Afghan Women's Mission

By Lina Abirafeh

Visions of Afghan women throwing off their burqas in the name of freedom helped fuel the Bush administration’s case for war against Afghanistan. Just how free are women in today’s Afghanistan? Was removing their burqas ever really the issue?

“Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” – Laura Bush

Has the US military campaign restored “rights and dignity” to Afghan women? Just over two years ago, the public was inundated with media images of Afghan women casting off burqas, taking to the streets, returning to work. Many would argue that these images were not entirely accurate, and that conditions for women are in fact regressing. In today’s Afghanistan, women are struggling to be heard and to find alternatives to living in despair. Only a fraction of women – and only those in Afghanistan’s cities – are accessing economic opportunities and are able to support themselves and their families.

Over two years into the reconstruction process, conditions for women in Afghanistan remain challenging – an illiteracy rate of 85 percent, female-headed households living in dire poverty, and an inability to access training and economic opportunities. The full extent of the situation for Afghan women is still unknown due to the absence of reliable statistics and data. What we do know is that Afghan maternal mortality is still the highest in the world, and women’s life expectancy (age 43) is among the lowest in the world. While the world’s focus remains on Kabul and we are inundated with images of girls going to school, the reality is that 80 percent of Afghans are living in rural areas where schools for girls continue to be burned. Aid agency reports are being issued, warning of increased violence and and the effect of what might happen if donor nations fail to fulfill promises of aid – a replay of the years following the Soviet pullout in 1989, when the international community abandoned Aghanistan to years of tribal warfare.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

Afghan women’s rights have been highly contested throughout history – linked to modernity and progress on the one hand and preservation of tradition on the other. Researcher Huma Ahmed-Ghosh aptly states, “Afghanistan may be the only country in the world where during the last century kings and politicians have been made and undone by struggles relating to women’s status.” Much more complex than existing formulations of pre- and post-Taliban, Afghan women’s history and women’s rights have been and continue to be highly politicized and central to Afghan conflicts.

Starting in the late 1800s, Afghan leaders have attempted to engineer social transformations by implementing liberal laws for women. Some of these include the earliest attempts at emancipation and social reform in the Muslim world. In the 1920s, King Amanullah sought to drastically transform gender relations by enforcing Western norms for women. These reforms were met with violent opposition, and were quickly replaced by more conservative measures. Similar attempts were made during several other periods in Afghan history, all with strong opposition from conservative forces. Despite incremental changes, women’s rights vacillated between enforced modernization and conservative backlash.

During Soviet occupation (1979-1989), further reforms were made, following a Soviet model. Opposition to Soviet reforms for women fueled a fundamentalist movement that took hold in refugee camps. This in turn served as the grounds for the mujahideen opposition to expel the Soviets and regain control both of women and Afghanistan. This period is known for its violence towards women in the form of rapes, abductions, and restrictions on mobility.

Historically, Afghan women have repeatedly found themselves caught between externally-driven Western concepts of modernization and Afghan codes of culture. These enforced attempts to improve their status have led to violent, fundamentalist reactions and left women worse off than they were before.

IMAGES & PERCEPTIONS: FACT VS. FICTION

Researchers, analysts, aid workers, and Afghan women alike feel that the predominant Western image of Afghan women was that of victims behind blue burqas in need of liberation. The perception was that all Afghan women are “battered and abused, relegated to a horrid and invisible position in society,” explains Sarah Takesh, Creative Director of Tarsian and Blinkley, a for-profit social venture training Afghan women in updating and marketing Afghan clothing designs. “I think most people still think so,” she added.

Violations of Afghan women’s rights began to take on an increasingly prominent role in the justification of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan. A recently published online letter by Jenna and Barbara Bush, written to support their father’s campaign and to reach out to young voters, lauded Bush’s “decision to liberate the women of Afghanistan.” The military campaign “to liberate the women of Afghanistan” was launched alongside support for many of the former Northern Alliance factions that have a history of oppressing women.

All of this “liberation” is taking place in a climate that is relatively unfriendly to Islam. Islam continues to be represented as incompatible with human rights, leaving ample room for the West to justify “saving” Afghan women. In Afghanistan, inaccurate and facile analyses were made connecting women’s oppression to Islamic practices. In fact, contrary to common understandings of the role of women in Muslim contexts, norms governing women in Afghanistan are based on tribal codes. These tribal codes trump Islamic laws – particularly in the case of Islam’s more enlightened messages on women. It becomes increasingly difficult for women in Islamic countries to convince the world that they are able to act on their own behalf in a context of pre-determined international opinion about the status of women in Islam.

BEHIND THE BURQA

There is no agreed-upon measure of social change or progress for women in Afghanistan. From the perspective of the international media, the burqa has often taken on a symbolic role as the barometer of social change. Yet the burqa, or any act of veiling, must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of women’s agency. Further, the Taliban are not the inventors of the burqa. The garment existed prior to Taliban rule and was used by the urban elite to allow increased mobility. It is repeatedly argued by Afghan women that generalizations on the ‘situation of women’ based on visible transformations such as burqa or veil are not constructive. More important indicators exist “behind the burqa,” so to speak.

The burqa initially brought much attention to Afghanistan. It continues to play the most prominent role for the Western media, producing documentaries, articles, and photographs claiming to offer a glimpse behind/under/beneath the burqa. This unconstructive image of Afghan women serves only to feed the stereotype of the backwardness of Afghan society. Even President Bush coined a new term – “women of cover” – to further divide women who wear veils and burqas from those who don’t. The image of the burqa-clad Afghan woman prevents the international community from seeing Afghan women as possible active participants in their own futures, explains Rachel Wareham, Head of Mission of Medica Mondiale in Afghanistan.

The media’s expectation was that there would be a mass casting-off of the burqa following the US military campaign. Media reporting followed suit, claiming that burqas were thrown off at every opportunity following the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif on November 11, 2001. “The reports were not true,” wrote Kate Clark, a BBC correspondent in Afghanistan prior to and during the fall of the Taliban, in a recently published book on aid in Afghanistan. “But for journalists and editors who assumed that unveiling was the main preoccupation of Afghan women living under the Taliban, it must have seemed obvious that they would throw away their burqa at the first chance.”

THE RHETORIC OF LIBERATION

The international community and the Western media hardly took notice of the situation of women in Afghanistan until the fall of Kabul on September 27, 1996. It was the Taliban who, ironically, drew world attention to the situation of Afghanistan and Afghan women. Following the US military campaign in Afghanistan, aid agencies poured into the country with women’s issues at the top of their agendas. “Liberating” women appeared to be the development order of the day. Their belated ‘discovery’ of the discrimination of Afghan women – discrimination that passed largely without comment during previous regimes – was due largely to insufficient historical and social analyses. The ‘women’s issue’ also helped further political agendas.

The language of “saving” and “liberating” women in Afghanistan was not without controversy. This rhetoric implies firstly that Afghan women need to be saved and cannot save themselves, and further that they are being saved from something. Such language is problematic in that it may not only fail to achieve the promised “liberation” but that it may do more damage than good for Afghan women. Many Afghan women are still struggling to find the space within which they can rectify this image and demonstrate their ability to act in their own interest. Sarah Takesh explains that “there is a seemingly uncontrollable urge to overlay the experience of ‘the Afghan woman’ with the Americans’ worldview and to create programs that thrust that woman into the American design of what is good and beneficial for them.”

Afghan women have long-established mechanisms by which they have achieved gains in the past. Images of Afghan women as victims serve a strategic purpose but tell little about women’s realities, serving only to dislocate them as historical and political actors. Research has demonstrated that feminism did not need to be imported; it had always existed in Afghanistan. An important step would be to understand such mechanisms and to help Afghan women to use them for their own “liberation.”

