“Something that is beyond man is happening. America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.”
I don’t understand this. There’s very little content to this statement. Will we be scrapping our nuclear arsenal anytime soon? The content of the “turning back” is important. Ten thousand people getting together to “turn back to God” can be a great thing or a terrifying thing, depending on what the ethical content of the god’s tenets are. For example, both of these mass gatherings were claiming the imprimatur of God:
Gandhi talking satyagraha
Hitler addresses a bunch of Nazis
Spouting this kind of “turning back to God” rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. What matters are the ethical admonitions inherent in the turning. Is Glenn Beck asserting the United States is suddenly becoming comfortable with turning the other cheek, with taking up the cross (literally being willing to face the death penalty rather than use violence when opposing the injustice of the powerful), etc.?
I feel that I’m either missing a trend, or making an assumption that he’s referring to the same god I’m thinking of.
The thing I remember most is the smell. I had nightmares about it.
I woke up our second night in New Orleans under a pool table, pulling myself out of a nightmare with one component: the horrible smell of a basement apartment that had been submerged, food and cats and all, in the flood and left in the dark for at least 8 weeks. When we opened it up two days prior to begin the cleanup, it set off fight-or-flight responses in us. It was a smell your DNA knew to run away from. It was the smell of death. You had to force yourself to step over the threshold into the pitch-black room.
The next things I remember most clearly are the bugs. It’s true: when the world ends, only the cockroaches survive. The world ended in New Orleans in August, and by the time we made our first trip down to help with the cleanup in November, the roaches had conquered their new kingdom. They scurried everywhere anytime you moved the wreck of a piece of furniture (or the glob that particle-board becomes after staying wet for several weeks). First they were terrifying. Then they were disgusting. Then you learned to live with the occasional flight of a couple of them across your hands, feet, and arms while you carried something out into the light. Then you hardly noticed.
We drove all night from Washington, D.C. with a cleanup team pulled from the membership of the regional Episcopal Church and arrived in New Orleans in the morning. The city was dead. There was no other way to describe it. A major city with almost zero traffic in sight. Silence in the air. Packs of dogs, long given up on finding their owners, roamed some of the neighborhoods. Where people used to stand waiting for buses or trolleys, now crowds of bulging refrigerators stood, duct-tape straining to contain the decaying food matter and maggots, failing to contain the stench. You half expected these techno-organic zombies to chase you down the street.
We expected to run into crowds of volunteers and to hear the hopeful sounds of construction work. We were disappointed. We had no contact with any other team the entire time we were in the city. We heard not one beep or crunch or hiss to betray the presence of an unseen Bobcat or other machine working to move or build.
I remember the rage at the incompetence, and sometimes viciousness, of the federal and local responses. The local Episcopal Relief and Development coordinator told us that so little was being done with the material sent by the dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security and FEMA that ERD staff would just walk into their warehouses and take the blue roof tarpaulin to put it to use, and when FEMA staff protested, they said, “Either use it yourself, or try and stop us from taking it.” They didn’t try and stop them, but I don’t know if they used it themselves.
I remember the Barlows and the Evanses, the two families whose homes we worked on during our first trip. I remember Miss Bertha from across the street of the local Episcopal church, a 90-something-year-old Creole woman, the last of more than a dozen siblings, who would rather I sit and listen to her than work on her property. I remember the vivid stories we were told by survivors who described the wailing in the night as people clung to their roofs and yelled out for help in the dark to a nation that watched the city drown. People needed help with their homes, but periodically during the work you’d have to stop, because finally the person would realize that here was someone who hadn’t also lost everything, someone with whom they could talk that could listen without having to also tell their stories. Everyone in town that survived need you to listen. It slowed the work, but not The Work. They needed more than just volunteer labor and donations. They needed your love.
Our first trip damaged my wife and me in various ways. When we drove back into Arlington, VA, we couldn’t stop looking for the arcane spray-painted Xs on the front of buildings, the ones that denoted who searched it, when, how many pets and people were found dead inside. I remember we cried off and on for weeks. I still cry, sometimes. I’m crying now. I don’t regret going on the first trip, or the subsequent trips. But you don’t come back the same.
Of course, we weren’t alone in New Orleans. The breadth and depth of the need just swallowed and obscured for some time the visibility of the volunteers that trickled in in the first few months. But there was one moment I remember more than any other. I remember standing in the middle of a street under a dark streetlight, watching the silouettes of now-wild dogs further up the street, hearing no sound but that made by fellow volunteers packing up our gear for the night. I remember standing there and feeling terribly inadequate to the task in front of us, and seeing the hundreds of homes up that street that we’d not have time to work on. But I remember a thought came to me, strong and deep and calming, that this is what love is. Love means showing up. Love means showing up even if only to fight the long defeat.
New Orleans, I love you. We all still love you. We want you back.
With General Petraeus’ stop on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric now halfway over, it’s worth taking a moment to unpack the unchallenged, false assertions and implications he’s piled up thus far on his media tour. We decided to look into the claims he made about “oil spots” of “progress” during his interview with NBC’s David Gregory. Both claims were absolute fantasies, and the remaining journalists on Petraeus’ tour owe their viewers more rigorous skepticism than what we saw on Meet the Press.
