"What Happens If We Stay In Afghanistan?": Response To TIME Magazine

Sunday, 15 August 2010

The August 9, 2010 issue of TIME magazine featured a striking cover photograph of an 18-year-old Afghan woman, Aisha, who was disfigured by the Taliban last year (http://www.time.com/time/ world/article/0,8599,2007269, 00.html). The cover title read, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.” While Aisha’s story and the stories of many other women like her may depict some part of the reality of women’s lives under the Taliban, TIME’s conclusion that continuing the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is necessary, is highly misleading and troubling.

Afghan women, like women around the world, have lived under very oppressive conditions for decades. Many women remain indoors, without education or health care, or economic security, have early marriages, and are unprotected from domestic violence. Today, after a decade of the U.S.-led occupation, the lives of Afghan women have become worse, not better: in addition to facing continued oppression under the Taliban and the equally oppressive Northern Alliance, they also live in a war zone.

TIME’s statement echoes and resurrects the same justification for the war given during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan: if U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan, any rights gained for Afghan women will be reversed by fundamentalist forces. However, this false logic grossly ignores the history of the U.S. imperialist relationship and presence in the region and its effect on women’s rights. During the Soviet occupation in the 1980’s, the U.S. armed the anti-Soviet Mujahideen forces, who were at one point led by Osama Bin Laden. In subsequent years the Taliban rose to power, with the Unitd States as its ally. In 2001, when the Bush administration sought to topple the Taliban regime, the United States armed and enlisted the help of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of warlords with its own track record of human rights abuses. Indeed, the United States has consistently chosen the side of fundamentalist allies at the expense of Afghan women, and has always sought its own gains in the region.

In its nine long years, the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan has done nothing to improve the conditions for people in Afghanistan, especially for women. As the classified documents recently leaked by WikiLeaks.org corroborate, the coalition forces have been killing hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the 2009 civilian death toll, close to 2,412 civilian deaths, was the highest of any year since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, and an increase of 24% from 2008. There has been a general increase in violence and civilian deaths because of occupation. A Human Rights Watch Press Alert in 2005, stated that up to 60% of law makers in the lower house of Afghanistan’s newly elected parliament are directly or indirectly connected to human rights abuses. By 2009, the U.N. human development index ranked Afghanistan 181 out of 182 countries. The maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan reveals the highest ever documented. Over the past decade, the immensely corrupt, U.S.-backed Afghan regime led by Hamid Karzai has passed and maintained numerous misogynist laws, including the one that put Aisha in jail after she fled from her in-laws.

For the last decade, the occupying forces of the U.S. and its NATO allies have nourished warlords and supported a corrupt government, leading many to join the Taliban and increasing their influence across Afghanistan. Increased civilian deaths, a fundamentalist resurgence, and deadly bombing raids have led to a devastated country and a Taliban stronger than ever before. TIME’s claim to “illuminate what is actually happening on the ground” falsely equates the last decade of occupation with progress. The occupation has not and will not bring democracy to Afghanistan, nor will it bring liberation to Afghan women. Instead, it has exacerbated deep-seated corruption in the government, the widespread abuse of women’s rights and human rights by fundamentalists, including Karzai’s allies, and stymied critical infrastructure development in the country. The question should not be “what happens if we leave Afghanistan,” the question should be “what happened when we invaded Afghanistan” and “what happens if we stay in Afghanistan.”


more: http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1-/13685-qwhat-happens-if-we-stay-in-afghanistanq-response-to-time-magazine.html

Since if done to help the people, and not for profit then it has good reason. Although hard to do that with bombs isn't it.

"I heard Aisha's story from her a few weeks before the image of her face was displayed all over the world. She told me that her father-in-law caught up with her after she ran away, and took a knife to her on his own; village elders later approved, but the Taliban didn't figure at all in this account. The Time story, however, attributes Aisha's mutilation to a husband under orders of a Talib commander, thereby transforming a personal story, similar to those of countless women in Afghanistan today, into a portent of things to come for all women if the Taliban return to power. Profoundly traumatized, Aisha might well muddle her story, but what excuses reporters who seem to inflate the role of the Taliban with every repetition of the case?"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/14-7

The author of Time's cover story has a personal financial stake in our continued occupation and involvement in Afghanistan. She's married to a tech "entrepreneur" who's making a mint from the occupation directly, benefiting from military sourced contracts, as well as from the Afghan govt which won't be paying him another cent if the US withdraws support and it collapses.



Here's the thread about it at DU, which sadly sank like a stone - much like the other thread you linked to which reveals that the girl with no nose has told versions of her story in which the Taliban don't appear.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8935984#8941527

Don't get me wrong, Aisha has done nothing I would blame her for in strategically embellishing her story. No doubt she was coached by people "who just want to help her tell her story" that blaming her father in law would get her an instant of heartfelt pity from Americans, but that blaming the Taliban would make her a cause celebre, would attract powerful allies and supporters, and would finance the reconstruction of her face. She has done nothing that merits blame. Her "Coaches", however, are perpetrating a malicious propaganda campaign against the American public which will result, if they succeed at their jingoism, in many American kids needing reparative surgeries like Aisha's, and in thousands of amputations, broken minds and bodies, and funeral services for the KIAs and suicides.

I despise those who use the plight of women in Afghanistan to justify war, when is Time magazine going to run a story on the plight of women in Saudi Arabia? They won't because Saudi Arabia is a US ally and they don't want to focus on the abuses by those who help their economic interests. Time's reasons for supporting the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with women, if they were concerned about women they would also show concern for the women killed by US bullets and bombs, they would care about the women of Saudi Arabia, and they would care about the women right here in the US who suffer abuse at the hands of Christian fundamentalists. Time is not truly concerned about women, they are simply using women to justify an unwinnable war that has killed thousands of people many of whom were women and children. They use women as a propaganda tool to justify the unjustifiable, but where are they when a US ally abuses women? They are nowhere to be found.

chimpy style.