GETTING WORSE WITH IMPROVEMENT

Valentine Moghadam, a researcher on Afghan women, points out that “many Afghan women leaders and outside observers have felt that women’s rights and needs have been given only lip service [and] that funding for Afghanistan’s reconstruction and women’s advancement was inadequate.” Jeanne Bryer, Humanitarian Officer for the British Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG), warns that “we may exacerbate problems by trying to improve things.” She believes that Afghan women have not been sufficiently consulted prior to interventions, nor are agencies sufficiently accountable to them. Gretchen Bloom, gender consultant and former head of the Program Unit at the World Food Program in Afghanistan, elaborates: “Many programs have been designed with Western notions of feminism and/or women’s perceived appropriate status. When Afghan national staff, both women and gender-sensitive men, have been allowed a voice, the correct historical perspective was taken into consideration.”

Many organizations in Afghanistan are working to engage women’s perspectives and to involve men in similar programs. However, most organizations are subject to international priorities and donor decrees, with little room to input local realities. The result is an emphasis on Afghan women that extracts them from their social context and interrelationships. Excessive references to “Afghan women” as existing in a vacuum serve to disrupt gender dynamics and to create new tensions between men and women.

Numbers are used to measure the success of programs for Afghan women. These indicators drive funding, and projects that achieve their numbers are touted as a success. Dawn Sparks-de la Rosa, a Resettlement Expert at the International Catholic Migration Commission, argues that this should not be the case. “Progress should be slow, especially in a country like Afghanistan,” she says. Funding for projects supporting Afghan women has declined dramatically in the last year. Available funding continues to be difficult to access and comes with pre-determined donor priorities. “A lot of aid defined job training as its specific focus,” Sparks-de la Rosa explains. “But how many tailors can there be in Kabul? And how many women can be carpet-weavers – a profession that has exploited Afghan women for years. Aid comes and goes and carries with it the whim of agencies who reset their priorities based on funding available. They work to please their donors, not the women they are helping.”

Rachel Wareham concludes that Afghan women are very strong and capable, yet there will be hard times ahead. “The international community continues to support cultural relativism and are afraid to do what women really ask for. Afghan women themselves are not necessarily conservative. It’s the decision-makers – including the international community – who are.”

LEGALLY BOUND

Although Afghanistan’s new Constitution – approved in January 2004 by the Afghan Constitutional Loya Jirga (Grand Assemby) – secures women’s rights and ensures equality before the law, many Afghan women fear that these words may not reach the right ears. Human rights and women’s rights organizations have begun to identify fissures in the document where women’s rights may vanish. Afghanistan is also a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), signed without reservation in March 2003.

Women comprised 20 percent of the delegates to the Constitutional Loya Jirga. With their help, several articles protecting their rights were passed. Article 7 requires Afghanistan to observe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all covenants to which Afghanistan is a party. Article 22 guarantees the legal equality of men and women. While it might be touted that women were present and active in the Loya Jirga, this should not overshadow the fact that these women expressed concern for their safety on the streets and at home in addition to the harassment they experienced at the event itself.

National divorce laws have been revived, and women are beginning to exercise this right. Women who are abused or whose husbands are reported as missing are now able to divorce within Afghan law. The Kabul Family Court has granted approximately 40 divorces for women this year.

Presidential elections in Afghanistan are scheduled for October 9. In the past few months, a major campaign has been launched to bring women to the polls. This entails a poster campaign, but little else, Sparks-de la Rosa explains. “Women should be called in a meeting forum at a local mosque or school so that they can learn about their rights. From what I know nothing of this sort was ever done…As a result, many women will not vote since they may view it as a ‘man’s duty.'” In a country with little history of or faith in central government, exercising civic duty is not a priority. In discussions of women’s role in politics, one woman told me, “What good is politics? Look at where it has brought Afghanistan.”

Current security risks in Afghanistan have made voter registration a difficult task. Violence has increased in recent months, and agencies are concerned about sending staff to rural areas. The recent deaths of female election workers has slowed the registration process. Further, the process is a lengthy one as most women will need to be approached individually and within their own homes, Gretchen Bloom explains.

Although many women have registered, true representation is a challenge. It is unlikely that women will vote differently from the men in their household, and men will vote to keep themselves secure. Jeanne Bryer explains that “most rural areas have commanders whose word is law, and no one would be likely to vote against the commander’s preferred candidate for fear of persecution. In other words, both women and men will do what they are told.”

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

Experience in other contexts such as Bosnia has revealed that violence against women often increases in the immediate aftermath of a conflict. Afghanistan may very well fall into this pattern. However, increased violence against women in Afghanistan could also be construed as a reaction to the high-profile focus of development agencies on women in the country. Women’s human rights are still being violated across Afghanistan; reports of self-immolation and violence against women at home and on the street have increased in the last year. Despite reports that have been released about women’s continued and increasing abuse, Rachel Wareham explains that there is hardly any funding to combat violence against women. And certainly no one is accepting responsibility for possibly perpetuating the increased violence. Dawn Sparks-de la Rosa explains: “There were several cases known to me where women were being abused by their husbands for taking classes and participating in women’s workshops. Some women became scared and stopped attending. Fathers, brothers, husbands were never involved in any of the programming activities.”

The media and international agencies only present opposite sides of the spectrum: the few heroines who have attracted the media’s fickle eye, and the oppressed masses who remain victims. Even this limited picture of Afghan reality fails to capture media attention today. Isolating Afghan women – from the burqa-clad to the lipstick-wearer – is not the best way to make changes and achieve gains. Focus on Afghan women is lessening, leaving the masses with a false perception that Afghan women have been “liberated” and our task now lies elsewhere. In Iraq, perhaps.

Recently returned from research in Afghanistan, Jeanne Bryer asked an Afghan man what his assessment was of Afghanistan’s future. His response was, “I work to hope.” She understood his answer to mean that an opportunity seems to be lost again. “The world focused on helping Afghanistan after September 11: money was allocated, promises were made, thousands of internationals including heads of state, the UN, media, aid agencies, and businesses arrived and made pronouncements – but things are most definitely going backwards again,” explains Bryer. “Rural areas are bereft of assistance due to lack of security and the country is awash with guns and drugs. Corruption is rife from top to bottom, political parties are rife with ethnic division; there are power struggles, shifting alliances, and underlying violence threatening to rip the country apart once more. Everyone suffers, including women. All any of us can do is ‘work to hope’ – and continue doing what we think is right from a humanitarian point of view. We need to try to understand and learn with humility what Afghan women think is right for them. This would be the right thing for us to do.”

Lina Abirafeh has worked for NGOs in Afghanistan for the past several years. Abirafeh is currently pursuing her PhD in gender and development.

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by Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON — A leading human rights group has condemned the first reported execution of an Afghan woman for alleged adultery since the ouster of the extremist Taliban regime.

The 29-year-old woman, named only as Amina, was killed Thursday. Afghan police said they are investigating.

”The case of Amina demonstrates the failure of the Afghan government to protect, ensure and dispense justice, particularly for women,” rights watchdog Amnesty International said Tuesday.

Amnesty, citing reports from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the woman had been sentenced to death by a decree from a local religious figure, or mullah, in the Urgu district of northeastern Badakhshan province.

”The Afghan government has the responsibility of protecting women from violence, committed not only by the state but also by private individuals and groups,” Amnesty said in a statement issued after sifting reports of Amina’s stoning to death.

Amnesty, citing eyewitnesses, said Amina’s husband and local officials dragged her out of her parents’ house before stoning her to death in public. The man accused of committing adultery with her reportedly was whipped one hundred times and freed.

