The people of Afghanistan are awesomely proud, strong and just.

[ConsAreLiars]

None of that should be taken to mean I think they are progressives or have put away the most vile aspects of their religious theocracy. But they have caused far less suffering in the world than our own reactionaries and religious fanatics. Just to keep things in perspective before folks get too overwrought.

I had the good fortune to spend a couple months there in my youth, before the US decided to turn it into a war zone. It was as alien a place as I (rural bible-belt raised, but progressive/radical by temperament and through college) have ever been. A few days in Herat, Kandahar, and much more time in Kabul. Almost nobody spoke any English, almost no motorized vehicles except long haul buses and trucks. One paved road that Almost ran from one end of the country to the other. Obvious as outsiders, my (unveiled) companion and I, were treated with respect, not any special "sahib" status, just as equals. Not because of who we were but because, as guests, in their society, it was simply right to provide hospitality.

Intruders, invaders, gangsters, bandits, however, would experience a much different reception, as their whole history has proven many times over.

In Peshawar, Pakistan I was able to to talk at length with an Afghan youth who was returning from an education in England (long story) and helped me get some sense of what ethics, justice, morality meant to people who were raised in that extraordinarily harsh environment. The short version is for family, village, tribe, and ethnic group, in that order, the rule of "an eye for an eye" is absolute. Not vengeance or even honor. Just the difference between being human and being less than swine. The lesson -- brute force power, as the US invaders have attempted, earns neither respect nor submission.

For those who want to to regard the people of Afghanistan as "backward" or "savages," or otherwise less than human, there is a grain or truth in those accusations -- the country is one of the least urbanized, least educated, and poorest on the planet, with one of the harshest environments. Subsistence and survival take first place. But, before the US decided that arming, importing, and organizing religious fanatics would be "a really good idea," progress was being made. In both the elite and among the poorest nomadic tribals (remember that National Geographic cover?). Women were free to go around with their faces uncovered. The statues at Bamiyan were a source of national pride, and the diversity of influences in the history of the nation was celebrated by the few who knew it.

Unfortunately, very unfortunately, the US decided to change the natural dynamic within Afghanistan and to create, empower and provide modern weapons to the Taliban. Who blew those statues up? Chimpy and the PNAC monsters. (Not directly, of course, through surrogates). The statues had survived for a couple thousand years in the custody of the people of Afghanistan, before the neocons who had been put in power by Corporate Hegemonists decided to change things.

So don't denounce the people of Afghanistan and expect the US to "bring progress" to them.

Instead, cry for them, and demand that the US imperialist warmongers get their bloody, murderous, fucking hands off their throats.

[nealmhughes]

1. Beautifully written essay, I must say. I have but little knowledge of the Afghans, but what I do

know is that theirs is an honor society. It has been for a very long time. That is why when governments come and go, invaders along with them, that the culture, albeit somewhat changed by contact, remains in more or less the same in the long duree.

It is hard for a culture that celebrates the individual such as the contemporary West does, to appreciate the emphasis on the family, the clan and the tribe. Governments come and go, but Afghanistan remains Afghanistan. And they are a singularly handsome people -- I have never seen a photo of an Afghan that did not strike me as a portrait of pride itself...heads held high, clothing although not of the newest or even the cleanest, still worn defiantly and proudly as an identifier of their collective identity.

There is, indeed, a lot to admire about the Aghans! Now, would the Islamists Arabs and the Russians and the US and everyone else please leave them alone to their crops and flocks.

[cali]

2. I have great admiration for the Afghani people

but your essay is ridiculous in that you totally ignore the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Sorry, The U.S. may bear a portion of the blame for the Taliban, but there are more players involved than your tritely anti-American to the exclusion of all other influences, suggests.

[ConsAreLiars]

5. If you so admire the "Afghani" people, you might at least give them

the respect of naming them properly.

My comments were not a complete history of the country, but a reminder of the responsibility of "our" government in nurturing religious extremism.

From an essay by Will Pitt: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/042203A.shtml
------------------------------
I have been giving a lot of talks lately at colleges and for organizations about the Iraq war. Always in my remarks I ask the same question. "It has been almost 20 months since the attacks of September 11. It has been over 570 days since the Towers fell. The 9/11 attacks are the principle reason, according to the Bush administration, which justifies the war. Can anyone tell me why those attacks happened? Has anyone in the Bush administration or the media come forth with a reasonable explanation besides 'Evildoers who hate our freedom?'"

...

