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Today's
Stories
December 5, 2003
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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|
December
5, 2003
Afghanistan
The
Road Back
By PABLO MUKHERJEE
If you look closely, all landscapes speak their
histories. But few do with such dramatic directness as the ones
in Afghanistan. One afternoon, about halfway between Bamiyan
and Baghlan we stopped at the bottom of a gorge guarded by three
massive jagged lunar peaks, the sun in half eclipse behind one
of their giant faces. We stopped not because we were tired, but
simply because we were struggling to come to terms with the turmoil
of feelings unspoken within each of us at the colour, texture
and contour of the land, the light, the water. Even our veteran
Afghan driver was overcome, and getting down from the car he
gestured at the towering peaks, spreading and lifting his hands
like a pious Muslim marvelling at Allah's imagination. In front
of us was a bridge--rusted, twisted, blown up by the forces of
one of the many warring forces that have traversed this region
over the past two decades. It too, had become a part of the land
- a corpse, half fossilised, of some gigantic animal native only
to this realm. What haunts me most about the Afghan landscape
is how the evidence of seemingly endless conflict--the scrap
metal of bridges, the endless miles of rock painted red to mark
mine-fields, the silhouettes of burnt out tanks against the sky
has become a part of nature. It struck me that you read, in W.G.
Sebald's words, a natural history of destruction, as you read
this terrain..
I was in Afghanistan for a very short
period--just under two weeks- in October 2003. There were several
reasons for making the long trip from the north of England. I
owed a visit to a close friend who works with a NGO there. And
this seemed a good time for the visit, because after months of
being completely overshadowed by Iraq in the British and American
airwaves, Afghanistan was gradually seeping back into public
consciousness. The debate between Tariq Ali and Mike O'Brien
published in The Guardian on Oct.11, 2003, was a fairly typical
example of this. Here Ali, a leading critic of Bush and Blair's
global wars, argued that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
had resulted in the breakdown of security, decimation of the
economy, regional instability and escalation of radical Islamism
as evident in the war currently raging in the south of the country.
In the long-term, he predicted, this would mean a return to the
anarchy of the pre-Taliban civil war years. Mike O'Brien, as
befits a loyal (so far) Blairite official, dismissed this and
answered that the benefits of 'liberation'--increased security
and opportunities for women, access to education, economic recovery,
dispersal of terrorist training camps--far outweighed the negatives.
He added that unlike Ali, he had only recently been to the country,
and thus had the benefit of a 'first-hand experience'.
I am one of those people who believe
in the value of distance and perspective, especially in any critical
analysis of the 'reality on the ground'. But a lot of what the
demagogues in Britain and the US, both in the pro and anti-war
camps, have been spouting too often deliberately ignored the
complexities of Afghanistan. I do not believe that any 'field
trip' automatically guarantees an all-seeing access to the 'real
truth' of any country. Inevitably, one operates within certain
constraints. In my case, for instance, I would be only travelling
in a rough triangle (albeit fairly extensive) north of Kabul,
in areas traditionally hostile to the Taliban, mostly meeting
educated Afghans working with the Aid community, and as a foreign
guest of a blonde, white woman who herself was startlingly foreign.
All these factors would set limits to my Afghan experience. Still,
I felt that it would give me a lot wider access to the people
than a heavily protected British Minister who would only meet
officials in the urban areas, usually within Kabul. I felt both
Ali and O'Brien had, perhaps necessarily, excluded a variety
of shades of grey from their analyses of Afghanistan, and I could
at least make their pictures less simplistic. Also, Tony Blair
frequently cites his 'success' in Afghanistan to answer critics
pointing at the fiasco in Iraq, and argues that as in Afghanistan,
Iraq would also be gradually 'normalised' by the dint of Anglo-American
steadfastness and commitment. Blair and Bush, as we have been
learning everyday, have lied and continue to lie about everything
from WMDs, Al-Qaida, and the diplomatic background to the Iraq
war. So I was also eager to test how far Blair's analogy held
up to the view from the Afghan roadside, not from the spin generating
couches of Westminster and Washington. This, in short, was the
framework of my Afghan visit. In the event I travelled from Kabul
to central and northern Afghanistan and then back through the
Salang tunnel to Kabul in one of those amazing Japanese All-terrain
vehicles that forded rivers as easily it took the boulder strewn
donkey tracks of Afghan hillsides. I had the opportunity to observe,
talk and listen to Afghans from a range of backgrounds, urban
and rural. I was invited to share the gallows humour of the expatriate
aid workers. What follows is my attempt to test out the assertions
made about Afghanistan by both the apologists for war and their
critics.
