The Afghan people will win - part 4

One mega-Martin point for Fidel... Unionist is right. You really don't need to address an inexistent critique. It tends to validate it.

I believe Afghan warlords have said that they want UN mediated peace talks among other things. Canada is also a UN member country, yes?

The majority of the world's countries are U.N. members.

Unionist wrote:

Fidel wrote:

I believe Afghan warlords have said that they want UN mediated peace talks among other things.

Warlords? There is an insurgency going on. The warlords are in the government. I'll just bet the warlords want someone to rescue them from the people. The U.N. will do. Anyone will do. Our job is to surrender, or run. Now.

You mean like the US is cutting and running from Iraq? The Iraqis sure showed our imperial masters what's up, didnt they? In fact, the brutal colonizers still maintain over 50 military bases in Iraq - their largest US embassy in the world -  142,000 combat troops in the oil-rich desert nation - and over 100,000 mercenaries/death squads for hire and military contractors. And the suffering and misery in Iraq is unspeakable. Iraq has become a nation of widows, orphans, and guns for hire. What a mess - what a terrible human tragedy it's become.

"al Qa'eda" is a US creation. Their purpose, along with former Anglo-American proxies, the Taliban, is to aid in the destabilization of Central Asia, Middle East, Africa, and even providing a phony threat to peace and security here at home. They are the perfect enemy.

 And now the imperial master nation is looking to expand the war in Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Yes, as it was with the immoral warfiteering in South-East Asia, US military are marauding over the border into another sovereign country alleged to be harboring "insurgents" I believe we're not being told the truth again about another illegal and immoral war on poor people situated on the other side of the world. I think this is part of the larger "great game" as Zbigniew Brzezinski once described it. They want to redraw the borders for several countries and probably a lot more if we dare consider.

"Everyone is concerned about stopping terrorism. Well, there is an easy way: stop participating in it" - Chomsky

Fidel,

You probably know (as I do) the histories of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Both also had/have(?) ties with the CIA.

Remind me, what are we fighting for in Afghanistan, again?

Frmrsldr wrote:

Fidel, You probably know (as I do) the histories of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Both also had/have(?) ties with the CIA. Remind me, what are we fighting for in Afghanistan, again?

I think that as far as the masters of chaos and their fundamentalist friends are concerned, all life is cyclical. Order must make way for disorder. One news journalist who met with the Taliban in 2001 said the most common question asked of him was, Are the sun and the moon the same thing? Veritas

Okay, I'll ignore Canadian John Ryan's short essay on the matter in order to slide around in the mud with you. What do you think these people's view of the solar system is?

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v697/rabblerabble/zarmina1.jpg[/IMG]

How are the Taliban different from Pinochet's DINA killers who executed socialists and union leaders at Santiago football stadium?

I admit I could be wrong possibly. I believe the Taliban have their own hunches on how the solar system operates. I think the CIA provided picture books on science and terrorism to the madrassas in 1980's Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Can you confirm that for me, Unionist? Or are you just babbling for the sake of it?

But I have to admit that it sounds highly plausible that the Taliban have no interest in general education for roughly half of the remaining population and who havent fled the country now living a stone age subsistence under NATO's watch , girls and women in particular.

Because there was no Taliban ideology in either Pakistan or Afghanistan prior to the 1980s. The Talibanization of Pakistan and Afghanistan was not the result of democratic choice. It was meant to destabilize those two countries and promote Islamic jihad against three or four of the largest nations in Asia rich which happen to be rich in resources and nurturing nationalist political tendencies not in-line with US and British corporate interests,  and  this required pursuit of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan for western intel agencies and governments with significant corporate and military influence in government.

The radicalization process in Afghanistan and Pakistan has still not produced an ideologically driven society as was created in post-Shah Iran. At least one mullah in that country stated during the time leading up to Khomeini that religious clerics have no idea how to run a modern society and that handing the country over to rule by religious leaders would be disasterous.

As Canadian John Ryan said in 2001, the secular revolution in Afghanistan was an entirely indigenous affair. Not even the CIA blamed the Soviets for it happening. The women of Kabul were wearing jeans, going to university and becoming doctors, engineers and teachers in the 1970s and 80s. Now they must wear head to toe veils for fear of retribution from the Taliban, the Anglo-Americans proxies until relatively recently.  And it appears that the two phony enemies will love each other again if backchannel talks are sweet enough.

Daedalus wrote:

Fidel wrote:

I think that as far as the masters of chaos and their fundamentalist friends are concerned, all life is cyclical. Order must make way for disorder. One news journalist who met with the Taliban in 2001 said the most common question asked of him was, Are the sun and the moon the same thing? Veritas

I have no love for the Taliban, but I gotta say, they are not the 'masters of chaos' - they are mere amateurs. I'm with Naomi Klein on who the real masters of chaos are.

