The Forgotten War

[Paladin]

Caught Bill Moyers on PBS this evening, and watched among other things an interesting interview with Sarah Chayes. Having an insiders view of the goings in in Afghanistan she is leading an effort to move people away from growing poppy plants and into other lucrative endeavors.

And all this makes me wonder, if the Taliban are taking the country back over to the degree she says, why are we putting all our attention on Iraq?

Check it out:Bill Moyers Journal . Home | PBS

[juantoo3]

It does raise questions about the opium trade...

[seattlegal]

Originally Posted by article

What exists down there is very valuable crops. Almonds, apricots. It's fruit crops mostly. To me, the way to attack opium is to compete with it. Like let's make it possible to make a living and not— you don't have to import some exotic new plant. They've got almonds, they've got apricots, they've got pomegranates. They've got Cumin, they've got anise seed. Wild pistachios. We're putting all this stuff in our soap. Why isn't there a fruit juice factory in Kandihar? It's the pomegranate capital of the world.

Wouldn't a pomegranate juice factory become a target of the control freaks {under some made up ideological principle to hide the real economic reason behind it?}

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Paladin

And all this makes me wonder, if the Taliban are taking the country back over to the degree she says, why are we putting all our attention on Iraq?

This may be true in the US Paladin but I wouldn't say that it's the forgotten war as far as people in the UK (and the media are concerned). This may partly be due to relative troop numbers and casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think there is also relatively more (and more vocal) opposition to the Afghan war in the UK.

s.

[Tao_Equus]

I was going to, ( I deleted a few 100 words), start on a rant here but no point preaching to those who already know the score.

But i agree the war in Afghanistan is in the UK still quite prominent news. heavily propagandised news usually but news none the less.

Tao

[wil]

In the US generally Afghanistan is considered part and parcel of 9/11 therefor ok, Iraq is the thorn in our sides.

Some interesting tidbits from along the way...(from memory, some conspiratorial??)

• Afghan supplied oil and wheat and resources to Russia hence our reason to support Osama et al in the first place, to weaken Russia.
• Poppies were introduced as a crop more valuable to the farmers than what was sold to the Russians
• Once Russia moved out we quit supporting the freedom fighters and went to creating the pipeline across the country
• Taliban grew in power, eliminated the poppy problem, increased power of radical Al Queda types, Conoco left the country and testified before congress that they wouldn't go back to work on the pipeline until Taliban was removed.
• 9/11 Osama now bad guy, plays hide and seek, US again uses typical foreign policy our enemy's enemy is our friend.
• Warlords empowered, Taliban removed, pipeline completed, 90% of heroin again comes from Afganistan
• Which brings us back to today, unhappy Afghans rejecting US policy and returning to an Islamic state which will again bring order, with the religious law and oppression of the past....

[Paladin]

Rant away Tao

In the US whenever we hear of Afghanistan it is the Bu$h and Co telling us how peachy things are. I wonder how many people will respond to the Chayes interview and ask questions. If the Taliban are back in control are we not right back where we started?

[Pathless]

Sarah Chayes offers some good insight.

Originally Posted by SARAH CHAYES

You know, there's a title of a book that's come into parlance now. Clash of Civilizations. There are a lot of people, I think, both in the West and in the Muslim world, who believe in clash of civilizations. Who want to see the world as a place dominated by two irrevocably hostile blocs. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I think that we live in an interconnected world full of rich, flawed, varied civilizations that are inextricably intertwined. And, so what I'm doing in Afghanistan, is working for that intertwined world.

...

I would say that Osama bin Laden and certain members of our government are actually on the same team. Because they're working toward, they want to split the world apart, into two poles that are enemies. I'm on that other team.

Thanks for linking, Paladin.

[Pathless]

Originally Posted by Paladin

Rant away Tao

In the US whenever we hear of Afghanistan it is the Bu$h and Co telling us how peachy things are. I wonder how many people will respond to the Chayes interview and ask questions. If the Taliban are back in control are we not right back where we started?

It makes me think about Obama and how he keeps saying that the war in Iraq is the wrong war to be fighting, that the focus should be on Pakistan. As you may have gathered, I'm not pro any war (just like my brother wil); but I do wonder, if Pakistan has been funding and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, wouldn't our resources be better focused on working on that problem? Diplomatically?

[Pathless]

This, from what I understand, is also exactly what is continuing to happen in Iraq:

Originally Posted by SARAH CHAYES

In this particular metaphor, we're the sheriff, right? We're going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don't ask them anything about how they're governing. We don't demand-- all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we've fed them money, we've fed them arms, and then we say to the people, "okay, you're supposed to hold your government accountable." they're looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, "you want us to hold them accountable?" So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.

[Pathless]

A very relevant article detailing the mis-identification and abusive treatment of "enemy combatants" rounded up and sent to Guantanamo and other, more sinister secret prisons, during the lead off episode of the "War on Terror": Afghanistan. It also offers some long-overdue analysis of the connections, or lack of, between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as a discussion of the United States military's pact with the Northern Alliance and, from time to time, the Taliban.

Excerpt:

Originally Posted by Afghanistan: The Brutal and Unnecessary War the Media Aren't Telling You About

Holland: OK, let me go back briefly to an earlier point. Supporters of Bush's global network of "black" prisons say that those who ended up in them were "unlawful combatants." And you said that a lot of people from around the Muslim world were drawn to serve as foot soldiers in Afghanistan's civil war, but in the book, you also make it clear that many were not even foot soldiers -- not combatants at all -- but religious students, aid workers and other adventurous young people, and many of them would later get caught up in the chaos that followed the invasion and ended up at Gitmo.

Worthington: Yes, that's right. I'd say that between 70 and 100 of the foreign -- non-Afghan -- detainees had traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, to teach or study the Koran, as economic migrants, or even because they were curious about the "pure Islamic state" that, in some quarters, the Taliban was alleged to have established. A similar number were captured in Pakistan. Charity workers were captured near the border, where they had traveled to provide assistance at refugee camps, and others -- including missionaries, entrepreneurs, economic migrants, refugees and students -- were actually captured elsewhere in Pakistan, in towns and cities far from the "battlefields" of Afghanistan.
And then, of course, there are the Afghan detainees, who made up over a quarter of Guantánamo's total population. Many of these were unwilling conscripts, who were forced to serve the Taliban, and most of the rest were picked up either on the basis of false intelligence -- because the U.S. forces did not know who to trust -- or were handed over by their rivals, in business or in politics, who told false stories to the Americans.

Holland: And what was the process by which the U.S. military sorted out one from the other -- how did they distinguish between "enemy combatants" and the poor suckers that were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Worthington: There was no process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff -- or the fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.
In Afghanistan, however, not only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were processed, noted in his book The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo on the orders of senior figures in the military and the intelligence services, who received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait.

Full article:

AlterNet: ForeignPolicy: Afghanistan: The Brutal and Unnecessary War the Media Aren't Telling You About

[Muslimwoman]

Originally Posted by Pathless

It makes me think about Obama and how he keeps saying that the war in Iraq is the wrong war to be fighting, that the focus should be on Pakistan. As you may have gathered, I'm not pro any war (just like my brother wil); but I do wonder, if Pakistan has been funding and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, wouldn't our resources be better focused on working on that problem? Diplomatically?

Interesting point Pathless, I was just saying to my husband yesterday that I see Pakistan as being one of the greatest threats to peace.