Media Monitors: Afghan resistance causing political unrest in Canada

[tuvor]

Afghanistan is sinking into a black hole, but this is not what the rulers of the West, whose forces are busy killing Afghans, will admit. They continue to talk as if all is well and that the Afghans are happy to be "liberated" by gun-toting foreigners who shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. Hunger, lawlessness and drug-peddling (Afghanistan now supplies 92 percent of the world's heroin, according to one UN report) stalk the war-ravaged country, even as Western officials prattle about non-existent progress. A highly critical report released on September 5 by the Senlis Group, a non-governmental organization in Brussels, has found widespread poverty and hunger in the country. The report also pulls no punches: it exposes corruption among Afghan officials and their American masters, who are stealing billions of dollars by means of ill-conceived ‘aid' projects.

One such project was the Kabul-Qandahar highway; instead of getting competitive bids, USAID awarded it to the American company Louis Berger Group for US$700,000 per kilometre. Non-American companies were prepared to do the work for US$250,000 per kilometre. The Louis Berger Group then subcontracted the 389-kilometre highway to Turkish and Indian firms but still charged one million dollars per kilometre: the money was added to Afghanistan's burgeoning debt. Action Aid, a South African NGO, has described such transactions as "phantom" aid: the money never leaves the US but adds to the supposed recipient country's debt. The highway is already crumbling, and has led Ramazan Bashardost, Afghanistan's former planning minister, to complain that when it came to building roads the Taliban did a better job.

Last month, when the new session of the UN General Assembly met in New York, US president George W. Bush and his Western allies, especially Britain and Canada, were profuse in their boasts of the "progress" they had made in the lives of ordinary Afghans. Bush's poodle-in-waiting, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, speaking to an almost empty hall on September 21, thundered that Canada's military will not cut and run from Afghanistan. Canadian forces are operating under NATO cover, but nobody has bothered to explain which coast of the Atlantic Ocean landlocked Afghanistan is situated on. This is clearly an expansion of NATO's role from defending Europe against a threat from the erstwhile Soviet Union to venturing into new lands (especially Muslim, ones) to advance the US's agenda.

Foreign occupation forces, however, are getting nowhere in Afghanistan, even in military terms. More than half of Afghanistan is now firmly under the control of the Taliban, who have regrouped, and are better organised and much more determined than before to fight. Having got a bloody nose both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has handed over the heavy lifting to NATO, especially Britain and Canada, whose forces are operating in Southern Afghanistan, which is a traditional stronghold of the Taliban. Such provinces as Helmand and Qandahar are almost completely controlled by the Taliban, and an increasing number of ordinary Afghans are joining them because they are appalled by the brutal manner in which foreign troops treat them. Barging into people's homes, shooting and killing without reason, and insulting Afghans (especially women) have turned most Afghans against the occupiers of their country.

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/36618