Watch the entire interview here.

According to Human Rights Watch, civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO action have tripled in the past year. Ninety civilians were killed in just one day August 20 and now there’s news of US action claiming lives on the Pakistan border provoking a “strong protest” from the Pakistani government who this week said they reserved the right to retaliate.

Yet President Bush announced Tuesday his plans to increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Senator Obama countered, “his plan comes up short – it’s not enough troops, and not enough resources with not enough urgency.”

Some are declaring Afghanistan the “right war” but does that sound RIGHT to you?

Here to discuss US policy in the region –past and future — are filmmaker, Wazhmah Osman, director of the film, Post Cards from Tora Bora, journalist, Jan Goodwin, author of The Price of Honor, Jake Sherman, Project Coordinator at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Michael Shaikh, the Asia Programs’ Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, before joining ICG, he worked with Human Rights Watch on their new report. Joining us by phone from California, Sonali Kolhatka, Co-Director of The Afghan Women’s Mission and the host of the Pacifica radio show, Uprising. She’s also the Co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence.

Read/watch/listen to the entire interview here.

Interview Transcript

JUAN GONZALEZ: NATO has denied a report in the French newspaper Le Monde that ten French soldiers killed in Afghanistan earlier this week died as a result of friendly fire from allied planes. A NATO spokeswoman said Thursday that Le Monde’s claims were “completely unfounded.”

The Le Monde report had quoted French soldiers who had survived the Taliban ambush. The soldiers told the newspaper that NATO planes arrived four hours after the ambush and accidentally hit French troops.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited survivors in Kabul earlier this week and vowed to continue the fight against terrorism. He said no regrets about the sending of 700 additional troops to Afghanistan, despite the soldiers’ deaths.

At a memorial service in France Thursday, Sarkozy justified maintaining the French presence in Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT NICOLAS SARKOZY: [translated] We do not have the right to give up on our values. We do not have the right to let the barbarians triumph, because a defeat at the other end of the world will be paid by defeat here on the territory of the French Republic.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Burbank, California by Sonali Kolhatkar. She’s the host of Uprising on Pacifica radio station KPFK and co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. She is also co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a group that works in solidarity with Afghans to help improve health and educational facilities for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

Sonali Kolhatkar, welcome to Democracy Now!

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Thank you, Amy and Juan.

AMY GOODMAN: The situation right now in Afghanistan?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, it’s getting worse, in a nutshell. Basically, if you want to look at how things have changed over the past few years, you can simply look at how the Afghan people themselves have changed their minds about the US occupation. Just in 2005, there was almost a 70 percent approval rating of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, because Afghans thought maybe things would get better if the foreign troops were present and they could be a buffer to the fundamentalist forces. In 2007, just a year ago, that approval rating was down to 40 percent, and I believe it’s probably a lot lower right now.

I mean, basically, what’s happening is, Afghan people are caught between a variety of forces, ordinary Afghans. They’re caught, on the one hand, between the forces of the Taliban, who are increasing in number and strength—if you just look at the way in which they launched these recent attacks against the French, at the same time, they had a series of suicide bombers going to attack a US base in a geographically separate location. This means they can launch, you know, simultaneous attacks at the same time in different areas. This means they’re very strong. And, of course, US and NATO forces are attacking, and they’re killing civilians. So far, 2,500 people have been killed in Afghanistan since January, about half of them civilians. So, Afghan people are feeling the brunt of that very seriously, because attacks against forces are up, and attacks from forces are up, so the violence is really escalating.

Then, on the other hand, you have this other aspect that’s rarely covered by the US media, certainly never mentioned by government officials here, which is that the Afghan central government, created and installed essentially by the United States, is really devastating the people of Afghanistan. There’s rampant corruption. They’re sucking away the aid. They’re completely oppressing people. They’re attacking journalists. Women are being imprisoned in greater numbers than ever before, for the crime of escaping from home or having, quote-unquote, “sexual relations”—“illegal sexual relations.” Most of these women are simply victims of rape. And so, you have all of these forces that are converging upon the Afghan people from different directions, and life for the ordinary—average ordinary Afghan has gone from bad to so much worse in a very short period of time.

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that the Bush administration repeatedly pointed to was the supposed liberation of the women of Afghanistan as a result of the US invasion and the replacement of the Taliban. What is your sense of what is actually going on at the grassroots level with women in Afghanistan?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, there’s several aspects. You know, on one hand, you have to look at how Afghan women are affected on a day-to-day level. Day-to-day level, of course, they’re suffering the terrible effects of grinding poverty. There’s hardly, you know, food and water and employment. Only ten percent of Afghans have electricity. So Afghan women are suffering the same thing that all Afghans are suffering in terms of poverty and all of the things that go along with that.

On top of that, of course, they face increasing fundamentalist forces from the government and from the “insurgency,” quote-unquote, the Taliban, to—you know, in terms of repressive Islamist-type decrees. You know, they have to increasingly worry about Sharia law, or strict interpretations, rather, of Sharia law. And then they face a very fundamentalist judiciary that was installed by our puppet president, Hamid Karzai.

And then, politically, you know, Afghan women enjoy political equality with men in their constitution. It’s enshrined in their new constitution, which is, of course, a wonderful thing, but the constitution is just a piece of paper. If you look at what happens on the ground, politically speaking, women who are in parliament, if they speak up, are completely attacked. And the best example of that is a woman I know that has been interviewed on Democracy Now! before, Malalai Joya, the young social worker from Farah province who has very bravely spoken out against warlordism in the parliament and, you know, has really been the voice of the people. For speaking out, she has been banned from parliament and has yet to be reinstated. She faces an Islamic court. And that’s the price that women pay politically for speaking out. It’s OK for women to be in government, as long as they shut up and stay quiet. But if they exercise their rights, they get attacked.