Police officials and Afghan human rights commission workers, however, have told news agencies that local accounts also suggest the possibility that Amina’s husband and his family may have killed her by some other means, not by stoning, and that they could have trumped up the adultery accusations against her to deflect her request for a separation.

Journalists also have reported that Amina’s husband recently returned from Iran after five years away and that she asked him for a separation on the grounds that her husband could not support her. The husband, however, accused Amina of having a relationship with another man. It was not clear whether the couple had any children.

During the Taliban’s rule, adultery provided a frequent basis or pretext for women to be stoned to death. At least one other woman reportedly was stoned to death in the same area as Amina in the three-plus years since the Taliban’s removal. Amina’s apparently was the first sanctioned execution of a woman for adultery, Amnesty said.

Amnesty welcomed Afghan officials’ assurances that they are investigating and urged the government of President Hamid Karzai to abolish the death penalty.

”The case of Amina illustrates the irredeemable injustice of the application of the death penalty,” the group said.

”This is especially pertinent with regards to Afghanistan where the central criminal justice system is unable to provide adequate safeguards against local court decisions and similarly cannot, as of yet, ensure the minimum standards of a fair trial with due process,” it added.

The case also highlights the precarious situation of Afghan women even after the Taliban’s ouster.

”Despite the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghan women continue to endure undue dangers and discrimination,” according to an assessment by the Washington-based advocacy group Women’s Edge Coalition.

”Rape of women is still rampant as a means of revenge against the Pashtuns, the ethnic group most closely associated with the Taliban,” Women’s Edge said. ”Outside of Kabul, women continue to fear the repercussions of appearing in public without the burqa, and mothers are still dying at a rate of 160 per 10,000 live births. Given that women outnumber men 6 to 4 in Afghanistan, widespread gender-based violence and deprivation must be seen as mainstream epidemics afflicting the majority of the population.”

Under international human rights law, states must exercise due diligence to secure women’s rights to equality, life, liberty, security, and freedom from discrimination, torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, Amnesty said.

Adultery is forbidden under Islamic law, which places sentences ranging from whipping to stoning to death unless the adulterers repent and change their ways, according to the Web site Islam Online.

However, sentences can only be handed down after an Islamic court has heard evidence, according to the religious site.

Standards of evidence require that in order to convict someone of adultery, the accused must make a confession and not retract it. Alternatively, four men deemed reliable and pious must testify that they witnessed the act and actually saw the man’s penis inserted into the woman’s vagina, according to Islam Online.

”Any doubt about the evidence should prevent the punishment,” it said.

Islamic scholars have debated the rules of evidence even as women’s and rights advocates have assailed them as biased, lacking legal rigor, failing to ensure due process, and an invitation to abuse. Rights monitors and religious scholars alike have said, however, that mullahs have honored the standards mainly in the breach.

Copyright © 2005 OneWorld.net ###

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The Bush Administration’s Afghan Spring

By Tom Engelhardt

April 05 , 2005

If Iraq has been the disaster zone of Bush foreign policy, Afghanistan is still generally thought of as its success story — to the extent that anyone in our part of the world thinks about that country at all any more. Before the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan experienced a relative flood of American attention. It was, after all, the liberation moment. Possibly the most regressive and repressive regime on Earth had just bitten the dust. The first blow had been struck against the 9/11 attackers. The media rushed in — and they were in a celebratory mood.

As Bush administration efforts quickly turned Iraqwards, however, so did media attention. By June 2003, just two months after the invasion of Iraq, the American Journalism Review tells us, “only a handful of reporters remained in the struggling country on a full-time basis, while other news organizations floated correspondents in and out when time and resources permitted.” More recently, just Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and possibly the New York Times (which seems to have Carlotta Gall back on the beat) consider Afghanistan — the devastated land that has been the crucible for, and breeding ground for, so many of the crises and problems of our era — important enough to have full-time reporters assigned to it.

There was a burst of media attention last October for the Afghan presidential election, won by Hamid Karzai. It was a demonstration of something we’ve seen since in Iraq and elsewhere — that people everywhere feel understandable enthusiasm at the thought of determining their own fates with their own hands (however limited their ability to do so may be in reality). It was, in fact, with the Afghanistan election that the Bush administration’s “Arab Spring” blitz, its present success story about spreading democracy worldwide, with an emphasis on the Middle East, really began.

Since then, what news Americans have gotten about Afghanistan has consisted largely of infrequent reports on the deaths of small numbers of American troops there; statements, interviews, and press conferences by various American generals or officials on the ever-improving situation in the country, or on the Pentagon’s sudden willingness to tackle the drug problem there; pieces on “abuses” of Afghan prisoners by American troops or CIA agents; or statements about how we must stay in the country until a struggling new democracy truly takes root in that impoverished land. Throw in the odd propaganda visit by an American dignitary and you more or less have Afghan news as it exists in this country. After all, in most of Afghanistan there are no reporters. Even the 5,000 European troops guarding the capital, Kabul, under the NATO banner have but recently begun to make it beyond Kabul’s bounds. The Americans alone have given themselves the run of the country and they have generally preferred to keep the news to themselves.

The last wash of Afghan news came when, after a year of planning, Laura Bush made it there for six hours last week to “offer support for Afghan women in their struggle for greater rights,” to meet President Hamid Karzai, and to have a meal with American troops at Bagram Air Base. (Headlines were of the “Laura Bush Pledges More Aid for Afghanistan,” “Laura Bush in Afghanistan to Back Women’s Education,” “First Lady Drops in on Afghanistan” variety.) Standing next to an Afghan woman, shovel in hand, she also had her picture taken and disseminated in the American press. The caption in my hometown paper says she was “posing for a photograph at a women’s dorm at Kabul University and planting a tree.” As a photo, nationalities aside, it might easily have graced the pages of Soviet Life magazine and come from a distant imperial era.

Drugs

So Afghanistan has once again become the land that time forgot. Given the present Bush democracy blitz and given the country’s “success” — a “struggling” or “nascent” democracy or “semi-democracy,” liberated from one of the worst regimes on Earth and helped back onto its feet by 17,000-plus American troops stationed on its territory, it seems a case worth revisiting. What follows is the best assessment I can offer — from this distance — based at least to some extent on more fulsome reporting done for media outlets outside the United States.

When you begin to look around, you quickly find that just about everyone — Bush proponents and critics alike — seems to agree on at least some of the following when it comes to the experiment in “democracy” in Afghanistan: The country now qualifies, according to the Human Development Index in the UN’s Human Development Report 2004, as the sixth worst off country on Earth, perched just above five absolute basket-case nations (Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone) in sub-Saharan Africa. The power of the new, democratically elected government of Hamid Karzai extends only weakly beyond the outskirts of Kabul. Large swathes of Afghanistan are still ruled by warlords and drug lords, or in some cases undoubtedly warlord/drug lords; and while the Taliban was largely swept away, armed militias dominate much of the country as they did after the Soviet withdrawal back in 1989. In addition, a low-level guerrilla war is still being run by elements of the former Taliban regime for which, in areas of the South, there is a growing “nostalgia.”

Women, outside a few cities, seem hardly better off than they were under the Taliban. As Sonali Kolhatkar, co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

“We hear… about [how] five million girls are now going to school. It is wonderful. When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed that in Kabul, certainly schools were open, women were walking around fairly openly with not as much fear. Outside of Kabul, where 80% of Afghans reside, totally different situation. There are no schools. I visited the Farah province, which is a very isolated, remote province in western Afghanistan and there were no schools except for the one school that Afghan Women’s Mission is funding that is administered by our allies, the members of RAWA. Aside from that one school for girls, there are no schools in the region. And so we hear all of these very superficial things about how great Afghan women are, you know, the progress they’re making. The U.N. just released a report recently on Afghanistan where they described Afghanistan’s education system as, quote, ‘the worst in the world.’ And, you know, we never hear that. Our media, when they covered Laura Bush’s trip, will not mention, will not do their homework, and will not mention these facts.”

