September 3, 2006
Ted Rall speaks a hard truth here, one that goes unspoken across the political spectrum, including among innumerable anti-war dissidents:
"The war against Afghanistan is no different, no more justifiable, and no more winnable than the war against Iraq. Both were underfunded, poorly planned and based on lies. Neither had anything to do with 9/11."
The absence of this truth from the national discourse guarantees that the country will continue to barrel down the dangerous, self-defeating road of misguided militarism. You should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
Taking Our Brain Off the Ball (via The Smirking Chimp)
…. George W. Bush's war against Iraq, most Americans believe, was a distraction from the war on terrorism. But so was Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has been in Pakistan since before 9/11. Bush knew that. Nevertheless, he bombarded the military dictator of Pakistan, who financed the Taliban and Al Qaeda's training camps and hosted bin Laden, not with cluster bombs but with millions of our taxdollars. He never tried to catch Osama.… In order to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public, Bush and his caba l of ideologues stooped to all sorts of grotesque lies: WMDs for which they had no evidence, linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, calling him "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," claiming that we would be "welcomed as liberators" by rose-petal-flinging throngs, and that we'd liberate so much oil that the war would pay for itself. And why wouldn't they have lied? They'd used analogous propaganda to con us into bombing 18th century Afghanistan back to the 14th. The Taliban, Bush lied, had refused to turn over Osama. (Actually, they had [offered]. But the Taliban were lying too. Since bin Laden was in Pakistan, the Taliban couldn't turn him over.) We came to liberate Afghans from Sharia law and the burqa, yet both remain. Life for Afghan women today is just as harsh as before, only more dangerous.
...Five years later, the canard that Bush neglected the good war against Afghanistan to start a bad one against Iraq is beginning to unravel. "Nothing that [Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai] promised has materialized," Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told The New York Times. "Beneath the surface, it is boiling." Afghans chant "Death to Karzai!" in the streets of Kabul. "Corruption is so widespread, the government so lethargic and the divide between rich and poor [are] gaping," reports the Times.
… A person's stance on Afghanistan has become a national litmus test on one's political intelligence. That includes semi-antiwar Democrats like Hillary Clinton. Anyone who can't see that Afghanistan is as much of a distraction as Iraq from the war against those who attacked us on 9/11--political and religious figures in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt--is a fool. They don't want peace. They want to replace one pointless and distracting conflict with another. Republican or Democratic, such people deserve neither our respect nor our votes.
UPDATE: Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL, New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.
He described the figures as "alarming" and "very bad news" for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001..."This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent," Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.
He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,00 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005.
"It is indeed very bad, you can say it is out of control," Mr. Costa said Friday in an interview before the announcement...."The southern part of Afghanistan was displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption," he said in a statement released by his office.
Note: Carlotta Gall is a former colleague of mine at the Moscow Times: an outstanding, courageous reporter who in those days was calling in stories – sometimes at the front lines, with shellfire in the background – from Chechnya, during the first Russian assault there in the mid-1990s. (Safe back in Moscow, I'd often have to type in her stories as she dictated them over the crackling phone lines and satellite connections from Chechnya.)
Carlotta, a British national, is now one of the most credible voices in the American media, working for the New York Times. What she sees and discovers, she reports: no spin, no agenda but the truth. Much of the NYT's reportage is suspect and skewed in various ways, but when you see her byline, you know you are getting the straight goods.
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