I mean, that’s basically what women are facing in Afghanistan, not that much better than what they were facing under the Taliban. Certainly they can legally wear whatever they want to wear, but oppression and freedom is a lot more about wearing or not being able to wear a burqa.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonali Kolhatkar, the resignation of the General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan—Pakistan has long been funding through its ISI, the intelligence services, and actually from US money—billions have been lost—but working with the Taliban. Can you talk about that relationship and the significance of the resignation of Musharraf?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, Musharraf’s resignation is interesting, because it basically, I think, is a symbol. It’s a symptom of how untenable the situation has become. And the relationship between, of course, Pakistan and Afghanistan is one significant part of why Musharraf resigned. His government and its support for—and his—and the ISI’s support for the Taliban over the years has become something that is pretty much intolerable both at home, but also by the US government.

And really, what’s happening in terms of if you’re looking at Afghanistan, is the Taliban are able to organize simply by crossing the border into Pakistan. And you can’t fight an insurgency if they’re free to go and organize and recruit and do whatever they need to do. In fact, of course, you can’t really fight an insurgency with pure military power anyway, but that’s another story.

And so, where Pakistan is concerned, I think the main significance of Musharraf resigning is it now opens up a political vacuum in Pakistan, where the Pakistani government has to decide what to do about the problem of the Taliban. Do they want the Taliban to be—you know, to have an organizing base in their country, which of course increases the instability in Pakistan itself and certainly worsens the situation in Afghanistan? It’s up to Pakistan to crack down on its borders, if they want to. It’s up to Pakistan to decide what to do with the Taliban.

But it’s also more complex than that. The Taliban are Pashtun people. A lot of Pakistanis are Pashtun. The Pashtun population was cut in half by the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, on purpose, to destabilize that region, of course, if you go back in history. And so, you can’t really separate the Taliban from Pakistan, either. It’s a problem that I’m not sure has a clear answer. But really, it’s up to the new Pakistani government to decide what to do with the mess that essentially Musharraf created. Also, you know, of course, Musharraf has been Washington’s man, so they really have to decide what to do now in the vacuum left behind by him.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The heroin trade, it’s been exploding since the occupation of Afghanistan. Why, in your sense, is thousands of foreign troops in Afghanistan, yet the trade continues to explode in size?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, you have to go back and see what has happened over the past several years. When the Taliban were defeated in late 2001, the United States and the UN at the time, which was then replaced by NATO, had an opportunity to, you know, make things right, if you will, in terms of what was happening on the ground, in terms of poppy production, because the Taliban had done a good job for them. The Taliban had already banned opium production. And if you had gone—if the US had gone from that point onwards, in terms of giving farmers an alternative to poppy production, an alternative that could feed their families, we wouldn’t be at the place we were today.

But the United States chose to work with local Afghan warlords, commanders, militia leaders, all of whom were either drug traffickers themselves or working with drug traffickers, and turned a blind eye, in many cases, to opium production. The poppy production flourished in the last several years under US occupation and now is out of control and now is very much funding the insurgency, very much funding the Taliban and their war.

So, the Taliban has an organizing base in Pakistan. They’ve got a stable source of funding with the opium production—excuse me. And for every civilian killed or every Taliban fighter killed, there will be ten more disgruntled, angry people to join their place. You can’t blame them, if you look at it from their perspective. So, Taliban has all these things going for them. And the US and NATO and Obama actually thinks that they can defeat them militarily, which, in my opinion, is completely ludicrous and shortsighted.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the candidates, as we move into the Democratic and Republican conventions. Senator Obama has repeatedly called Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan the, quote, “central front in the war on terror.” He raised this again during his speech Tuesday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: We should not keep spending $10 billion a month in Iraq. We should not keep spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, while Americans struggle in a sluggish economy. Ending the war will allow us to invest in America, to strengthen our military and to finish the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan. That is the central front in the war on terrorism.

For years, I have called for more resources and more troops to finish the fight in Afghanistan. With his overwhelming focus on Iraq, Senator McCain argued that we could just—and I quote—“muddle through” in Afghanistan, and only came around to supporting my call for more troops last month.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator McCain has also brought up sending troop reinforcements to Afghanistan. This is an excerpt of his speech at a town hall in Albuquerque, New Mexico last month.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Senator Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan. Our commanders on the ground in Afghanistan say that they need at least three additional brigades. Thanks to the success of the surge, these forces are becoming available, and our commanders in Afghanistan must get them.

AMY GOODMAN: The leading presidential candidates. Sonali Kolhatkar, John McCain and Senator Obama, what do you make of their approaches? Is there really a difference, ultimately?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, that’s a really good question. It’s so interesting to hear them try to distinguish themselves from each other. I mean, basically, in a nutshell, McCain thinks that the war in Afghanistan is going well, and so we should send more troops. Obama thinks the war in Afhganistan is going badly, so we should send more troops.

Obviously, both of them are wrong.

I mean, if you just look at what McCain is saying, that Iraq is an example for how we can actually win in Afghanistan? I don’t think I even have to qualify that to your listeners and viewers.

But let’s look at what Obama is saying. Obama is saying that Afghanistan is a frontline in the war on terror, we should be sending more troops there. You know, if he were to simply listen to, for example, what the RAND Corporation, not by any means a liberal think tank—what the RAND Corporation has said about using a military solution in Afghanistan—RAND just recently did a study about the situation in Afghanistan, and according to this institution, the military force is “too blunt,” in their words, an instrument to use in this war, that really the United States should not be using military force, that it has only something like a seven percent chance of success. If anything, they say that the US’s military footprint should be a very light one, if at all. So, if Obama is listening to RAND, he would not be saying what he’s saying.

And it’s true. You really can’t solve the situation in Afghanistan by just throwing more troops at it, because over the last several years, tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan have not done—have not managed to do anything other than worsen the war. So, basically what the logic is, is that the war is going terribly; the more troops we have, the worse it’s getting; so let’s throw more troops to it? The predictable outcome of this policy—and, you know, I would love to get just half-a-minute of airtime with Obama and tell him—the predictable outcome of his policy is that you throw more troops at Afghanistan, and the war is just going to get worse. The violence is just going to escalate. It’s not going to ramp down.