The way of the gun
Security and stability, unsurprisingly,
is the mantra for all who want to control Afghanistan. The Taliban
swept to power promising an end to the anarchy of the warlords,
the CIA-backed Mujahideen commanders who fought the Soviet forces
and subsequently tore the country apart with a decade of bloody
civil war. For a brief period beginning in 1996, the talibs succeeded
in defeating the warlords and restoring law and order, albeit
it was a particularly severe version of the Islamic sharia that
infringed the basic human rights of over half the country's population.
Blair and Bush sing from the same hymn-sheets, and claim that
their invasion and ousting of the Taliban has restored a humane
and would-be democratic stability to a country tired of almost
twenty five years of constant war. Their claim, at this moment,
is at least as inflated as the Taliban's.
I couldn't travel in southern Afghanistan
because of the low scale, largely unreported war going on there
involving the forces of the international coalition, the private
armies of the landlords and the mainly Pashtun tribal forces
sympathetic to the Taliban. In the northern areas, things are
relatively normal. In Afghanistan, 'relatively' is a big qualifier.
I was unable to fly from Kabul to Mazaar-E-Sharif, because a
small 'local' dispute between rival warlords, the result of which
was a savage shelling of the city that killed almost a hundred
people. While I was in the supposedly safe town where my friend
is based, a bus carrying villagers was hit by anti-tank missiles
in the neighbouring province of Samangan, and twelve people killed.
It was a routine flare up between the forces of rival warlords.
In the province itself, at least 26 children of both sexes have
been kidnapped and raped. A large improvised explosive device
had recently been left near a UN agency office, which fortunately
did not explode (In Kandahar, a bomb did explode recently outside
the UN compound). Of course, people do carry on with their lives,
locals as well as foreigners. Two German friends who live and
work in Kabul took a day-trip to Ghazni, a city dotted with ancient
historical sites. It was largely acknowledged that they had a
mild form of death wish, since the city had been classified as
a no-go zone by the UN, and since then a French woman has been
shot at point blank range while travelling in a UN vehicle in
broad day-light in the town centre. Overall, Tariq Ali's description
of the Afghan security situation seemed to be closer to truth
than Bush-Blair, Fox and Murdoch's.
However, that is not the only story.
The day after the bus got blown up, I took a taxi with an Afghan
friend and travelled up the road towards the northern province
of Kunduz. That day, the road was busy with international troops
out on patrol--Germans and some bearded gunmen travelling in
unmarked vehicles with the distinctive white and black patterned
kaffeyahs around their necks who were, the locals said with knowing
smiles, US special forces. I asked our taxi-driver, and then,
some people eating at the restaurant we stopped for lunch, how
they felt about foreign soldiers on Afghan soil. Almost universally
they agreed that they were a good thing. One young boy said "B-52",
beamed and gave a big thumbs up. But only, they added, if they
were disarming the warlords and the local 'security' forces.
They didn't care whether they were Americans, British, Germans--whoever
kept them safe and rebuilt their country was welcome to stay
in Afghanistan. But the larger aims of the international forces
often puzzled the Afghans. Why, they wondered, were international
forces training and arming the private forces of the warlords
in some place, Paktiyar for example, where these were being used
against the Afghan national army? Why, in the campaign to disarm
the country with a cash-for-guns incentive, there were no efforts
being made by the Americans to target the private thugs of the
warlords. Till the warlords, or 'commanders' as Afghans call
them, were disarmed or at least the size and firepower of their
private armies cut down, no ordinary Afghans would be willing
to give their guns up. It was their only defence against the
so-called law-keepers. The Afghan engineer of one of the NGOs
I visited, beat off armed gunmen of the local commander with
the help of his extended family. Without their guns they would
have been another bit of local kidnapping statistics.