Despite Petraeus’ use of the term more than a dozen times in his MTP interview, virtually no data that shows strategically significant security “progress” in Afghanistan since the start of the latest escalation. According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), emphasis mine:
…[T]he number of provinces having more than three attacks per day has grown from 1 to 4 while the number of provinces seeing the lowest rate (<1 per 2 days) has dropped from 22 to 19. Overall ANSO assess that, in terms of daily attack rates, 23 provinces have remained stable, 1 has improved and nine provinces have deteriorated being Nangahar, Paktya, Kandahar, Paktika, Uruzgan, Helmand, Ghazni, Farah, Kunduz.
AOG are presenting a formidable geographic presence and are escalating attacks, in areas well outside of IMF main focus, at their own direction and tempo.
Needless to say, if insurgents are initiating many more attacks “at their own direction and tempo,” International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has not “regained the initiative.”
But let’s talk specifically about General Petraeus’ “oil spots.”
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you’re trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out. …[D]own in Helmand Province what we sought to do was to build an oil spot that would encompass the six central districts of Helmand Province, including Marjah and then others, and then to just keep pushing that out, ultimately to connect it over with the oil spot that is being developed around Kandahar City…
The general’s visit to Wardak Province today was in part to underline the …importance of that security bubble being extended from outside Kabul to the southwest here to Wardak Province.
The general, quite frankly, is out of his mind if he wants us to apply a term that means “a peaceful area, secure area” to Helmand (which includes Marjah), Kandahar, or Wardak. None of those provinces are secure. None. In fact, compared to this time last year, they are less peaceful and less secure.
Helmand/Kandahar Region
According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), southern Afghanistan is in the grip of an ever-escalating insurgent assassination campaign. UNAMA’s latest report conveys the local Afghans’ perception that the insurgents can strike anywhere, anytime, and that U.S. and allied forces can’t protect them. From the report:
The Taliban’s use of assassinations increased from an average 3.6 per week and 15.6 per month in the first part of 2009 to on average 7.0 per week and 30.5 per month in the first four months 2010. In May and June, the number of assassinations skyrocketed to on average 18.0 per week according to the UN Department of Safety and Security- Afghanistan.
Helmand (including Marjah)
According to ANSO, the number of insurgent attacks in Helmand province during the second quarter of 2010 spiked to 820, compared to 257 attacks during the same period last year. According to UNAMA, the has effectively prevented provincial authorities from delivering the promised “government in a box” in Marjah, while Operation Moshtarak “has not resulted in increased protection for the civilian population.”
UNAMA also slapped ISAF for decreasing civilian security by locating their bases in or near residential areas. ISAF justifies this placement by appealing to counterinsurgency admonitions to “live in and among the population,” but UNAMA’s report retorts that, because of the locations of the bases,
Afghan civilians face not only the risk of often disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks by AGEs, but also death and injury from mortar and rocket attacks fired by IM Forces that mistakenly fall short of their target and hit residential compounds.
The failure of ISAF to establish security for the residents of Helmand and the ever-growing insurgent assasination campaign combine to make Helmand “the most violent province in the country,” according to ANSO.
Kandahar
When Karzai, McChrystal and other representatives of ISAF and the Afghan government held their shuras in Kandahar to win local support, they were told in no uncertain terms that the locals didn’t want a military operation brought to their home because they feared it would just drag violence into their neighborhoods. They complained bitterly about ISAF’s dismissal of their concerns to UNAMA:
Elders also reported that…these meetings were “photo opportunities” at which the elders’ concerns and suggestions were not taken seriously. As one elder from Panjwayi district told UNAMA HR, “.. there are far too many ‘meetings in name.’ ISAF and the Government ignore what we say, because we are from the districts..[T]his is not true, and it is insulting…[t]here are too often photographers and television cameras at these meetings. In Pakistan, of course, the Taliban can watch television, see me sitting with the governor and decide to kill me. So, when there is a ‘meeting in name,’ first I risk my life, and then I am insulted.”
As ISAF’s so-called “rising tide of security” began to materialize, the elders’ contended to UNAMA that “ISAF‘s publication of its plans to launch the military operation caused the Taliban to plant more IEDs and intensify their campaign of intimidation against pro- Government figures.” ANSO and UNAMA figures bear out their assertion: Armed opposition groups initiated 559 attacks in the second quarter of 2010, up from 399 during the same period last year, with “more civilians were killed in the region in the first six months of 2010 than in any other region.”
Wardak
As for Wardak, ANSO’s figures show that, again, attacks were up in the second quarter of 2010 (183 attacks) compared to the same period in 2009 (139). The province is a hotbed for abductions, particularly along Highway 1. In fact, according to UNAMA, “On 15 June, the acting District Governor of Sayadabad district in Wardak province was abducted reportedly by AGEs and later beheaded.” Also according to UNAMA:
“[E]lders in Logar and Wardak provinces…said their priority was to end the culture of impunity for civilian deaths and injury from military operations and for those who committed abuses to be held accountable.”
