Collected articles from SOCIALISTWORKER.
org
The U.S. war
on Afghanistan
EDITORIAL
It’s Obama’s
war now
December 2, 2009
Barack Obama motivated his decision to send
30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan with a warmon-
gering speech that recalled the worst of
George W. Bush.
B ARACK OBAMA has disappointed many of
those who hoped his presidency would de-
liver “change we can believe in.”
But there’s one campaign promise Obama
has kept—twice.
In his prime-time speech on December 1,
Obama followed through on a pledge to escalate
the war in Afghanistan for a second time, an-
nouncing that he would send an additional
30,000 U.S. troops. When Obama took office,
fewer than 50,000 U.S. soldiers were deployed
to Afghanistan. He ordered an additional 21,000
troops there earlier this year. With the additional
30,000, he has doubled the U.S. presence.
Obama motivated the troop buildup with a
speech that recalled George W. Bush’s call for a
“war on terror.” He recycled the Bush lie that the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago was
retribution for the September 11, 2001, attacks,
and he falsely claimed that Afghanistan’s Taliban
government refused to hand over Osama bin
WHAT’S INSIDE
EDITORIAL
It’s Obama’s war now
Page 1
MALALAI JOYA
Why the U.S. has to go
Page 2
BACKGROUND AND ANALYSIS
PHIL GASPER
How Afghanistan
was bled dry
Page 4
Laden and al-Qaeda. “America, our allies and the
world were acting as one to destroy al-Qaeda’s
terrorist network, and to protect our common se-
curity,” Obama told West Point cadets.
Later, Obama concluded by summoning the
war frenzy cynically whipped up by the Bush
administration after September 11: “It is easy to
forget that when this war began, we were united
—bound together by the fresh memory of a hor-
rific attack, and by the determination to defend
our homeland and the values we hold dear. I re-
fuse to accept the notion that we cannot sum-
mon that unity again. I believe with every fiber
of my being that we—as Americans—can still
come together behind a common purpose.”
Wrapping himself in the flag Bush-style,
Obama strained to sell people on the idea that
the discredited, fraudulently elected govern-
ment of President Hamid Karzai can rule legiti-
ERIC RUDER
What the U.S. wants
from this war
Page 6
ELIZABETH SCHULTE
Is the U.S. fighting for
women’s liberation?
Page 6
SHARON SMITH
The war they all agree on
Page 7
ANAND GOPAL
Who are the Taliban?
Page 9
mately. “[W]e and our allies prevented the Tal-
iban from stopping a presidential election,”
Obama boasted, “and although it was marred
by fraud, that election produced a government
that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and
constitution.”
So the U.S. military helped Karzai to hold an
election so obviously fraudulent that the UN de-
manded a run-off, only the second-place finisher
refused to participate—that’s some triumph of
democracy!
Obama tried to sugarcoat the war drive with a
promise that U.S. troops will start pulling out of
Afghanistan in July 2011. But given the scale of
the Taliban resistance, that plan is utterly lacking
in credibility. The talk about Afghans taking re-
sponsibility for their own security was a dead
ringer for George W. Bush’s promises that “as
Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”
ERIC RUDER
The warlords’ president
Page 11
THE FIGHT AGAINST THE WAR
AHMED SHAWKI
Can the U.S. bring justice?
Page 12
SHARON SMITH
The antiwar movement
retreats
Page 13
ERIC RUDER
The myths of the “good war”
Page 15
I N ANOTHER note reminiscent of the Bush
years, we were treated in the run-up to the
speech to a steady media diet of good news
about the Afghan war campaign, designed to
suggest that there’s “light at the end of the tun-
nel.”
Take, for example, the revelation that anti-
Taliban militias are “spontaneously” springing
up in various parts of Afghanistan. A front-page
New York Times report gushed that the “emer-
gence of the militias, which took some leaders in
Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the Ameri-
can and Afghan officials that they are planning
to spur the growth of similar armed groups
across the Taliban heartland in the southern and
eastern parts of the country...”
“The Americans hope the militias will en-
courage an increasingly demoralized Afghan
population to take a stake in the war against the
Taliban.”
But even the Times acknowledges that U.S.
Special Forces are “fanning out across the coun-
tryside, descending from helicopters into valleys
where the residents have taken up arms against
the Taliban and offering their help”—casting se-
rious doubt about how “spontaneous” these
militias are.
With this effort, the U.S. is hoping to bypass
unpopular and tyrannical warlords and set up
tribal networks allied with occupation forces.
Money for development will be used to further
cement these ties.
But this strategy is a long shot at best. As the
Times admits, the strategy of giving ammunition,
communication hardware and other support to
these militias could backfire spectacularly. “The
growth of the anti-Taliban militias runs the risk
that they could turn on one another, or against
the Afghan and American governments,” it re-
ported.
This isn’t just a hypothetical. U.S. backing
for Afghanistan’s mujahideen fighters against
the ex-USSR’s occupation in the 1980s gave rise
to the armed networks that eventually produced
al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Now the Obama administration cites the
fight against the terrorists of al-Qaeda as the
primary justification for sending even more
U.S. troops to kill and be killed in Afghanistan.
This involves a double conceit—historical am-
nesia about the bitter fruits of U.S. policy in
Afghanistan since the 1970s, and deception
about the real reasons for the continued U.S.
interests in cultivating a pro-U.S. regime in
Afghanistan.
That effort goes back to the 1979 invasion of
Afghanistan by the USSR. “The day that the So-
viets officially crossed the border, I wrote to
President Carter,” recalled Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who was Carter’s national security advisor from
1977 to 1981. “We now have the opportunity of
giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.”
At the time, U.S. foreign policy officials en-
couraged the growth of the most extreme Islamic
elements because they considered them the key
to defeating the USSR. After the U.S. achieved
its goal, the mujahideen fighters it had backed
came to power—and Washington stepped aside
and watched, as the country descended into a
civil war among the divided factions that had tri-
umphed over the Soviet Union.
When the Taliban emerged as the victor in
1996, the U.S. adopted an attitude of benign in-
difference. At least the Taliban brought stability
and an unrelenting hostility to the opium trade,
reasoned U.S. officials.
But September 11 gave the U.S. a new oppor-
tunity to project military power into the heart of
Central Asia. It quickly installed military bases
in countries that had been part of the old USSR,
giving the Pentagon the means to pressure
China, Russia and neighboring Iran, and provide
greater U.S. access to the region’s oil and gas re-
sources.
B USH’S FAILURE to secure those gains
with the “war on terror” drew criticism
from Obama throughout the presidential cam-
paign.
Perhaps some Obama supporters thought
that the Democratic candidate’s call to escalate
troop strength in Afghanistan was simply rheto-
ric to shield him from criticism on the right. But
Obama’s West Point speech makes it perfectly
clear that he’s a willing and aggressive propo-
nent of the pursuit of U.S. imperial aims.
According to White House estimates, each
additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan will
cost taxpayers $1 million a year. So Obama’s
double dispatch of troops will cost an additional
$55 billion over the next year. Compare that to
the Afghan government’s entire national budget
of roughly $1 billion a year.
But even more outrageous than the vast
sums Obama wants to spend is the reality that
his strategy of escalating the war has almost no
chance of succeeding, as many in the Washing-
ton political and media establishment seem to
recognize. “The Karzai government is like an
organized crime ring,” wrote New York Times
columnist David Brooks. “The governing talent
is thin. Plans to build a 400,000-man Afghan
security force are unrealistic.”
The Obama administration hasn’t committed
as many troops as some military hardliners want.
But the reality is that the current combined
U.S./NATO presence—68,000 U.S. troops,
33,000 from various NATO countries, and more
than 70,000 U.S. military contractors—already
exceeds the number of troops deployed by the
Soviet Union at the height of its involvement in
Afghanistan.
The U.S. could continue to muddle through
—unless it meets a significant opposition that
can’t be ignored. Already, there is anxiety that
the U.S. public may not be willing to put up
with a five- or 10-year strategy, especially con-
sidering the high price tag.
The antiwar movement needs to give those
anxieties concrete expression by organizing a
visible opposition. The demonstrations organ-
ized in cities across the U.S. to respond to
Obama’s speech are an important opportunity to
begin building a vocal opposition to a war that is
all Obama’s now.
2
INTERVIEW WITH MALALAI JOYA
Why the U.S.
has to go
November 10, 2009
Malalai Joya has been called the “bravest
woman in Afghanistan” for her outspoken
opposition not only to the U.S. occupation of
her country, but both the corrupt U.S.-backed
government of Hamid Karzai and the Taliban-
led insurgency.
Joya was elected to Afghanistan’s parlia-
ment from Farah province in 2005, but was
suspended several years later after other
representatives claimed she insulted them.
She has continued to speak out against war
crimes and warlordism, in spite of numerous
attempts on her life.
Joya is on a speaking tour of the U.S. for her
book A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordi-
nary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise
Her Voice. She talked to Deepa Kumar about
the situation in her country and the message
she hopes to bring to people in the U.S.
WHAT HAS been the impact of the U.S.
occupation and its puppet government on
women in Afghanistan? Has the U.S. liber-
ated Afghan women as it claimed it would?
FIRST, LET me say that after September 11, the
U.S. government threw us from the frying pan
into the fire. Over the last eight years, the U.S.,
under the banner of women’s rights and human
rights, has occupied my country, and millions of
men and women have suffered from injustice,
insecurity, corruption, joblessness, poverty, etc.
But women have suffered more—for them,
it is almost as if the Taliban was still in power.
After the war, the U.S. brought to power these
misogynist warlords called the Northern Al-
liance, who are just like the Taliban. These were
the same people who ruled between 1992 and
1996, and they attacked women’s rights and hu-
man rights.
This time, wearing suits and ties, they have
again have come into power with the help of the
U.S. That’s why today’s situation for women is
worse, especially in many of the provinces. It is
true that in some big cities like Kabul, Mazari
Sharif or Herat, you will see that some women
have been able to get jobs and an education. But
in most of the provinces, women do not even
have basic human rights—the situation is like
hell.
Today, killing a woman is like killing a bird.
Even in big cities, women do not feel secure, and
so most of them wear the burqa. I believe that the
burqa is a symbol of oppression. Yet women have
to wear them just to be safe. So the disgusting
burqa today gives life.
Over the last eight years, women in my coun-
try have not even regained the limited rights that
they enjoyed in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. During
that time, women could wear any kind of clothes
they wanted to, and they had jobs, they could
walk freely on the streets, and they didn’t have
to worry about being kidnapped or raped.
Then, the warlords attacked women’s rights,
and the Taliban continued this. The U.S. brought
the same misogynist warlords back, and the
only difference between the Taliban period and
now is that all of these crimes are happening in
the name of democracy. The warlord misogy-
nists who are in power cover up, in the name of
democracy, countless cases of rape, violence
against women, domestic violence, suicide, etc.
And these sorts of attacks are increasing rapidly.
Let me give you a few examples of the situa-
tion for women. I think it will help people in the
U.S. to understand the situation better.
For example, recently in Jowzjan province, a
25-year-old girl burned herself in a hospital.
These sorts of suicides are becoming common.
We recently got a report that there have been 600
such suicides. Also, a 5-year-old girl was killed
by a 40-year-old man in Sar-e Pol province as
she resisted his attempt to rape her. A 14-year-
old girl was brutally gang-raped by three men,
one of them the son of a member of the parlia-
ment. And this member of parliament, his name
is Haji Payinda Mohammad, changed the age of
his son in documents to show him to be less than
18, so he won’t be punished.
There are many examples like this. This is a
crime against women. It’s fashionable for the
media to say that it’s the Taliban, but these are
not all the crimes of the Taliban—there are war-
lords as well who are continuing their fascism.
Today, Sharia law is guiding the laws that
parliament has made. This is quite similar to
the Taliban, and that’s because the warlords are
mentally like the Taliban.
WHAT DO you think of the recent elections
and of the government of President Hamid
Karzai? And what about the man who was
runner-up to Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah?
If they formed a coalition government,
what do you think would happen?
FIRST, LET me tell you, the election was just a
showcase for the U.S. government. International
observers have talked about widespread fraud.
The so-called independent commission for the
election says that around 1.3 million ballots
were fixed. The actual number is higher.
There is no question that an election is the
main sign of democracy in a country, but in
Afghanistan, they have been betraying democ-
racy for the eight years of the U.S. occupation.
Abdullah is the main candidate of the war-
lords, and he is seen as a war criminal in Af -
ghanistan because of his activities between 1992
and 1996. Abdullah has been a part of Hamid
Karzai’s parliamentary system. Karzai has com-
promised with people like Abdullah and many
other warlords who now have key posts in
Afghanistan. Neither will bring positive changes
to the lives of men and women of my country.
