John Pilger describes what he saw in Afghanistan on a visit earlier this year. To say it's heart breaking would be to put it mildly.
In a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July, Human Rights Watch has documented atrocities “committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001” and who have “essentially hijacked the country”. The report describes army and police troops controlled by the warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons; the widespread rape of women, girls and boys; routine extortion, robbery and arbitrary murder. Girls' schools are burned down. “Because the soldiers are targeting women and girls”, the report says, “many are staying indoors, making it impossible for them to attend school go to work”.
In the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they drive; they are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even an unrelated taxi driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a “chastity test”, squandering precious medical services to which, says Human Rights Watch, “women and girls have almost no access, particularly in Herat, where fewer than one per cent of women give birth with a trained attendant”. The death rate of mothers giving birth is the highest in the world, according to UNICEF. Herat is ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld endorsed as “an appealing man... thoughtful, measured and self-confident”.
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Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies were put in front of their houses”, Marina told me. “Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story — you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11, 2001.”
Afghanistan's tragedy exemplifies the maxim of Western power — that Third World countries are regarded and dealt with strictly in terms of their usefulness to “us”. The ruthlessness and hypocrisy this requires is imprinted on Afghanistan's modern history. One of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War was the United States' and Britain's collusion with the mujaheddin, and the critical part they played in stimulating the jihad that produced the Taliban, al Qaeda and 9/11. http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/556/556p12.htm
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