And, for the bonus round, rocket fire interrupted Petraeus’ shura while Gregory accompanied him for his puff-piece interview. Sounds like a place safe enough for a middle-school field trip, doesn’t it?
You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me
All this brings us back to Petreaus’ definition of an “oil spot.”
“Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area.”
Nobody in their right mind or wearing pants that aren’t on fire can honestly look at the information above and derive from that anything remotely approaching an “oil spot,” as Petraeus defines it. Helmand, Kandahar, and Wardak aren’t examples of peace or security. I honestly have no idea why Petraeus would hold any of these places up as his “progress” examples. Wardak is certainly not stabilized, and Helmand and Kandahar are glaring examples of the failure of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
So here’s a takeaway for all you reporters out there rounding out Petraeus’ media tour: General Petraeus’ job is not to tell you the truth. Petraeus’ job is to win the war handed him by President Obama. He sees public opposition crystallizing, while at the same time coming to the realization that his mission will not be accomplished by the deadline to start withdrawals. Rather than questioning the basic assumption that COIN was the right strategy to pursue in Afghanistan (it wasn’t), he wants what generals always want: more troops, more time. Thus, he sees it as his job to sell the messages that need to be sold to get the things he think will help him accomplish his mission.
His job isn’t to tell you the truth. It’s to sell you his war. Buyer beware.
General Petraeus is on a media tour to sell the idea that the U.S. military is “making progress” in Afghanistan, a well-worn message aimed at convincing elites to extend this brutal, futile war. So far, it looks like the mainstream media is buying it, hook, line, and sinker.
Petraeus kicked off his spin campaign this morning with an hour-long special on Meet the Press with David Gregory. The piece opened with a montage of Petraeus doing sit-ups, and later showed him jogging, with Gregory opining about him wearing out troops half his age. Gregory went out of his way to set up a "Petraeus saves the day" narrative, asking the general if the situation in Afghanistan reminds him of the "dark days" in Iraq just before Petraeus "succeeded" with the surge. Petraeus hammered home his one-word message relentlessly: progress. Gregory feigned tough skepticism, but betrayed his hero-worship with setups like, "Watch how savvy Petraeus is when he answers my tough question." Throughout, Gregory’s sheepish grin conveyed the sense that he wanted to hug Petraeus instead of critically probe his assertions.
Petraeus and Gregory jovially closed the interview by quoting Generals Grant and Sherman, with Petraeus saying he’s no politician. Don’t believe that for a second. The military wants to extend this war, and it sees American public opinion as an obstacle in getting what it wants. Petraeus admitted as much when he told Gregory that the point of his upcoming media appearances were scheduled in the hopes of showing "people in Washington" and the public that we’re making progress (Finish your drink!) and to shore up support for the failing war effort. This media blitz is about Petraeus shaping public opinion to affect the political environment for a future push to extend the war far beyond the bounds implied by Obama’s December 2009 West Point speech. In short, the military is turning its several-billion-dollar public relations apparatus on the American people, and the mainstream media is so far complicit. To quote one of my favorite bands, "There is a war going on for your mind."
If the media fail to ask hard questions, there’s a chance Petraeus could get what he wants: the freedom to extend an extremely unpopular war that’s not making us safer. We’ve got to push back, and we’ve got to do it now.
General Petraeus’ media blitz is just getting started. We’ve got to push our media–hard–to ask real questions and prevent easily disproved spin from polluting the debate. Petraeus wants to change public opinion, and he’s spending your money to sell you a brutal, futile war that’s not making us safer. If you’re tired of this kind of manipulation, join the tens of thousands of other people working to end this war with Rethink Afghanistan.
Today, President Obama came to my town to give an invite-only speech at the University of Texas. Lacking an invite, I wondered what people with invites had to say about the Afghanistan War. Here’s what I found:
All the people who had tickets to the event who consented to be interviewed and who gave an opinion for or against are in this video, and their views are fairly represented. Of course, that’s not a surprise, given the levels of public disgust with this war, the higher levels of opposition among Democrats and the likely makeup of the invitee crowd.
Most Americans — 54 percent — think the U.S. should set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Forty-one percent disagree.
There is a partisan divide on the issue: 73 percent of Democrats think the U.S. should set a timetable, while only 32 percent of Republicans say the U.S. should do so. Fifty-four percent of independents want a timetable.
What is surprising, though, is the “heads down, follow through” attitude on the part of our elected leaders.
ISAF immediately attacked the credibility of the Afghan government’s report, complaining bitterly of Karzai’s decision to condemn the incident without conferring with U.S. and allied forces.
Working with our team in Afghanistan led by Anita Sreedhar, Brave New Foundation‘s Rethink Afghanistan campaign sent an intrepid local blogger into Sangin–one of Afghanistan’s most volatile areas–to get the truth. The video interviews he obtained are incredible and horrifying. We made the full interview transcripts available online at http://rethinkafghanistan.com, and we encourage you to read them. Here’s the short version: Every survivor our interviewer talked to confirmed that a massive civilian casualty event occurred, and that NATO was responsible.
