CIA Document Calls For Using Afghan Women as Messengers to Humanize the War

Once more we are being played for suckers!

Published on Saturday, July 31, 2010 by Feminist Peace Network

CIA Document Calls For Using Afghan Women as Messengers to Humanize the War

by Lucinda Marshall

The August 9th issue of Time Magazine, with a cover picture of an Afghan woman, horribly disfigured last year because of the Taliban, is meant to pull at American heartstrings as it asks what will happen to Afghan women if the U.S. withdraws from the country. It has caused considerable comment in numerous publications and blogs (see below for links), including on the Feminist Peace Network blog.

Several serious issues have been raised: first that this appears to be a reduction of facts to support the war effort, and secondly that it is yet another callous use of women's lives to justify war. Reading the article in full (and I've seen a copy of the print edition), as well as the excerpt online, one is left wondering if the article is simply a piece of military propaganda. Time editor Rick Stengel, in his introduction to the article, seeks to frame it as a contribution to the existing debate about the war:

"The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead."

But here is something you can find in one of the WikiLeaks documents, entitled, "CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum: Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission-Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough". The document, assessing how to shore up support in Germany and France for the war, begins with this summary:

This classified CIA analysis from March outlines possible PR strategies to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. After the Dutch government fell on the issue of Dutch troops in Afghanistan last month, the CIA became worried that similar events could happen in the countries that post the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF mission. The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in NATO. The memo is a recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential/No Foreign Nationals.

It includes sections with the following titles:

•"Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters"
•"...But Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash"
•"Tailoring Messaging Could Forestall or At Least Contain Backlash"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/31-3

Afghan women are being used as pawns in the propaganda war to drum up support for continuing the war in Afghanistan.

The US pals in the Northern Alliance were among the worst human rights abusers when it came to women and girls. Had the Taliban been a willing partner with US imperialist designs, and the Northern Alliance been on the other side, we would be ignoring Taliban atrocities on women and focusing on the the Northern Alliance's instead.

You are using them to slam the CIA.

I don't need to slam the CIA. The CIA has a long record of criminal activity across the world.

You posted the OP, with the comment:"Once more we are being played for suckers!"

Sorry, I don't find it appauling to be made to recognize the plight of women, or a people anywhere.
That doesn't mean I agree with the war, I do not.
Bush started this war, Obama did not.

Who has expanded the use of drone strikes, not just only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but elsewhere in the world?

Who has claimed a power reserved only to absolute monarchs: the power to order the killing of a citizen without due process?

Who is shamelessly using the plight of women only in Afghanistan, not in Saudi Arabia, to cynically drum up support for an unpopular war?

that Obama would pull the troops out the minute he took office? Ignoring everything on the ground?
Sorry but that would be height of irresponsibleness on Obama's part if he did that.

I think this war should have never happened, but it is what it is, we are already there. We were there when Obama took office.
Obama is trying to end it responsibly. To pull everyone out immediately would be irresponsible.

I don't think they are using Afghan women to drum up support for the war, in my view it's high time we do recognize the human side of it, instead of being kept from it, like the damn Bush administration did.

The power to kill citizens without due process, is hyperbole, and a fear tactic.

and resulted in the needless deaths of thousands.

is being realistic in my views.

I hate this damn war with a passion. I hate any wars, we should have never been there.
If I had my choice, I would love to bring everyone home, right this very damn minute.
But that is not realistic, and a personal point of view.

The only thing this Administration will accomplish in Afghanistan, as the Nixon Administration did in Vietnam, is to increase the number of graves in our national cemeteries.

"unwinnable", which I happen to believe you are correct IMO, it doesn't mean that you get pull out "right fucking now".
That's irresponsible.

Taking the simple argument, do you think it's logistically possible to pull everyone out right now, this very minute? With that many troops on the ground, taking into account they are being targeted daily, how is that possible?
It has to be done carefully, and over time. Otherwise even the "rescuers" will be targeted.

with our blessings.

You tell our soldiers that the folks that are trying to kill them will eventually end up as part of Afghanistan's government because that's the only way the US government can save face! See what reaction you get.

You cannot pull that many troops out immediately.
That's a logistic nightmare, and not possible.

Get out as quickly as we went in, if not faster, is something our troops can do very well. Politicians are the ones having problems extracting from problems of their own making.

much you would like to believe that they can get out as quickly as they went in, doesn't make it so.

It may appear that way to you, but it doesn't take into account the reality of logistics.
I think this war has got everyone frustrated, and rightfully so. There are no easy answers.

Much of the equipment we got there can be abandoned in place because it would be cheaper to do so, than to haul it back to the States to fix it.

that is admirable. I agree they could leave all the equipment there, and it would be cheaper.
I'm not worried about the equipment. I'm worried about lives. There are lives being lost daily over there.
Do you think that we could pull out immediately and the Taliban or any of the enemies would just turn their heads?
There would be a huge uptick in violence against our troops and those "rescuers" coming to get them.
Why give them that big of a target? It has to be done responsibly and carefully.