Let me say to the people of the U.S.: an elec-
tion held in the shadow of Afghan warlordism,
drug-lordism, awful corruption and occupation
forces has no legitimacy at all. People in my
country say that the result of this election will
bring back the same donkey, but with a new sad-
dle. As the old saying goes, “It’s not important
who’s voting, it’s important who’s counting.”
That’s our problem.
RIGHT NOW, the Obama administration is
trying to decide whether to go with a Pen-
tagon recommendation to send tens of
thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan.
What would you like to say to Obama, and
what do you think will happen if more
troops are sent to Afghanistan?
MORE TROOPS will bring more conflict and
more war. Obama’s foreign policy regarding
Afghanistan is quite similar to that of the Bush
administration. Bush is a war criminal, and now
Obama wants to approach the moderate Taliban
to join the government as well. There are no
moderate Taliban—they are putting a soft name
on these terrorists in order to bring them into
power.
3
I think that the people of the U.S. would
agree with us—democracy never comes from the
barrel of a gun or through war. Also, Obama is
really not being honest with the Afghan people.
First of all, Obama should apologize to my
people and put Bush on trial in the international
criminal court. Obama should stop arming the
warlords, and he shouldn’t negotiate with the
Taliban. We have many democrats and demo-
cratic-minded people in my country, and Obama
should support them instead. If Obama were re-
ally to be honest with the Afghan people, he, to-
gether with the UN, would stop working with
countries like Iran, Pakistan and Russia, who
support the Taliban and these warlords.
Let me give my condolences to those fami-
lies here who have lost their sons in Afghanistan.
I would like to send condolences on behalf of
my people, but I also ask them to please raise
their voice against the wrong policies of the U.S.
government. The troops are the victims of the
policy of their government. The U.S. is spending
taxpayer money and shedding the blood of its
soldiers in support of an undemocratic corrupt
mafia system.
WHAT DO you think about people in the
antiwar movement in this country who now
say that we shouldn’t speak out for U.S.
immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan?
They say that the U.S. should stay longer,
because if it pulls out, the situation for
women will get worse. What’s your mes-
sage to them?
I THINK the people who are saying that should
know that the people of Afghanistan do not want
more troops in Afghanistan.
First of all, it is the right of my people to say
that. Secondly, we believe that no nation can
bring liberation to another nation. Today’s situ-
ation, this eight-year disaster, is a good example
of what war and occupation does.
People also say that if the U.S. withdrew,
there would be a civil war. My message to people
who say that is that there already is a civil war,
and as long as these troops are in Afghanistan,
the worse the civil war will be.
The occupation forces are even bombing
wedding parties. In Nuristan, 47 people, includ-
ing the groom and bride, were killed. In a bomb-
ing in May in Farah province, 150 civilians were
killed, most of them women and children. In
Kunduz province, 200 civilians were killed,
most of them women and children. After all of
these war crimes, why haven’t they apologized?
We want occupation forces out of Afghan-
istan as soon as possible. They must end this
tragedy of the so-called war on terror, which is
war on innocent civilians. In the last eight years,
fewer than 2,000 Taliban have been killed, and
more than 8,000 civilians by U.S. forces. The
occupation forces are not protecting my people
or women—they are doing more harm.
They say they are bringing democracy to
Afghanistan. In reality they have brought war-
lords and drug lords to power. They have al-
lowed my country to become the center of drugs
today. Even the White House says that the Tal-
iban have become more powerful since the 2001
war. These medieval-minded men of the Taliban
are destroying the country.
Today, we have two enemies in Afghanistan
—the occupation forces, and the Taliban and
warlords. If one of them is gone, it makes our
task easier. Then we will have only one enemy
to fight.
WHAT DOES the resistance or resistances
to occupation look like in Afghanistan?
THERE ARE two kinds of resistances in Afghan -
istan. One is of ordinary, democratic-minded
people, and the other is of the Taliban. Most ordi-
nary people hate the Taliban, and so their resist-
ance is not the resistance of the people.
Ordinary people have resisted in many
provinces. They are demonstrating both against
the occupation and against the Karzai govern-
ment. For instance, I mentioned that in May in
Farah province 150 people were killed by occu-
pation forces, most of them women and chil-
dren. In response to this, thousands of students
in various provinces came out onto the streets to
express their solidarity with the victims and to
protest their killing. There are many such exam-
ples of students and others are resisting the oc-
cupation. This is happening in big cities—peo-
ple are coming out onto the streets in Kabul and
also in other provinces.
So there is resistance, but it isn’t that big.
Why? Because people are tired from war, and
they hate the warlords and the Taliban. But to-
day, there is more resistance than there was eight
years ago. People are starting to stand up against
war crimes, and with the passage of time, I think
they will stand up and resist more.
CAN YOU describe some of the secular
and democratic groups and forces of the
resistance in Afghanistan?
THERE ARE a lot of parties and democratic in-
tellectuals who are risking their lives and strug-
gling to challenge the corrupt warlord govern-
ment.
RAWA [the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan] is one such group. I met
a member of RAWA, Zoya, who told me about
the problems and risks they take, and how they
have to be underground. There are many such
groups and people, but I would not reveal their
names because of a lack of security. There have
been many attempts on my life, and I don’t want
to risk the life of anyone else. But it is these
people who are the hope for the future.
WHAT HAS been your experience here
in the U.S. as your speaking tour gets
underway?
THERE IS a lot of support among people who
have come to the meetings. People in the U.S.
haven’t been told the correct story through the
media. They’re told that Iraq was the bad war,
and that Afghanistan is the good war. When they
hear about the suffering of my people, some peo-
ple cry—some have come up and hugged me and
shown their support.
This isn’t my first trip to the U.S. When I was
here earlier, I met a group of mothers who lost
their sons in Afghanistan. They, too, hugged me
and cried. Sometimes, people apologize for what
their government is doing to my people. And I
reply to them that they should not apologize, be-
cause it is their government that is responsible
for this, and the government should apologize to
them for its war crimes.
I have also come across rich Afghans—peo-
ple who are enjoying their lives here in the U.S.
They support the occupation and claim that the
U.S. is bringing democracy and freedom to
Afghanistan. They are wrong, and they don’t
know what is really happening in Afghanistan.
There are also some corrupt NGOs that support
the occupation because they don’t want to lose
their contracts and their projects. But most of
the people at the meetings support the cause of
my people.
My main message to the democratic people of
the U.S. is that you are not the same as your gov-
ernment. You can support the Afghan people and
ask Obama to do four things. First, end the occu-
pation immediately—this is not a war on terror,
this is a war on innocent civilians. Second,
Obama must apologize to my people and deliver
Bush to the International Criminal Court. Third,
he should stop arming the warlords, and not ne-
gotiate with Taliban. Fourth, he should tell Iran,
Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan and other countries
that support Taliban and the warlords to stop.
My message to people in the U.S. is to put
pressure on their government to support demo-
cratic-minded people in Afghanistan.
Transcription by Rebecca Anshell and Meredith
Reese
4
BACKGROUND
AND ANALYSIS
PHIL GASPER
How Afghanistan
was bled dry
September 28, 2001
Phil Gasper examines the history of the coun-
try the U.S. is ready to bomb.
“W E COME now to the question of bomb-
ing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age,”
Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary wrote in
an article for Salon.com. “Trouble is, that’s been
done…”
“Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already
suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their
schools to piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their
hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure?
Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too
late. Somebody already did all that.”
Unless Afghanistan’s Taliban regime turns
over Osama bin Laden, the U.S. is prepared to
rain death and destruction on a country that has
already been devastated by more than 20 years of
military occupation and civil war.
Millions of Afghanis live in refugee camps.
The country has more than 500,000 disabled or-
phans. Much of the already devastated country-
side is currently experiencing a drought, lead-
ing to famine in some areas.
The U.S. government’s massive military
might will make things far worse. But past U.S.
actions are in no small part responsible for the
misery and poverty that already exists in
Afghanistan. As the Economist magazine put it,
“[U.S.] policies in Afghanistan a decade and
more ago helped to create both Osama bin Laden
and the fundamentalist Taliban regime that shel-
ters him.”
The U.S. is only the latest power to cause
mayhem in the country. Modern Afghanistan
emerged during the 19th century as a buffer state
squeezed between the Russian and British em-
pires. From the beginning, it was a pawn in bat-
tles between these two world powers.
The country’s mountainous terrain protected
it from imperial occupation, but also resulted in
little economic development. Afghanistan has
always been one of the poorest countries in the
world. By the 1970s, less than 10 percent of the
population was literate, and life expectancy was
only 35 years. The central state was weak, and
outside of a few cities, Afghan society remained
traditional, with power divided among rival eth-
nic clans.
This began to change in the 1950s and 1960s.
As a result of foreign aid from the former USSR
and the U.S.—which were competing for influ-
ence during the Cold War—there was a shift of
power toward the state.

In 1973, the corrupt and repressive regime of
King Zaher was overthrown by his cousin, Daud,
who declared a republic. But expected reforms
didn’t materialize, and the emerging urban mid-
dle class grew increasingly discontented.
In April 1978, as Daud tried to move against
opponents to his left, he was overthrown and
killed by army officers sympathetic to the Peo-
ple’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which
had close ties with the USSR.
But the new government had little support
in the countryside, and its attempt to institute
reforms from above was disastrous. Resistance
began to spread across Afghanistan.
It was met with severe repression as the gov-
ernment itself broke into hostile factions. The
opposition came to be dominated by a collection
of radical Islamist groups—known as the “muja-
hadeen,” or holy fighters—with reactionary po-
litical ideas, especially concerning women.
In December 1979, hard-liners in the USSR
—worried that a regime hostile to them might
come to power in Afghanistan—decided to inter-
vene. Russian troops advanced on the capital of
Kabul, killed the president and replaced him with
their own man.
For the next decade, the USSR fought a bru-
tal war for domination of the country. More than
1 million Afghanis died, and millions more fled
their homes, becoming refugees in neighboring
Pakistan and Iran. But by 1989, with casualties
mounting and its troops in a state of near-rebel-
lion, the USSR withdrew its forces.
U.S. policymakers celebrated the Russian re-
treat from the country—and promptly cut off aid
to the rebel forces that they had armed, trained
and supported.
Afghanistan collapsed into virtual anarchy.
Almost a quarter of the population was in refugee
camps, and most of the country was in ruins.
Different factions of the mujahadeen strug-
gled for power in the countryside, while the
government of Muhammed Najibullah, the last
USSR-installed president, remained in control
in Kabul.
Kabul finally fell in April 1992 to one faction
of the mujahadeen. But the civil war continued.
In 1994, a new organization, the Taliban,
emerged. Its members had been trained in the
religious schools set up by the Pakistani govern-
ment—with U.S. support—along the border.
The Taliban advocated an ultra-sectarian ver-
sion of Islam. Under its rule, Afghani women
have been denied education, health care and the
right to work, and must cover themselves com-
pletely in public. With the aid of Pakistan’s army,
the Taliban swept across an exhausted country,
taking power in 1996.
The U.S. government made no criticism of
the regime it now demonizes as the main source
of international terrorism. A State Department
spokesperson told reporters that there was “noth-
ing objectionable” about the Taliban’s coming to
power. That opinion wasn’t shared by Afghani
women—or the Taliban’s political opponents,
who were savagely repressed.
In fact, the U.S. hoped the Taliban would pro-
vide stability. Its “most important function,” one
commentator wrote, “was to provide security for
roads and, potentially, oil and gas pipelines that
would link the states of Central Asia to the inter-
national market through Pakistan rather than
through Iran.”
Today, U.S. politicians denounce the Taliban
5
regime for its repression and brutality. But this is
rank hypocrisy. Washington’s warlords are only
looking for an excuse for war—a war that will
further devastate the lives of ordinary people in
Afghanistan.
“Freedom fighters” armed
and trained by the U.S.
THE AFGHAN rebels that fought the USSR’s
military occupation were backed to the hilt by the
U.S. government. In fact, in a 1998 interview,
Zbigniew Brezinski, who was national security
adviser in the Carter administration, admitted
that Washington had begun funding the muja-
hadeen six months before the Russian invasion in
order to provoke “a Soviet military intervention.”
The U.S. deliberately chose to back Islamic
fundamentalist organizations, rather than secular
and nationalist groups, because Brezinski hoped
not just to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan,
but to cause unrest within the USSR itself.