This is where Blair and Bush's backing
of the commanders of the 'Northern alliance' against the Taliban
chafe against their stated aim of restoring security to the country.
A strong central government and regional stability is directly
opposed to the interest of the warlords and commanders--who control
the gun and opium trade of the country. Warlords like Rashid
Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatiyar have fought for twenty years,
switching sides, forming temporary alliances, committing large
scale atrocities, not in order to give up their power to the
US-favoured would-be government of Hamid Karzai. In fact, on
November 13 Hekmetyar (a key ally in the war against Taliban)
gave an interview to Al-Jazeera where he expressed his intention
of organising "Islamic resistance" against the Americans
in Mazaar-e-Sharif, just like he "did against the Soviets".
This is what the Afghans I spoke with were worried about--that
the West's strategic alliance with the warlords would result
in a slide back to pre-Taliban anarchy. And these were northern
Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who are emphatically not misty-eyed
about the Taliban. In the south, the armed resistance that Hekmetiyar
spoke of is already underway. This reality is the one Blair and
his spokespeople are at pains to deny--the lack of any coherent
strategy to deal with the warlords and the pitfalls of their
alliance with them. While critics of the war like Tariq Ali may
be overstating their case when they speak of an anarchic country
waging a war against unpopular foreign occupiers, in the long-term
their predictions seem to have been more accurate than those
politicians and 'specialists' who whipped up war-hysteria by
talking about liberation, democracy and security.
Re-building Rubble
Like security, 'reconstruction' has been
a word much abused by western leaders. For Blair, this has not
only meant restoring the economy but much more ambitiously, the
whole political and social fabric that lies torn to bits. I was
fortunate to have been the guest of the Aid community, which
is at the heart of this 'reconstruction'. As anybody who has
visited the 'field' in any part of the world will recognise,
years of living in physically harsh and dangerous conditions
and the frustrations of having to deal with mind-numbing bureaucratic
quagmires, as well as the cultural isolation and dislocation,
breeds a kind of self-deprecating gallows humour among the members
of this community. Generous to me to a fault, they treated me
to a series of stories about the underside of 'reconstruction'
that would make Blair choke and go blue in the face in the middle
of one of his pious exhortations about 'saving the Afghans'.
Over a lavish, if eccentric dinner and later in a bomb-shelter
that has been converted into a night-club (where, weirdly, I
spent hours spinning Eminem) I heard stories about how tons of
coal was dumped on the Kabulis during winter 2002/3- as fuel
to keep them warm- and how people died of carbon monoxide poisoning
and explosions trying to light their kerosene stoves with it.
No one had bothered to research whether their stoves were capable
of using coal. I heard how the WFP was pressurising the NGOs
to receive surplus seeds after the planting season when
they were completely useless to farmers in order to inflate the
statistics about the amount of agricultural aid being delivered
to Afghanistan. Or how UNICEF, after declaring the famous Buddhas
to be a world heritage site, turned out the several hundred Afghans
who have traditionally lived in the rock caves around the statues
and despatched them to live on the freezing, open plateaus in
utterly inadequate plastic tents, alleging that their presence
would otherwise hinder the restoration work. Unless these people
are sheltered before winter arrived, a number of them could die
from exposure--but then these Afghan lives are not rated very
highly in Downing Street, Brussels or Washington, unless, that
is, they make good copy.
But once one cuts through the ironic
survivor's humour, it is easy to see that some people are doing
the best they can under extremely difficult conditions. One soon
learns that there is a certain heroism in building a 50 feet
long bridge, built to replace one blown up by a local warlord,
that will enable the women of the local village to cross the
river to the local market for the first time in many years (being
heavily veiled they could not ford the river before). Or that
sinking a well, and organising a teacher's training course may
not be media-friendly and will not attract press photographers
from London, but are activities as evocative as that of the marine
patrolling with his M-16 cocked and ready. The central problem
in the re-building of Afghanistan it seems to me, is that it
is caught in a transition point between the culture of emergency
aid and sustained development. Emergency aid aims at immediate
short term-relief of food and shelter and is a very different
thing from empowering the local population to develop their own
society by assisting them with funds, technology and expertise.
