutal put down of student demonstrations against apartheid famously said the meaning of that experience was "Black Man you are on your own." A lot of us took that to mean that achieving freedom and equality had to come from within the group which had neither freedom nor equality. The most we could do was to boycott and get sanctions imposed on the Apartheid government but it was not within our power to have a constructive part in the actual achievement of that. The subsequent history of South Africa after apartheid has shown that even the official beginning of freedom and equality is hardly the thing in reality. That is no more the case than that the Emancipation Proclamation achieved it for Black People in the United States as de facto enslavement and inequality was never abolished and won the next century through the end of Reconstruction (due to Rutherford Hayes' corrupt Electoral College deal with the hardly dead slave power). The Republican-fascists are trying to set back the country to the days of inequality and enslavement through the Supreme Court here.
If we can't end inequality here, the idea that we could impose it in Afghanistan was absurd. That it was the Bush II regime which put two of the major figures in the reimposition of American apartheid through the destruction of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts on the Supreme Court, Roberts and Alito, that claimed it would do so only shows what a mockery of a sales job for the war it was.
History is complex, so is geography, if you ignore both and present reality at the same time, you're going to be shocked at what happens. That is so typically 21st century America that this is only one such shock that awaits us.
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