With the support of Pakistan’s military dicta-
tor, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the U.S. began recruiting
and training mujahadeen fighters from the 3 mil-
lion Afghan refugees in Pakistan—as well as
large numbers of mercenaries from other Islamic
countries.
The operation was supervised by the CIA,
with Pakistani forces carrying out the work on
the ground. “The trainers were mainly from Pak-
istan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency, who
learnt their craft from American Green Beret
commandos and Navy SEALS in various U.S.
training establishments,” according to the British
military magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly.
Washington leaders fell in love with their
rebel army in Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan—the
same man who denounced the African National
Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organiza-
tion for not renouncing violence—described the
mujahadeen as “freedom fighters.”
Reagan met in Washington with rebel lead-
ers like Abdul Haq, who openly admitted his re-
sponsibility for terrorist attacks, such as a 1984
bomb blast at Kabul’s airport that killed at least
28 people.
Meanwhile, with CIA assistance, the muja-
hadeen greatly expanded opium production in ar-
eas under its control—turning Afghanistan into
what one U.S. official later described as the new
Colombia of the drug world.
Between 1979 and 1989, “the CIA and Saudi
intelligence together pumped in billions of dol-
lars worth of arms and ammunition,” according
to the Economist. But when the USSR finally
withdrew in 1989, the administration of George
Bush Sr. turned its back on Afghanistan—leav-
ing it, in the words of the Economist, “awash
with weapons, warlords and extreme religious
zealotry.”
Who trained Osama bin Laden?
OSAMA BIN Laden, a civil engineer and busi-
nessman from a wealthy family in Saudi Ara-
bia, was one of the first non-Afghan volunteers
to join the mujahadeen. He recruited 4,000 vol-
unteers from his own country and developed
close relations with the most radical rebel lead-
ers in Afghanistan.
He also worked closely with the CIA raising
money from private Saudi citizens. “In 1988,
with U.S. knowledge,” reports Jane’s Weekly,
“Bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The Base): a
conglomerate of quasi independent Islamic ter-
rorist cells spread across at least 26 countries...
Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Quaeda,
confident that it would not directly impinge on
the U.S.”
After the USSR’s withdrawal from Afghan-
istan, bin Laden and other volunteers returned to
their own countries. “In their home countries,
they built a formidable constituency—popularly
known as ‘Afghanis’—combining strong ideo-
logical convictions with the guerrilla skills they
had acquired in Pakistan and Afghanistan under
CIA supervision,” writes author Dilip Hiro.
Over the past 10 years, the “afghani” network
has been linked to terrorist attacks not only on
U.S. targets, but also in the Philippines, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, France, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan,
China, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere.
“This is an insane instance of the chickens
coming home to roost,” one U.S. diplomat in Pak-
istan told the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t plug
billions of dollars into an anti-Communist jihad,
accept participation from all over the world and
ignore the consequences. But we did.”
ERIC RUDER
What the U.S.
wants from
this war
December 7, 2001
Eric Ruder looks at what’s behind the U.S.
war against Afghanistan.
“E ITHER YOU accept our offer of a carpet
of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of
bombs.” That’s how one U.S. diplomat report-
edly put it to Afghanistan’s Taliban government
during negotiations that began just after George
W. Bush took over the White House in January
2001—and continued until just weeks before
September 11.
Of course, it’s difficult now to find any men-
tion of U.S. efforts to woo the Taliban. That
wouldn’t fit with the Bush administration’s
agenda of claiming that U.S. bombs liberated
Afghans from a sworn enemy of freedom.
But only a few months ago, the U.S. was try-
ing to cut a deal with the Taliban—and it didn’t
have anything to do with human rights.
What’s more, according to a new book, the
Bush administration blocked efforts by U.S. in-
telligence agencies to investigate Osama bin
Laden during its bargaining with the Afghan gov-
ernment—prompting FBI Deputy Director John
O’Neill to resign in protest in July. “The main
obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were
U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by
Saudi Arabia,” O’Neill told French intelligence
analysts Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie,
authors of the new book Bin Laden: The Forbid-
den Truth.
This wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. oil
interests played a major role in shaping U.S.
dealings with the Taliban. The U.S. began “ro-
mancing the Taliban,” as journalist Ahmed
Rashid put it, even before Islamist hard-liners es-
tablished full control over Afghanistan in 1996.
“Between 1994 and 1997, the U.S. in fact was
supporting the Taliban in the sense that it was al-
lowing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, its two allies
in the region, to back the Taliban,” Rashid said in
an interview. “And this was because the U.S. and
U.S. oil companies were interested in building oil
and gas pipelines from Central Asia across
Afghanistan, through Pakistan, to the Gulf…
“[T]here was the hope at one time, by U.S.
policymakers, that the Taliban would provide a
kind of security force for these pipelines, be-
cause these pipelines were crossing southern
Afghanistan, which is the heartland of Taliban
control.”
The U.S. oil giant Unocal was particularly
bold in sucking up to the Taliban, even flying
representatives of the regime to its corporate
headquarters in Texas. The Taliban “were of-
fered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15
percent was mentioned,” journalist John Pilger
wrote in Britain’s New Statesman magazine. “A
U.S. official observed that, with the Caspian’s
oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become
‘like Saudi Arabia,’ an oil colony with no
democracy and the legal persecution of women.
‘We can live with that,’ he said.”
The U.S. attack on Sudan and Afghanistan
in 1998—in retaliation for the bombings of two
U.S. embassies in Africa supposedly organized
by Osama bin Laden—effectively ended Uno-
cal’s plans.
But U.S. designs on the region were always
bigger than one pipeline. Since the collapse of
the USSR in 1991, U.S. oil companies have
schemed to gain access to the huge oil and gas
reserves—worth an estimated $4 trillion at cur-
rent prices—in the former Soviet republics bor-
dering the Caspian Sea.
The list of countries that want a piece of the
action is predictably long—and includes Russia,
China, Iran and Europe, in addition to the U.S.
Given the Bush administration’s ties to the
oil industry, it’s not surprising that quiet but
persistent negotiations with the Taliban were
near the top of its agenda when it set up shop in
Washington.
Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, has
long understood the importance of the Caspian
Sea. While still CEO of the oil services company
Halliburton, Cheney said, “I can’t think of a time
when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to
become as strategically significant as the
Caspian.”
But after months of talks, U.S. officials
weren’t any closer to an agreement with the Tal-
iban and were beginning to lose patience—and
increasingly turned to the “stick” of threatened
military strikes rather than the “carrot” of oil
money.
At a UN-sponsored meeting in Berlin in mid-
6
July, senior U.S. officials proclaimed that mili-
tary action against Afghanistan was in the works
and would likely take place by October, accord-
ing to Niaz Naik, Pakistan’s former foreign sec-
retary.
The officials said the U.S. had plans to get
Osama bin Laden. But the wider objective would
be to topple the Taliban and install a “more mod-
erate” regime in its place.
“The Americans indicated to us that in case
the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan
also doesn’t help to influence the Taliban, then
the United States would be left with no option
but to take an overt action against Afghanistan,”
Naik told reporters.
As it turns out, the September 11 attacks
provided the U.S. with a perfect excuse to carry
out a strategy that it had been considering for
months.
Before the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, Busi-
ness Week magazine declared in an editorial:
“Oil is worth going to war for.” Now it turns out
that the U.S. war for “democracy” and “justice”
in Afghanistan is about the same thing—who
will profit off the world’s most valuable com-
modity.
ELIZABETH SCHULTE
Is the U.S. fighting
for women’s
liberation?
December 7, 2001
Many voices—from pro-war Republicans to
mainstream feminists—are applauding the
U.S. war in Afghanistan for supposedly putting
an end to the horrible conditions that women
suffered under the Taliban government. But
have Afghan women been liberated? Elizabeth
Schulte explains why Washington’s rhetoric
about freeing women from oppression is a
cover for an unjust and barbaric war.
“The scenes of joy in the streets of Kabul evoke
nothing less than the images of Paris liberated
from the Nazis. Women taking to the streets to
bask in the Afghan sun, free at last to show
their faces. Children gathering to fly kites, a
once forbidden pastime. Old people dancing to
music, banned for many years. The liberation
of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban
is a watershed event that could reverberate for
years. The warm embrace by ordinary people
of the freedom to do ordinary things is a major
victory for Western humanist values. This
victory of values, in the long run, may count for
far more than the hunt for Osama bin Laden.”
THIS IS how Business Week magazine—its front
cover featuring an unveiled Afghan woman be-
neath the word “Liberation”— described the fall
of the Taliban government last month.
 They must not have asked Abdul Abdullah
for his opinion. Abdul’s cousin Aziz Khan and
his wife Fatma fled their home near Herat when
fighting erupted between Taliban and Northern
Alliance forces. On their way toward the Iranian
border, Khan and his wife were stopped with 20
other families at a checkpoint set up by anti-Tal-
iban warlords. The men were herded into the
hills and shot. The women were taken away.
Abdul doesn’t know Fatma’s fate. But given
the appalling record of rape among Northern
Alliance soldiers, he can guess. “I know they let
most of the women go, but they kept the young
and pretty ones,” he told a reporter.
Stories like these expose the lie that Afghans
have been “liberated” by the U.S. government’s
brutal new allies.
Western news reports regularly feature pic-
tures of women appearing in public without a
veil. “What the photos do not show is the women
putting [the veils] back on again moments later,”
one reporter for Britain’s Guardian wrote. “For
the fact remains that the Alliance feels the same
way about women as the Taliban did—they are
chattel, to be tolerated but kept out of real life.”
In fact, the Observer newspaper reported that
the Taliban’s retreat from Kabul had unleashed a
wave of so-called “honor crimes”—in which rel-
atives kill or maim young men and women for vi-
olating the strict Islamic code governing relation-
ships.
This should be no surprise. The warlords of
the Northern Alliance have a miserable record of
human rights abuses, especially against women.
One has only to ask Afghan women who re-
member when the warlords reigned before the
Taliban came to power in 1996. “They’re just as
bad as the Taliban, and in some ways worse,”
explained Tahmeena Fayral, of the Revolution-
ary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
during a recent U.S. speaking tour. “They looted
museums and hospitals and schools, and sold
what they found. They raped women and even
children. They committed the worst crimes in
Afghan history.”
The U.S. government didn’t let these well-
established facts get in the way of backing the
Northern Alliance—just as it ignored the Tal-
iban’s vicious repression of women when it was
courting the regime in the mid-1990s.
And any talk about the U.S. going to war for
women’s liberation will come as a surprise to
women in Saudi Arabia, which imposes Taliban-
style restrictions as well.
T HE U.S. media’s interest in what life is like
for Afghan women is sudden. Under the hard-
line version of Islam followed by both the Tal-
iban and the Northern Alliance warlords, women
must dress in the head-to-toe shroud of the
burqa, for fear of public beating or death.
They aren’t allowed to leave home unaccom-
panied by their husbands or other male family
members and are banned from school and work.
And underlying this is the grinding poverty that
cripples the entire population of Afghanistan.
The many widows in a country brutalized by
23 years of war often resort to begging or prosti-
tution to survive. Some 1,700 out of 100,000
Afghan women die during childbirth—the high-
est rate in the world. Life expectancy for women
is about 45 years.
Human rights groups like Amnesty Interna-
tional have tried for years to get the word out
about the plight of Afghan women, but the main-
stream media showed no interest. Now, because
of Bush’s war, the issue is splashed across the
cover of Time magazine.
Even Laura Bush got into the act. “Because
of our recent military gains in much of Afghan-
istan, women are no longer imprisoned in their
homes,” she said in her own radio address last
week. “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.”
No one should forget who spoke these fine-
sounding words. They should be seen for what
they are—a cynical rationalization for a U.S. war
that has already murdered thousands of civilians,
many of them women.
That’s why it’s infuriating to see many liber-
als, and even radicals, backing Bush’s cam-
paign—in the name of liberating women. For ex-
ample, the liberal group Feminist Majority has
asked members to circulate a petition thanking
Bush and his administration for its commitment
to restoring the rights of Afghan women. “We
have real momentum now in the drive to restore
the rights of women,” Feminist Majority Presi-
dent Eleanor Smeal told Congress last week.
Are they talking about the same administra-
tion that, immediately on taking power last Jan-
uary, imposed a gag order on international fam-
ily planning organizations from mentioning the
word “abortion”—in one stroke of the pen rele-
gating millions of women to poverty?
And a few radicals are having second
thoughts. Susan George, vice president of the
French-based global justice group ATTAC, said
recently that, though she opposed the U.S.
bombing campaign, the media pictures of
women celebrating in Kabul made her question
her stand.