NATO vs. the Kabul Government
ISAF began their push-back against press accounts of the Sangin incident with a simple press release on July 24: “We have no operational reporting that correlates to this alleged incident.” No further press release available on the ISAF website expands or updates this statement. However, ISAF personnel soon ratcheted up their attacks on the Afghan government’s narrative and, in the process, circulated alternative (and often contradictory) official responses, tallies and accounts of the event.
“Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi village is completely unfounded…We are conducting a thorough joint investigation with our Afghan partners and will report any and all findings when known.”
Later, again on August 5, while ISAF provided quotes from named sources for attribution that denied knowledge of the outcome of the investigation, an unnamed “senior intelligence official” told The New York Times that six civilians died with eight Taliban fighters when a troop fired a Javelin rocket into a structure from which U.S. Marines took fire.
When asked to explain the discrepancy between his tally and that of the Afghan government, the unnamed official cited “political challenges,” as if “political challenges” account for a 33-person difference in the death tallies. This explanation reminds one of the Gardez massacre earlier this year, when ISAF tried to pass off its blatant lie about an American special forces team finding women “bound, gagged and executed” as a “cultural misunderstanding,” when in fact they’d killed the women themselves and tried to dig the bullets out while one of them was still alive, screaming in pain. In effect, this unnamed source accused Afghan locals and officials of lying about civilian deaths because of hard feelings between them and the coalition.
What is going on here? One explanation might be that ISAF engaged in the same type of damage control campaign utilized in other horrifying incidents like the Farah airstrike and the Gardez massacre. In both cases, ISAF initially denied wrongdoing, aggressively attacked the credibility of alternative accounts that disputed the official story, and claimed that the evidence was either neutral or exculpatory. Only when new information made it impossible to deny responsibility did ISAF admit its guilt in both cases. Perhaps we’re seeing a repeat of that behavior here.
Regardless of the source and possible motivation for all this contradicting information and blatant disinformation, what is clear, based on interviews obtained by our team on the ground in Sangin, is that ISAF troops killed dozens of civilians on July 23.
52 people were killed! We don’t know how many children or women! …The rest of my family is scattered and lost I don’t know where they are. …My mind doesn’t work okay. … My daughter’s in laws were sitting in our house with their other children when the bombing started I saw them get killed with my own eyes!
–Mahmoud Jan Kaka
I saw a child on the floor was injured. I thought he was the only injured one so I took him to the clinic. When I came back my nephew told me that there were more injured people. I tried to pull my daughter from the rubble but I couldn’t. I heard her calling for help but I couldn’t reach her.
–Abdul Zahar
In all of my experiences not the Russians or the Taliban ever did what they (N.A.T.O.) did. …I wanted to go to the government post and tell them to kill the rest of us too as we have nothing to live for anymore!
…In the morning we see bodies with heads, blood and guts everywhere, arms here and legs there. All of my loved ones who were still alive were soaked in blood. We tried to go and identify the bodies; everyone was looking for there missing relatives. There was so much sorrow and pain from those people who were lost in shock.
The most important takeaway from these interviews, aside from the universal attribution of blame to NATO, is that there is absolutely no way that the civilian death toll is in the single digits. One person described losing eight family members; another said he lost nine loved ones; still another lost 11. One of the men, Abdul Barg, insisted that, “the number of martyred were no less than 35 up to 50.” He also related that “every family in the village was placing at least a couple of their loved ones in a bag.”
These video interviews prove what NATO wants to deny. As you watch the footage of these Afghan men and hear their voices crack, it becomes sickeningly clear. U.S. and allied forces killed dozens of Afghan civilians in Sangin.
More than 200 people demonstrated over the July 23 incident in the Sangin district of Helmand province… The protesters shouted "Death to America" and carried banners calling for justice and pictures of children they say were killed in the strike…
This is what our elected officials need to understand: when we debate the war in Afghanistan, it’s not an academic exercise. It’s a string of specific incidents like Sangin, concrete moral outrages that pay us back with increased strategic risk.
Our reaction to Sangin and the other similar catastrophes defines us. That’s why when I go into a voting booth this November, or I get a solicitation for a political donation or a request to volunteer for a federal candidate, I’m going ask, “How did this person respond when he or she heard that we slaughtered the heart of a village? Did this person explain it away? Did they continue to support a policy that ensured more Sangins all across Afghanistan? Or did they finally catch themselves, finally realize that this war ensures the slow death of more children under rubble while parents claw at the pile?” These are the questions I’ll ask myself before I punch the touch-screen at the local library, and if the opinion polls are any indication, I’ll be far, far from alone.
I encourage all of you to visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com to send a note to your elected officials and let them know you’ll be watching what they do in response to this disaster, and that you’ll remember it when you vote in November.
Over on Ms. Magazine‘s blog, Rafia Zakaria takes issue with my response to TIME Magazine’s pro-war, propaganda cover art. Zakaria and I agree on the critical importance of getting women into real decision-making positions in the reconciliation and reintegration processes. However, Zakaria falls right into the bad frame pushed by TIME’s cover art, and in so doing she caricatures my position (and by doing so, attempts to caricature the entire anti-war Left) as being one of total abandonment of any sort of aid to Afghanistan or Afghan women. That’s not my position at all (see below), nor, as far as I can tell, is it the position of the anti-war Left.