According to the UN report, “Every 30 minutes a woman in Afghanistan dies from pregnancy-related causes… 20 percent of children die before the age of five… [and] the poorest 30 percent of the population receive only 9 percent of the national income, while the upper 30 percent receive 55 per cent.”

Reconstruction throughout the country has been faltering; funds promised by international bodies and states have not been delivered in anything like the amounts agreed upon; the new Afghan National Army, being trained by the Americans, is a weak reed when it comes to national (or local) security; most nongovernmental aid organizations, many of which largely abandoned the country because it was so perilous for their workers, have yet to return or are just barely testing the waters again; and what economic growth there is seems to exist largely thanks to the drug trade, which is said to account for 60% of the country’s gross domestic product.

Having cornered most of the world’s supply of opium poppies and a growing slice of its heroin-production facilities, Afghanistan seems to be well on the way to becoming the globe’s narco-state par excellence. It has “bumper harvests that far exceed even the most alarming predictions,” according to “senior Pentagon officials” quoted by Thom Shanker of the New York Times.

Paul Rogers, the canny geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, sums the situation up this way:

“Afghanistan is returning to levels of production typical of the chaotic period after the withdrawal of Soviet military forces in 1989. According to United Nations sources, opium poppy cultivation from 2003-04 increased by 64%; around 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) are now under cultivation. The most recent UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, Afghanistan: Opium Survey 2004, finds that Afghanistan now accounts for 87% of the world’s illegal production of opium… On the basis of the 2004 estimate, 2.3 million people in over 330,000 households are involved in production, 10% of the Afghan population.”

According to the Times’ Shanker, “One military officer who has served in Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: ‘What will be history’s judgment on our nation-building mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave behind is Colombia’ of the 1990’s?” It’s an apt analogy, though economically Colombia looks like paradise compared to Afghanistan. Until recently, the Pentagon actively resisted in any way interfering in the burgeoning drug trade — in part, undoubtedly, because it was funding local warlords involved in the trade. The recent organized murder (on the eve of his departure from the country) of a British development specialist, Steven MacQueen, who had been involved in a small-scale project to wean Afghan farmers from opium growing was but one ominous sign of the direction the new democracy seems to be taking.

The Karzai government is weak indeed. Parliamentary elections have just been postponed for the third time — until September. Warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, the new defense minister, is probably a bona fide war criminal (and former American ally) with 30,000 militia under his command. And this is but to scratch the surface of a nearly lawless land destroyed by decades of war against the Soviets, of civil war among warlords, of war and rule by the Taliban, and of bombing and invasion by the United States (which paid the Northern Alliance and other warlords to do most of its war-fighting work for it and has been dealing with the results of that decision ever since).

The Afghan story may, in many ways, be the saddest tale on Earth today, which, given the role of the country in our recent history, may also make it the most dangerous story around. Who now remembers a time in the 1950’s and early 60’s when, in peaceful Cold War competition for influence with the Soviets, we were building ranch-style houses near Kandahar in a country that had a middle class and was reasonably prosperous. Today, it’s as if that took place on the other side of the moon. But let’s not assume that everyone other than the drug lords in Afghanistan is unhappy. Take the Bush administration and the Pentagon, for example.

Bases

Just the other day, Air Force Brigadier General Jim Hunt gave an interview in which he announced an $83 million upgrade for the two main U.S. bases in Afghanistan: Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, and Kandahar Air Field in the South. A new runway to be built at Bagram will be part of a more general effort, said Hunt: “We are continuously improving runways, taxiways, navigation aids, airfield lighting, billeting and other facilities to support our demanding mission.”

The general offered some other figures relating to that mission: “150 U.S. aircraft, including ground-attack jets and helicopter gunships as well as transport and reconnaissance planes, were using 14 airfields around Afghanistan. Many are close to the Pakistani border. Other planes such as B-1 bombers patrol over Afghanistan without landing.”

Strange, those 14 airfields, since in Iraq the U.S. has reportedly been building up to 14 permanent bases (or “enduring camps”). You have to wonder whether there’s something in that number. In certain numerological systems, 14 is evidently associated with “addiction.” The question is: What exactly are America’s air-field upgraders and base builders addicted to?

Gen. Hunt typically explains the addiction, or mission, this way: “We will continue to carry out the… mission for as long as necessary to secure a free and democratic society for the people of Afghanistan.” But here’s the curious thing: We’re ramping up our air bases in Afghanistan at the very moment when our generals are also claiming that the left-over guerrilla war being carried out by Taliban remnants is on the wane. After another of those American drop-ins on Hamid Karzai and his country, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently announced from the relative safety of Kabul airport that Afghanistan was “secure” (“Security is very good throughout the country, exceptionally good”), even as he suggested that “the United States is considering keeping long-term bases here as it repositions its military forces around the world.” In the process, he also discussed what he and others politely call a future “strategic partnership” between the Pentagon and Karzai’s Afghanistan (which is a little like saying that a lion and a mouse are considering forming an alliance).

In recent months, guerrilla attacks had indeed fallen off radically, though a particularly fierce Afghan winter may in part have been responsible. As spring arrives, the pace of the fighting seems again to be picking up somewhat. Still, if you were considering Afghanistan in isolation, the logic of our generals and officials might seem to indicate that, as the war against Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants winds down, so should American troop strength and base positioning. That on bases at least, the opposite seems to be happening might lead you to scratch your head — especially if your only source of information was our largely demobilized press in which the news is reported (when it is) more or less country by country and days can pass before you run across a piece that includes, say, three or four countries, no less discusses the actual geo-political look of things. Throw in the fact that Pentagon basing policy is considered an inside-the-paper story for policy wonks and that U.S. bases — wherever located — are not considered subjects worthy of significant coverage.

But, of course, our strategists in Washington pay notoriously little attention to the press and, from the beginning, they’ve been thinking in the most global of terms as they plan various ways to garrison the parts of the world — essentially, its energy heartlands — that matter most to them. And if you turn, for instance, to a striking piece in the Asia Times by Ramtanu Maitra, US scatters bases to control Eurasia, you can get a sense of what all this Pentagon basing activity really adds up to. Maitra reports that a decision to set up new U.S. military bases in Afghanistan — up to 9 scattered across in six different provinces — was taken during Donald Rumsfeld’s drop-in on Kabul Airport in December. These small bases, expected to be small and “flexible,” are to be part of a new American global-basing policy that “can be used in due time as a springboard to assert a presence far beyond Afghanistan.”

As Maitra points out, Sen. John McCain, the number two Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, while on a Kabul drop-in of his own and after talks with Karzai, proclaimed himself committed to a “strategic partnership that we believe must endure for many, many years” and assured reporters that the “partnership” should include “permanent bases” for U.S. military forces. (He later backtracked on the bases, his statement perhaps being a bit too blunt for the moment.)

For our Afghan bases to make much sense, you have to consider as well, those fourteen (or so) permanent bases in Iraq, our many other Middle Eastern bases, our full-scale access to three or more Pakistani military bases, our penetration of the once off-limits former SSRs of Central Asia, including the use of an air base in Uzbekistan and the setting up of a base for up to 3,000 U.S. troops at Manas in impoverished Kyrgyzstan (where “the Tulip Revolution” has just ejected a corrupt pro-Russian regime). In fact, you have to see that from Camp Bondsteel in the former Yugoslavia to the Manas base at the edge of China, the United States now effectively garrisons most of the heartland energy regions of the planet.