For a country that has been in the state of extreme emergency
for over two decades, it is not surprising that both the locals
and occasionally the agencies are unwilling to break out of the
culture of emergency aid. The people expect the agencies to be
hand-out centres for food, clothing, shelter and are resentful
when these are withheld in favour of longer-term infrastructural
investments. To change this attitude would require a guarantee
of sustained political stability--NGOs can only work in parallel
with governments and in the absence of any stable local administrative
structures cannot, and should not forge ahead with any sustained
developmental work. Here one comes back to the problem of political
stability. The Afghans desperately long to believe that the international
community will not bail out again, leaving the people in the
grip of unscrupulous warlords. But in the absence of any signs
of this happening, they cannot trust in investing in their regions,
harnessing their own abilities, and are unwilling to see the
agencies as being in a supportive, instead of all-powerful sources
of succour
One step initiated by Hamid Karzai's
central government to give back political agency to the people
at grassroots level, and one that most people in the aid community
seemed enthusiastic about, is the NSP or the National Solidarity
Programme. This calls for elections to be held in the countryside,
where the villagers would choose local representative councils
- ideally, of both genders--that would then be provided with
block grants to spend up to £200 per family in the villages.
Here it seems, is the perfect solution to the reconstruction
dilemma--political empowerment of the people at the grassroots
level leading to regional stability and confidence, which in
turn will stem the emergency aid culture and facilitate long-term
regional development. Sitting in on one of the village meetings
and listening to Afghans, young and old, it is easy to see people
get excited about this project. About half the people of this
particular village were 'returnees', Afghans who fled the conflict
to Iran and Pakistan. Their return has clearly had a dynamic
effect on the village, and this seems true of most 'returnee'
villages of the region. They were eager to participate in the
NSP programme and already had a functioning village council with
two women on it (we didn't see them, apparently all the women
were away at a wedding). When asked why they elected two women
to be their representatives, they said it was because they had
spent time in Iran and they felt this gave them the experience,
education and ability to raise and secure issues important to
all villagers. They added they were grateful to the current government
for giving them this opportunity to decide their own fates, at
least to a greater extent than before. This seems capture a genuine
mood in those rural areas participating in the NSP. I was told
by my friend, equally touched and bemused, how Afghans had been
explaining the exciting new notion of 'one person, one vote'
and 'secret ballot' to her and asking whether things were the
same in England!
But it is by no means clear that this
political reconstruction can be sustained in Afghanistan. Will
the Pashtun south embrace it? Will the warlords allow the villagers
to vote for genuine candidates rather than those hand-picked
by themselves? Will Karzai's government be in a position or even
interested in the village councils or will they be a public relations
exercise for Karzai, London and Washington? Amidst all the tales
of rotting seeds, exploding stoves the NSP came as one ray of
light in the 're-building' of Afghanistan. To sustain it, the
West in general and the World Bank - the sponsors of the project
- in particular, needs the political will, courage and honesty
to put the Afghan people first, and ignore local warlords and
foreign multi-nationals hovering to carve up the land. This Republican
administration in Washington is not known for putting humanitarian
concerns above business and strategic interests. Its staunchest
supporter, Tony Blair talks in ringing evangelical tones about
conscience and humanity, but has so far done little to back this
up. I fear for the future of those Afghans I met who are so desperately,
and courageously, trying once again to believe.
Unveiling Afghanistan
I had 36 hours in Dubai before I could
board the tiny UN plane that would take me to Kabul. I have always
found Dubai's combination of glitzy hotels and hordes of roaming
ex-pats and tourists, eyes glazed with shopping fever, vaguely
depressing. So I decided to drug myself with sleep and bad television.