Our leaving now will save American lives!

What we lack is the political courage and will to make it so.

I don't want to see more names added to a future black marble monument in Washington, DC.

There is a timetable for withdrawal. By July of 2011, I believe. That is next year, not 10 years.

This has nothing to do with political courage, what it has to do with is American lives.
I don't want to see more names added to black marble either. I hear what you are saying, and I agree with that.
War is horrible, and the cost to American lives has been tremendous already.
I just don't want to run the risk of that number being made greater, because it was politically the smart thing to do.

SunsetDreams, I understand your arguments. Yet I found them very familiar because they reminded me of the arguments from back in the late 1960s that 'we just can't pull out of Vietnam and leave a mess.' Yet, that's what happened.

I'm curious about whether you were a teenage back in the late 1960s, as I was. How about you, IndianaGreen?

that saw the Kent State shootings, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Detroit riots, and the needless carnage in Southeast Asia.

I am also a military veteran that still has ties to the military. I don't want to see a new generation of troops get used and discarded by the political elites in our country.

We didn't "invade" Afghanistan for women.

who knows why Bush the fuck up did it, I know what we were told.

Here's the reality, we could stay there for a thousand years and the day we decide to pull out, all hell is going to breaking lose.

We're not going to change that, no matter how hard we try.

It's nice to believe that we could leave Afghanistan as a beacon of light to democracy, but peace and democracy at the point of a rifle are neither.

Many of them never brought this up as an issue at all when we went there in the first place, and it's clear that some are just using these women to cover up their own desire to stay in Afghanistan. It wasn't an issue for them until their other rationalizations failed. Now the sudden;y care about the women. And I have some nice beach front property in Missouri to sell...

An endless quagmire does not help the women there.

Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

Some of the feelers to the Taliban are being put out by the Karzai government and some by the Pakistanis. Some, eventually, will be handled by General Petraeus and other military officials. Contacts are being kept under wraps, several officials said, because any evidence that insurgent leaders are talking to American or Afghan officials could be used against them by rival insurgents.

Another factor that has spurred talk of reconciliation is a classified military report, called “State of the Taliban,” prepared by Task Force 373, a Special Operations team composed of the army’s Delta Force and Navy Seals, which has captured insurgents and taken them to Bagram Air Base for interrogation.

While the report does not offer a silver bullet for how to deal with the Taliban, one official said that for the first time, it gives Americans and their allies “a rich vein of understanding of why the Taliban was fighting and what it would take them to stop.” The report depicts the Taliban as spearheading a fractured insurgency, but one in which conservative Pashtun nationalism and respect for Afghan culture are both at play, this official said.

Despite deep American concerns about Pakistan’s trustworthiness as an ally, Pakistan has also emerged in recent months as a potential agent for reconciliation. Mr. Karzai has held at least two meetings with General Kayani of Pakistan. American officials say they believe that their talks have not yet delved into the details of negotiations with insurgent leaders, but Pakistan is eager to play a role in talks with the Haqqani network, a major insurgent group based in the country that has close ties to its intelligence service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/world/asia/01afghan.html?pagewanted=2&hp

If the Taliban will ultimately end up in the Afghan government, why are we asking our troops to die and suffer today at the hands of the future Afghan government? Let's bring them home now!

War may rarely be justified. But I'd have a hard time opposing one if they actually gave the reason that it was for the women and due to their treatment. Not that this would ever happen. I recall wanting us to attack Nigeria when it was in the news they were going to stone a woman in one of the provinces. If there were a US government that wanted to go after Saudi Arabia over it (rather than the oil) that would be tough to oppose.

The problem is here the right wing is cynically using that to get liberals on their side.

while laudable isn't really practical, invading Nigeria may have saved that woman from a stoning, however she probably would have died from one of our cluster bombs, is that any better? The Military should not be used as the world's police or the world's "liberator", the military, to be frank, sucks at that.

we would be in an endless state of warfare.

Darfur, Somalia, Sierra Leon are only the tips of the iceberg. We have to move from country to country along parts of Asia and Africa and by the time we finished it would be the year 3500.

Here was Robert Fisk's take on the Afghan situation before he returned to his home in Lebanon. Fisk was the only British correspondent in Kabul when the US first bombed the city in the aftermath of 9-11. Fisk was the first reporter to see civilian casualties, including babies, killed during B-52 strikes on Afghan villages.

Robert Fisk: 'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

Thursday, 27 November 2008

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai's government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape – one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul's death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, "gender-sensitive" Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban's ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nobody-supports-the-taliban-but-people-hate-the-government-1036905.html

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/727873---liberation-was-just-a-big-lie



Does she humanize this war enough?

Her words were largely ignored by those in America that adhere to the heretical view of American Exceptionalism.

and she's a harsh critic of Karzai regime and of the warlords and drug cartels that both Karzai and the United States tries to cut deals with.