As Maitra comments,

“Media reports coming out of the South Asian subcontinent point to a US intent that goes beyond bringing Afghanistan under control, to playing a determining role in the vast Eurasian region. In fact, one can argue that the landing of US troops in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 was a deliberate policy to set up forward bases at the crossroads of three major areas: the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. Not only is the area energy-rich, but it is also the meeting point of three growing powers — China, India and Russia.

“On February 23, the day after McCain called for ‘permanent bases’ in Afghanistan, a senior political analyst and chief editor of the Kabul Journal, Mohammad Hassan Wulasmal, said, ‘The US wants to dominate Iran, Uzbekistan and China by using Afghanistan as a military base.'”

Throw in our access to potential bases in the former Eastern European satellites of the former Soviet Union (Rumania and Bulgaria in particular) and you have the Pentagon positioned in quite remarkable ways not just in relation to the oil lands of the planet, but also in relation to our former superpower adversary. People ordinarily say that the Soviet Union “fell” in 1990 as the Berlin Wall came down, but in fact the Soviet Union has never stopped “falling.” Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, until recently Moscow bureau chiefs for the Washington Post, quote “analysts” as now speaking of “‘the second breakup of the Soviet Union.’ Some were even daring to ask the ultimate question: Could Russia itself be next?”

Just in the last year, we’ve seen “the Rose Revolution” in Georgia, “the Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, and now “the Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, all heavily financed and backed by groups funded by or connected to the U.S. government and/or the Bush administration. As Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times writes:

“The whole arsenal of US foundations — National Endowment for Democracy, International Republic Institute, Ifes, Eurasia Foundation, Internews, among others — which fueled opposition movements in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, has also been deployed in Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan]… Practically everything that passes for civil society in Kyrgyzstan is financed by these US foundations, or by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). At least 170 non-governmental organizations charged with development or promotion of democracy have been created or sponsored by the Americans. The US State Department has operated its own independent printing house in Bishkek since 2002 — which means printing at least 60 different titles, including a bunch of fiery opposition newspapers. USAID invested at least $2 million prior to the Kyrgyz elections — quite something in a country where the average salary is $30 a month.”

American policy-makers have been aided greatly by the harsh and heavy-handed rule of corrupt local leaders and by the crude politics of Russian President Vladimir Putin who, in his attempt to protect the Russian “near abroad,” has positioned himself to fail in country after country. As Ian Traynor of the British Guardian writes, “He has managed to manoeuvre himself into the unenviable position of being identified as a not very effective supporter and protector of unsavoury regimes throughout the post-Soviet space.” And, of course, they have been aided by the genuine urge of peoples from Kyrgyzstan to Ukraine not to be under the thumb of various Putin-style semi-autocrats — or worse.

(You could say, in a way, that the “near abroads” of both former superpowers have been falling away for years now; for, in a similar manner, an urge to break away and implement new forms of democratic and economic independence from Washington’s diktats has been evident in our former Latin American “backyard” — from Argentina to Bolivia, Brazil to Venezuela — the difference being that the Latin American version of this has lacked the funds from a distant superpower.)

The result of all this has been that, with the exception of Belarus and Siberia, Russia has been pushed back into something reminiscent perhaps of its borders several centuries ago. This has to be a dream result for former anti-Soviet cold warriors like Dick Cheney and Condi Rice. After all, they’ve accomplished what even the most rabid cold warriors of the early 1950s could only have dreamed of. They have turned “containment” into “rollback.”

In the meantime, the Pentagon, firmly ensconced in an ever expanding set of bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, has Iran militarily encircled. With approximately 160,000 troops (not counting mercenaries) and all those planes and helicopters, it now occupies two countries right in the oil and natural gas heartlands of the planet.

In fact, though their situations are many ways different, there are certain (enforced) similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan. In neither country, did we arrive with an exit strategy, because in neither case did we plan on departing. Both countries are ruled by exiles, effectively installed by us. Realistically speaking, both the government in Baghdad’s Green Zone and the one in Kabul are, in the kindest of terms, “wards” of the United States. Both lack the ability to defend themselves. The Iraqi government is essentially installed inside a vast American military base and, as Maitra points out, “the inner core of Karzai’s security is run by the US State Department with personnel provided by private contractors.” (As a little thought experiment, try to imagine this in reverse. What would we make of an American president whose Secret Service was made up of foreigners hired by the government of Hamid Karzai?)

In both countries, democratic elections of a sort were conducted not just under the gaze of, but under the actual guns of, the occupiers (though when it comes to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the Bush administration quite correctly insists that democratic elections shouldn’t be run in an occupied country). Above all, in both countries, the Bush administration is eager for a “strategic partnership,” which means that its officials are eager to remain free to act beyond anyone’s laws, in any manner of their choosing, and with almost complete imperial impunity.

Jails

In recent months, the best news reporting on Afghanistan has focused on the detention and jailing practices of Americans in that country and has been based largely on limited investigations conducted by one or another part of our government. A December Washington Post piece by R. Jeffrey Smith (General Cites Problems at U.S. Jails in Afghanistan), while discussing “a wide range of shortcomings in the military’s handling of prisoners in Afghanistan,” managed to mention that we have “roughly two dozen” (count ’em: 24) prisons in that country. Smith’s piece began:

“A recent classified assessment of U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan found that they have been plagued by many of the problems that existed at military prisons in Iraq, including weak or nonexistent guidance for interrogators, creating what the assessment described as an “opportunity” for prisoner abuse.”

In such pieces, there are always “shortcomings” in American practices or dangerous “opportunities” still available for “abuse.” (The word torture is seldom used in the U.S. media in such situations). The major abuses almost invariably turn out to have been largely over by the time the investigation being reported on took place. The Smith piece ends typically: “U.S. forces have ‘tightened up procedures for training up our people to handle and care for the prisoners,’ Keeton said. They now have standard operating procedures in place, she said, and mechanisms to enforce them.” All of which proves true until the next batch of horrors pours out.

A recent Dana Priest piece for the Post (CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment) on long past crimes against Afghans has a similar flavor. (“The CIA’s inspector general is investigating at least half a dozen allegations of serious abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, including two previously reported deaths in Iraq, one in Afghanistan and the death at the Salt Pit, U.S. officials said. A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the agency actively pursues allegations of misconduct.”) Such acts (or crimes) are normally dealt with in the American press as individual cases — just as recently stories of the various “extraordinary renditions,” global kidnappings of terror suspects, and the like, many of whom then passed through Afghan jails, have trickled out largely as individual tales of terror and mistreatment, even if sometimes then toted up. They are essentially part of what really is the “bad apple” school of journalism, largely based on various military or official investigations of what the military, intelligence agencies, and the Bush administration have done.

To see the larger patterns in this you usually have to look elsewhere. For instance, Emily Bazelon of Mother Jones magazine had this to say (From Bagram to Abu Ghraib):

“Hundreds of prisoners have come forward, often reluctantly, offering accounts of harsh interrogation techniques including sexual brutality, beatings, and other methods designed to humiliate and inflict physical pain. At least eight detainees are known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and in at least two cases military officials ruled that the deaths were homicides. Many of the incidents were known to U.S. officials long before the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted; yet instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan to the Iraqi prison… Even now, with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing.”

As it turns out, the problems are indeed continuing and in a form that simply cannot be read about in the mainstream media in this country. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark went to Afghanistan for the British Guardian and traveled the country investigating American detention practices to produce a piece, “One huge US jail”, that really should be read in full by every American. They do what any good reporter should do: They attempt to put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, take in the overall picture, and then draw the necessary conclusions.