How can you just—what is he planning to do? Kill every last terrorist? And then he’s somehow going to win the war? What’s the plan here? He doesn’t even have a strategy. He isn’t even looking at the central government. He is not looking at the corruption of the warlords. He is not looking at Hamid Karzai and what he has failed to do. He’s not looking at how ordinary Afghans are struggling. He is not looking at the fact that the Taliban are actually becoming more and more popular, while the troops are becoming less and less popular.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Sonali, I’d like to ask you—

SONALI KOLHATKAR: What does that mean? And Obama really needs to know.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Sonali, one last question. Iran, the impact of the continuing US occupation of Afghanistan on Iran? Obviously, Afghanistan borders with Iran. And the—your sense is, the United States is also continuing to use the occupation as a means of threatening or being able to encircle Iran?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Well, certainly, what Afghanistan gives to the United States, particularly under the Bush administration, which has not been as interested in oil pipeline routes as it has been in military bases, it gives, of course, as you said, a launching pad, and it enables the United States to encircle Iran.

When I was in Afghanistan a few years ago, we drove past a military base that used to be just a local airport near the border with Iran, and our driver told us, “Oh, yes. Last month, US troops came and took over the space. And if they attack Iran, everyone knows that they’re going to probably do it from here, as one of the places.”

McCain has said that he would like to see the military bases in Afghanistan become permanent. And this is very important, because geopolitically Afghanistan is crucial to the United States. Never before, since—until 2001, has the United States had military bases in the heart of Central Asia, in Russia’s backyard, in China’s backyard, and certainly, of course, in Iran’s backyard. This is going to be something that the US will make use of in the future, unless, of course, the American people stand up and say, “Get out of Afghanistan,” which is what I think we should do.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonali Kolhatkar, thank you very much for joining us, host of Pacific radio KPFK’s morning show called Uprising. She is co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence.

http://www.ocweekly.com/culture/
books/that-other-quagmire/27160/

Remember Afghanistan? The Taliban? Hamid Karzai? That weird game Afghans play involving a goat carcass? Of course not. If the Iraq War is our latest Vietnam, then Dubya’s Afghanistan adventure is our Philippine-American War: a major incursion that became a quagmire no one talks about.

One of the few media figures who bother to pay attention is Sonali Kolhatkar, host of KPFK-FM 90.7’s popular Uprising morning show. She’s involved with various Afghan charities and is the author, along with her husband, of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. Kolhatkar will talk about the book and show slides from her visits this Saturday at the Centro Cultural de México. But first, she talked to the Weekly.

* * *

Give us a summary of your book in 25 words without using the word “imperialism.”

The book traces the history of U.S. policy in Afghanistan from the 1970s to today, its effects on ordinary people, particularly women, and their resistance and resilience to war and fundamentalism.

You went to Afghanistan in 2005. How was the situation then, and has it changed for better or worse?

When I went in 2005, Afghans had just finished voting in the presidential elections and there was a lot of optimism. However, there was still overwhelming poverty and unemployment, and most people admitted that “liberation” was a Bush fantasy. While Afghans were surprisingly candid about what they saw as American double standards in defeating one set of terrorist fundamentalists by bringing back another set of terrorist fundamentalists, they were still hopeful the world community would pay some attention to them. Since then, that optimism has evaporated as the Taliban are stronger, warlords dominate the government and the U.S./NATO forces continue to kill civilians. It’s a much more dangerous country now.

Are you optimistic about Afghanistan’s future?

Not really. Firstly, the U.S. doesn’t seem to want to change its trajectory of sponsoring fundamentalism and war in Afghanistan; secondly, American people just don’t give enough of a damn about Afghanistan to pressure the U.S. government to change. Ordinary Afghans are, as usual, caught between the twin forces of fundamentalism (U.S.-sponsored and otherwise) and war. Still, what’s hopeful is how incredible the nonviolent resistance on the ground is. Ordinary people are doing their best to survive and be defiant. They have organized peaceful demonstrations burning effigies of Bush and started schools for girls despite the dangers. If their efforts are supported internationally, perhaps there is a small measure of hope.

Your show Uprising covers an array of topics, yet it seems Afghanistan is the cause closest to your heart. Why?

I was actually involved in Afghanistan solidarity work about two years before I began my work at Pacifica Radio. It all started when I got a chain e-mail about the Taliban oppression of Afghan women. I did a Web search and found RAWA—the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Despite their sectarian sounding name, they are an incredible group of women whose ideals are based on democracy and human rights. I wrote to them and asked if I could help. Myself and a couple of friends started a nonprofit, the Afghan Women’s Mission, to fund RAWA’s social and political projects in 2000. Six years later, my partner Jim Ingalls and I published the book. We’re still deeply involved with supporting RAWA as volunteers.

Do you think the United States had the right to invade Afghanistan in 2001?

Not at all. It had just about as much right in 2001 as the Soviet Union had to invade Afghanistan in 1979. If the U.S. was really interested in defeating the Taliban before the tragedy of 9/11, Clinton and Bush would’ve pressured their allies and weapons buyers—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE [United Arab Emirates]—to stop supporting the Taliban.

Earlier this year, Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya said the United States “pushed us from the frying pan into the fire.” Do you agree with that statement?

Yes, I do. The Taliban is stronger today than it was in 2001, even if they don’t control as much territory. The Northern Alliance warlords and druglords have government power and legitimacy, which they didn’t have in 2001. It took barely a month for the U.S. to defeat the Taliban in 2001. Yet today, the Taliban are carrying out suicide attacks—an unheard-of phenomenon before 2005—and are gaining popularity because they don’t kill as many civilians as the U.S.

At this point, what’s the United States’ responsibility to the Afghan people?

The U.S. needs to disarm its warlord allies—these men should be considered proxy U.S. soldiers on the ground who are terrorizing the population. The U.S. should divert far more funds into Afghan-led reconstruction projects than the military effort. And I’m talking about grants to local groups here, not corporate subsidies or paying foreign aid workers. The U.S should then pressure its allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to stop tacitly supporting the Taliban.

And then, the U.S. should get the hell out of Afghanistan. The U.S. should also support Afghan-led efforts to criminally prosecute the warlords and Taliban for past crimes in the interest of healing and reconciliation. If these things are done, there will theoretically be some space for Afghan civil society to grow, exercise their democratic rights, and reject the armed fundamentalists.