When I ask my question at these talks, someone in the audience always demands an answer. More often than not, I tell them about Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Afghan Trap. In 1979, Brzezinski was serving as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, and he decided the time had come to challenge the Soviet Union in their own back yard. At this time, Afghanistan was ruled by a communist puppet regime of the Soviets called the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, or PDPA. Brzezinski instituted a plan to train fundamentalist Islamic mujeheddin fighters in Pakistan, and sent those fighters to attack the PDPA. The idea was not to destroy the PDPA, but to make the Soviets so nervous about the stability of their puppet regime that they would invade Afghanistan to protect it. Brzezinski wanted, at bottom, to hand the Soviet Union their own debilitating Vietnam.

The plan worked. The Soviets invaded in 1979, and over the next ten years spent its blood and treasure trying to defeat the Afghan warriors who banded together to defend their country. By 1989 millions of Afghan civilians had been killed, millions more had been internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops had been killed or wounded. In the process, the nation of Afghanistan was torn to pieces. Worst of all, the United States, which energetically worked to start the war, and which armed and funded the Afghan mujeheddin once the war was underway, did absolutely nothing to aid ravaged Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew. Brzezinski proudly described the Afghan Trap in an interview he gave to a French publication called Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs <"From the Shadows">, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

How innocent we were in 1998. How gravely we misjudged the dire ramifications of empowering the Taliban. How profoundly we underestimated the strength of the "stirred-up Moslems" we armed and trained with American tax dollars. What a price we have paid.

------------------------------

[JNelson6563]

3. Many good points, well written piece

Now I may get flamed mightily for this but I have often wondered, why are the people of Afghanistan so proud? Their main export is heroin and poverty and starvation seems to be everywhere. Even before we obliterated the country as we have.

What am I missing? Is it because it is one of the roughest, toughest outposts of Islam and they manage to survive it? I am hard pressed to come up with anything else. It reminds me of the medieval mindset in Ireland, itself one of roughest, toughest outposts of Christendom at the time but with perhaps a bit more to recommend it than Afghanistan.

Julie

[ConsAreLiars]

6. I think the comparison to medieval Ireland is accurate.

"Proud" is probably a bit misleading in that it carries some implications in English ("I'm better than you") that I never felt. More to do with a strong sense of surviving adverse conditions for hundreds of generations and a sense being an integral part of a greater whole -- family, clan, tribe, land. Islam was the religion, but it more of an overlay onto these relationships than a cause, at least as I saw it.

The history section of the Wikipedia article on Afghanistan might help you get a better sense of the basis of their pride as a people or nation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#History .

When I was there it had the feel of being an intact society undergoing gradual change. By getting pushed into the dollar economy the local subsistence economies have been undermined, and turning to cash crops like opium has been one result. Instead of walking, horses and camels for transportation, they now need gasoline, or money. Instead of defending themselves against marauders with hand crafted single shot rifles and knives, they now must turn to the international arms merchants.

[JNelson6563]

7. Thank you for that great reply!

Very informative. Glad I was kinda right on that feel for things.

It seems so unjust that people whose county has been a big part of human history are now suffering at the hands of "modernization".

Cheers,
Julie

[ConsAreLiars]

10. You might be interested in some photo galleries

that show Afghanistan before it was turned into yet another killing field by the "great powers."

http://www.lukepowell.com/
http://richardmcguire.com/travel/asia/afghanistan/img0005.htm
http://www.pbase.com/qleap/afghan_1

[ShaneGR]

4. I get the feeling you were in Afghanistan before the rise of the Talibani?

Because under Taliban rule women were centainly not allowed to wander around with their faces uncovered. Or work. Or go to school. Or that Afghanistan as a whole was generally destroyed by the Russians, not the Americans.

http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/10/02/fatima/

[ConsAreLiars]

9. My goal in posting was to remind people to distinguish between the

traditions and people of Afghanistan and the practices of the US/Saudi funded Taliban. My experience there was before the US policy makers decided that launching a "holy war" against the Soviet allied government in Kabul and causing the slaughter of a million people was "a good thing."

[cynatnite]

8. I kind of thought the Soviets changed the natural dynamic...

when they invaded. After they left the Taliban took over and from there things went downhill. The US came in, was making some decent progress until bush's war in Iraq took precedence. Now, it's worse than it ever was.

Yes, the US is to blame, but not for all of it. I put it equally on the Soviets and the Taliban as well. I'll never forget their destruction of Buddha statues that were thousands of years old and the innocent people they murdered in the name of their deadly brand of religion.

Just sayin'.