As I said in my original post:
TIME’s depiction of the women’s rights issue is based on a faulty premise: that “staying” rather than “leaving” is having the effect of weakening an insurgency hostile to women’s rights. In fact, if we are to believe the official reports from the Pentagon to Congress, the opposite is true. As the first several months of President Obama’s escalation strategy played out, the military reports claim the insurgency gained in strategic and political power in the key areas of Afghanistan. As those trends continue, the political difficulties for women in the eventual reconciliation and reintegration processes increase. Prolonging the massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the regressive elements in the Kabul government will achieve their agenda through “compromise” with powerful insurgent elements during the reconciliation/reintegration processes.
Some sort of reconciliation process is going to take place. When it comes to securing the rights of women in Afghanistan, all other things being equal, sooner is better.
…
As the reader can tell, the issue is far more complex than the farcical “stay or leave” choice framed up on TIME’s shameful propaganda cover art. The U.S.’s massive troop presence and the escalating instability is strengthening the hand of the political forces that want to roll back women’s political equality, so the longer we stay, the worse off women will be as they attempt to navigate the eventual political settlement of the conflict. Yet, U.S. inattention to (or outright malignant influence on) the factors shaping the field for that political struggle are affirmatively hurting the struggle for women’s political equality. We will leave the combat field, and we have to do it soon, and while we leave, we have to do our best to help shape a political field supportive of the Afghan women’s struggle to liberate themselves.
Pulling this off will require a deft hand, and it’s not clear whether the Kabul government or our own government, given the atrophied nature of the State Department, is up to the task. Given the vested interests who have a stake in the existence of the Amnesty Law, repealing it will be enormously difficult in Afghanistan’s political arena (and no one should let the U.S. off the hook for helping to shape this political environment through support for known warlords and war criminals). But what is clear is that using the rights of women as a justification for extending our massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan is a recipe for failure on this issue and for the betrayal and heartbreak of those who care about the fate of Afghan women.
I wrote a long response to Zakaria in a comment submission, which I include below in full.
Thank you for a thoughtful article and for including my arguments among those discussed and critiqued above.
While you are correct that the West is complicit (and therefore morally culpable) in the rise of the Taliban, the same can also be said of the regressive warlords comfortably nestled inside the government. As Sonali Kolhatkar told us while Brave New Foundation was filming Rethink Afghanistan, our backing of the most fundamentalist warlords as pawns vs. the Soviets was really the beginning of the end of women’s political equality in Afghanistan.
We do share several points of agreement – the most critical of which is, as you say, “no withdrawal from Afghanistan should be initiated without ensuring that women are consulted and represented in developing the peace and reintegration program.” I say this in the article you cite.
What I think you’ve neglected in the above is that this exclusion of women in the process is happening right now, under current policy, and the bad framing behind TIME’s cover (keeping a massive U.S. military force is “helping,” while withdrawing troops is “abandoning”) provides cover for this neglect. The Amnesty Law that wipes the slate clean on Kabul-connected warlords’ crimes against women during past conflict and the exclusion of women from the the High Level Peace Council and the Joint Secretariat for Peace, Reconciliation and Reintegration Programs happened or is happening right now with tacit U.S. approval.
Even if we follow TIME’s lead and narrow our alarm about anti-women groups to the insurgency, the U.S. military strategy is still not “helping.” War always disproportionately affects women in general, but specific to this conflict, every indication we have, including official military reports, show that as we’ve added troops, the level of violence has increased and the size and capability of the insurgency has increased. At the very least, current policy is failing to arrest the growth of the insurgency. At worst, it’s directly driving its growth by alienating Afghans and legitimizing insurgents as defenders of Afghanistan against foreign forces.
Nowhere in my article do I question the importance of programs like “literacy and entrepreneurship initiatives for women, civil society seminars designed to encourage women’s participation and midwifery training projects to reduce Afghanistan’s sky-rocketing rates of maternal mortality,” nor do I suggest abandoning them. However, as Nicholas Kristof explains in his recent op-ed, these programs are not synonymous with the military strategy the U.S. pursues in Afghanistan, nor is it true that aid and education programs cannot be run without the umbrella of U.S. military occupation.
I agree Aisha and the other women of Afghanistan deserve our empathy and our best efforts to support their struggle for political equality in Afghanistan. However, I strongly disagree with the notion that foreign military force in general or the current U.S. military strategy in specific represent the best we can do.
Zakaria and I agree on a few very important points, but I think she’s dead wrong that delays in a U.S. troop withdrawal could help the women of Afghanistan. I wish she had taken the time to address the points made by women’s advocates in Afghanistan that are included in the Rethink Afghanistan documentary’s segment on this issue, which is embedded in my original post. Many of those points directly contradict many of the arguments she raises not addressed in my reply. But I’ll say it again: the frame set up on TIME’s cover serves to obscure the neglect of women’s political equality in the current U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and if we want to support the struggle of Afghan women, we have to reject that frame.