Why do you think the media and American public pays so little attention to Afghanistan?

They’re too busy thinking about Iraq, which is understandable. There are more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only about 20,000 in Afghanistan. We’ve killed far more Iraqis than Afghans. Also, I think that, sadly, most Americans subconsciously think of Afghanistan as “the good war”—a myth that Jim and I try to dispel in our book. So there is a tendency among most Americans that we need to get our troops out of Iraq so we can focus them on Afghanistan. But this is very shortsighted—the same military blunders in Iraq have been committed in Afghanistan, and the Afghan war is as unjust as the Iraq war.

What should the United States do about Al-Qaeda?

What hasn’t the U.S. done about Al-Qaeda?! Our actions have only strengthened the group and helped get them more recruits. We’ve made this organization far more important than it ever was. If the U.S. were to improve its policies in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, and other Muslim and Arab countries, Al-Qaeda would have no reason to scream bloody jihad. That’s the only long-term permanent solution. Any other solution involves brute force, and that will only lead to more anger, more recruits, more terrorism.

* * *

SONALI KOLHATKAR WILL READ FROM HER BOOK AT THE CENTRO CULTURAL DE MEXICO, 310 W. FIFTH ST., SANTA ANA. SAT., 6 P.M. FREE. LISTEN TO KOLHATKAR ON KPFK-FM 90.7. MON.-FRI., 8 A.M.

Bleeding Afghanistan reviewed by Harold Lavender

Spring 2007 Issue of New Socialist. Download PDF.

Canadian troops may be fighting in Afghanistan, but (war propaganda aside) many of us know little of the real history and impact of foreign intervention. Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence is therefore a work very much worth reading.

This 2006 work by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, coordinators of the US non-profit Afghan Women’s Mission, is rooted in the experience of the Afghani women’s movement, especially the Revolutionary Women’s Association of Afghanistan (RAWA). The book opposes the role of imperialism, warlordism
and Islamic fundamentalism. Instead, it raises the urgent need for a democratic and secular (though not anti-Islamic) society that respects and promotes women’s rights.

It does an excellent job of exposing the huge gulf between imperial rhetoric and the reality of women’s lives in Afghanistan. The authors thoroughly dismantle the notion (peddled even by some liberal feminists) that the occupation has made major gains in liberating Afghani women. The work is thoroughly grounded in the tragic history of Afghanistan, especially the ongoing warfare that has engulfed and destroyed the country over the last 30 years.

The authors are also sharply critical of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the indefensible methods used to maintain the occupation. But the book is primarily a critique of the role
of US imperialism and the terrible consequences of Washington’s pursuit of its own self-interest via alliances with Islamic fundamentalist forces and warlords. Today, some propagandists paint Washington as defending civilization against Islamic “terrorism.” But Bleeding Afghanistan breaks the mainstream
propaganda of silence and exposes a very different reality and advances a detailed, well organized body of evidence to show the dark side of imperialist intervention in Afghanistan.

Us role
The initial section of the book shows how US policy between 1979 and 2001 helped destroy the Afghani state. The US materially backed the Mujahideen warlord forces to defeat the Soviet Union. These groups used widespread terror, including much directed at women, and later engaged in vicious civil war among
themselves. Many war crimes were committed and many thousands were killed in Kabul between 1992 and 1996. But this terrible devastation was virtually ignored in the corporate media.

The following section examines why and how the US effected regime change in Afghanistan. The authors argue that Iraq was the main target of US neo-cons, but that Afghanistan was targeted for deliberative punitive action following 9/11. A success in Afghanistan was viewed as a necessary stepping stone to the invasion of Iraq.

Over 3,000 civilians were killed in US bombing. It was the beginning of a long litany of US abuses, including torture and the militarization of aid as a tool of counter-insurgency warfare. The US was able to drive the Taliban (whose takeover they did not initially oppose) out with the aid of the well funded and armed Northern Alliance. In doing so, the US made an alliance with armed warlords. Their previous atrocious human rights records and war crimes were confidently ignored.

The US also found and made their own man, Hamid Karzai, whom they manoeuvred to the forefront as interim President. But the power of warlords and Islamic fundamentalists (from local dictates to Sharia law and the courts) was not challenged. Warlords stole and controlled land, grabbed revenues at checkpoints, stole humanitarian aid and engaged in massive narcotics trafficking. Afghanistan is today the world’s largest supplier of heroin.

The warlords and their allies came to dominate both houses of what the authors dubbed “a parliament of vultures.” According to the authors, most Afghans, devastated by years of war, were initially grudgingly prepared to tolerate the occupation. However, promises of greater security and well-being have not
materialized, and odious US tactics have helped drive a significant sector (perhaps 30 per cent, far broader than the Taliban) to support resistance.

Illusory Conclusions
The book has real merit. However, it disappointments sharply from an antiimperialist perspective when it tackles the thorny question of solidarity and activist perspectives. Not surprisingly, given the weakness of the US and Afghan left, the authors fall deep into lesser-evil politics. Kolhatkar and Ingalls have an excellent critique of the US role in Afghanistan, providing an analysis of Washington geo-political motives. And they do look to end the occupation, but not until the security situation improves. Currently, they argue, the US presence is still needed. And they call for an increase in international security forces.
In reality, the security situation under the occupation is unravelling. Canadians were told our forces would be peacekeepers. Now it is absolutely clear they are war-makers in an escalating conflict. The anti-war movement should certainly not shy away from demanding Canadian Troops Out Now!