Sorry if I wasnt clear on the English. The masters of chaos are the CIA and US military and colonial outposts, from Ottawa and  Bogota to Islamabad and Kabul. And the US is the world's foremost exporter of terror and chaos.

Quote:

I'm surprised anyone is taken in by this recycled garbage about building schools and so on - it's enough to make me supersititous, because I think I've just seen the ghost of Cecil Rhodes.

The spirits of Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold haunt Africans still today, and so is a new and improved enemy hatched from CIA, British and Saudi funded graduate schools for terrorism. We can think of "al-Qaeda" as the Islamic wing of the CIA and proxies for nouveau western colonialists. And Afghanistan and Pakistan are now the end result of the last 30 years' worth of white man's syndrome.

The Pentagon has such beautiful logic:

1. Create a problem.

2. Intervene to 'solve' the problem.

3. Use the 'problem' to justify sending in the vanguard of capitalism - the troops. The capitalists (corporations) follow close behind.

Conclusion: The longer the 'problem' exists, the longer the merry money making go round continues. Everyone (at least the people who count) is happy.

Fidel is definitely against intervention (occupation).

He tried to paint Unionist into an interventionist corner by making the argument that interventionism itself isn't wrong - it depends on whether the grounds (reasons) on which we are basing our intervention are right or wrong.

My argument is that unilateral military or exploitive intervention is wrong, period.

Killing Civilians
How Safe Do You Actually Want to Be?
By Tom Engelhardt

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death -- so many lives snuffed out so regularly for more than seven years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They're so repetitive that, once you've started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs -- so many "insurgents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or "anti-Afghan forces" killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.

In response -- no less part of this formula -- have been the denials issued by American military officials or coalition spokespeople that those killed were anything but insurgents, and the assurances of the accuracy of the intelligence information on which the strike or raid was based. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step, while doggedly waiting for any hubbub over the killings to die down. If that didn't happen, an "investigation" would be launched (the investigators being, of course, members of the same military that had done the killing) and then prolonged, clearly in hopes that the investigation would outlast coverage of the "incident" and both would be forgotten in a flood of other events.

Forgotten? It's true that we forget these killings easily -- often we don't notice them in the first place -- since they don't seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country. (...)

Click here to read more

Deconstructing the Taliban - Fawzia Afzal-Khan 

"I still recall cringing when, conducting an interview a few days prior to the storming of the Red Mosque, with Umm Hassan (wife of the recently-released Islamist cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz of Red Mosque fame, and herself the founder and principal of the women's madrassah there)-- she said to me in a biting tone: "You people [I believe she meant my class of the urban educated elite as well as the government power structure]-you people have treated us like lizards on the walls, like cockroaches on the ground." She continued to look me up and down, her glance scornful, withering. Several of her students and teachers who were part of the group I interviewed that blisteringly hot summer day added that they would pray for what they could see was my unrepentant westernized soul, and that the ultimate victory would be theirs.

I walked out that day from the premises of the Red Mosque thinking that these "Muslimahs" had a point, at least regarding the deep class inequalities and injustices that marred the psychic, economic and political landscape of the country of my birth. Their anger against the "comprador elite" was justified-and hence also against Western, specifically US imperialist interests being shored up by this ruling class. Indeed, of late, the US itself has helped the case of the various Taliban groups by continuing to bomb the hideouts of these and Al-Qaeda outfits in the Northern Areas with their remotely-piloted Drone and Reaper predator missiles. But I no longer think of the Pakistani Taliban and their female counterparts as deserving of any empathy whatsoever. In fact, I am prepared to go as far as calling them non-Muslims."

An interesting perspective, with a central message that is somewhat similar to the the consistent theme we've discussed in these threads, that the people most effected by these events are better positioned to bring about change within their societies.

It's a screed about people standing up for themselves Unionist, if that is what they wish to do, without foreign 'assistance,' which exacerbates the problem, as she clearly points out.  It's done in a way that doesn't shy away from discussion of the nature of the problem as she sees it.  Essentially, I view it as an inter-discussion of problems and potential solutions, for which outsiders might wish to take note.  I don't see how the premise is much different from what we've discussed here many times before, except that normally, and perhaps appropriately because we are it's owners, we are generally mindful of only one elephant.

[url=http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet209.html]Reframing the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a Class War[/url] The Socialist Project

Quote:

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada's war in Afghanistan, I wrote:

"The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam."

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of 'Godless' socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be 'legally' executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Godless socialists are apostates of theocratic feudalism.

A suicide bombing that killed five Afghan police officers and wounded nine others Saturday in Kandahar shows how Canadian troops are doing so badly there.

Oh, well, if an internal Military Police investigation says there was no abuse, then it's got to be true.

Fidel, have you seen "Taxi to the Dark Side"?

Military Police Complaints Commission Report

Here is the full report.