Tomorrow, TIME Magazine will treat newsstand customers everywhere to one of the most rank propaganda plays of the Afghanistan War. The cover features a woman, Aisha, whose face was mutilated by the Taliban, next to the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Far more people will see this image and have their emotions manipulated by it than will read the article within (which itself seems to be a journalistic travesty, if the web version is any indication), so TIME should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for such a dishonest snow job on their customers. Readers deserve better.
Let’s clarify something right off the top when it comes to this cover: Aisha, the poor woman depicted in the photograph, was attacked last year, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops tramping all over the country at the time. This isn’t the picture of some as-yet-unrealized nighmarish future for Afghan women. It’s the picture of the present.
Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) recently published report on this issue, The “Ten-Dollar Talib” and Women’s Rights, provides key context for the struggle for women’s political equality in Afghanistan:
Afghan women assert their rights in what is already a deeply hostile political environment. Any assessment of women’s rights, and indeed the prospects for long-term peace and reconciliation needs to be made in the context of the very traditional and often misogynistic male leadership that dominates Afghan politics. The Afghan government, often with the tacit approval of key foreign governments and inter-governmental bodies, has empowered current and former warlords, providing official positions to some and effective immunity from prosecution for serious crimes to the rest. Backroom deals with abusive commanders have created powerful factions in the government and Parliament that are opposed to many of the rights and freedoms that women now enjoy. As one activist told us, “We women don’t have guns and poppies and we are not warlords, therefore we are not in the decision-making processes.”
This is something that folks who put together TIME’s cover better understand right now: the fox is already in the hen-house. There is a very powerful set of anti-women’s-equality caucuses already nested within the Afghan government that the U.S. supports. These individuals and groups are working to reassert the official misogyny of the Taliban days already, independent of the reconciliation and reintegration process. Given the opportunity, these individuals and groups in the U.S.-backed government will manipulate the reconciliation and reintegration process and leverage armed-opposition-group participation in the process to push through policies they’d prefer already as compromises with their “opponents.” This is why the propaganda of TIME’s cover is so pernicious: the women of Afghanistan are caught in a vice already, stuck between their opponents in the insurgency and in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. If one is concerned about the rights of women in Afghanistan, the question is, how do we give women the most leverage possible in this situation?
Further, TIME’s incendiary headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” is a total misrepresentation of the issue discussed in the article. Here’s Aisha in her own words:
“They [the Taliban] are the people that did this to me,” she says, touching her damaged face. “How can we reconcile with them?”
Here’s another quote from another woman that gets at the issue much better than TIME’s headline:
“Women’s rights must not be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved,” says parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi.
And another quote:
“When we talk about women’s rights,” Jamalzadah says, “we are talking about things that are important to men as well — men who want to see Afghanistan move forward. If you sacrifice women to make peace, you are also sacrificing the men who support them and abandoning the country to the fundamentalists that caused all the problems in the first place.”
If we are to believe the setup on the cover and in the article, the women of Afghanistan see two options: the U.S. can “stay” and ensure the rights of women, or we can “leave” by route of selling them out. But that’s neither what the women’s quotes say nor what Human Rights Watch found when they interviewed 90 “working women and women in public life living in areas that the insurgents effectively controlled or where they have a significant presence to illustrate the current nature of the insurgency.” While they found an intense anxiety over the consequences of the Taliban regaining a share of national power, they also found that:
“All of the women interviewed for this report supported a negotiated end to the conflict.”
The quotes of the women in TIME’s article express anxiety about the Kabul government negotiated away women’s rights to warlord war criminals, not us “staying” or “leaving.” See what TIME did there? They’ve taken these quotes from Afghan women and manipulated them to portray a false dilemma.
TIME Magazine throws out this useless bromide: “For Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous.” Early compared to what? How can a pull-out almost a decade into a conflict be remotely described as “early?” Even if we build a shining utopia for women while U.S. troops were there in large numbers, women’s rights would evaporate the day after we departed if U.S. troops were the force holding them in place. That’s what Afghan Women’s Network’s Orzala Ashraf meant when she told Rethink Afghanistan that,
“I don’t believe and I don’t expect any outside power to come and liberate me. If I cannot liberate myself, no one from outside can liberate me.”
The struggle is the liberation as Afghan women discover and use their power. Grassroots involvement in social struggle is what creates societies rooted in democratic values, not men with guns from other countries.
Although you wouldn’t know it from TIME’s editorializing within the article or from the horrendously misleading cover, the issue is not even remotely “if” we leave Afghanistan. We will. The questions are “When?” and “How?”
When
U.S. forces could stay for another twenty years in Afghanistan (would that still be “early?”), and even if they pound Kandahar into dust, no development in the war so far even remotely suggests the possibility of military force eliminating the Taliban as a significant political and armed force. Therefore, the war’s end would still involve some sort of political settlement that involves Taliban (unless, of course, the U.S. wants to guarantee the most ferocious civil conflict possible upon their exit by totally excluding them). At the end of that twenty years, we’d be faced with the same problems regarding the rights of women in Afghanistan, plus the effects of those years of war on the U.S. force and the Afghan population.