EAGLE ROCK
WHAT: Revolutionary Mic Nite: RAWA/AWM Benefit Event
WHEN: 7-11 pm, Friday May 18, 2007
WHERE: IMIX Bookstore, 5052 Eagle Rock Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90041
FOR MORE INFO, Download the event flyer or visit www.imixbooks.com

SANTA ANA, ORANGE COUNTY
WHAT: Bleeding Afghanistan book Discussion and Slide Show
WHEN: 6 pm, Saturday May 19, 2007
WHERE: El Centro Cultural de Mexico, 310 W 5th Street Santa Ana, CA 92701
FOR MORE INFO, visit www.el-centro.org

There will be copies of Bleeding Afghanistan for sale at both events. The authors will be available to sign books. Afghan crafts and other items from Afghan Women’s Mission will also be available for sale. All sales will benefit the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

The “good occupation”

Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls
Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence
Seven Stories Press, 2006
304 pages $19

Review by NICOLE COLSON

WHILE OPPOSITION to the Iraq war continues to grow, the other U.S. occupation—in Afghanistan—is still considered by many to be the “good occupation.” Indeed, the argument from many conservatives and liberals alike is that the cardinal sin of the Bush administration in invading Iraq was to divert resources and attention from the real “ground zero” of the war on terror in the “failed state” of Afghanistan.

This point has been driven home as prominent Democrats, including Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who have called for a troop “surge” in Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has publicly signaled a willingness to consider it.

Amid these calls for more war, Kolhatkar and Ingalls, co-directors of the non-profit Afghan Women’s Mission, make an important contribution with a book that shows how U.S. intervention helped make Afghanistan a failed state in the first place.

Bleeding Afghanistan focuses in particular on U.S. attempts over the past three decades to arm, fund, and prop up various warring factions in order to serve U.S political and business interests in the region.

With the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, Afghanistan became a battlefield for a proxy war between the U.S. and USSR. For its part, the U.S. government—first with the Carter administration, then through Reagan—supported fundamentalist Afghan rebel groups based in Pakistan. “The amount of U.S. and Saudi assistance to these groups started at around $30 million in 1980,” write Kolhatkar and Ingalls, “and increased to over $1 billion per year in 1986–89.”

The U.S. chose to ignore progressive and secular forces. Instead, support went to fundamentalist groups that were not only anticommunist, but anti-nationalist as well—because nationalist movements were seen as a threat to U.S. interests.

U.S. clients also had a reputation for ruthlessness. This included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received the most U.S. aid, and was known for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. “The CIA admitted to his ‘vicious’ and ‘fascist’ tendencies, but perhaps because of these tendencies he was expected to be the most effective against the Soviets,” the authors write.

By the time the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the toll of the U.S.-and Soviet-sponsored fighting had reached 1.5 million dead, 5 million disabled, and another 5 million refugees.

With the country in ruins, and little U.S. aid coming in for reconstruction, the early and mid-1990s again saw an escalation of violence and the brutal repression of women’s rights, as various factions, including Hekmatyar and other formerly U.S.-sponsored warlords, fought each other for power.

The Taliban arose against this backdrop. Yet far from condemning the Taliban for human rights abuses when it first captured the city of Kabul in 1996, the State Department under Bill Clinton

instructed the Islamabad Embassy on “Dealing with the Taliban.” The administration wanted to engage the new Taliban “interim government at an early stage to: demonstrate…willingness to deal with them as the new authorities in Kabul; seek information about their plans, programs, and policies; and express [U.S. Government] views on areas of key concern to us—stability, human rights, narcotics and terrorism.”

And, it would seem, business. Indeed, the Clinton administration initially viewed the Taliban as a potentially “stabilizing” force that could pave the way for the progress of such projects as the building of a natural gas and oil pipelines for U.S.-based UNOCAL.

If the people of Afghanistan had little reason to trust U.S. motives for intervention in their country prior to September 11, the U.S. invasion and occupation itself have since shattered any ideas that the U.S. would bestow liberation. Kolhatkar and Ingalls detail an extensive list of crimes carried out during and following the war, including the abuse and murder of detainees, extraordinary rendition, and (once again) collaboration with some of the county’s most notorious warlords, including the forces of the Northern Alliance.

Moreover, promises of a new “democratic” Afghanistan have been consciously thwarted, with the U.S. engineering the election of Afghan President Hamid Karzai—a U.S.-friendly puppet who is widely considered to be all-but-powerless outside of the capital city of Kabul, and who has been forced to concede key positions of power to warlords.

Kolhatkar and Ingalls are at their best in puncturing the claims made by liberal apologists of the occupation—that, whatever else, at least the U.S. invasion would have the effect of “liberating” oppressed Afghan women from the tyranny of the Taliban. In a refreshingly blunt chapter titled “‘Liberation’ Rhetoric and Burqa Obsessions,” the authors note that, “What is rarely heard in current feminist discourse hijacked by the U.S. government and uncritically joined by most Western feminist organizations is a more complex analysis of the effects of U.S. policies on women’s rights in the first place, as well as Afghan women’s own militant resistance to fundamentalism.”

It comes as somewhat of a surprise, then, that having spent nearly the entire book detailing the effects of U.S. policies on ordinary Afghans, the authors refuse to call for the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. presence from the country. While they admit that “the U.S. government has always acted in its own self-interest in Afghanistan,” they conclude that the

occupation of all foreign troops should end, but only after disarmament is complete and Afghans feel safe in their own country. We recommend that the United States end its futile “war on terror,” stop backing any and all warlords armed militias, and those with violent backgrounds in Afghanistan, and instead focus on taking back the weapons provided over decades [authors’ emphasis].

Such a passage, coming after more than 250 pages’ worth of information about U.S. crimes in Afghanistan, reads at best like wishful thinking, and at worst, as a call for U.S. troops to militarily “disarm” various factions—an almost certain invitation to more violence and bloodshed.

Certainly there is much the U.S. government owes the people of Afghanistan, including a massive campaign of no-strings-attached reparations for decades of destruction. But as the most of Bleeding Afghanistan shows, U.S. meddling—political, financial, and most importantly, military—has never been a benefit for ordinary Afghans. There is no reason to believe that it can or will be in the future.

Written by Richard Alan Leach

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

(this review appeared in the journals, “Toward Freedom,” and “Third World Traveler“)

Less than four weeks after 9/11, on October 7, 2001, the US attacked Afghanistan in the opening salvo of what was later justified as a new “war on terror.” The US dropped more than 10,000 bombs, including air strikes from B-2 and B-52 stealth bombers and cruise missiles from submarines in the Arabian Sea.