They start by saying, “Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture.” Then, based on their own investigations, Levy and Scott-Clark lay out the geography of detention in America’s Afghanistan:

“Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed ‘Camp Slappy’ by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major ‘collection centre’ at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the ‘Salt Pit,’ in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment.”

They conclude that — U.S. courts having made Bush administration detention centers in Guantanamo, Cuba, vulnerable to potential prosecution, “what has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantanamo Bay… [as an] offshore gulag — beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions.” They add:

“However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, ‘Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part.’ In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.”

The Great Game

In the current Great Game of armed geopolitical chess the Bush administration is playing, it’s not quite clear who is on the other side. Is it Vladimir Putin and his desire to create a new, more modest version of the Soviet Union? Is it China – or rather, the anticipation of a future oil-crazed Chinese move into the region? Is it largely to isolate Iran and finally create American-style regime change there? Or is it all of the above?

Speaking of Russian-American competition, it has, it seems, become modish for American officials from our Secretary of Defense to assorted generals to brag that, in Afghanistan, we did in weeks what the Soviets couldn’t do in years. What the Soviets couldn’t do in years, of course, was successfully conquer Afghanistan. (Despite present appearances, needless to say, it’s not yet clear that the Bush administration has done so either.)

This seems to me a bizarre, yet telling expression of American imperial pride; even a reasonable description of Afghan realities, as seen from Washington. After all, the Soviets too swore they were “liberating” the Afghans from an oppressive way of life as they staked their imperial claim on the country back in the late 1970’s. In fact, the largest American base in Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, is often referred to in the press as “the former Soviet base.” If, to put this in context, we went back to the Soviet period and observed Soviet troops in Afghanistan doing what American troops are now doing (as, in fact, they did, right down to the grim detention centers), we would certainly have employed other terms than “democracy” or even “strategic partnership” to describe what was going on.

It may be the case that Afghanistan will prove the perfect Bush “democracy.” It had an election and sooner or later will undoubtedly have more of them. Its resulting government remains weak, malleable, and completely dependent on American forces. The U.S. military and our intelligence services have had a free hand in setting up various detention centers, prisons, and holding camps (where anything goes and no law rules) that add up to a foreign mini-gulag stuffed with prisoners, many not Afghan, beyond the reach of any court. Our fourteen airfields and growing network of bases and outposts are now to be “upgraded” as part of a ‘strategic partnership” with an Afghan government that we put into power and largely control. These bases, in turn, should serve as a launching pad for controlling the larger region, and the detention and torture centers as suitable places for the unruly of the area. Afghanistan, in short, is in the process of becoming an electoral-narco-gulag-permanent-base dependency, and so qualifies as a model democracy, suitable to be spread far and wide.

If you wanted to come up with a little formula for what’s happened you might put it this way:

Afghan Spring American freedom of action

Afghan democracy American air bases

So the Afghanis go to hell while making drugs their export of choice; the Bush administration gets its bases; and if you happen to be one of the American conquerors of that benighted land, you don’t return home to parade down a major thoroughfare in your chariot with your war booty and slaves before you (and a slave by your ear whispering about the vanity of conquerors) à la the Romans, but you do get an American version of the same. You can go out on the lecture circuit and make a fortune, or become a play-by-play TV commentator for the next American war to come down the pike, or if you’re Tommy Franks, former Centcom commander and victorious general in our Afghan border war, you might be “tabbed to join the board of directors of Outback Steakhouse Inc.” with a modest $60,000 annual compensation (plus expenses and fees). Could life be sweeter — or meatier? Could Outback Franks be next? Will Outback open a Bagram outlet? Stay tuned as geopolitics meets the chain restaurant.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.

Read the original article here.

Laura Bush’s visit to Afghanistan focused media attention on the still-struggling country. But not a single news article dared to question her empty talk of solidarity with Afghan women.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Published in Alternet.org.

In the past two years the US media have drastically reduced their coverage of Afghanistan. According to the American Journalism Review only three news organizations–Newsweek, Associated Press and The Washington Post–have full-time reporters stationed in Kabul. What little is published focuses mostly on feel-good stories, superficial change and unopposed reportage of the Bush administration’s claims.

Take Laura Bush’s recent visit to Afghanistan. The news media immediately turned toward the still-struggling Central Asian country. But despite a slight increase in media coverage thanks to Mrs. Bush, not a single news article dared to question her empty talk of solidarity with Afghan women. For example, the Associated Press’s Deb Riechmann mentioned Laura Bush’s meeting with “Afghan women freed from Taliban repression.” Reichmann simply ignored their new oppressor–U.S.-backed warlords. Mrs. Bush cited the progress made on girls’ education–a statement made very often by the State Department and George W. Bush himself. The U.S. media failed to remind the public that the U.N. recently concluded Afghanistan’s education system is the “worst in the world.”

This behavior on the part of the U.S. media is not new. In the early 1990s, the worst atrocities by mujahadeen fighters (including some members of the current government) resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees in a four year period in Kabul alone. During that time, media coverage dropped drastically. In the late 1990s, when the Taliban were implementing their oppressive laws, the media largely ignored it. In 2000, when tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were trapped in horrific conditions in refugee camps in the Pakistani side of the border, the same pattern of silence continued. Only when the Buddha statues of Bamiyan were blown up, or the attacks of 9/11 took place was Afghanistan worth focusing on.

Why don’t the media today examine Afghanistan and Bush’s claims of “freedom and democracy”? True, most Afghans have embraced wholeheartedly the promise of choosing their own leaders through an electoral system, despite having certain aspects of democracy imposed on them by a foreign country. But the power of undemocratic warlords has stifled the aspirations of Afghan people. When I visited Afghanistan a month ago, I spoke with independent pro-democracy political activists like Malalai Joya, who is forced to conduct her work underground. Fearing attacks by warlords, they use false names and travel in disguise or with bodyguards. I met journalists who are risking their lives to report the crimes of the warlords in the face of government threats.

A majority of Afghans voted for Hamid Karzai, even though he is clearly a U.S. puppet. They did so because he promised never to compromise with warlords. But after his election, Karzai appointed the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, a fundamentalist misogynist warlord, as Minister of Energy. Karzai recently appointed a known war criminal, Abdul Rashid Dostum, as the National Army Chief of Staff. These moves were praised by U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as “wise,” even though the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’s recent survey revealed a deep desire among Afghans across the country for justice for past war crimes committed by the likes of Khan and Dostum. The Afghans I met were eager to see the warlords disarmed, and prosecuted, not rewarded with government positions.

Aside from its “democratic development,” the Bush administration refuses to mention serious life-and-death issues plaguing Afghanistan. Obediently following suit, the U.S. media do not cover the struggle for survival. In the 2004 National Human Development Report for Afghanistan, conducted by the United Nations, the country ranked 173 out of 178 countries in terms of human development. Only five countries, all in sub-Saharan Africa, were worse off: Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone. Refugees, whose (sometimes forced) return was loudly praised by the Bush administration as evidence of Afghan freedom, are now homeless in their own country and have turned parts of Kabul into squatters’ camps. They have no homes and little to no training, employment opportunities, or health care. Maternal mortality, especially in the provinces where the majority of Afghans live, is among the highest in the world, just as it was before 9/11 when the media were ignoring Afghanistan. Education–most vocally cited by the Bush administration as a measure of the success of U.S. policy in Afghanistan–is deemed the “worst in the world” by the UN. Outside Kabul there are dismally few educational opportunities for Afghan girls and women. In the cities, I was told that most schools have a curriculum limited to Islamic studies.

