Zalmay Khalilzad Is Not Fit To Represent The United States In The United Nations

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1856/81/

The occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States is not only based on misguided policies, denials of truth and glaring political realities, it is also guided by ignorance and profoundly distorted notions of the cultural foundations and social complexities of these devastated countries. The poverty of the framework of the administration’s policies and behavior is clearly available in the publicly expressed views and writings of Zalmay Khalilzad, who has served as a major cultural and scholarly authority on Afghanistan and Iraq for the US policy making apparatus. Khalilzad’s thinking and the neo-con passions to which he subscribes are the seed bed on which the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan is sown.

The former American Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq and currently the nominee as UN ambassador has profoundly distorted and deficient knowledge about societies and cultures of the Middle East, specifically Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, if his public pronouncements are any measure of his knowledge, he possesses a novel understanding of the basic principles of the structure and dynamics of human society. In his August 23, 2005 appearance on the PBS NewsHour NewsMaker segment Khalilzad made the astonishing claim that “compromise does not come easy in this part of the world, that the word compromise does not exist in the Arabic language, and when I served in Afghanistan, the same problem existed there as well. The word compromise did not exist in the Afghan language as well”. It is shocking for a US ambassador to such vitally important posts, to speak and think like this.

Ambassador Khalilzad’s condemnation of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to compromise-deficiency is starkly contradicted by extensive cultural, linguistic, and ethnographic evidence from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The cognitive and behavioral ability for compromise exists in all corners of human communities. Social life, as we know it, would be virtually impossible without the flexibility which the universal intellectual ability and practice of compromise offers.

Arabic is not the only language spoken in Iraq and at least six languages are spoken in Afghanistan. Dictionaries of Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Paxtu, Baluchi and other languages in the region contain elaborate linguistic labels and cultural constructs for the equivalent of the English concept of “compromise”—a settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions. The extensive ethnographic record about the Middle East, Central and South Asia is replete with unambiguous evidence for not only the existence of the concept “compromise” in the cultures of these regions but also for the creative and varied application of this vital intellectual construct (and ways in which it facilitates consensus) in the social, political, and economic lives of the people in these regions. These culture areas contain rich traditions for peaceful disagreement, dialogue, compromise, concord and consensus. In fact, no other region of the world has more elaborate and complex procedures, tactics, strategies, and rituals for bargaining and compromise than the organized cultural and social spaces in the countries stretching from Morocco to the Indus and on to Southeast Asia.

Claiming that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq lack the intellectual and behavioral capacities to produce compromise is all the more disturbing since Mr. Khalilzad has been hired by the Bush administration as the chief scholarly authority on the peoples and cultures of the Middle East and the frontline political operative in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has played central roles in the planning and implementation of the destabilization and attempted reconstruction of the two countries. Khalilzad played a major role in the production and management of the mujahidin terrorists who caused the collapse of the state infra-structure of Afghanistan and the emergence of the Taliban movement. During the 1990s he negotiated on behalf of UNOCAL with the Taliban regime and openly recommended its recognition by the United States. But when UNOCAL decided not to pursue its involvement in Afghanistan, Khalilzad changed his mind and announced his opposition to the Taliban regime.

good thing there`s a little over a year left.