Once again we present a
view from a different source. This is on the US puppet government of
Afghanistan and its treatment of women.
From Trouthout.org:
Janine Jackson: Some
jokes write themselves. When we learned negotiations on Afghanistan suggested
the possibility of an end to the grueling 17-year war, the longest in US
history, the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “Fearing What Could
Follow a Quick Exit.”
The US invasion and
occupation have devastated the country and killed more than 100,000 people. But
consider, cautions the Washington Post: “An end to
the Afghan war is desirable, but not at the expense of everything the United
States has helped to build there since 2001.”
What and who is
missing from such conversations around the current talks about Afghanistan, and
from the talks themselves? Phyllis Bennis directs the New
Internationalism project at the Institute
for Policy Studies, and is author of numerous books, including Ending
the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer, co-authored with David Wildman. She
joins us now in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.
Things are in flux;
things are changing, absolutely. We’re recording on February 13. What do we
know about the nature of these ongoing negotiations?
I would say, first of
all, it’s always important for there to be negotiations. Wars
end with negotiated settlements, before, during or after massive killing. So
having those talks after such a long time is a good thing.
It’s a good thing that
the US has finally acknowledged that the Taliban exist. They
in fact control, depending on who you believe, somewhere between 50 and 70
percent of the country’s territory. So they’re obviously a force that has to be
reckoned with, and has to be part of the negotiations. That’s all good.
If we look at
who’s not at the table, then it’s a little more problematic.
The Afghan government is not at the table. That’s not the worst thing in the
world. The Afghan government is as corrupt as governments come.
The Taliban has
refused to talk to the Afghan government on the theory that they are nothing
but puppets of the United States, which is mostlytrue, probably
not entirely true. But they certainly are not an independent
actor.
More importantly,
however, who’s not at the table includes women, crucially, particularly because
the US claim is that the war in Afghanistan is grounded in the need to “protect women.” We hear this in the
mainstream press all the time.
We also are not
hearing from Afghan trade unions, Afghan farmers, Afghan tribal or religious
leaders; we’re not hearing from youth leaders. We’re basically not hearing from
any of the Afghan people. So that’s a serious problem.
In some ways, a
greater problem is who is at the table. So talks between the
US and the Taliban — not a bad thing. But on the US side, who’s leading those
talks? Well, it’s a guy named Zalmay Khalilzad, who’s a longtime cohort of the Bush family, a longtime oil
guy. He worked for Unocal in the 1970s and ‘80s.
He was one of these analysts assessing the “threats” they would face in
different parts of the world.
And one of the things
that he’s most known for — it was written up in theWashington Post, back
in the mid-’90s — about an incident that had happened in 1995, I think it was,
when Zalmay Khalilzad went to Afghanistan and brought back with
him — this is during the Afghan civil war, when the Taliban was fighting against a coalition of warlords
known as the Northern Alliance; the Northern Alliance, of course, backed by India at the time against the
Taliban, which was backed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the
US. In that period, he came back to the US, back to Houston, with a delegation
of the Taliban to negotiate pipeline deals.
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