S HE SHOULD remember what she knows
full well about the U.S. government’s long
record of promoting injustice around the globe.
The U.S. military’s own wartime abuses of
women are well documented. During the Viet-
nam War, American soldiers earned the title of
“double veterans” when they raped civilian
women before murdering them. Accounts of
the 1968 My Lai massacre describe an orgy of
gang rape—followed by soldiers mowing down
at least 400 people, most of them women and
children.
The U.S. military’s culture of brutality
against women is alive and well today, with sev-
eral recent cases of U.S. soldiers stationed in
Okinawa, Japan, raping local teenagers. And this
isn’t to mention the rapes of women in the U.S.
military by fellow soldiers.
Conditions for Afghan women are far worse
than for women in the U.S. But to hold up the
U.S. government—especially under the Bush ad-
ministration—as a champion of women’s rights
is offensive.
Bush has the nerve denounce Islamic “fanat-
ics” even after he appointed anti-abortion fanat-
ics John Ashcroft as attorney general and Tommy
Thompson as head of Health and Human Serv-
7
ices. And when Bush needed advice about life-
saving stem cell research, he turned to anti-
woman evangelist Billy Graham for guidance.
No one who wants Afghan women to achieve
real freedom should support the U.S. govern-
ment’s war. The decades-long intervention by the
U.S. and other Western powers is to blame for the
grinding poverty of Afghanistan and the vicious
rule of tyrants and warlords—the perfect breed-
ing ground for the cruel oppression of women.
They haven’t suddenly become interested in
liberation now. We have to expose the real aims
of this U.S. war for “liberation”—before they
“liberate” other countries.
SHARON SMITH
The war they
all agree on
September 11, 2008
Sharon Smith explains how America’s two
ruling parties have come together to plan the
escalation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan.
N EARLY September, the Pentagon closed
Ibombs
its investigation into allegations that U.S.
killed 92 Afghan civilians, including
as many as 60 children, as they slept peace-
fully in the village of Nawabad on the night of
August 21.
Despite protests from the UN, human rights
organizations and the villagers themselves, Pen-
tagon officials insisted for weeks that only seven
civilians had been killed, along with 35 Taliban
fighters, during a legitimate military operation
aimed at capturing Taliban commander Mullah
Sadiq.
Indeed, they claimed that the attack, which
included bombardment with a C130 Specter
gunship, was a necessary response to heavy fire
emanating from a meeting of Taliban leaders in
the village.
In its defense, the Pentagon cited evidence
from an embedded Fox News correspondent who
had substantiated its claims. Unfortunately, that
correspondent turned out to be former Marine Lt.
Oliver North, who has been known to bend the
truth in the past.
North’s military career was cut short after his
role was revealed in the Iran-contra scandal in the
1980s. At the time, North admitted to having ille-
gally channeled guns to Iran while funneling the
profits to the CIA-backed contra mercenary force
fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s democratically
elected Sandinista government—and then lying
to Congress about it. In recent years, North has
nevertheless cultivated a lucrative broadcasting
career at Fox.
Although North assured Fox viewers, “Coali-
tion forces...have not been able to find any evi-
dence that non-combatants were killed in this
engagement,” video footage taken on the scene
by a local doctor showed scores of dead bodies
and destroyed homes, documenting a civilian
death toll at Nawabad that is the largest since the
U.S. began bombing Afghanistan nearly seven
years ago.
Thus, the U.S. military was forced to reopen
its own investigation on September 8, only days
after it had exonerated itself. A red-faced offi-
cial told reporters that “emerging evidence” had
convinced the Pentagon to investigate the matter
further.
On that same day, Human Rights Watch is-
sued a report that U.S. and NATO forces dropped
362 tons of bombs over Afghanistan during the
first seven months of this year; bombings during
June and July alone equaled the total during all
of 2006.
The rising civilian death toll in Afghanistan
rattled even the normally placid New York Times,
which argued, “America is fast losing the battle
for hearts and minds, and unless the Pentagon
comes up with a better strategy, the United States
and its allies may well lose the war.”
A S NEWS of the Nawabad massacre un-
folded, another atrocity was also gaining
media attention, further exposing the gangster
state installed and maintained by U.S. forces to
run Afghanistan since 2001.
President Hamid Karzai, the U.S.’s hand-
picked puppet, reportedly pardoned two men
convicted of brutally raping a woman in the
northern province of Samangan in September
2005.
At the time, Mawlawi Islam, the commander
of a local militia, was running for a seat in
Afghanistan’s first parliamentary elections. “The
commander and three of his fighters came and
took my wife out of our home and took her to
their house about 200 meters away and, in front
of these witnesses, raped her,” the woman’s hus-
band told the Independent.
The couple has a doctor’s report that the
rapists cut her private parts with a bayonet dur-
ing the rape, and then forced her to stagger home
without clothes from the waist down.
Mawlawi won a seat in parliament in Septem-
ber 2005, as the U.S. media celebrated the elec-
tions as proof that democracy was flourishing in
Afghanistan thanks to U.S. occupation. But
Mawlawi was assassinated, mafia-style in Janu-
ary of this year.
His past had caught up with him. Mawlawi
had first fought as a mujahideen commander in
the 1980s, but switched sides to become a Tal-
iban governor in the 1990s. He switched sides yet
again when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001
and re-joined the former mujahideen, which had
morphed into the Northern Alliance—the group
of warlords installed by the U.S. to run
Afghanistan as a collection of private gangster
fiefdoms.
Karzai issued a press statement expressing his
“deep regret” in response to Mawlawi’s death in
January. Bypassing the rape charge, he expressed
nothing but praise: “Mawlawi Islam Muhammadi
was a prominent jihadi figure who has made
great sacrifices during the years of jihad against
the Soviet invasion.”
Mawlawi’s three subordinates were finally
convicted for the rape this year, and one died in
prison. But although they were sentenced to 11
years, Karzai reportedly issued a pardon for the
other two in May, claiming the men “had been
forced to confess their crimes.”
The drug-running warlords who have con-
trolled Afghanistan since 2001 have no interest in
either democracy or women’s rights. Indeed, it is
not uncommon for poor poppy farmers who can-
not repay loans to local warlords to offer up their
daughters for marriage instead.
Gang rapes and violence against women are
on the rise, according to human rights organiza-
tions. As a member of parliament, Mir Ahmad
Joyenda, told the Independent, “The command-
ers, the war criminals, still have armed groups.
They’re in the government. Karzai, the Ameri-
cans, the British sit down with them. They have
impunity. They’ve become very courageous and
can do whatever crimes they like.” In this situa-
tion, Afghan warlords again produce 90 percent
of the world’s opium, without legal repercussion.
Women’s prisons, in contrast, are teeming
once again. As Sonali Kolhatkar, author of Bleed-
ing Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the
Propaganda of Silence, argued on Democracy
Now! “Women are being imprisoned in greater
numbers than ever before, for the crime of escap-
ing from home or having, quote-unquote, ‘sexual
relations’—’illegal sexual relations.’ Most of
these women are simply victims of rape.”
D ESPITE THE appalling conditions that seven
years of U.S. occupation have produced for
ordinary Afghans, the two U.S. ruling parties
came together in August to plan the escalation of
that sordid war with the goal of adding 10,000
more U.S. troops in the coming year.
Barack Obama chided his Republican rival
during his acceptance speech at the Democratic
Party convention on August 28, using a page
from Bush’s playbook: “John McCain likes to
say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of
Hell—but he won’t even go to the cave where
he lives.”
Obama did not utter a word of criticism
about rising civilian casualties, rampant corrup-
tion, the flourishing drug trade or women’s op-
pression in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan during
that historic speech. On the contrary, he contin-
ued, “I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and
8
finish the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban
in Afghanistan.”
Ending the war in Iraq “responsibly” will al-
low a long-term U.S. military presence there—
and the redeployment of 10,000 U.S. troops to
Afghanistan to “finish” the job started by George
W. Bush.
In one fell swoop, the candidate whose slo-
gan is “change” laid out a strategy bearing strik-
ing similarity to that of the neocons who in-
vaded Afghanistan in 2001. This was not a sur-
prise. Obama first expressed his willingness to
bomb Iran and Pakistan in 2004, when he told
the Chicago Tribune, “surgical missile strikes”
on Iran may become necessary.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “having
a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of
nuclear weapons is worse.” Obama went on to
argue that military strikes on Pakistan should
not be ruled out if “violent Islamic extremists”
were to “take over.”
Obama represents the dissenting ruling class
view since 2003, which regarded the Iraq war as
a “distraction” from the real war the U.S. should
pursue. That war has little to do with al-Qaeda,
but much more to do with Afghanistan’s strate-
gic location in Central Asia, and its borders with
Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China.
The Russia-Georgia conflict this summer
surely reminded U.S. rulers that they cannot af-
ford to ignore their longstanding aim to establish
U.S. military bases in this key region, a goal
which long pre-dated 9-11. As the BBC News re-
ported on September 18, 2001, “Niaz Naik, a for-
mer Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by sen-
ior American officials in mid-July that military
action against Afghanistan would go ahead by
mid-October.”
The antiwar movement in the U.S. can no
longer afford to ignore the war in Afghanistan
without fading into irrelevance. The war on terror
has been resuscitated, and as Obama has repeat-
edly emphasized in recent months, its “central
front” is shifting back to Afghanistan.
The Afghan people have endured seven long
years of misery thanks to U.S. occupation, and
it is high time to take a principled stand against
U.S. imperial aims in Central Asia.
ANAND GOPAL
Who are the
Taliban?
December 9, 2008
Journalist Anand Gopal writes from Afghan-
istan on conditions driving resistance to the
U.S. war and occupation.
IestFWest’s
THERE is an exact location marking the
failures in Afghanistan, it is the mod-
police checkpoint that sits on the main
highway 20 minutes south of Kabul. The post
signals the edge of the capital, a city of spec-
tacular tension, blast walls and standstill traf-
fic. Beyond this point, Kabul’s gritty, low-
slung buildings and narrow streets give way to
a vast plain of serene farmland hemmed in by
sandy mountains. In this valley in Logar
province, the American-backed government
of Afghanistan no longer exists.
Instead of government officials, men in mud-
died black turbans with assault rifles slung over
their shoulders patrol the highway, checking for
thieves and “spies.” The charred carcass of a
tanker, meant to deliver fuel to international
forces further south, sits belly up on the roadside.
The police say they don’t dare enter these
districts, especially at night when the guerrillas
rule the roads. In some parts of the country’s
south and east, these insurgents have even set up
their own government, which they call the Is-
lamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the name of the
former Taliban government). They mete out jus-
tice in makeshift Sharia courts. They settle land
disputes between villagers. They dictate the cur-
ricula in schools.
Just three years ago, the central government
still controlled the provinces near Kabul. But
years of mismanagement, rampant criminality
and mounting civilian casualties have led to a
spectacular resurgence of the Taliban and other
related groups. Today, the Islamic Emirate enjoys
de facto control in large parts of the country’s
south and east. According to ACBAR, an um-
brella organization representing more than 100
aid agencies, insurgent attacks have increased by
50 percent over the past year. Foreign soldiers are
now dying at a higher rate here than in Iraq.
The burgeoning disaster is prompting the
Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai
and international players to speak openly of ne-
gotiations with sections of the insurgency.
The new nationalist Taliban
W HO EXACTLY are the Afghan insurgents?
Every suicide attack and kidnapping is usu-
ally attributed to “the Taliban.” In reality, how-
ever, the insurgency is far from monolithic. There
are the shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-
bobbing religious students, of course, but there
are also erudite university students, poor, illiter-
ate farmers and veteran anti-Soviet commanders.
The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Is-
lamists and bandits that fall uneasily into three or
four main factions. The factions themselves are
made up of competing commanders with differ-
ing ideologies and strategies, who nonetheless
agree on one essential goal: kicking out the for-
eigners.
It wasn’t always this way. When U.S.-led
forces toppled the Taliban government in No-
vember 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall
of a reviled and discredited regime. “We felt
like dancing in the streets,” one Kabuli told me.
As U.S.-backed forces marched into Kabul, the
Afghan capital, remnants of the old Taliban
regime split into three groups.
The first, including many Kabul-based bu-
reaucrats and functionaries, simply surrendered
to the Americans; some even joined the Karzai
government. The second, comprised of the move-
ment’s senior leadership, including its leader
Mullah Omar, fled across the border into Pak-
istan, where they remain to this day. The third
and largest group—foot soldiers, local com-
manders and provincial officials—quietly melted
into the landscape, returning to their farms and
villages to wait and see which way the wind
blew.