During a period that ultimately led to between 3000-3400 civilians killed (1) outright – and thousands more from starvation and disease as a direct consequence of the attack – then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked by an admiring press corps if the US was running out of targets. He responded with a characteristic quip: “We’re not running out of targets. Afghanistan is.” The assembled journalists thought this marvelously funny. A cynic might say that certain journalists were deemed worthy of assemblage because they passed the laugh test.

Thus began the latest of well-intentioned Western efforts to “help Afghans.” Of course, if the US had really wanted to help Afghans, they would have started by cleaning up the mess left in 1989, after the disastrous invasion and failed occupation by the Soviet Union, which some analysts cite as a major factor in its demise. In the unvarnished history that Bleeding Afghanistan relates, the US used Afghans to fight a proxy war against the invaders, and after both Cold War adversaries wrecked the country, US policy entailed leaving the Afghans to fend for themselves. A CIA-originated comment (well known to the locals) has it that “the US was willing to fight the Soviets to the last Afghan.” Today, the Taliban are attempting to win Afghan hearts and minds by citing this recent history, arguing that the Soviets failed to win their war against Afghanistan even though they were not bogged down elsewhere.

The authors of Bleeding Afghanistan are Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, the co-directors of the Afghans Women’s Mission, a US-based grassroots organization that is affiliated with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, or RAWA, a collective of courageous Afghan feminists working for social change within the country. In their research, Kolhatkar and Ingalls spent most of 2005 in Afghanistan conducting interviews that form much of the groundwork for Bleeding Afghanistan. Their book provides a nuanced corrective to recent history, which is submerged under a mainstream media whitewash. Kolhatkar and Ingalls cite the self-serving (and largely ignored) reasons for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan: to “restore imperial prestige” undermined by 9/11; to pave a “stepping-stone to Iraq”; to demonstrate that “imperial democracy” can be imposed by force to turn a failed state “into an upwardly-mobile democracy”; to shore up future Republican gains with “election propaganda”; and to provide a “war on terror demonstration.”

After the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US and its allies began jockeying for position in a region that is a strategic prize in the new “great game” — for petroleum resources. The old Great Game was played in the 19th and early 20th century by the major world powers (Britain, France, Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey). During this period, Great Britain fought three failed wars against Afghanistan.

Recognizing that increasing amounts of oil and natural gas must be imported from Central Asia within the next twenty years, the US has made deals with authoritarian regimes in the region since the Clinton era. The world’s richest untapped oil source is the Caspian Basin, which includes parts of Russia and Iran, and the five independent republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (which houses the largest US base in Central Asia). The authors of Bleeding Afghanistan reiterate what many analysts have long warned against: that this provocative period of US adventurism “may spark a new era of Cold War-style tension with China and Russia.” As the US extends its reach from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea Basin, new alliances are being formed among Russia, China, and India in a region that was formerly Russia’s backyard. On July 13th, 2006, the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline (which reaches the Mediterranean by bypassing Russia) was formally opened. In March, 2007, Russia countered with a new pipeline deal with Greece and Bulgaria to host a pipeline to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

Historical ironies abound: after the former Soviet Union invaded in 1979, Moscow emphasized its construction of schools and clinics, while its military worked to feed hungry Afghans and free the women from misogynist oppression. The West rightly dismissed such actions as public relations tactics: the “evil empire” could not disguise the fact that it was an invader against the will of the Afghan majority and a recognized government. The humiliating pullout by the Soviets in 1989 was followed by a civil war and the advent of Taliban rule. The US soon recognized the Taliban because, as the authors assert, “an internationally recognized government would enable World Bank funding for Unocal oil and gas pipelines.” Bleeding Afghanistan also emphasizes that realpolitik trumped other considerations:

As long as the Taliban resisted Russian, Iranian, or Chinese influence, brought their country under unified control, and confined their mayhem to within the border of Afghanistan, they were acceptable to the US.

— but that was before September 11th 2001, which provided the opportunity for “regime change” in Kabul. Early that same year, the Taliban fell out of favor with Washington after rejecting a bid from Unocal for pipeline construction (in favor of an Argentinean firm).

As the writings of Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, and Richard Clarke have documented, Afghanistan was selected as a test-case before the main event: an invasion of Iraq. September 11th also provided the US with a convenient opening to justify the use of force to its people while attempting to gain a stronger foothold in the region. While Central Asia is estimated to contain 46% of the world’s gas reserves, Afghanistan also has a large supply of recently discovered natural gas (1.6 billion barrels, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik basin). One pipeline route (dubbed the “new Silk Road”) reaches from Uzbekistan to Karachi, Pakistan, via Kabul. Such crass commercial considerations are central, yet are usually hidden. The neocons felt that the American people must remain innocent of the knowledge of US long-term geopolitical goals for the region — and their likely human cost — as the reality would not sell well. So the Bush administration billed “Operation Enduring Freedom” (OEF) as a military action that would capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, and overthrow the Taliban.

Washington’s post-9/11 goals were furthered by the US mainstream media’s presentation of them. Military officials explain why we should support the mission while journalists interviewing them largely ignore such matters as the priority of military base construction over reconstruction, trans-Afghan pipeline routes, or long-term US geopolitical goals.

Among the Western public, only the naïve believe that “helping Afghans” could be a priority either then or now — but, of course, Western propaganda induces naïveté. As cheap symbolism is preferable to nuanced explanations, the burqa was ideal for the image-makers. The fact that Afghan women, especially in rural areas, actually preferred to wear this traditional garment, was ignored. Naturally enough, they regard the covering as a minor issue compared to their lack of access to health care and education.

In Afghanistan, “cultural backwardness” is a trait shared by many rival tribes: as bad as he is, the Taliban is only one of many offenders. A broader context from the media would have revealed that the abuse of women is no better in other parts of central Asia, such as eastern Turkey, rural Pakistan, and India. Of course, during the Soviet occupation, it was off the agenda to reveal the attitude towards women of the US-backed mujahedeen or “freedom fighters” (and forerunners of the Taliban).