Flicking between Al-Jazeera and Will and Grace, I was suddenly
arrested by an image on the MTV channel. It was showing some
beauty contest and among the bevy of improbably perfect human
bodies, had chosen to focus on one particular one. A tall, dark-haired
woman in a bikini was standing next to a swimming pool and speaking
in faultless American. The voiceover introduced her as the first
Afghan model to represent her country for over two decades. The
camera slid lovingly over the perfect contours of her body as
she explained how her presence in the competition signalled the
real progress made by Afghan women since their liberation from
the Taliban regime. The interviewer put the best of trembles
in her voice and welcomed the Afghan beauty to the world of freedom
and choices, and in turn, she answered that she was now looking
forward to returning to Afghanistan from the US where she had
grown up.
Before, during and after the invasion
of Afghanistan, British and American airwaves were clogged with
virtually unprecedented coverage of veil. Countless images of
Afghan women in chador and the burqa found their way into newsprint,
with much earnest discussion about the brutality of the Taliban
regime who had enforced the veiling of Afghan women, who now
needed to be freed by the western armies and self-styled 'liberators'
like BBC's John Simpson. This image of the veil as a symbol of
the oppression of women in Islamic states, specifically Afghanistan,
conveniently ignored the complex history and function of the
veil--like its use as a statement of resistance to the West by
Egyptian women in the 1980s and as revolutionary weapon by Algerian
women who smuggled bombs in their burqas during the war of liberation
against the French. It also neatly dovetailed into Islamophobic
hysteria promoted by much American and British media that found
a fertile ground in the racist popular imagination of these countries.
In this particular algebra of western power, Taliban=veil=oppression
of women=Islam with the end product, inevitably, being a war
of liberation undertaken on behalf of the poor Afghan women.
Now programmes like the one I saw on MTV were unveiling Afghan
women were beaming the image of the US-resident bikini-clad model
across the world as the sign of their liberation. The body unclothed
could now act as the counterpoint to the body veiled. It seemed
to me that caught between the Taliban and MTV, the women of Afghanistan
were still struggling to make their own voices heard.
The Taliban committed many atrocities
against Afghan women, the chief among which were the dismissal
of the entire female work-force from the public sphere and denying
education to female children. Among the most uplifting sights
in Afghanistan today are women working in offices, albeit under
varying degrees of segregation from men, and girls attending
schools. But I wanted to know whether being a part of the reality
manufactured by MTV was on their list of priorities, and whether
the mantra of freedom chanted by George Bush and Blair was also
how they thought about freedom.
Being a foreigner and a male drastically
reduced my chances of meeting Afghan women, especially outside
Kabul. Afghanistan has been one of the most patriarchal societies
in the world for thousands of years. The veil has repeatedly
been a flashpoint in Afghan history between the so-called 'modernisers'
and the rest of the country. Early in the twentieth century,
King Amanullah dramatically unveiled his wife in a public congregation,
a symbolic gesture of welcome to modernity in 'Afghanistan' and
an extension of his other reformist measures like opening of
schools for women and encouraging their participation in sports.
Within two years, he had been deposed by the popular armed rebellion
of Bacha-E-Saqo--a rural warlord--and was forced to flee the
country. Nearly three years after John Simpson of the BBC reported
about the liberation of Kabul, the overwhelming majority of Afghan
women have refused to give up the veil. Clearly, the equating
of veil with oppression and lack of progress was simplistic.
As was the equation of unveiling or disrobing with freedom.
The important question was how much control
Afghan women had over their lives through access to education,
jobs and healthcare. And if they did, how this could be sustained.
I tried to overcome the disadvantages of my nationality and gender
by sticking as close to my friend as possible. As a foreign woman
her movements in the public sphere were severely restricted but
she was welcomed into the 'female', domestic spaces of Afghanistan.
Here are some glimpses I caught of the lives of Afghan women
today.
Driving through the northern mountains,
one day our car-radio crackled to life and a colleague of my
friend came on air. He was trying to organise the NSP elections
in a Tajik-dominated valley renowned for its anti-Taliban sentiments
and once described to me once as the wild west of Afghanistan.
Everything was going fine, he reported, except one thing--the
Tajiks were not allowing any women to participate in the elections.