Meanwhile, the country was being carved up
by warlords and criminals. On the brand-new
highway connecting Kabul to Kandahar and
Herat, built with millions of Washington’s dol-
lars, well-organized groups of bandits would reg-
ularly terrorize travelers. “[Once], thirty, maybe
fifty criminals, some in police uniforms, stopped
our bus and shot [out] our windows,” Muham-
madullah, the owner of a bus company that regu-
larly uses the route, told me. “They searched our
vehicle and stole everything from everyone.”
Criminal syndicates, often with government
connections, organized kidnapping sprees in ur-
ban centers like the former Taliban stronghold of
Kandahar city. Often, those few who were caught
would simply be released after the right palms
were greased.
Onto this landscape of violence and criminal-
ity rode the Taliban again, promising law and or-
der. The exiled leadership, based in Quetta, Pak-
istan, began reactivating its networks of fighters
who had blended into the country’s villages.
They resurrected relationships with Pashtun
tribes. (The insurgents, historically a predomi-
nantly Pashtun movement, still have very little
influence among other Afghan minority ethnic
groups like the Tajiks and Hezaras.) With funds
from wealthy Arab donors and training from the
ISI, the Pakistani intelligence apparatus, they
were able to bring weapons and expertise into
Pashtun villages.
In one village after another, they drove out
the remaining minority of government sympa-
thizers through intimidation and assassination.
Then they won over the majority with promises
of security and efficiency. The guerrillas imple-
mented a harsh version of Sharia law, cutting off
the hands of thieves and shooting adulterers.
They were brutal, but they were also incorrupt-
ible. Justice no longer went to the highest bidder.
“There’s no crime any more, unlike before,” said
Abdul Halim, who lives in a district under Tal-
iban control.
The insurgents conscripted fighters from the
villages they operated in, often paying them $200
9
a month—more than double the typical police
salary. They adjudicated disputes between tribes
and between landowners. They protected poppy
fields from the eradication attempts of the central
government and foreign armies—a move that
won them the support of poor farmers whose
only stable income came from poppy cultivation.
Areas under insurgent control were consigned to
having neither reconstruction nor social services,
but for rural villagers who had seen much foreign
intervention and little economic progress under
the Karzai government, this was hardly new.
At the same time, the Taliban’s ideology be-
gan to undergo a transformation. “We are fight-
ing to free our country from foreign domina-
tion,” Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi
told me over the phone. “The Indians fought for
their independence against the British. Even the
Americans once waged an insurgency to free
their own country.” This emerging nationalistic
streak appealed to Pashtun villagers growing
weary of the American and NATO presence.
The insurgents are also fighting to install a
version of Sharia law in the country. Nonethe-
less, the famously puritanical guerrillas have
moderated some of their most extreme doctrines,
at least in principle. Last year, for instance, Mul-
lah Omar issued an edict declaring music and
parties—banned in the Taliban’s previous incar-
nation—permissible. Some Taliban commanders
have even started accepting the idea of girls’ ed-
ucation. Certain hard-line leaders like the one-
legged Mullah Daddullah, a man of legendary
brutality (whose beheading binges at times re-
portedly proved too much even for Mullah
Omar) were killed by international forces.
Meanwhile, a more pragmatic leadership
started taking the reins. U.S. intelligence offi-
cers believe that day-to-day leadership of the
movement is now actually in the hands of the
politically savvy Mullah Brehadar, while Mul-
lah Omar retains a largely figurehead position.
Brehadar may be behind the push to moderate
the movement’s message in order to win greater
support.
Even at the local level, some provincial Tal-
iban officials are tempering older-style Taliban
policies in order to win local hearts and minds.
Three months ago in a district in Ghazni
province, for instance, the insurgents ordered all
schools closed. When tribal elders appealed to
the Taliban’s ruling religious council in the area,
the religious judges reversed the decision and
reopened the schools.
However, not all field commanders follow the
injunctions against banning music and parties. In
many Taliban-controlled districts such amuse-
ments are still outlawed, which points to the
movement’s decentralized nature. Local com-
manders often set their own policies and initiate
attacks without direct orders from the Taliban
leadership.
The result is a slippery movement that
morphs from district to district. In some Tal-
iban-controlled districts of Ghazni province, an
Afghan caught working for a non-governmental
organization (NGO) would meet certain death.
In parts of neighboring Wardak province, how-
ever, where the insurgents are said to be more
educated and understand the need for develop-
ment, local NGOs can function with the guerril-
las’ permission.
The “other Taliban”
N EVER SHORT of guns and guerrillas,
Afghanistan has proven fertile ground for a
whole host of insurgent groups in addition to
the Taliban.
Naqibullah, a university student with a sparse
beard who spoke in soft, measured tones, was not
quite 30 when we met. We were in the backseat
of a parked dusty Corolla on a pockmarked road
near Kabul University, where he studied medi-
cine. Naqibullah (his nom de guerre) and his
friends at the university are members of Hizb-i-
Islami, an insurgent group led by warlord Gul-
buddin Hekmatyar and allied to the Taliban. His
circle of friends meet regularly in the university’s
dorm rooms, discussing politics and watching
DVD videos of recent attacks.
Over the past year, his circle has shrunk:
Sadiq was arrested while attempting a suicide
bombing. Wasim was killed when he tried to as-
semble a bomb at home. Fouad killed himself in
a successful suicide attack on a U.S. base. “The
Americans have their B-52s,” Naqibullah ex-
plained. “Suicide attacks are our versions of B-
52s.” Like his friends, Naqibullah, too, had
considered the possibility of becoming a “B-
52.” “But it would kill too many civilians,” he
told me. Besides, he had plans to use his educa-
tion. He said, “I want to teach the uneducated
Taliban.”
For years Hizb-i-Islami fighters have had a
reputation for being more educated and worldly
than their Taliban counterparts, who are often il-
literate farmers. Their leader, Hekmatyar, studied
engineering at Kabul University in the 1970s,
where he made a name of a sort for himself by
hurling acid in the faces of unveiled women.
He established Hizb-i-Islami to counter grow-
ing Soviet influence in the country and, in the
1980s, his organization became one of the most
extreme fundamentalist parties as well as the
leading group fighting the Soviet occupation.
Ruthless, powerful and anti-Communist, Hek-
matyar proved a capable ally for Washington,
which funneled millions of dollars and tons of
weapons through the Pakistani ISI to his forces.
After the Soviet withdrawal, Hekmatyar and
the other mujahideen commanders turned their
guns on each other, unleashing a devastating
civil war from which Kabul, in particular, has yet
to recover. One-legged Afghans, crippled by
Hekmatyar’s rockets, still roam the city’s streets.
However, he was unable to capture the capital
and his Pakistani backers eventually abandoned
him for a new, even more extreme Islamist force
rising in the south: the Taliban.
Most Hizb-i-Islami commanders defected to
the Taliban and Hekmatyar fled in disgrace to
Iran, losing much of his support in the process.
He remained in such low standing that he was
among the few warlords not offered a place in the
U.S.-backed government that formed after 2001.
This, after a fashion, was his good luck.
When that government faltered, he found him-
self thrust back into the role of insurgent leader,
where, playing on local frustrations in Pashtun
communities just as the Taliban has, he slowly
resurrected Hizb-i-Islami.
Today, the group is one of the fastest-growing
insurgent outfits in the country, according to An-
tonio Giustozzi, Afghan insurgency expert at the
London School of Economics. Hizb-i-Islami
maintains a strong presence in the provinces near
Kabul and Pashtun pockets in the country’s north
and northeast. It assisted in a complex assassina-
tion attempt on President Karzai last spring and
was behind a high-profile ambush that killed ten
NATO soldiers this summer. Its guerrillas fight
under the Taliban banner, although independently
and with a separate command structure. Like the
Taliban, its leaders see their task as restoring
Afghan sovereignty as well as establishing an Is-
lamic state in Afghanistan. Naqibullah explained,
“The U.S. installed a puppet regime here. It was
an affront to Islam, an injustice that all Afghans
should rise up against.”
The independent Islamic state that Hizb-i-Is-
lami is fighting for would undoubtedly have Hek-
matyar, not Mullah Omar, in command. But as
during the anti-Soviet jihad, the settling of scores
is largely being left to the future.
The Pakistani nexus
B LOWBACK ABOUNDS in Afghanistan.
Erstwhile CIA hand Jalaluddin Haqqani
heads yet a third insurgent network, this one
based in Afghanistan’s eastern border regions.
During the anti-Soviet war, the U.S. gave
Haqqani, now considered by many to be Wash-
ington’s most redoubtable foe, millions of dol-
lars, anti-aircraft missiles and even tanks. Offi-
cials in Washington were so enamored with
him that former congressman Charlie Wilson
once called him “goodness personified.”
H a q q a n i wa s a n e a r l y a d vo c a t e o f t h e
“Afghan Arabs,” who, in the 1980s, flocked to
Pakistan to join the jihad against the Soviet
Union. He ran training camps for them and later
developed close ties to al-Qaeda, which devel-
oped out of Afghan-Arab networks towards the
end of the anti-Soviet war. After the attacks of
September 11, 2001, the U.S. tried desperately to
bring him over to its side. However, Haqqani
claimed that he couldn’t countenance a foreign
presence on Afghan soil and once again took up
arms, aided by his longtime benefactors in Pak-
istan’s ISI. He is said to have introduced suicide
bombing to Afghanistan, a tactic unheard of there
before 2001. Western intelligence officials pin
the blame for most of the spectacular attacks in
recent memory—a massive car bomb that ripped
apart the Indian embassy in July, for example—
on the Haqqani network, not the Taliban.
The Haqqanis command the lion’s share of
foreign fighters operating in the country and tend
to be even more extreme than their Taliban coun-
terparts. Unlike most of the Taliban and Hizb-i-
Islami, elements of the Haqqani network work
closely with al-Qaeda. The network’s leadership
is most likely based in Waziristan, in the Pak-
istani tribal areas, where it enjoys ISI protection.
Pakistan extends support to the Haqqanis on
the understanding that the network will keep its
holy war within Afghanistan’s borders. Such
agreements are necessary because, in recent
10
years, Pakistan’s longstanding policy of aiding
Islamic militant groups has plunged the country
into a devastating war within its own borders.
As Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants trickled
into Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban govern-
ment in 2001, Islamabad signed on to the Bush
administration’s Global War on Terror. It was a
profitable venture: Washington delivered billions
of dollars in aid and advanced weaponry to Pak-
istan’s military government, all the while look-
ing the other way as dictator Pervez Musharraf
increased his vise-like grip on the country. In re-
turn, Islamabad targeted al-Qaeda militants,
every few months parading a captured “high-
ranking” leader before the news cameras, while
leaving the Taliban leadership on its territory un-
touched.
While the Pakistani military establishment
never completely eradicated al-Qaeda—doing so
might have stanched the flow of aid—it kept up
just enough pressure so that the Arab militants
declared war on the government. By 2004, the
Pakistani army had entered the Federally Ad-
ministered Tribal Areas, a semi-autonomous re-
gion populated by Pashtun tribes (where al-
Qaeda fighters had taken refuge), in force for the
first time in an attempt to root out the foreign
militants.
Over the next few years, repeated Pakistani
army incursions, along with a growing number of
U.S. missile strikes (which sometimes killed
civilians), enraged the local tribal populations.
Small, tribal-based groups calling themselves
“the Taliban” began to emerge; by 2007, there
were at least 27 such groups active in the Pak-
istani borderlands. The guerrillas soon won con-
trol of areas in such tribal districts as North and
South Waziristan, and began to act like a version
of the 1990s Taliban redux: They banned music,
beat liquor store owners and prevented girls from
attending school. While remaining independent
of the Afghan Taliban, they also wholeheartedly
supported them.
By the end of 2007, the various Pakistani
Taliban groups had merged into a single outfit,
the Tehrik-i-Taliban, under the command of an
enigmatic 30-something guerrilla—Baitullah
Mehsud. Pakistani authorities blame Mehsud’s
group, usually referred to simply as the “Pak-
istani Taliban,” for a string of major attacks, in-
cluding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Mehsud and his allies have strong links to al-
Qaeda and continue to wage an on-again, off-
again war against the Pakistani military. At the
same time, some members of the Pakistani Tal-
iban have filtered across the border to join their
Afghan counterparts in the fight against the
Americans.