TIME’s depiction of the women’s rights issue is based on a faulty premise: that “staying” rather than “leaving” is having the effect of weakening an insurgency hostile to women’s rights. In fact, if we are to believe the official reports from the Pentagon to Congress, the opposite is true. As the first several months of President Obama’s escalation strategy played out, the military reports claim the insurgency gained in strategic and political power in the key areas of Afghanistan. As those trends continue, the political difficulties for women in the eventual reconciliation and reintegration processes increase. Prolonging the massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the regressive elements in the Kabul government will achieve their agenda through “compromise” with powerful insurgent elements during the reconciliation/reintegration processes.
Some sort of reconciliation process is going to take place. When it comes to securing the rights of women in Afghanistan, all other things being equal, sooner is better.
How?
American policymakers, if they are truly interested in the rights of women beyond their use in sloganeering, are going to have to start playing a higher-level game than they are at present. When President Obama took 35 minutes to explain his rationales for his escalation strategy, he didn’t mention women’s political equality once. If they hope to assist the women of Afghanistan struggling for political equality, they need to understand the game and to start playing catch-up ball, pronto.
The most important work is to prepare the field before the negotiations begin. That means two things: getting women in, and keeping the worst of the worst out.
Two bodies will undertake the lion’s share of work on the peace process in Afghanistan: the High Level Peace Council and the Joint Secretariat for Peace, Reconciliation and Reintegration Programs. According to HRW’s report, key assurances have not been given that women would have a meaningful seat at the table in decision-making capacities. At the time of the report’s publication, the High Level Peace Council had not been appointed, but the Joint Secretariat was effectively functioning and no women were included. The extent to which Afghan women can succeed at inserting themselves into the various levels of this process will be a major determinant in the amount of leverage they’ll have to help them defend their rights as the new Afghanistan takes shape. Afghan women’s advocates have shown some adeptness at this sort of agitation: during the Consultative Peace Jirga, women were promised only 10 percent representation. Through intense agitation, they obtained 20 percent. U.S. policymakers who want to help women in Afghanistan have to figure out how best to support the effort of women to get into these decision-making bodies and exert real influence. The U.S. is a prime funder of the Afghan government. It’s time to figure out how to use that leverage for this purpose. That’s why Human Rights Watch makes this key recommendation:
Make women’s meaningful participation in relevant decision-making bodies a precondition for funding reintegration programs, and ensure that reintegration funds benefit families and communities, including women, rather than individual ex-combatants.
That brings us to the touchy subject of keeping the worst of the worst out. This is a touchy subject because the obstacles to getting this done have come into being due to the active and tacit support of the United States.
Let’s talk about just a couple of these obstacles: Hajji Mohammed Mohaqiq and his Amnesty Law.
Mohaqiq was one of the leaders of the notorious Hezb-e Wahdat, which in late 2001-early 2002 targeted Pashtun civilians for violence because of their ethnic ties to the Taliban. According to Human Rights Watch, Hezb-e Wahdat was:
implicated in systematic and widespread looting and violence in almost every province under their…control, almost all of it directed at Pashtun villagers. …[T]here were several reports of rapes of girls and women. In Chimtal district near Mazar-e Sharif, and in Balkh province generally, both Hizb-i Wahdat [alternative English rendering of Hezb-e Wahdat] and Jamiat forces were particularly violent: in one village, Bargah-e Afghani, Hizb-i Wahdat troops killed thirty-seven civilians.
Following the overthrow of the Taliban, Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq managed to get himself appointed as a vice chair of the interim government and as Minister of Planning. During the 2002 loya jirga that set the basic shape of the new government, Hezb-e Wahdat was named by Human Rights Watch as one of the groups that used threats and intimidation against other delegates. Through their use of these thuggish tactics, Mohaqiq’s militia helped corrupt a process which many hoped would lead to greater civilian control relative to the warlords, but which led instead to the warlords’ solidifying their power. Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, of course, retained his positions of power.
But then came the absolutely corrupted 2009 election: Karzai promised to carve out a new province for Mohaqiq in exchange for his support in the election. Karzai “won,” and President Obama declared the government “legitimate.” Then, in January 2010, Karzai quietly slipped the Amnesty Law into effect, immunizing Mohaqiq for his crimes against women. Mohaqiq has since publicly decried Karzai’s moves toward negotiations with the Taliban, but even though he doesn’t support it, his handiwork is a malignant shaper of the process with regards to the rights of women.
Here’s HRW’s summary of the law:
The Amnesty Law states that all those who were engaged in armed conflict before the formation of Afghanistan’s Interim Administration in December 2001 shall “enjoy all their legal rights and shall not be prosecuted.” It also says that those engaged in current hostilities will be granted immunity if they agree to reconciliation with the government, effectively providing amnesty for future crimes. The law thus provides immunity from prosecution for members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups, as well as pro-government warlords, who have committed war crimes.
