Taliban revisionism, historical amnesia
A friend of mine sent me the link to rethinkafghanistan.com yesterday. “Demand Civilian Solutions for Afghanistan… Watch the documentary”. Sounds interesting. You can go through the Mimsy archives all you want and you’ll never see me defending the Afghanistan invasion. The basic hope—a free Afghanistan—is sound, but Afghanistan is a mountainous hell that has defeated several empires. It will take a strong national will for us and them to maintain a free society there. A non-military solution would be awesome. So what is this Civilian Solution we’re to demand? Let’s glance through the six parts of their documentary. Which one will we need to watch to learn about this solution?
- The evils of military escalation.
- The destabilizing effects of war.
- The staggering costs of war.
- The civilian costs of war.
- Are women really better off going to school than staying home under the Taliban?
- The war can’t be won anyway.
- Make money now! Sell our DVD on your site!
A lot about war, but where is the promised solution? Other than the DVD Tupperware scheme?1
A friend of mine who watched it says that the message of the DVD is that the Taliban weren’t really so bad. They were just passive Melanie Griffith landlords with Al Qaeda tenants played by Michael Keaton. And everyone who’s seen Pacific Heights• knows how hard it is to get rid of Michael Keaton. It wasn’t their fault!
If there’s one thing that pisses me off on a gut, reactionary level, it’s this sort of enemy-of-my-enemy revisionist historical amnesia. Just because you don’t like United States military intervention in a country, you don’t have to whitewash the crimes of the groups fighting us.
You want to argue that we should leave Afghanistan to the Taliban, fine, argue that. But don’t pretend to a deadly figleaf of “civilian solutions” or that a bunch of pre-genocidal murderers are really nice guys when you get to know them. Not when what you really mean is “just let the Taliban oppress Afghans and keep us out of it.”
You don’t need to pretend that the Taliban are good to argue that war is bad. You can argue that it isn’t right to use war to keep a people free, without arguing that their oppression is noble.
Of course, even that’s not the real purpose of this historical revisionism. This argument is solely to provide cover to people who for years have argued that we should leave Iraq because Afghanistan is the good fight. If the parties were reversed—if the Taliban had left Afghanistan and Al Qaeda remained, they’d be arguing that Al Qaeda were just a bunch of misguided priests, unwittingly used by the Taliban. Like most historical revisionism, the argument doesn’t matter; all that matters is the pre-drawn conclusion.
But the Taliban isn’t something we just discovered after September 11, 2001. It was obvious they were going to erupt in some bloody way all the way back to the Clinton years. They were never a passive “landlord” sitting back helplessly watching Al Qaeda kill. Theirs was a murderous, repressive regime that destroyed ancient religious icons of religions they disagreed with, that viciously beat “criminals” whose crime was owning a television set, or a satellite dish, or a stereo. Women were locked in their homes under threat of being dragged into the street and beaten. Women were forbidden employment, education, and health care2, and were forbidden any voice in public society, from appearing on radio and TV, to being visible on the balconies of their homes. Even places with “women” in their names were renamed.
The Taliban were well on their way to a Rwanda- or Khmer Rouge-style mass murder program. I’d like to know what these “civilian solutions” are before handing the Afghan people back to those “landlords”. And if we are going to just leave (and there certainly are arguments for that) then we should argue it honestly without pretending that we’re implementing a non-existent “civilian solution”.
If the Taliban gets back in we’ll be right back where we were in 1998-2001, watching helplessly while women are stoned to death in public stadiums, ancient wonders are wantonly destroyed, and knowing that one morning we’ll wake up to the news that the Taliban have found their internal enemy. Then, as in Rwanda, as in Darfur, as in Iran, we’ll watch as millions of women or students or intellectuals or Hazara or whatever enemy they choose are offered as a sacrifice to our indifference. We’ll sigh as we read editorials lamenting the international community’s inability to form a coalition to stop the slaughter. And we’ll sign petitions in English that no one in Afghanistan will read.
Seriously: “Sign-up for our DVD referral program and earn $5 dollars for each Rethink Afghanistan DVD sold through your blog or web site. It’s very simple to get started, so take a minute and sign up now!” Operators are standing by! It’s one of the few jobs available to women under the Taliban, because they can do it in their homes, at least until their phones are confiscated.
↑Women were forbidden from receiving any health care without a close male relative as chaperone.
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Before 9/11
- Afghanistan: Humanity Denied (October 2001) (PDF)
- “Women living in Afghanistan have suffered massive and systematic violations of their human rights under the Taliban. Women are forbidden to take employment, to appear in public without a male relative, to participate in government or other public debate, and to receive secondary or higher education. The discrimination is cumulative and so overwhelming that it is literally life threatening for many Afghan women.”
- Annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999: Afghanistan
- “In a 1998 survey, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) found that 22 percent of the female respondents surveyed reported being detained and abused by the Taliban; of these incidents, 72 percent were related to alleged infractions of the Taliban’s dress code for women. Most of these incidents reportedly resulted in detentions that lasted 1 hour or less, but 84 percent also resulted in public beatings and 2 percent resulted in torture.”