The new Western campaign against the burqa turned it into a simplistic symbol of women’s oppression. As Kolhatkar and Ingalls point out, it reinforced negative stereotypes and failed to reflect the contemporary history of women’s movements in Afghanistan. RAWA, for example, has extended its mandate by opposing both indigenous fundamentalism and Western imperialism. Clearly, for the Western media, this would not do. Kolhatkar and Ingalls point out that “Militant and vocal Afghan women are not as easy to ‘liberate’ as those who are voiceless and faceless and can be portrayed as dependent on the benevolence of foreigners.” The authors remind us that, after the impending invasion of Afghanistan was announced, a spate of “blue burqa books” soon appeared which condemned Taliban repression against women. However, the narrow focus of this curiously-timed new industry implied that Afghan women’s problems began with the Taliban. This selective moral outrage was highly serviceable to US policy.

On January, 2002, in his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush remarked that “the last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school… Today, the women of Afghanistan are free…” Thus, the media were signaled by Washington to provide coverage of a liberated people. On the ground in Afghanistan, TV journalists paid Afghan women to remove their tent-like garments, toss them into a bonfire, and parade their newly-liberated selves before the TV cameras. After the cameras were switched off, the women promptly donned new burqas. Such propaganda works. Among US Congress members who opposed the war and occupation of Iraq, virtually all have supported the war in Afghanistan; among US soldiers who applied for conscientious objector status in Iraq, most indicated a willingness to serve in the “good” war in Afghanistan.

Little has changed for women or impoverished Afghans under the rule of our new warlord friends, for whom Hamid Karzai serves as front man. The US media now engages in what Kolhatkar and Ingalls call “the propaganda of silence” (shifting focus elsewhere to reinforce the belief that Afghanistan’s problems were solved by the US). These days, the subject of women’s oppression is “no longer fashionable to discuss, as it is perpetrated by US allies and is inconsistent with the supposed ‘liberation’ of Afghan women [so] there are few if any such books published.”

The notion that foreign troops can elevate a society from cultural lag is an absurdity. In reality, a legacy of lawlessness has been restored under another faction, the former Soviet collaborators of the Northern Alliance, whose warlords, drug lords, and unpunished war criminals serve as part of Afghanistan’s fledgling “democracy,” to the outrage of many Afghanis. In Canada, roughly half the population is skeptical of its leading role in support of Washington’s geopolitical designs, and greater numbers of Americans are now beginning to oppose the Afghan mission as well.(2)

In a stage-managed election held in December, 2004, Washington’s man was sworn in as the newly elected President. All parties opposed to the American occupation were excluded, including the Pashtun majority. To his credit, Hamid Karzai is a liberal Pashtun and no warlord, yet not only was he an unknown figure on the world stage, he was largely unknown to Afghans as well. An oft-heard charge against Karzai concerns his possible ties to Unocal. After one year of research in the country, the authors of Bleeding Afghanistan found that the charge is without foundation. However, Karzai’s previous utility as a CIA asset explains why the “Mayor of Kabul” was hand-picked by Washington to be the face of the new US- and NATO-backed coalition government. Recently, Afghanis have begun to chant “Death to Karzai” alongside “Death to America.” The paid hirelings who protect him will be needed for as long as he pretends to represent people who overwhelmingly regard him as an American satrap.

This book also gives the lie to the claim that soldiers can assist aid workers in reconstruction. Médecins Sans Frontières pulled out of the country in 2004.(3) Such organizations as CARE have also complained of the increased dangers to their workers when the distinction between them and soldiers is blurred. The military have sometimes offered “conditional” aid to Afghans in exchange for their cooperation in identifying insurgents. What our media don’t tell us is that rural Afghanis often claim that their lives were better under Taliban rule, since they now have less security, electricity, or clean water than before the US-led war and occupation. Such a perspective is elided here, as it would encourage cognitive dissonance in the Western public.

The “propaganda of silence” can easily be seen following the Soviet pullout in 1989, which resulted in a catastrophic civil war (1992-1996). This corresponded to a drastic decline in coverage. Kolhatkar and Ingalls searched an online database representing the five major newspapers comprising the prestige press (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor). Reviewing the extent of news coverage between 1975 and 2005, their quantitative analysis reveals a pattern whereby coverage reflects the strategic importance of Afghanistan to Washington policymakers (not concern about the plight of Afghanis). The authors cite an editorial from the conservative newsmagazine The Economist, which revealed the underlying values:

The war may be sad for Afghans, but does it matter to the rest of the world? For nine years, while the Soviet army was in occupation it had the status of an international problem… then, suddenly, the invaders were gone, driven out by the mujahedeen… anyway, problem over.

— that is, our problems were over, not theirs. After the Soviets left, Afghanistan’s internecine civil war was of little concern to Western governments, so it became irrelevant to media managers as well: those who see nothing wrong with jumping on the bandwagon to help “clarify” our strategic interests at other times.

The record of the warlords of the Northern Alliance during the Soviet occupation revealed them to be even more brutal than the Taliban. Their depredations were so extreme that the Taliban was initially welcomed by Afghans hoping for the restoration of some kind of order. Yet it has never been Washington’s goal to tamp down the ethnic rivalries that plague such countries. As noted, Kolhatkar and Ingalls make clear that “the primary concern was the Soviet presence and its threat to US influence.” Then, as now,

The price of this for the Afghan people was never considered. Progressive or secular groups interested in gaining control over their own country might not be willing to shed enough blood. To the US, the Afghans were cannon fodder.

It is easy to predict that the failed campaign in Iraq will prompt the US government-media axis to resume Afghanistan coverage in order to consolidate Washington’s “war on terror” there. Against an impending PR blitz, this book is an essential antidote to the skewed media picture of a “successful” occupation undertaken by a benevolent Western coalition.

The authors counsel against the arrogance of paternalism. If the major powers really wanted to “help Afghans,” they emphasize, instead of deciding which warlord faction to support in our own interest, we would ask the Afghan people what they want. Such a standpoint, of course, is remote from that of our political and military establishments, whose mantra is that “we” will decide what is best, both for Afghans and for our “national interest” (and when these conflict, it is easy to guess whose interests will prevail).

