The Other Bad War

[Spoonerian]

By Ted Rall
...
During his 2004 presidential primary campaign Howard Dean said: "Our military has done an absolutely terrific job in Afghanistan, which is a war I supported...I believe that, had Saddam been captured earlier, we might have been able to spend more time looking for Osama bin Laden, which is the real problem." John Kerry took the same position--Afghanistan war good/part of war on terror, Iraq war bad/distraction--in his run against Bush.
...
Liberal magazines like The Nation and The Progressive, the Air America radio network and the leftie blogosphere are packed with ferocious insults and attacks on the Bush Administration about the Iraq War, from how they conned us into it to their lack of postwar strategic planning to the profiteering and looting that ensued. But when Afghanistan makes one of its rare appearances in the leftie media, it's invariably held up as the war Bush ought to be fighting, the good war that got sidetracked when we went into Iraq.

Everyone loves Bush's war against Afghanistan, even though it was based on just as many lies as his assault on Iraq: Osama bin Laden probably wasn't in Afghanistan on 9/11 and was certainly not there by the time bombs began falling. People approve even though, as in Iraq, Bush didn't send enough troops--8,000 where 500,000 were required--to provide basic security. Even though Afghans didn't greet us as liberators. Even though, as in Iraq, he installed a government composed of corrupt, violent and vengeful minorities, guaranteeing sectarian bloodshed and civil war.
...
And even though the news from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan--if you can find any--is as relentlessly bleak as that from Iraq. Afghanistan suffers its own litany of roadside bombs, suicide bombs, massacres of foreign aid workers, citizens terrorized by kidnappers and rapists. It even has its own Abu Ghraib. U.S. troops are jailing, torturing and occasionally murdering about 500 uncharged (and therefore legally innocent) inmates at a top-secret makeshift concentration camp at a disused Soviet-era machine shop at Bagram, about 40 miles south of Kabul. "Some of the detainees," reports the New York Times, "have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years." The paper says that the Bagram camp is "in many ways rougher and more bleak" than the notorious U.S. gulag at Guantánamo. "Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages...sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines." And if Abu Ghraib serves as a guide, check out what Army interrogator and self-admitted prisoner abuser Anthony Lagouranis says about those "terrorists": "90 percent of them were probably innocent."
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20060301/cm_ucru/theotherbadwar">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20060301/cm_ucru/theotherbadwar

[lvx35]

1. Afghanistan just ends up looking good by comparison to Iraq

I don't blame folks too much for not protesting it as much...In retrospect its probably just as bad, but it all happened before we went down the rabbit hole, while things still made some kind of sense. OBL blew up buildings, he was hiding in Afghanistan, Taliban wouldn't give him to us, etc...

[Spoonerian]

3. My understanding is that "the Taliban" said they would

hand over OBL if Bush would show them the evidence that OBL was involved in 911 and Bush responded, "I don't have to show you the evidence, I showed it to Tony Blair."

Have they shown you the evidence? Maybe they showed it to Ted Rall.

[lvx35]

5. Yeah, totally.

That's what I was saying, its probably just as bad in retrospect. At this point, I think I can safely assume that anything Bush has touched with a ten foot pole is a turd. Its just that it seemed to make more sense at the time. It was the Iraq war when I really realized the level of nonsense, and then it just kept coming and coming, from the downing street memos, to torture as policy, to the raging incompetence of Katrina. But back then, if you wanted to fool yourself that Bush was okay, it was a lot easier, that's all I'm saying ;)

[Spoonerian]

7. Yes, I'm always amazed

that despite a lifetime of figuring out government lies well after the fact--from the JFK assassination on down--when they pull one of these spectacles like 911, my first instinct is NOT to assume that everything they're feeding us is bullshit. It seems like it takes me a few weeks or months to ask the simplest questions. It must be something to do with the way they've programmed our minds to respond to their shock tactics.

[theoldman]

2. Actually we took out the good guys and put in the bad guys.

Of course the good guys (Taliban) were also bad guys just not as bad as the others. Afghanistan will be a mess for many years to come and our military personnel will continue to die.

[billbuckhead]

4. Afghanistan probably would have been better off if the Soviets won

At least for women.

[roody]

6. If Osama bin Forgotten

did it, Bush would know, for he would have helped him plan it.

[eridani]

8. We might have listened to the natives about how to proceed there--

--but we refused. Too important to stick our steel-toed military boot in their faces.

WTF does carpet-bombing civilians have to do with going after Osama? 1000 anti-Taliban leaders meeting in Peahawar in 10/2001 were unanimously against the bombing campaign. They thought they could bribe the non-hardcore Taliban over to their side given a little money. We crammed our chosen government down their throats--they overwhelmingly preferred the ex-king of Afghanistan as the person that the fewest number had a beef with. (And if you think their 'elections' were honest, you probably think ours are as well.) We kept the project of running Afghaninstan in-house, and outsourced chasing Osama--it should have been exactly the other way around.

The only valid reason for doing anything in Afghanistan was to go after bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which would not necessarily have involved trying to get rid of the Taliban. That would have meant, as Kerry suggested in the first debate, going directly after them ourselves instead of outsourcing the job to a bunch of fundie whackjob warlords who are not the slightest bit different from the Taliban and backing them up with a massive bombing campaign that mainly slaughtered civilians.