- Report on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan (10 January 2000) (PDF)
- “There is growing and disturbing evidence that armed conflict in Afghanistan is now chiefly directed against civilians. Increasingly, civilians are treated as ‘the enemy’. Gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law include forced displacement, summary execution, abduction and disappearance of young women, use of child soldiers, the indiscriminate use of landmines, separation of menfolk from their families, arbitrary detention and forced labour.”
- The Taliban’s war on women (PDF)
- “The Taliban is the first faction laying claim to power in Afghanistan that has targeted women for extreme repression and punished them brutally for infractions. To PHR’s knowledge, no other regime in the world has methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest, prohibiting them on pain of physical punishment from showing their faces, seeking medical care without a male escort, or attending school.”
- UN Urged to Prevent More Killings as Taliban Offensive Continues: Human Rights Watch
- “Western diplomats, UN officials, and Western aid workers say thousands of Hazaras, mostly males, were killed in front of their families in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of the anti-Taliban alliance in northern Afghanistan, when the Taliban captured the city last month. According to aid workers, young men over 16 had their throats slit, while younger boys and women had both hands chopped off at the wrist.”
Today
- Afghan women fear a retreat to dark days
- “More than a quarter of Afghanistan’s parliamentarians are women. A woman now governs the northern province of Bamiyan. Millions of girls are in school. Yet these advances are increasingly vulnerable to erosion at the hands of an emboldened insurgency. In the past three months, Taliban supporters in the south assassinated Afghanistan’s leading policewoman and threw acid on teenage schoolgirls.”
- Hazara at Wikipedia
- “The Hazara are a Persian-speaking ethnic group who live mainly in the central region of Afghanistan. They are overwhelmingly Shia Muslims, with a Sunni minority, and comprise the third largest ethnic group of the country with about 10% of its population.”
- Military, Intel Sources: Obama’s Lying About Risks of Afghanistan Stategery: Ace at Ace of Spades HQ
- “Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the Taliban and other Pakistan-based groups that are fighting U.S.-led forces have much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11, would allow the terrorist network to re-establish bases in Afghanistan and would help Osama bin Laden export his radical brand of Islam to Afghanistan’s neighbors and beyond, the officials said.”
- Taliban at Wikipedia
- “The Taliban’s extremely strict and ‘anti-modern’ ideology has been described as an ‘innovative form of sharia combining Pashtun tribal codes,’ with radical interpretations of Islam favored by members of the Pakistani fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam organization. Sharia law was interpreted to ban a wide variety of activities hitherto lawful in Afghanistan. The Taliban do not consider Shias to be Muslims. The Taliban also declared the Hazara ethnic group, which totaled almost 10% of Afghanistan’s population, ‘not Muslims’.”
- Taliban treatment of women at Wikipedia
- “Women were forced to wear the burqa in public, because, according to a Taliban spokesman, ‘the face of a woman is a source of corruption’ for men not related to them. They were not allowed to work. They were not allowed to be educated after the age of eight, and until then were permitted only to study the Qur'an. Women seeking an education and their teachers risked execution if caught. They were not allowed to be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male chaperone, which led to illnesses remaining untreated. They faced public flogging and execution for violations of the Taliban's laws.”
- ‘Code Pink’ rethinks its call for Afghanistan pullout
- “Many women, primary victims of such groups in the past, are adamant that international troops stay until a sufficient number of local forces are trained and the rule of law established.”
More Afghanistan
- Peace is a deal
- Afghanistan isn’t the first time the left has denigrated the idea of making deals for peace. The left has never wanted to negotiate peace in the Middle East or elsewhere. They’ve always preferred unilateral disarmament. But without deals for peace, what we get is Afghanistan. Peace is always a deal. The absence of deals is barbarism.
- Drug war undermining Afghan, Iraqi peace
- Prohibition continues to fund terrorist organizations, and we continue to pour money into maintaining prohibition. Prohibition is, as it has always been, one of the best and easiest means for criminal organizations to grow.
More genocide
- A little hypocrisy in Ron Paul reporting
- If you support a hypothetical war against Germany just to end the holocaust how can you oppose the much easier war against Iraq to end the genocide there?
- Hangover on Miracle Monday
- “There is a right and a wrong in the Universe.” So, yeah. Good morning to you, too!
- The ultimate question of Bush, Iraq, and genocide
- News sucks. Really, I just don’t understand how headlines and stories are chosen. Dog bites man can be a story, if that man is George Bush.
- When is it right to stop mass murder?
- The question about the war in Iraq isn’t how many people died. It’s whether or not we can ever be justified in removing another government that engages in mass murders of its own people.
- Hotel Rwanda
- Great movie, great story, great acting on Don Cheadle’s part. You must see this.
Sometimes I think the best solution in mires like Afghanistan is just to make sure everyone who wants to emigrate can. Unfortunately, this would still require a major military presence to ensure that people who want to emigrate are allowed to; and what kind of a solution is “leave home forever”?