Most women are still wearing the burqa (veil), or hijab, in Afghanistan. This is admittedly far too simplistic a measure of women’s oppression, but it was exploited by the Bush administration and the media after 9/11 to visualize the brutality of the Taliban against women. Likewise, the discarding of the burqa after the fall of the Taliban was widely used by the media to showcase women’s “liberation.” Today in the cities and provinces outside Kabul, most women dress exactly as they did under the Taliban’s rule. Nasreen, an 18-year-old returned refugee living in Heart, told me she does not want to wear her hijab, but is afraid of attracting too much attention in an atmosphere that is still hostile to women.

There is an obvious pattern here: before 9/11 the media did not deem Afghanistan and its myriad problems (most of which were initiated by U.S. policies in the ’80s and ’90s) worth covering. After 9/11, when it was convenient for the Bush administration to highlight mass oppression and poverty as justifications for war, the media complied. Now, despite continued mass oppression and poverty, Bush and Rice have informed us that Afghanistan has been “saved” by our military intervention and installation of “democracy” and so it no longer needs our attention. The media continue to comply with government wishes.

The very people that Americans compassionately and generously supported after 9/11 are suffering once more because of a lack of attention and interest. Donations toward life-saving projects like hospitals, clinics, schools and training centers, have plummeted. Armed militias led by US-backed warlords have replaced the Taliban, financing their armies through heroin sales. In the short term, this compliance has had tangible consequences for the people of Afghanistan. In the long term, the lack of media coverage of the rise of these armed groups could once again have horrible and shocking consequences, like the attacks of 9/11.

Urge the media to increase and improve their coverage of Afghanistan. It only takes a few minutes.

Sonali Kolhatkar is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit that funds health, educational, and training projects for Afghan women. She is also the host and co-producer of Uprising, a daily morning radio program at KPFK, Pacifica in Los Angeles.

Read original article here.

Amy Goodman Interviews AWM’s Sonali Kolhatkar

We talk to Sonali Kolhatkar, co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and filmmaker, Carmela Baranowska who was embedded with 800 U.S. Marines in one of the most remote and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. She made a film called Taliban Country which is a disturbing expose of American actions in that country. [includes rush transcript] Earlier this week, First Lady Laura Bush made a surprise visit to Afghanistan. Mrs. Bush was surrounded by heavy security and spent a total of six hours on the ground. She met with women training to be teachers at Kabul University, U.S troops at Bagram Air Base and President Hamid Karzai.

Mrs. Bush, a former teacher and librarian, thanked the troops for ousting the Taliban. She said “thanks to you, millions of little girls are going to school in this country, little girls who were denied an education just three years ago.” Mrs. Bush also announced plans for the U.S to build an American University of Afghanistan and an International School of Afghanistan for children to receive a western style education. Though President Bush often cites the country as a symbol of success and on the road to democracy, he has has never been to Afghanistan.

We are joined in studio by the co-Director of the Afghan Women”s Mission, Sonali Kolhatkar. Sonali recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan. We are also joined in our New York Studio by filmmaker, Carmela Baranowska. In June of 2004, Carmela was embedded with eight hundred US Marines in one of the most remote and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. She made a film called Taliban Country which is a disturbing expose of American actions in that country. Here are a few excerpts from the film

* Sonali Kolhatkar, host of the popular Pacifica Radio Show, Uprising on KPFK. She is also co director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a group that works in solidarity with Afghans to help improve health and educational facilities for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

* Carmela Baranowska, an award-winning film maker of “Taliban Country.” She has just completed a 12-city tour of the US screening her film and addressing audiences on East, Midwest, South and West coasts.

* “Taliban Country”, excepts from Carmela Baranowska’s new film.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined here in Los Angeles in the studio by the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission. She is the host of Pacifica station KPFK’s morning show “Uprising.” Sonali Kolhatkar joins us. Sonali recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan. Welcome to Democracy Now!

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Thanks, Amy, good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Its great to have you with us. Can you talk about this surprise trip of the First Lady, Laura Bush?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: You know, Laura Bush used Afghan women to help launch her husband’s war right after the 9/11 attacks in late 2001, and this was a time when the Bush administration’s operation in Afghanistan needed a little bit of a boost. Karen Hughes is back on the team. She was the initiator of the whole marketability of Afghan women, if you will, to promote the Bush administration’s liberation, so-called liberation of Afghan women. So she went back, completely surprise visit, and she took with her $21 million for a school in Afghanistan highlighting all of these superficial positive changes. Of course, what we didn’t hear is that at the same time the U.S. spent about $83 million upgrading its military bases in Afghanistan, and really that’s the U.S.’s main goal. They want to be in Afghanistan for the long haul. It’s a very convenient, very strategic military area for them where they can have their bases, and they’re spending much more, of course, on military operations than they do on humanitarian projects.

AMY GOODMAN: What about where women stand now? I mean, it is often raised. They can go to school. Her point. Many point of the administration. Girls are being liberated. Women in Afghanistan.

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Right. We hear the thing about, you know, that fact about five million girls are now going to school. It is wonderful. When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed that in Kabul, certainly schools were open, women were walking around fairly openly with not as much fear. Outside of Kabul, where 80% of Afghans reside, totally different situation. There are no schools. I visited the Farah province, which is a very isolated, remote province in western Afghanistan and there were no schools except for the one school that Afghan Women’s Mission is funding that is administered by our allies, the members of RAWA. Aside from that one school for girls, there are no schools in the region. And so we hear all of these very superficial things about how great Afghan women are, you know, the progress they’re making. The U.N. just released a report recently on Afghanistan where they described Afghanistan’s education system as, quote, “the worst in the world.” And, you know, we never hear that. Our media, when they covered Laura Bush’s trip, will not mention, will not do their homework, and will not mention these facts.

AMY GOODMAN: What about warlords?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Warlords is the most important problem in Afghanistan today. Everybody I met talked about how they were really happy the Taliban was gone, and then they said, well, now we’ve got these warlords who are ideologically the same as the Taliban. They’re just less organized. And the U.S. has backed these warlords, some of them since the ’70s in the fight against the Soviets, and they empowered them at a time when the Afghan people just did not want them around. Instead of undermining them, Hamid Karzai has actually put them into positions of power. Ismail Khan, is now the Minister of Energy and he is an extremely fundamentalist warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, the war criminal whose forces were implicated in the massacre of Taliban soldiers, remember that documentary, Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death? Well, his forces were the men implicated in that massacre of thousands of Taliban. He is now the Army Chief of Staff and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, called Karzai’s moves “wise.” So, the Afghan people are extremely dismayed, because they voted for Karzai on the platform that he would not compromise with warlords. Their hopes are being dashed, and the warlords, I think its important for us to understand, give the United States an extremely good excuse to stay in Afghanistan. The Afghan people are tolerating foreign troops, because they see them as an antidote to the warlords. So the U.S. continues to allow warlords to flourish, empowers them, pushes the Karzai government to keep them in power, because it means that the U.S. can stay there for the long haul.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonali Kolhatkar is the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission. We are also joined in our New York studio by filmmaker Carmela Baranowska. In June 2004 Carmela was embedded with 800 U.S. Marines in one of the most remote and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. She made a film called Taliban Country, which is a disturbing expose of American actions in Afghanistan. Here is a few excerpts of the film.

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: In the next village, Lieutenant Colonel Khan believes he’s found an important lead in his search for the Taliban.

SOLDIER: [inaudible] the Taliban leader’s compound. The guy that we captured just a few moments ago is a known Taliban leader in this area. We’ve been looking for him for the last three years. So that was a good find.

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: Where did you find him?

SOLDIER: He was sleeping in a field with a loaded weapon.