Not just preventing them from standing for posts, but from voting
at all. This, of course, sort of defeated the purpose of the
whole exercise, and he was wondering what to do about it. Here,
it seemed, was the face of traditional Afghanistan, Taliban or
not, writing out women from even the most fledgling of democratic
gestures if it meant sharing any public space with them. But
again, this may be too simplistic an argument. As in most things,
security is a key issue in the gender politics of Afghanistan.
I was told that behind this apparent 'oppressive' behaviour of
the Tajik men were deep-seated fears about the fate of women
in a zone of sustained conflict. The veil and prohibition of
female presence in public spaces have become a way of protecting
them from the mass rapes that characterised the conflicts in
Bosnia and Rwanda. The people were desperately worried about
the proposed national elections of 2004 and were trying to keep
the women 'safe' from future trouble.
There seemed to be a minor uproar in
my friend's office about a group of Afghan women who had been
recently recruited to do fieldwork. Urban, sophisticated and
clearly worn out by their long bus trip from Kabul, they were
finding it hard to face up to the prospect of life in rural Afghanistan.
Most of them had only recently bought the full burqa; usually
they would wear just a headscarf and this had added to their
sense of dislocation. This too, was a face of Afghanistan, well-travelled
(most from this group had spent more than 8 years in Pakistan),
urbane 'returnee' women struggling to adjust to life in a country
where the codes of veiling and female participation were different
from what they had grown used to.
We visited an Afghan friend's house.
This is not as simple as it sounds, as social interaction between
ex-pat workers and Afghans are not encouraged because of security
issues. But my presence gave my friend some leeway and we walked
all the two hundred "unsafe" yards to the house. Her
colleague is from Kabul (he constantly complains about how boring
it is in the provinces) and lives here with his sister, her husband
and their children. Their home was like any Muslim home in India
and Pakistan. His sister did not have any English, but after
scolding us for failing to turn up the evening before, she brought
enormous piles of food, vodka and Pepsi (it was around 11 in
the morning) and sat around fussing at our weak appetite. Her
two year old daughter played around us, we all chatted and watched
MTV, which was now showing a hip hop band in fairly graphic video.
I wondered what would happen if the Afghan beauty queen came
on now and used her body to signal the liberation of her country.
How would these friends react? Especially what would our hostess--the
hospitable, curious, chatty pregnant mother of one with her elegant
headscarf think about this image of her liberation being peddled
in the west? For the moment, she was showing no signs of discomfort
at this televisual intrusion of foreign bodies simulating sex
to pre-packaged urban beats, not even in the presence of a foreign
male guest. Did her Kabuli background explain this? Or were they
trying to make us comfortable by offering us culturally familiar
entertainment?
I met another Afghan colleague of my
friend, this time a woman, very briefly one day in my guesthouse
when they dropped in between what she described as mind-blowingly
boring UN NGO coordination meetings. We said hello, she struck
me as unusually strong, determined, open. She worked on gender
training programmes and exuded hard-nosed efficiency and intelligence.
But again, she worked in a NGO office where women had been allocated
a segregated space after allegations that the lack of such facilities
destroyed the "work culture", encouraged flirting and
turned the office into a social club. What does this tell us
about life for women in 'liberated' Afghanistan?
It seemed to me that life for Afghan
woman after Taliban does not at all conform to the stereotypes
being currently peddled in the west. Just as the stereotype of
the veil does no justice to the complex reality of women's life
in Islamic societies. The Afghan woman is hungry to get back
to education, to work. She is buffeted by the differences between
rural and urban Afghanistan by patriarchal prejudices that pre-date
the Taliban by thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan
women have been extremely mobile over the past few decades, living
mostly in Pakistan, Iran. Many have returned, bringing with them
complex experiences from abroad. They may be able to confront
the hyper-consumerist MTV culture without necessarily abandoning
those facets within their own Islamic, central Asian culture
that empower them. In this, they need the support of the outside
world, which insults their struggle by presenting the veil and
the bikini as the only two alternatives of freedom and oppression
available to them.