Tehrik-i-Taliban proved surprisingly power-
ful, regularly routing Pakistani army units whose
foot soldiers were loathe to fight their fellow
countrymen. But almost as soon as Tehrik had
emerged, fissures appeared. Not all Pakistani Tal-
iban commanders were convinced of the efficacy
of fighting a two-front war. Part of the move-
ment, calling itself the “Local Taliban,” adopted
a different strategy, avoiding battles with the Pak-
istani military. In addition, a significant number
of other Pakistani militant groups—including
many trained by the ISI to fight in Indian Kash-
mir—now operate in the Pakistani borderlands,
where they abstain from fighting the Pakistan
government and focus their fire on the Americans
in, or American suppy lines into, Afghanistan.
The result of all this is a twisted skein of al-
liances and ceasefires in which Pakistan is fight-
ing a war against al-Qaeda and one section of the
Pakistani Taliban, while leaving another section,
as well as other independent militant groups, free
to go about their business. That business includes
crossing the border into Afghanistan, where the
Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and independent
fighters from the tribal regions and elsewhere add
to the mix that has produced what one Western
intelligence official terms a “rainbow coalition”
arrayed against U.S. troops.
Living in a world of war
D ESPITE SUCH foreign connections, the
Afghan rebellion remains mostly a home-
grown affair. Foreign fighters—especially al-
Qaeda—have little ideological influence on most
of the insurgency, and most Afghans keep their
distance from such outsiders. “Sometimes groups
of foreigners speaking different languages walk
past,” Ghazni resident Fazel Wali recalls. “We
never talk to them and they don’t talk to us.”
Al-Qaeda’s vision of global jihad doesn’t
resonate in the rugged highlands and windswept
deserts of southern Afghanistan. Instead, the ma-
jor concern throughout much of the country is
intensely local: personal safety.
In a world of endless war, with a predatory
government, roving bandits, and Hellfire mis-
siles, support goes to those who can bring secu-
rity. In recent months, one of the most dangerous
activities in Afghanistan has also been one of its
most celebratory: the large, festive wedding par-
ties that Afghans love so much. U.S. forces
bombed such a party in July, killing 47. Then, in
November, warplanes hit another wedding party,
killing around 40. A couple of weeks later they
hit an engagement party, killing three.
“We are starting to think that we shouldn’t go
out in large numbers or have public weddings,”
Abdullah Wali told me. Wali lives in a district of
Ghazni Province where the insurgents have out-
lawed music and dance at such wedding parties.
It’s an austere life, but that doesn’t stop Wali
from wanting them back in power. Bland wed-
dings, it seems, are better than no weddings at
all.
First published at TomDispatch.com.
ERIC RUDER
The warlords’
president
November 4, 2009
Eric Ruder analyzes the latest developments
that handed a re-election victory to Hamid
Karzai—in the context of the debate in the
U.S. political establishment over how to esca-
late its war and occupation.
A FGHANISTAN’S ELECTION farce came to
an appropriately laughable end in early No-
vember when incumbent President Hamid Karzai
was declared the winner, after his rival, Abdullah
Abdullah, withdrew from a runoff vote scheduled
for November 7.
Karzai tried to steal the first election on Au-
gust 20 through massive vote fraud, but the theft
was so brazen—more than 1 million votes cast
for him in the first round were disqualified—that
he was pressured by international observers into
admitting he hadn’t won the necessary majority.
The runoff was scheduled for early November,
but a week before, Abdullah pulled out.
Karzai initially appeared to oppose cancella-
tion of the runoff in the hopes that a victory, even
in an election without an opponent, would help
him restore a semblance of legitimacy to his
U.S.-backed reign.
11
But U.S. officials quickly expressed satisfac-
tion with the result, apparently in the hopes of
avoiding another round of fraud and the difficul-
ties associated with providing security for voters
and election observers in Afghanistan’s far-flung
provinces. Karzai relented and accepted victory.
In a teary speech, Abdullah described his de-
cision to withdraw as a personal decision based
on his concerns about fraud. But the emotional
veneer concealed a cold political calculation.
Abdullah had called for the replacement of
Karzai’s handpicked chair of the Independent
Election Commission, Azizullah Ludin, plus
other voting reforms that Karzai flatly refused to
implement. But Abdullah no doubt figured that
withdrawing would be a better way to preserve
his chance at a future bid for power than losing.
Thus, Abdullah—who served as minister of
foreign affairs after the U.S. established an “in-
terim” Afghan government in December 2001
and continued in that post after Karzai’s first
election in 2004—didn’t call on his supporters to
boycott the election, nor did he call for protests.
Abdullah has also said he won’t join Karzai’s
government, but in a political system marked by
frequently shifting allegiances among warlords,
drug traffickers and various ethnic and religious
leaders, enemies are rarely irreconcilable forever.
Case in point: The various warlords that
make up the Northern Alliance served as a par-
liamentary opposition to Karzai until they made
their peace with him—and helped him turn out
votes, both real and fake—on August 20.
Perhaps Abdullah will try to fill the opposi-
tion vacuum they left behind. Or he may have cut
some other deal with Karzai or the U.S., despite
his insistence that he accepted nothing in return
for his decision not to contest the election.
N EWS OF the latest twist in the presidential
election came as the U.S. war in Afghanistan
intensified, with October bringing the highest
monthly death toll yet for U.S. soldiers—the re-
sult of roadside bombs and two helicopter
crashes that claimed the lives of 22 U.S. person-
nel in the closing days of the month.
The increased fighting between U.S. and
NATO forces and insurgent rebels has not only
produced a spike in the number of troops killed
in action, but led to a sharp increase in the num-
ber of injured troops. “More than 1,000 Ameri-
can troops have been wounded in battle over the
past three months in Afghanistan, accounting
for one-fourth of those injured in combat since
the U.S.-led invasion in 2001,” according to the
Washington Post.
Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are
now the weapon of choice for Taliban fighters,
and some are so powerful that they can destroy
the state-of-the-art mine-resistant vehicles that
the Pentagon had deployed to protect troops.
“Walter Reed [Army Medical Center’s] Ward
57 provides wrenching proof of the devastating
effectiveness of the bombs, with patients suffer-
ing amputations, spinal cord damage, traumatic
brain injuries and fractures,” the Post reported.
With President Barack Obama weighing a re-
quest from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top
Pentagon officer in charge of Afghanistan, for an
additional 40,000 to 80,000 U.S. troops in addi-
tion to the 68,000 already in Afghanistan, the
number of casualties will inevitably rise further.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-NATO war is continu-
ing to inflict a devastating toll on Afghans that
is only rarely the subject of mainstream media
attention.
David Kilcullen, a former Australian army of-
ficer and now a consultant to the U.S. and other
NATO countries on counter-insurgency tactics
pointed out that in recent air attacks, the U.S. has
killed 98 civilians for every two “insurgents”
killed. As antiwar author Richard Seymour wrote
on his blog:
If that ratio holds for the air war as a rule,
then consider that the U.S. is currently
boasting of having killed up to 25,000 in-
surgents. Twenty-five thousand is 2 percent
of 1.25 million. Lacking a Lancet-style
cluster survey, one can only make an edu-
cated guess as to whether such a figure is
approximately realistic.
There was one cluster survey carried out
for the first nine months of the invasion and
occupation, which estimated that 10,000
civilians had been killed, the majority from
air attacks. A similar survey today would be
reporting the effects of a far more intense
aerial campaign, in a war lasting for eight
years now. Who can say that the soaring
use of cluster bombs, daisy cutters, “smart”
missiles aimed at wedding parties, drone-
based ordnance and the usual deposits of
unexploded ordnance will have harvested a
negligible number of bodies?
T HE GROWING casualties from its war—
along with the tarnished credibility of the
Karzai government—has put the U.S. govern-
ment in a difficult position.
It pinned its hopes for a stable, U.S.-friendly
Afghanistan on Karzai’s ability to construct a
viable central government that can command an
army. But Karzai’s reliance on the country’s
hated warlords to cement his rule makes a legit-
imate central government a long shot at best.
And if the situation weren’t already bad
enough, the New York Times revealed in late Oc-
tober that Karzai’s brother—Ahmed Wali Karzai,
who is known for profiting immensely from the
opium trade and running a large area of southern
Afghanistan around Kandahar with an iron fist—
has been on the CIA payroll for most of the last
eight years.
Not only does Karzai’s brother provide intel-
ligence to the U.S., but he is helping the CIA run
the Kandahar Strike Force, a paramilitary force.
He also rents a large compound outside Kanda-
har—the former home of Mullah Mohammed
Omar, the Taliban’s founder—to U.S. Special
Forces. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American
official said.
Karzai’s CIA ties help him avoid the raids
and arrests that other Afghan drug lords face,
and his control over the lucrative drug trade has
almost certainly increased as a result.
The revelations come at a horrible time for
U.S. forces hoping to portray themselves as the
protectors of civilians in Afghanistan. “If we are
going to conduct a population-centric strategy in
Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing
thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,”
said Major Gen. Michael Flynn, the senior Amer-
ican military intelligence official in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration insists the U.S. is
fighting a “war of necessity” in Afghanistan. It
has all kinds of rationales—keeping Americans
safe, protecting Afghan civilians, liberating
Afghan women, crushing the Taliban insurgency,
keeping al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a
base of operations.
But the collaboration between U.S. military
and intelligence forces and the warlords, drug
dealers and paramilitaries expose these justifi-
cations as a pretext for the real reason the U.S.
won’t bring its troops home from a country that
has rejected their presence.
The U.S. wanted war in Afghanistan because
it saw the September 11 attacks as an opportu-
nity to pursue its imperial ambitions in Central
Asia. Washington’s aim was never, first and
foremost, to defeat the Taliban. In fact, the U.S.
viewed the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan prior to
September 11—with its focus on law and order
and eradicating the drug trade—as a boon to re-
gional stability.
If the U.S. had really wanted to capture al-
Qaeda operatives responsible for September 11,
why did U.S. officials reject, according to the
9/11 Commission Report, Mullah Omar’s over-
tures to hand over Osama bin Laden in exchange
for the U.S. calling off its invasion?
The answer: The prospect of establishing a
military occupation in a region rich with oil and
natural gas ranked higher for those who call the
shots in U.S. foreign policy than capturing al-
Qaeda leaders.
Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dol-
lars in futile efforts to occupy both Iraq and
Afghanistan, these decisions appear foolish. But
in the early 2000s, the neoconservative vision of
remaking the Middle East according to U.S.
wishes commanded overwhelming support from
both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
And today, the Obama administration continues
to work from the Bush playbook on Afghanistan.
It’s time to end the tragic waste of lives and
money in Afghanistan and bring the troops
home now.
12
THE STRUGGLE
AGAINST THE WAR
SPEECH BY AHMED SHAWKI
Can the U.S.
bring justice?
October 12, 2001
Ahmed Shawki, editor of the International
Socialist Review, spoke at an evening plenary
session of the People’s Summit in Washington,
D.C., in late September. These are excerpts
from his speech.
T HE TRAGEDY of September 11 is being
used by the government of this country not to
honor those who died, not to search for justice,
but to advance its agenda.
Some of this agenda has been in the works
for years, but couldn’t be advanced. But they in-
tend to try to use this crisis to push it as quickly
as possible.
The attacks are coming fast and furious:
militarism and a drive to war; a slew of attacks
on minorities—Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, people
of color.
I’m wearing a button today that I wouldn’t
have thought I’d have to wear, which says sim-
ply, “No scapegoats! Being Arab is not a crime.”
But it is the case that, instead of flying to
D.C., I drove. It is the case that hundreds of
Arabs, Muslims and others have been visited by
law enforcement agencies to ask if they have a
connection—what are their politics, what are
their views.
It is the case that this government is moving
forward with legislation to expand police powers.
They’re talking about surveillance mechanisms
and about rolling back a whole number of rights
that it took years and years to win.
And it isn’t simply happening here in the
United States. People will remember last sum-
mer’s events in Genoa, Italy, where a 23-year-
old global justice demonstrator named Carlo
Giuliani was shot twice in the head and killed
during protests of the Group of Eight summit.
The government of Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi came under some pressure and criti-
cism after the bloody police raid on the head-
quarters of the organizers of the demonstrations,
the Genoa Social Forum.
It may have gone unnoticed, but the investiga-
tion into the crimes of the Genoa police and the
state security forces is over. There was a white-
wash rushed through the Italian parliament of the
police forces, leaving Berlusconi off the hook.
So here is what Silvio Berlusconi now feels
like he can say to reporters: “We should be confi-
dent of the superiority of our civilization, which
counts on value systems that have given people
widespread prosperity and guarantees respect for
human rights and religion. This respect does not
exist in the Islamic countries.”
And he goes on to discuss the need—and he
puts it very bluntly—for the West and Christian
civilization to recolonize those parts of the world
that are now out of their reach.
