NEWS & LETTERS, November - December 2010
Editorial
End Afghan war!
The invasion of Afghanistan, which George W. Bush began under the pretext of defeating the enemy that destroyed the World Trade Center and other targets on Sept. 11, 2001, has entered its tenth year. Obama, by expanding the war, has adopted it as his own.
When it is U.S. and NATO actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan that strengthen warlords, Taliban forces and al Qaeda alike, delaying withdrawal worsens the outcome for the Afghan people. But Obama's fear that right-wingers would castigate withdrawal as a "cut-and-run" strategy has extended the bloodshed, with no end in sight, the July 2011 date for "beginning" to withdraw troops notwithstanding.
News and Letters Committees hosted a meeting for Tahmeena Faryal from RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan) in October 2001. Despite the oppressiveness by which the Taliban ruled the Afghan people, especially women, she warned that U.S. bombing, and later outright invasion, would worsen conditions. U.S. intervention would rely on the corrupt warlords who had paved the way for the Taliban in the first place.
WAR AN ELECTION NON-ISSUE
Obama rolled to victory in 2008 in part from voters disenchanted with permanent war. He was an early opponent of the invasion of Iraq and a critic of Bush's Afghanistan policy. Yet two years later, Obama is continuing Bush's foreign wars.
Those war funds are all borrowed, as both Bush and Obama have pursued--like Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam--a "guns and butter" strategy.
The filibuster's point was to give Obama another legislative defeat, and to stop for the moment the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" contained in the "Defense" bill. So one party delayed debate on the rights of Gays and Lesbians to serve openly in the military, but neither party chose to debate the wars themselves and bring the troops home.
In Iraq, Obama missed the point of the Vietnam-era advice to just declare victory and go home--he declared victory and stayed.
DECLARING VICTORY AND STAYING
Obama has tried for cover from right-wing attacks by continuing the "good war" in Afghanistan and massively expanding it. The escalation of U.S. troops into Afghanistan has been for the public purpose of responding to the declining control of territory by the U.S.-supported Karzai government and resurgence of the Taliban, mostly by recruits created by the U.S. and NATO occupation.
The ocean of U.S. money that flows yearly into Afghanistan dwarfs its GNP of $14 billion and is irresistible to the powerful and the powerfully connected across the political spectrum. Local strongmen, including Taliban leaders, have grabbed great chunks of it in service to private security contractors, and extorted much of what the U.S. has paid to local tradesmen.
The continued presence of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and the flow of both dollars and blood of the innocent on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have emboldened the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The military campaign in Kandahar has a stated purpose of dislodging Taliban forces from their southern stronghold. But fighting against the Taliban has gone on simultaneously with negotiations between the Karzai government and high-level Taliban leaders, with U.S. approval and assistance.
AFGHANS BETWEEN TWO EVILS
That U.S. forces had given safe conduct to Taliban leaders empowered to make agreements indicates that the U.S. end strategy in Afghanistan will be some shared power arrangement between two great enemies of the Afghan people, and of Afghan women in particular: the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. But it would hasten the departure of U.S. and NATO forces, regarded by Afghan people, according to a survey, as just as dangerous to their well-being as the Taliban.
Prominent opposition feminist activist Malalai Joya said, "We are in between two evils: the warlords and Taliban on one side, and the occupation on the other. The first step is to fight against occupation--those who can liberate themselves will be free, even if it costs our lives." International solidarity with Afghan people, and Afghan women in particular, is required of us in the U.S., and demands that all troops come home now.
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