Surprisingly, Kolhatkar and Ingalls do not suggest that all foreign troops should simply go home. They remind us that we have a collective responsibility to face up to the crimes of our governments against the Afghan people. By way of restitution, foreign troops not operating under OEF or NATO could gradually return, but solely as peacekeepers with the goal of preventing another civil war, not to hunt down designated “terrorists.” Such troops could assist Western aid workers to provide security, disarm warlords, and help to rebuild infrastructure.

Of course, this is what Western propaganda claims the soldiers are doing now, but the reality is that the US and NATO have prevented the introduction of an international peacekeeping force. The insurgents recognize what we do not: that the goal of propping up the puppet regime in Kabul and consolidating a Western presence in this strategic area has priority over all humanitarian endeavors. Like the Iraqis, the Afghanis know their history, and recognize that, like every invader before it, the US-led NATO alliance acts in accordance with the self-interest of its member states. Washington has promised NATO members privileged access to the area’s energy resources in exchange for their cooperation in the humanitarian endeavor of helping Afghans by hunting Afghans.

Today, Afghanistan is a US- and NATO-controlled narcostate, which actively prioritizes search and destroy missions (which kill innocent civilians) over anti-poverty or reconstruction programs. In 2006, more than 4000 Afghan civilians died in the violence: twice as many as the previous year. The number of attacks against troops skyrocketed in 2006 as well. As is well known, the focus on a military solution is the problem. For every insurgent killed, a dozen more are recruited. The year 2006 witnessed as many US aerial bombing campaigns in Afghanistan as the previous five years, yet NATO forces suffered their highest casualty rate since the beginning of the occupation.

We are bleeding the Afghans, but not to death: these fierce tribal warriors represent a long history of resistance to would-be conquerors. As a result, the current spring offensive is not another Western response to what used to be a “low-intensity war.” The resurgent (4) Taliban are assisted by new recruits who do not share the sectarian religious ideology of the Taliban but concur with their anti-imperialist goals. The Iraq debacle is a foretaste of our future in a doomed occupation in Afghanistan as well, with increasingly hated Western forces facing xenophobic nationalists who comprise the Pashtun majority. All foreigners who arrive to “help Afghans” — while propping up a non-representative, puppet government — eventually learn this lesson, from the Macedonians of Alexander to the former Soviet Union. As former Soviet soldier and veteran Afghan fighter Sergey Kirjushin (5) recently remarked: “Every nation that goes to fight in Afghanistan discovers [that] nobody has ever conquered that place. Even children were involved. They would blow up our tanks.”

***

Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006.

Contributor Richard Alan Leach most recently taught at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea. He writes on Asian and English literatures, East Asian politics, and defense and security issues. In addition to his academic writing, he has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials.

NOTES

1. Marc Herold, “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan.”

2. For the First Time, Americans Oppose Afghan War,” Angus Reid, January 25, 2007.

3. MSF Leaves Afghanistan After 24 Years.”

4. Afghanistan Five Years Later: the Return of the Taliban,” Senlis Council Report.

5. Mathew Fisher, Victoria Times-Colonist, Oct. 26, 2006. “Veterans of Russia;s Afghan Wars Says It’s ‘impossible to win there.”

Copies of Extra! are available on newsstands across the US.

For more information, visit http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4.

The program was a recording of a recent talk given by Sonali and James in September 2006 in Los Angeles, CA.

You can buy a CD of the program through Alternative Radio: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/INGJ-KOLS001.shtml

Direct Link to review

‘Propaganda of silence’ ignores U.S. Afghan role

Sun Dec 10 2006

Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence
By Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls
Seven Stories Press, 313 pages, $22

Reviewed by Michael Stimpson

THE terrorist attacks of 9/11 sparked a lot of new phenomena in U.S. popular culture. Among the most curious was an obsession over a blue garment.

Well-meaning U.S. liberals like Jay Leno’s wife and self-serving conservatives like Laura Bush agreed that a traditional women’s robe known as the burka — which covers the wearer’s head and body — represented the epitome of oppression.

Under Taliban rule, Afghan women were required to wear the burka whenever they stepped out of their homes. That made the garment, usually blue in Afghanistan, a symbol of “gender apartheid.”

To the California-based authors of Bleeding Afghanistan, the fuss over the burka helps illustrate how invasion and occupation of the Asian country was sold to Americans through a public-relations campaign that simplified complex issues and ignored Washington’s role in Afghanistan’s troubled history.

The burka “is a widely accepted part of conservative Afghan tradition,” Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls note. “Focusing critique on the burka as a symbol of oppression reinforces negative Western stereotypes of Muslim culture.”

Five years after being “liberated” from the Taliban, many Afghan women still wear the burka. And women and men in most of Afghanistan remain oppressed, by U.S.-blessed warlords now instead of the Taliban.

“No longer does one hear the Bush administration, or even just Laura Bush, speaking out about women’s rights in Afghanistan,” Ingalls and Kolhatkar write. “No longer do liberal feminist groups focus all their energies on the ‘gender apartheid’ in Afghanistan. No longer do the mainstream media sport front-page exposés about the mistreatment of Afghan women, despite the fact that the women and men of Afghanistan suffer in silence under new tyrants.”

The scant attention paid to Afghanistan nowadays in U.S. news media constitutes what the authors term a “propaganda of silence.” The White House and Pentagon have benefited from the media’s “supportive or non-critical role,” they say.

But propaganda seems an inappropriate word. Rather than consciously choosing to help government spin doctors by ignoring problems in Afghanistan, the media basically have just moved on to other things. There’s no conspiracy here; that’s just how the news business works.
This book is thoroughly researched (706 endnotes) and provides insight from two writers who have seen the country and worked for the liberation of Afghan women with a great deal more sincerity than Laura Bush.

They are co-directors of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a non-profit group that supports the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

Their publisher is a New York-based left-of-centre press that includes intellectual heavyweights Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn among its authors.

This book provides a perspective you don’t often get on CNN or in your daily newspaper. And it just might make you reconsider what business Canadian troops have in Afghanistan.

Michael Stimpson is a Winnipeg writer.