Or, if one accepts getting the Taliban out as something also worth doing, it might have paid to listen to the convocation of more than 1000 anti-Taliban leaders who met in Peshawar on October 27, 2001.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20020201.htm

Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed, among them, for example, the 1000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar in late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned the U.S. war, which is "beating the donkey rather than the rider," one speaker said to unanimous agreement.

We might begin with the gathering of Afghan leaders in Peshawar, some exiles, some who trekked across the border from within Afghanistan, all committed to overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was "a rare display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and former guerrilla commanders," the New York Times reported. They unanimously "urged the U.S. to stop the air raids," appealed to the international media to call for an end to the "bombing of innocent people," and "demanded an end to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan." They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be achieved without slaughter and destruction.(21)

Reported, but dismissed without further comment.

A similar message was conveyed by Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq, who condemned the air attacks as a "terrible mistake."(22) Highly regarded in Washington, Abdul Haq was considered to be "perhaps the most important leader of anti-Taliban opposition among Afghans of Pashtun nationality based in Pakistan."(23) His advice was to "avoid bloodshed as much as possible"; instead of bombing, "we should undermine the central leadership, which is a very small and closed group and which is also the only thing which holds them all together. If they are destroyed, every Taliban fighter will pick up his gun and his blanket and disappear back home, and that will be the end of the Taliban," an assessment that seems rather plausible in the light of subsequent events.

Several weeks later, Abdul Haq entered Afghanistan, apparently without U.S. support, and was captured and killed. As he was undertaking this mission "to create a revolt within the Taliban," he criticized the U.S. for refusing to aid him and others in such endeavors, and condemned the bombing as "a big setback for these efforts." He reported contacts with second-level Taliban commanders and ex-Mujahidin tribal elders, and discussed how further efforts could proceed, calling on the U.S. to assist them with funding and other support instead of undermining them with bombs.

The U.S., Abdul Haq said, is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans.

20. For review, see my Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992, 2nd edition), "Afterword."

21. Barry Bearak, "Leaders of the Old Afghanistan Prepare for the New," NYT, Oct. 25. John Thornhill and Farhan Bokhari, "Traditional leaders call for peace jihad," FT, Oct. 25; "Afghan peace assembly call," FT, Oct. 26. John Burns, "Afghan Gathering in Pakistan Backs Future Role for King," NYT, Oct. 26; Indira Laskhmanan, "1,000 Afghan leaders discuss a new regime," BG, Oct. 25, 26, 2001.

22. Barry Bearak, NYT, Oct. 27, 2001.

23. Anatol Lieven, "Voices from the Region: Interview with Commander Abdul Haq," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, posted Oct. 15. See Lieven, Guardian, Nov. 2, 2001. Quotes below from this interview.

But there was still another chance to listen to anti-warlord and anti-Taliban sentiment among attendees at the loya jirga in the summer of 2002.


http://threehegemons.tripod.com/threehegemonsblog/id54....

The Warlords Win in Kabul

By OMAR ZAKHILWAL and ADEENA NIAZI

KABUL, Afghanistan — On the final night of the loya jirga, more than 1,500 delegates gathered for the unveiling of the new cabinet. Our hearts sank when we heard President Hamid Karzai pronounce one name after another. A woman activist turned to us in disbelief: "This is worse than our worst expectations. The warlords have been promoted and the professionals kicked out. Who calls this democracy?"

Interim government ministers with civilian rather than military credentials were dismissed. Mr. Karzai did not announce the minister for women's affairs, prompting speculation that Sima Samar, the popular current minister in that post, will be removed once international attention shifts elsewhere.

As the loya jirga folded its tent, we met with frustration and anger in the streets. "Why did you legitimize an illegitimate government?" one Kabul resident asked us.

The truth is, we didn't. While the Bonn agreement and the rules of the loya jirga entitled us to choose the next government freely, we delegates were denied anything more than a symbolic role in the selection process. A small group of Northern Alliance chieftains led by the Panjshiris decided everything behind closed doors and then dispatched Mr. Karzai to give us the bad news

This sentiment quickly grew into a grass-roots movement supporting the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, as head of state. The vast majority of us viewed him as the only leader with enough popular support and independence to stand up to the warlords. But our democratic effort to nominate Zahir Shah did not please the powers that be. As a result, the entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former king was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the government.

After that announcement, the atmosphere at the loya jirga changed radically. The gathering was now teeming with intelligence agents who openly threatened reform-minded delegates, especially women. Access to the microphone was controlled so that supporters of the interim government dominated the proceedings.

Fundamentalist leaders branded critics of the warlords as traitors to Islam and circulated a petition denouncing Women's Affairs Minister Samar as "Afghanistan's Salman Rushdie."


http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4303

One of the world's leading frontline aid organisations, Médeci because of a deterioration in security.

MSF, a neutral group which depends primarily on private donations, has a reputation for sending medical staff into troublespots regarded by other agencies as too dangerous. This is its first pullout from any country since being founded 33 years ago.

The organisation, which worked in Afghanistan through the Soviet occupation, the civil war and the Taliban, said yesterday that the US-led coalition put aid workers at risk by blurring the line between military and humanitarian operations.

The group said in a statement that it regretted having to leave Afghanistan, where it has been operating for 24 years, but added: "today's context is rendering independent humanitarian aid for the Afghan people all but impossible."