Endings
Life in post-Taliban Afghanistan is much
more complex than British and American commentators would have
us believe. The invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken with the
stated aims of 'liberating' the Afghan people from Taliban, securing
the country and the region from militant groups both Islamist
and non-Islamist, and to a lesser extent, reviving the economy
and helping the country recover from two decades of war. All
of these aims are very far from being achieved. In his recent
interview on BBC's Breakfast with Frost, the US president George
Bush said that the trouble in Iraq was being caused by "some
Mujahideen type of people who wanted revenge for getting whupped
in Afghanistan". As anybody living, working or visiting
in Afghanistan will testify, the Mujahideen are very far from
"whupped" in Afghanistan. Indeed, as the Northern Alliance,
they are in charge of most of the country and frequently clashing
over bribes, weapons, territory and the control of narco-traffic.
Similarly, Taliban's exit has not meant
the transformation of Afghanistan into some central-Asian Starbucksland.
The economy is fuelled by opium trade, and in the absence of
any alternatives or incentives, the Afghan farmers are rightly
not interested in stopping their poppy production. On the other
hand, the ordinary Afghans, despite regional differences, want
to work with the international community to rebuild their country,
to disarm the warlords, to have peace, basic healthcare, education.
Overall, they do not, despite Hekmetyar's recent declaration,
want to unite in an upsurge against foreign occupation. Jonathan
Steel, in a rare bit of level-headed and courageous analysis
of Afghanistan (Guardian, Nov., 13), wrote about the nostalgia
the people of Kabul seem to have about the Soviet occupation--when
they and other urban population of the country enjoyed access
to education, jobs, health care. Cold war politics dictated that
the west would back the resistance to Soviet occupation, even
when the resistance comprised of fundamentalist Islamic groups
who promptly devastated the country with their infighting. Steel
hopes that this time the West would stay and help the Afghans
defeat those dark forces still haunting the country and ends
with a call for continued assistance--"Let the development
money keep on flowing in. Governments will call it aid. I prefer
to see it as reparations." But nothing in the history of
western governments, certainly not the pattern of George Bush
and Tony Blair's own leaderships, suggest that British and American
resources, "reparations" for the decades of warfare
they sponsored by proxy, will keep flowing unconditionally and
indefinitely into Afghanistan.
I began describing an Afghan landscape
that seemed to speak of the decades of destruction visited on
this land. Let me end with one with one whose meaning I perhaps
cannot fully decode. As one drives into the Shomali plains away
from Kabul, one sees twisted tanks, trenches, gunmen smoking
in their dugouts, fingers of destroyed artillery batteries poking
the sky. The plains once used to be covered with vineyards, producing
wine that the Mughal emperor Babur praised almost 400 years ago.
About half an hour outside Kabul, as one drives towards the Hindukush
mountains and the Salang tunnel, there is a small cluster of
abandoned houses on the left, where one can see, so the local
legend goes, the 'hanging Talib'. This is the skeleton of a Taliban
fighter, who was caught and hanged on a tree in this spot, as
his forces retreated from Kabul. The locals did not permit his
body to be buried, keeping his bones hanging as a reminder of
their rage. This seemed a fitting symbol of the land, the desolate
dusty plain littered with broken machines of war, and this grim
reminder of death. But we already knew, even as our driver pointed
out the hanging Talib in a suitably hushed tone, that there was
no such thing. The German friends we were staying with the night
before had driven to the village, intrigued by the story, and
found nothing but abandoned houses and dusty trees. It is the
story told to outsiders by a people traumatised and scarred by
years of brutality inflicted on them. The legend captures the
spirit of the place, but the reality is already different. I
could have told our driver this. I could have told him that his
story was just that, a tale to scare children and tourists to
their beds. Another example of the Afghan gallows humour. But
instead I narrowed my eyes and looked at the tree. In the morning
sunlight, on the bare brown plain, what did I see moving in the
wind--dead twigs of a tree or the bones of a man long dead? I
kept quiet. The stories of the Afghans, these legends of survival,
must be respected.
Dr Pablo Mukherjee teaches in the school of english at University
of Newcastle. He can be reached at: pablo.mukherjee@ncl.ac.uk
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
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Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
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Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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