T HAT’S THE kind of politics that are being
floated today. And it’s the kind of politics
that domestically finds its reflection in George
W. Bush’s demands for Star Wars and new secu-
rity laws.
Plus the Republicans who want to give money
to the rich to fight terrorism. Their proposal is for
a capital gains tax cut and a new tax structure to
benefit the rich.
Why? To fight terrorism, of course. How?
Well, it’s not exactly clear.
But when it comes to the question of com-
pensation for workers whose family members or
colleagues died in the World Trade Center, not a
penny is to be found in the U.S. Treasury.
As House Majority Leader Dick Armey of
Texas said: “The model of thought that says we
need to go out and extend unemployment bene-
fits and health insurance benefits and so forth is
not one which is commensurate with the Amer-
ican spirit.”
A tragedy took place in America on Septem-
ber 11. But there isn’t one America. There isn’t
one America that we stand all united in.
This country, from its very inception, was a
country that privileged some and excluded many.
It’s a country that was built by the labor of many
to the benefit of the few. And it’s a country in
which war has always been used, no matter how
noble the supposed cause, in order to advance
the interests of those who run this country.
Don’t believe me. Believe U.S. Marine Gen.
Smedley Butler, who wrote still the best indict-
ment of imperialism that I’ve ever read by a
member of the Marine Corps: “I spent 33 years
and four months in active military service as a
member of this country’s most agile military
force, the marine Corps…And during that pe-
riod, I spent most of my time being a high-class
muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and
for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a
gangster for capitalism…
“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico,
safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the Na-
tional City Bank boys to collect revenues in…I
helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I
helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested.”
Now people will say that Butler was talking
about the 1910s. But I say that we already know
what this war will be about.
We had a glimpse of it in 1991 Gulf War. That
was supposedly a war to preserve “democracy”
in a feudal monarchy.
That war produced the term “collateral dam-
age”—the Pentagon’s phrase meaning the death
of innocents.
At the turn of the 20th century, four-fifths of
all deaths in wars took place on the battlefields.
By the turn of the new millennium, that propor-
tion was reversed—four-fifths of those who die
in wars are civilians.
A CALL to war today will not bring us a step
closer to justice. But it will bring danger and
instability to the world that will cause further vi-
olence.
Now some people say, “What about jus-
tice?” The brother who spoke just said that we
want justice, and we want peace. But I think he
rightly also said that we have to be very wary
who is asking for justice, on whose terms and in
what way.
There’ve been some proposals, for instance,
to have a tribunal to try those responsible for the
attacks in the U.S., presided over by the United
Nations. Yet this country has refused to abide by
the UN resolutions that have asked for the con-
demnation of the state of Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian lands.
The U.S. cares about the UN only when it
serves its purposes. We should not be asked to re-
spect two different sets of laws.
The abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass
put it well in a speech on the Fourth of July. He
said that you ask me to speak here on the Fourth
of July, and you speak of freedom and dignity in
a country that enforces slavery—this is the height
of hypocrisy. And I condemn not the people of
this country but those who would try to use the
language of justice to advance their own narrow
interests.
It wasn’t so long ago, on March 21, 1983,
that Ronald Reagan declared Afghanistan Day
in honor of the “freedom fighters” who were
fighting in Afghanistan, armed and trained by
the CIA.
That’s one group of people in this country
that knows all about Osama bin Laden. In fact,
the president’s father would know something
about that, too—about how it all started.
We will not allow them to take the language
of justice away from our movement. We don’t
have to explain why we’re against war, why
we’re for civil liberties and against racism—ver-
sus those who are on the other side.
In the 1960s, the United States meant two
things to the world. On the one hand, it repre-
sented napalm, it represented war, and it repre-
sented the barbarism of the war it was conduct-
ing in Vietnam.
But it also represented something else to
hundreds of thousands of people. I know my first
thoughts at the time in Egypt were not about the
Vietnam War—but were about the pride I felt
when the Black Panther Party stood up and said
we should have rights here.
There are two Americas. There’s an America
of the rich and powerful. And there’s the one that
represents us.
And there are also those who would bring
war to this country, and there are those who are
adamantly opposed to that war.
13
SHARON SMITH
The antiwar
movement
retreats
October 20, 2009
Many in the antiwar movement ardently op-
posed the war in Iraq, says Sharon Smith—
while remaining silent about an equally immoral
war in Afghanistan.
E IGHT YEARS into the war on Afghanistan—
and with no end in sight—seems a peculiar
time for antiwar activists to claim that U.S.
forces need to stay there even longer for the sake
of the Afghan people.
Yet Yifat Susskind, communications director
for the human rights organization MADRE, re-
cently argued on CommonDreams.org, “‘Bring
the Troops Home’ is a bumper sticker, not a pol-
icy.” She continued, “For MADRE, U.S. obliga-
tions stem from the fact that Afghanistan’s
poverty, violence against women and political
corruption are, in part, results of U.S. policy over
the past 30 years.”
Code Pink cofounders Medea Benjamin and
Jodie Evans began arguing for a “responsible
withdrawal” after their recent visit to Af -
ghanistan, which focused on discovering Afghan
women’s attitudes toward the U.S. occupation.
While there, they met with a handpicked group
of politically connected Afghan women that in-
cluded President Hamid Karzai’s sister-in-law,
Wazhma Karzai.
According to Code Pink, many of these
members of parliament and businesswomen op-
posed sending an additional 40,000 U.S. troops
to Afghanistan, but also said they rely on U.S.
troops for their own personal safety.
On October 6, the Christian Science Monitor
published an interview with Benjamin and re-
ported on her change of heart, based on conversa-
tions with some of the women she met in Kabul.
For example, CSM reported, “Shinkai Karokhail,
an Afghan member of parliament and woman ac-
tivist, told them. ‘International troop presence
here is a guarantee for my safety.’”
Benjamin claimed she was misrepresented in
the Christian Science Monitor. Yet Benjamin her-
self said in a recent interview:
[W]e certainly did hear some people say
that they felt if the U.S. pulled out right
now, there would be a collapse, and the Tal-
iban might take over, there might be a civil
war. But we also heard a lot of people say
they didn’t want more troops to be sent in,
and they wanted the U.S. to have a respon-
sible exit strategy that included the training
of Afghan troops, included being part of
promoting a real reconciliation process and
included economic development; that the
United States shouldn’t be allowed to just
walk away from the problem. So that’s re-
ally our position.
 This reasoning assumes, of course, that the
U.S. is capable of behaving responsibly toward
the Afghan people. It is not.
The Obama administration feigned disap-
pointment at the rampant corruption of the
Karzai regime, now that the UN Election Com-
plaints Commission has reported that widespread
stuffing of ballot boxes and coercion by warlords
helped Karzai “win” re-election by a margin of
54 percent this past summer. As many as one in
every three votes was fraudulent, and most of
them went to Karzai.
But the Obama administration hasn’t yet
lost faith in Karzai. Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton reportedly told Karzai over
the weekend “that this is an important moment
where he can show statesmanship and actually
strengthen his leadership position,” according
to administration officials.
To add to the embarrassment, Karzai was re-
sisting the UN commission’s findings. Despite a
flurry of phone calls and visits, including one
from Sen. John Kerry and another from former
U.S. State Department envoy Zalmay Khalilzad,
Karzai remains defiant. He indicated that he will
only accept a decision from Afghanistan’s Inde-
pendent Election Commission (IEC), a body
dominated by his political allies, which was also
accused of involvement in the massive election
fraud this past summer.
T HROUGH BLACKMAIL, bribery and brute
military force, the U.S. has determined the
political landscape of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
U.S. conquerors installed Karzai as
Afghanistan’s transitional head of state in De-
cember 2001. But Karzai was never meant to
build a genuine democracy in Afghanistan. Nor
was he expected to champion the rights of
women. On the contrary, he was chosen not for
his ethical credentials, but rather for his close ties
to the band of warlords with which the U.S. part-
nered to quickly overthrow the Taliban in No-
vember 2001.
Renamed the “Northern Alliance” for the
purpose of casting these warlords as freedom
fighters, in reality, they were veterans of the
National Islamic United Front for the Salvation
of Afghanistan, an unstable coalition that ruled
Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, when the
Taliban overthrew it.
Together, they constituted seven separate Mu-
jahideen political parties, each representing the
fiefdom of a corrupt warlord. Their president,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, suspended the constitu-
tion and issued a series of religious edicts banish-
ing women from broadcasting and government
jobs, and requiring women to wear veils. More
severe repression soon followed.
Karzai served as deputy foreign minister in
Rabbani’s government, while the feuding Mu-
jahideen parties unleashed a rein of terror against
Afghanistan’s already war-torn population.
Women were routinely abducted, beaten and
raped, or sold into prostitution. According to hu-
man rights expert Patricia Gossman, “Between
1992 and 1995, fighting among the factions of
the alliance reduced a third of Kabul to rubble
and killed more than 50,000 civilians. The top
commanders ordered massacres of rival ethnic
groups, and their troops engaged in mass rape.”
In June 2002, in what the U.S. media depicted
as a “flowering of democracy,” a loya jirga, or
tribal council, elected Karzai as Afghanistan’s in-
terim president. But most of the decisions were
made behind the scenes, where then-U.S. envoy
Khalilzad—a former Unocal oil executive—
worked hand in glove with Karzai and the North-
ern Alliance to manipulate the votes. During the
loya jirga, Karzai announced his own election as
president before the vote had actually taken
place, to the dismay of many delegates.
In the run-up to the 2002 loya jirga, eight del-
egates were murdered amid a general rise in po-
litical violence and intimidation by warlords
guarding their own fiefdoms. Meanwhile, Karzai
used a rumored plot to overthrow his government
as an excuse to round up 700 of his political op-
ponents in the weeks before the voting.
Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has
long been flagged as a drug trafficker in Southern
Afghanistan, but the allegations have never been
investigated. He continues to head the Kandahar
Provincial Council, the governing body for the
region.
He also has played a role in passing informa-
tion to international intelligence agencies. Ac-
cording to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, writing in the
Washington Post, while aware of information
implicating Karzai in the drug trade, “U.S. and
Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter,
in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given
valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he
also routinely provides assistance to Canadian
forces, according to several officials familiar
with the issue.”
Under President Karzai’s watch, Afghanistan
has returned to providing roughly 95 percent of
the world’s heroin supplies, while the U.S. mili-
tary looks the other way. As Jeff Stein recently
reported at the Huffington Post, Republican Rep.
Mike Rogers of Michigan explained, “We cer-
tainly need the president to be with us. That
would be hard if we’re hauling off his brother to
a detention center.”
T HE U.S. left has failed to effectively oppose
the war in Afghanistan from its onset, when
the U.S. population overwhelmingly supported
the war on the pretext that “we were attacked.”
That support has severely eroded, and polls
show that a clear majority now wants to end the
occupation. Yet many on the left have remained
confused for the last eight years—ardently op-
posing the war in Iraq while remaining silent
about the equally immoral war in Afghanistan.
This confusion has apparently been com-
pounded by the election of Barack Obama, who
initially opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding,
however, he has since embraced the aims of U.S.
imperialism with gusto. U.S. troops and, perhaps
more importantly, U.S. military bases remain in
Iraq with no deadline for complete withdrawal.
Obama authorized a surge of 21,000 addi-
tional U.S. troops to Afghanistan soon after tak-
ing office and is now pondering whether to send
at least 40,000 more. These are no longer George
W. Bush’s wars. Obama has claimed them for
himself. So far, the only consequence of the
surge has been the resurgence of the Taliban re-
14
sistance against U.S. occupation. Even his pledge
to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay re-
mains unfulfilled.
Yet Obama maintains a substantial following
on the U.S. left, sowing yet more confusion
among antiwar activists. For example, in re-
sponse to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, Juan
Lopez wrote in the People’s World on October
12, “Now, don’t get me wrong... Like other left
and progressive folks, I advocate ending the
Afghanistan military venture.” Yet he went on to
praise the award: “Most of the nation and world
embraced the choice as affirmation that, with
President Obama at the helm, America has em-
barked on a new, far more constructive course.”
Likewise, Code Pink’s Evans argued on
womensmediacenter.com, “I left the States with
a judgment about some of the women who were
members of the parliament: So many are sisters
and wives of warlords or tribal leaders chosen
merely to fill the required quota of women. But
member of parliament Shinkai Karokhal, a radi-
cal feminist from Kabul, reminded me that just
their existence, that they constitute 25 percent
of the body, is inspiring to women throughout
the country.”