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: As the sweeps wind down for the day, Lieutenant Colonel Khan makes a joke about the surrounding opium poppy fields with a militia leader who calls himself the minister for agriculture.

LT. COLONEL KHAN: Tell him he’s doing a very lousy job. I don’t see any agriculture.

TRANSLATOR: He says if I didn’t take any action of my agriculture because I am too busy fighting.

LT. COLONEL KHAN: Tell him that we need to get rid of the Taliban and al Qaeda here and improve the security of this nation and then we can have more agriculture and water.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from Taliban Country by filmmaker Carmela Baranowska. Here is another clip from the film.

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: It’s a few weeks later and I decide to head back independently to the same area of central Afghanistan without the presence of the Marines and the militia. I want to find out the real story behind the American and militia operations. I travel Afghan style with a driver, translator and two armed policemen. They’re brief is to safeguard us from roadside robbers, but we all realize that there is no real protection against the Taliban. After six hours we’re back in the village of Mossazai. At the forward operating base the Marines processed and tagged the 35 villagers. This man, Wali Mohammad was arrested by the U.S. Marines Force Recon Unit, their forward operating intelligence unit. He spent three nights in detention.

WALI MOHAMMAD: When they took us away from here, this is what happened to us. They made us stand like this. They fingered us, beat us, humiliated us. There was no food. My legs gave way. We were asking desperately for food. There was nothing. They gave us water, but spilled it over our mouths, noses and eyes. They shoveled snuff up our nostrils and into our eyes. They told us not to look at them. This type of cruelty has never been done to us or seen by us. We have never seen this type of cruelty.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the film Taliban Country. It is by Carmela Baranowska. She is an Australian filmmaker and joins us in the Firehouse studio in New York. Carmela, can you talk about this extraordinary experience that you had embedded with the troops looking at Afghanistan?

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: Well, for three weeks I was embedded with U.S. Marines in one of the most remote and dangerous parts of central Afghanistan. And while it was very interesting and I was really the only person there last year who spent that period of time embedded with them, I, you know, I felt this kind of certain uneasiness. I felt that there were more questions that I wanted answered. I felt that they were only wanting to show me certain things. So I decided to go back independently. And the film is really interesting because it’s the only independent eyewitness account in these U.S. military areas from the all of last year. And I would also warrant from this year there is no independent eyewitness testimony coming out from journalists in Afghanistan. And that’s a real problem.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think, Carmela, is the most important issue that has to be highlighted and understood about Afghanistan.

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: Well, from the perspective of the film, you know, I do believe that there must be transparency. There must be military, you know, investigations that are revealed to the public. Because, don’t forget that the U.S. military’s own detention practices, its own investigation into what went on, into what is going on in Afghanistan, was supposed to have been released in June. Now, I was in that area a couple of weeks later, and it seemed to me that because there is no transparency, there is no release of documents, there is no accountability, that the human rights abuses continue and there is impunity.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonali Kolhatkar, what about U.S. forces in Afghanistan, NATO forces in Afghanistan.

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, NATO had been in Afghanistan for the past year under the International Security Assistance Force’s framework. Basically they’ve been providing security in Kabul. Only 5,000 troops. Since the Taliban fell there have been foreign troops in Kabul, which is why Kabul is safer than the rest of the country. These folks are basically providing a sort of antidote to the warlords. And Afghan people, including Karzai, had been begging for international forces, preferably under the U.N. to be expanded throughout Afghanistan and the U.S. had been resisting that because it would somehow interfere with their operation in the provinces. Basically, the U.S. wanted to be able to act in the provinces alone with no oversight and with impunity if it felt like it. Now, however, NATO forces are slowly expanding into other provinces, but they’re operating in what are called “provincial reconstruction teams,” where basically they do aid work and they provide supposedly security for building wells and schools, and the aid community is really upset about this because it undermines their impartiality. That’s why Doctors Without Borders left Afghanistan last year after a number of their workers were killed. Doctors Without Borders had been in Afghanistan for over 24 years when the worst of the worst atrocities were happening. Now it’s become too dangerous for them to work in the provinces.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of Zalmay Khalilzad?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Khalilzad is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and he is basically the guy who is running the show in Afghanistan. He’s the one who makes the decisions. He’s the one who has done the backroom dealing, ensuring that warlords are in power. He has been saying that we —

AMY GOODMAN: He’s Afghan himself?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: He’s Afghan born, but he’s a U.S. citizen. And he says, ‘Look, we need justice. That’s fine, but we first must have peace before we can have justice.’ And Karzai just parrots that, and he’s a man — when I talk to Afghans, I ask them, ‘Well, what do you think Khalilzad is doing? Do you think he is acting in the interest of the Afghan people?’ And uniformly the Afghan people were like, ‘No, we know that this man is acting in the interest of the United States, and we understand this. We just wish that he would just stop influencing our government so much.’ So he is really running the show.

AMY GOODMAN: He is a former Unocal consultant?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: This is a man who was formerly a consultant for Unocal, and I am not sure necessarily whether that plays a big role right now. Certainly there is, you know, there was the whole incident with the Unocal Company wanting to do a pipeline, oil and gas pipeline, through Afghanistan, and trying to make a deal with the Taliban when Clinton was in power. That’s not necessarily on the table right now, and even if it were, it’s not as major a project as the military bases. But Khalilzad is one of the original founders of the Project for a New American Century. He’s a neo-con at heart, and he is part and parcel of the Bush Administration’s core group.

AMY GOODMAN: May he be the next U.S. Ambassador to Iraq?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: He has been tipped off. But it’s not clear whether its going to happen for sure. I think one thing that we should learn as antiwar activists is take a look at what he’s done in Afghanistan and that’s what’s going to be in store for Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Sonali Kolhatkar. Your website?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Yeah, our website is afghanwomensmission.org. And I encourage people to go to our website. They can write to the media on our website and urge them to cover Afghanistan, cover it accurately and cover it more often.

AMY GOODMAN: And Carmela Baranowska, I want to thank you for being with us in New York, where Taliban Country can be seen here. Your website?

CARMELA BARANOWSKA: The website is talibancountry.com.. You can view the film online, and just very quickly what I would also really like to, you know, try to push for, and I know that the A.C.L.U. is really trying to release the military documents dealing with Taliban Country and looking at the three military investigations that have resulted because of the film, and also the battalion commander, very interesting, Pakistani-American Lt. Colonel Asad Khan was fired, and he’s now left the Marine Corps as a result of the film. So I really urge your listeners and viewers to visit the website talibancountry.com and to, you know, discuss with colleagues and friends the situation in Afghanistan. Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Carmela Baranowska and also Sonali Kolhatkar.

Read the original article here.

Washington, DC, Dec. 15 (UPI) — U.S. military forces may take a larger role in the anti-narcotics campaign in Afghanistan, a top general said Wednesday.

“We don’t want to be in a lead role on this, but we have an awful lot of assets over there that can provide support to other organizations that will go out and do this,” said Lt. Gen. Lance Smith. Deputy commander of U.S. Central Command at a press briefing Wednesday.

Smith said the U.S. military is considering offering more dedicated surveillance flights and possible reconnaissance satellite missions to find poppy fields.

It’s a markedly changed attitude from a year ago.

“We have spent a lot of capital in trying to build relationships with the people in there and now this has potential for us to do things that wouldn’t be popular for some of the areas we’re operating in,” Smith said.

“But it is absolutely clear to us…that everything that we’ve done in Afghanistan would be for naught if we allowed the narcotic traffickers and everybody else to take over. And so it is clear that we have a role to play, and it will be up to the secretary and actually National Security Council to determine the role that we would play in that. Right now we are working to provide as much support as we can with the assets that we have in theater.”

Read original article here.