All through this process, the U.S. was either silent or supportive of these developments, and now the Amnesty Law stands as one of the threats most identified by Afghan women’s advocates to the progress of their political agenda during the reconciliation process. Those most dangerous to the women of Afghanistan–powerful fundamentalist warlords with a history of serious war crimes against women and girls–may find their way into influential negotiating positions where they can link up with their anti-women brethren already inside the Kabul government. The solution posited by Human Rights Watch and by women parliamentarians is to repeal the Amnesty Law and institute strong vetting processes that exclude the worst war criminals from the ballot or from political appointment while still allowing participation of their home tribes or groups. This solution goes hand in hand with that discovered last year by UK’s DFID to be preferred by those in insurgency-prone areas: a new “black list” standard for what crimes disqualify one from election or appointment, applied to everyone, including Taliban, other insurgents, or pro-Kabul-government figures.
As the reader can tell, the issue is far more complex than the farcical “stay or leave” choice framed up on TIME’s shameful propaganda cover art. The U.S.’s massive troop presence and the escalating instability is strengthening the hand of the political forces that want to roll back women’s political equality, so the longer we stay, the worse off women will be as they attempt to navigate the eventual political settlement of the conflict. Yet, U.S. inattention to (or outright malignant influence on) the factors shaping the field for that political struggle are affirmatively hurting the struggle for women’s political equality. We will leave the combat field, and we have to do it soon, and while we leave, we have to do our best to help shape a political field supportive of the Afghan women’s struggle to liberate themselves.
Pulling this off will require a deft hand, and it’s not clear whether the Kabul government or our own government, given the atrophied nature of the State Department, is up to the task. Given the vested interests who have a stake in the existence of the Amnesty Law, repealing it will be enormously difficult in Afghanistan’s political arena (and no one should let the U.S. off the hook for helping to shape this political environment through support for known warlords and war criminals). But what is clear is that using the rights of women as a justification for extending our massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan is a recipe for failure on this issue and for the betrayal and heartbreak of those who care about the fate of Afghan women.
Shorter version: TIME Magazine’ cover art is rank propaganda, and the current U.S. policy is failing women, badly.
Obama, speaking from the Rose Garden after a meeting with congressional leaders to discuss funding for the war and other issues, deplored the leak, saying he was concerned the information from the battleground “could potentially jeopardise individuals or operations”.
…
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said he was appalled by the leaks, telling reporters “there is a real potential threat there to put American lives at risk.”
Now, it may or may not be true that this leak put people in Afghanistan at risk, but I find that to be a very interesting point for this president to be making, considering that the policy and execution of his policy absolutely jeopardizes individuals in Afghanistan and around the world. After all, if you put Julian Assange and President Obama together in a room, only one person in that room is ordering heavily armed people into a hostile war zone filled with civilians. And only one of them is executing a policy that increases the likelihood of a suicide bombing campaign directed at the United States and its citizens and that kills thousands of civilians each year.
This is a tried-and-true warmonger move: according to this canard, it’s those that oppose the war policy or that take action to show the conflict between societal values and actual policies that endanger everyone, not the brutal, costly policy. I would say I was a bit shocked, but this is the same president that stood up during his Nobel Peace Prize lecture and opined about the necessity of war when he feels it’s justified. The President of the United States has tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, thus putting them in harm’s way for a policy that doesn’t make us safer and that causes enormous hardship for those caught in the crossfire. Those who support this policy but are attacking WikiLeaks for releasing this data need to take a good, hard look in the mirror before they jump on Julian Assange for “endangering” anyone.
But he went on to say the material highlighted the challenges that led him to announce a change in strategy late last year that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The policy is due to be reviewed in December.
…
“We failed for seven years to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge,” Obama said today, of the period starting with the 9/11 attacks. That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy,” he said, adding he has also sent one of the finest generals in the US, General David Petraeus.
Insisting that the strategy “can work”, he ended with a plea to the House of Representatives to join the Senate in passing a bill to provide funds for the Afghan war as a matter of urgency.
Help me out here. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the WikiLeaks information is “proof” that the president was right to initiate a massive escalation. If I were the president, this would be the drop-dead last argument I’d be making, because it begs the question: Okay, well, what’s the situation on the ground like now, 7 months into the escalation policy, compared to the time period captured in the War Logs leak?
Short answer: the president should be pining away for the good ol’ days depicted in the WikiLeaks report.
Here’s a chart from the latest Afghan NGO Safety Office report, showing a massive jump in the seasonal peaks in insurgent-initiated violence since President Obama took office and started his repeated escalations.
Organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding.
…
The strength and ability of shadow governance to discredit the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan Government is increasing.
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Insurgents’ tactics, techniques, and procedures for conducting complex attacks are increasing in sophistication and strategic effect.
Lots of change there, apparently. Good work, Mr. President.
Here’s a map from that same report that shows that the Kabul government is falling further behind the insurgents when it comes to winning sympathy or support in key regions of the country (a chart that the Pentagon laughably refers to when it wants to show “progress” to Congress, because they know Congress doesn’t actually read the reports).
Here’s another quote from the same source that compares the level of violence in 2010 to the level of violence at the time depicted in the WikiLeaks material:
Violence is sharply above the seasonal average for the previous year – an 87% increase from February 2009 to March 2010.
Like everyone else, I’m still combing through the documents and reading various summaries and reactions. But I don’t even have to get through any of the WikiLeaks material to see that the president’s attempt to spin this leak as a justification of his policies is totally bankrupt. The publicly available reports from his own administration prove it–no leak required.