Afghan women surely deserve better than
parliamentary representation by the wives of
warlords enforcing the lawless and repressive
status quo. Those seeking alternative opinions
among Afghan women can easily discover that
there is no shortage of those with the courage
to expose the rule of warlords and call for the
immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops.
Malalai Joya is a case in point. As a young
woman, she denounced the participation of drug
traffickers and warlords at the 2002 loya jirga.
Soon after she was elected to parliament in 2005,
she was suspended for her outspokenness. She
now escapes violent retribution by wearing a
burqa as a disguise.
As she wrote in the Guardian on July 25:
You must understand that the government
headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords
and extremists who are brothers in creed of
the Taliban. Many of these men committed
terrible crimes against the Afghan people
during the civil war of the 1990s. For ex-
pressing my views, I have been expelled
from my seat in parliament, and I have sur-
vived numerous assassination attempts. The
fact that I was kicked out of office while
brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from
prosecution for their crimes should tell you
all you need to know about the “democ-
racy” backed by NATO troops.
Likewise, the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has main-
tained its anti-occupation principles since the war
began, risking their lives to organize an under-
ground movement in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.
In a recent post to the U.S. antiwar move-
ment, RAWA stated:
The U.S. and allies occupied Afghanistan
in the name of “democracy,” “women’s
rights” and “war on terror,” but after eight
long years, everyone knows that the situa-
tion is as critical in Afghanistan as it was
under the brutal regime of the Taliban.
 While they talk about democracy and
women’s rights, on the other end, they are
supporting and nourishing the diehard ene-
mies of these values, and impose them on
our people.
Washington’s warmongers have been getting
away with mass murder in Afghanistan for far
too long. Obama is now at the helm of this disas-
trous imperial adventure. “Troops out now” is the
only viable exit strategy, yet it can also easily fit
onto a bumper sticker. Those who argue for pro-
longing the U.S. occupation until the U.S. trans-
forms its mission into a benevolent one are likely
to be kept waiting forever.
ERIC RUDER
Challenging the
myths of the
“good war”
December 4, 2008
Eric Ruder talks to veterans of the war on
Afghanistan about why they want the U.S. to
end its occupation.
C ORPORAL BRYAN Casler served with the
2nd Battalion, 6th Marines Fox Company as
an infantryman from 2002 to 2006. In those four
years, he was sent to Iraq twice and Afghanistan
once. He came back profoundly changed by his
experiences, joined Iraq Veterans Against the
War (IVAW) and dedicated himself to building
the antiwar movement.
But since his return and throughout his or-
ganizing activities, he says that he’s rarely been
asked about his time in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan was a high-stress environment,”
explains Casler. “We worked 100-plus hours a
week with a skeleton crew.
“Most of us had already deployed to Iraq, and
one of the striking things is that our training for
Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t any different. We
treated the situation exactly like it was Iraq. If it
was really a different war with different things
happening there, they would have trained us dif-
ferently, but they didn’t.”
When President-elect Barack Obama takes
office in January, he has pledged to withdraw a
battalion a month from Iraq—and begin a surge
of U.S. troops to Afghanistan. He has called for
a renewed focus on a military victory in Af -
ghanistan, as well as capturing or killing Osama
bin Laden.
But to antiwar U.S. soldiers, Afghan civilians
and even a growing portion of the Afghan elite,
the consequences of a sharp increase in foreign
troops in Afghanistan are predictable and dire—
more civilian deaths, more soldiers in harm’s
way, and more damage to what little remains of
Afghan society.
As Casler puts it, “It’s time for us to start
talking about Afghanistan.”
T HE OCCUPATION of Afghanistan is enter-
ing its eighth year, and yet the situation for
the U.S. is getting worse, not better. American
casualties are rising. The Taliban is resurgent
and newly confident about challenging both U.S.
troops and government forces under the com-
mand of U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid
Karzai.
At the same time, segments of the Afghan
population that once expressed gratitude toward
the U.S. for removing the Taliban from power
and took a wait-and-see attitude toward the on-
going U.S. presence are growing increasingly
angry.
The reasons are many. First and foremost, the
U.S. has increasingly relied on air strikes to sup-
press the growing influence of the Taliban—to a
jaw-dropping extent. U.S. fighters flew only 86
bombing raids in all of 2004; in 2007, the num-
ber of air strikes grew to nearly 3,000. The
bombing continued to rise in 2008, with 600,000
pounds of bombs dropped on Afghanistan in
June and July alone, almost equal to the amount
dropped in all of 2006.
While the Taliban has carefully avoided caus-
ing harm to civilians in areas under its control
and thus succeeded in winning some new bases
of support, the U.S. has used its air superiority
with a recklessness that undermined what little
reserve of good will remained among the Afghan
population.
In early November, U.S. air strikes killed 65
civilians in a wedding party—a horrific toll but
not unprecedented, as such parties, with their
large concentrations of people, have been targets
of air strikes in the past.
“The Americans are hitting civilian houses all
the time,” exclaimed Mohammad Tawakil Khan,
a provincial council member in Baghdis, whose
two sons and a grandson were killed along with
four others in a U.S. air strike the same week as
the wedding party massacre.
“They don’t care, they just say it was a mis-
15
take...Afghan officials are only offering their
condolences. After some 100 times that they have
killed civilians, we have to take revenge, and af-
terward say our condolences to them.”
Beyond the carnage caused by bombs
dropped by their supposed liberators, Afghans
also seethe at the U.S. partnership with the war-
lords, militias and gangsters who make up the
Northern Alliance.
Noting that Obama recently told a reporter
that he felt no reason to apologize to the Afghan
people, Eman, a member of the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA), expressed disbelief, bitterness and
anger.
“Didn’t he feel the need to apologize for the
occupation of our country under the banner of
democracy, the so-called ‘war on terror,’ and
women’s rights, but then compromise with ter-
rorists like the Northern Alliance, who cannot be
distinguished from the Taliban in the history of
their criminal acts?” Eman said on KPFK’s Up-
rising Radio, hosted by U.S.-based Afghan rights
activist Sonali Kolhatkar.
“In fact, these murderers were the first to de-
stroy our nation. And even after seven years of a
very long and very costly ‘war on terror,’ terror-
ism has not been uprooted in Afghanistan, but
has become stronger, and the Taliban are becom-
ing more powerful. From his statements during
his election campaign, we don’t think that
Obama’s position is different from the Bush ad-
ministration; it is the continuation of Bush’s for-
eign policy...
“RAWA strongly believes that whatever hap-
pens, a withdrawal of foreign troops should be
the first step, because today, with the presence of
thousands of troops in Afghanistan, with the
presence of many foreign countries in our nation,
for the majority of our people, particularly poor
people in the other provinces of Afghanistan out-
side Kabul, the situation is so bad that it cannot
get any worse.”
T ED GOODNIGHT served in Afghanistan in
2003 and 2004 with the North Carolina Army
National Guard and was stationed primarily at
the Bagram Air Base, and for a time at a forward
operating base near the Pakistani border.
Like Casler, his time overseas—combined
with his horror at deploying to Louisiana in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina fully armed to
repress the people he thought he was supposed
to be helping—persuaded him to end 15 years
of service with the National Guard after he re-
turned, and to join IVAW.
What he saw and heard in Afghanistan
shocked him. “Despite all the planning and flaw-
less execution of all the elements of a combined
arms task force, based on supposedly actionable
intelligence, we continually came up short—no
one captured of any value,” says Goodnight.
“I thought there’s something wrong with this
picture, so I asked my company commander
why we kept coming up short. Was it an intelli-
gence failure? Or something else? And the re-
sponse that I got was that these were simply
shows of force, that in reality there were no le-
gitimate targets.
“I also remember the various snatch-and-
grabs of Afghans that the military carried out.
They would come off the helicopters with their
handcuffs and leg shackles and hoods over their
heads, and were led into this compound, where
they were never seen or heard from by us again.
“I remember being in the dining facility and
overhearing conversations between military po-
lice personnel who were in charge of interroga-
tions, and they were bragging among themselves
about their brutality—who could be more intimi-
dating and more demeaning to the detainees.
“This was about dehumanization. They
weren’t people. They were acronyms, PUCs,
‘persons under control.’ So we were not only
harassing the population through giant shows of
military force, but also through thuggish intimi-
dation, kidnapping and abuse of detainees. We
were there simply as an occupying force.”
Goodnight says that the U.S. totally failed to
deliver on any of its promises to provide human-
itarian relief. “We haven’t provided any signifi-
cant assistance to the farmers who make up the
majority of the labor force in Afghanistan,” he
said. “We haven’t put forth any real effort to
provide alternative crops, so the only option has
been to turn to opium production, which the Tal-
iban had largely eliminated before the U.S.
came in and kicked them out.
“The humanitarian efforts that we have un-
dertaken have been primarily carried out by
contractors who perform shoddy work with for-
eign workers. The majority of the population
needs that income and those jobs, so how are
we supposed to win hearts and minds with con-
struction efforts using foreign contractors and
foreign workers when the population, which is
capable of skilled construction work, is left by
the wayside?”
The bombings and callous disregard for civil-
ian life, the routine abuse and mistreatment of
detainees, the lack of humanitarian assistance—
all of this explains, according to Goodnight, why
the Taliban has been able to reassert itself in
Afghanistan.
“The Taliban represents an alternative,” says
Goodnight. “They say to the people—you know
what we’ve done. We provided stability and se-
ghanistan as part of IVAW’s points of unity, but
if the organization as a whole doesn’t vote that
through, I’m of course going to continue my or-
curity, and yes, we were brutal in the enforce- ganizing against the war in Iraq. But we have to
ment of religious laws, but we provided more understand that there are a lot of Afghanistan
for the people and the farmers than the U.S. has veterans who want to see immediate withdrawal
or will. So the people figure that they prefer the from Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan
lesser of two evils—which in this case is in the people, just as in Iraq.
Taliban.” “It’s up to everybody to educate themselves
about Afghanistan. We’ve been so hyper-focused
B UT DOESN’T the U.S. have the right to pur-
sue Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to wipe
out the terrorist threat?
on Iraq that the issue of Afghanistan hasn’t been
brought up as much as it should have. But we are
fighting two wars every single day.
As Casler says, it’s a mistake “to hold an en- “Whether we like it or not, Afghanistan is
tire country responsible for the actions of a few going to be thrust into the public eye, and I hope
people. It wouldn’t make sense to hold the entire we’re prepared to provide context for what’s go-
American population responsible for Timothy ing on there when that happens.”
McVeigh’s actions or the Unabomber, would it?
“Retaliation against Afghanistan for the at-
tack by Osama bin Laden never made sense to
me, but during my time in the military, I never
questioned what I was told to do. So when we
went to Afghanistan, it didn’t matter why. They
could have told me we’re going into Wisconsin,
and I would have done it. The definition of dis-
cipline is instant willing obedience to orders,
and you strive to have discipline in the military.”
Matthis Chiroux was sent to Afghanistan for a
week as an Army reporter in 2005, and he is now
fighting the U.S. military’s attempt to reactivate
and deploy him involuntarily to Iraq. He echoes
Casler’s sentiments.
“Osama bin Laden is not Afghani, and he
wasn’t acting on behalf of the Afghani people or
the state of Afghanistan,” says Chiroux. “He was
supported by their government, which we our-
selves also supported, just as we supported Sad-
dam Hussein in Iraq. How many more Afghanis
must die for us to stop being terrified?”
In fact, every Afghan killed by the U.S. is
used as a recruiting pitch by both the Taliban and
al-Qaeda—and it’s working. “The inherent and
unjust nature of foreign occupation does far more
to foment terrorism than cool it,” says Chiroux.
“An occupied Afghanistan will never submit, and
it shouldn’t.”
Even before the September 11 attacks, the
U.S. had issued threats against Afghanistan’s Tal-
iban regime, which Washington once considered
benign but later deemed an obstacle to its plans
for controlling the shipment and distribution of
oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia.
The 9/11 attacks became more than just a pre-
text for the invasion of Afghanistan. The “war on
terror” has become the justification for a series of
interventions and potential military interventions
in the service of an American empire.
This is the crucial context for understanding
the meaning of an escalation of the U.S. military
presence in Afghanistan.
“Obama’s plan to shift troops into Afghan -
istan and then bring the aerial war into Iraq is
bringing another failed policy and a failed tactic
into a country already devastated by occupa-
tion,” says Casler. “I’d personally like to see the
removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and
Iraq, and some real reparations for the people of
both these countries, not just ‘reparations’ at the
end of the barrel of a gun.
“I’m actively campaigning to include Af -
16