Even Time Magazine recognizes this affront on civil liberties. The U.S. government claims to be supporting women’s rights through its occupation of Afghanistan. Perhaps the government does not want us to hear the hard truth about life after “liberation”? Call the State Department today to express your outrage.

By Ann Wright

British Army Lance Corporal Joe Glenton faces court martial for refusing to return to Afghanistan. He defied a direct order by his commanding officer to not participate in the in the Saturday, October 24, 2009, Stop the War march in London.

Challenging his military command, Glenton told the 10,000 gathered for the march: “I expected to go to war but I also expected that the need to defend this country’s interests would be legal and justifiable. I don’t think this is too much to ask. It’s now apparent that the conflict is neither of these and that’s why I must make this stand.

“It is distressing to disobey orders, but when Britain follows America in continuing to wage war against one of the world’s poorest countries, I feel I have no choice. Politicians have abused the trust of the army and the soldiers who serve, that’s why I am compelled and proud to march with the Stop The War Coalition today.” http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1561/1

On the day that the United States suffered the greatest number of deaths in its 8 year war in Afghanistan and in the month with the most casualties, an American diplomat assigned in Afghanistan resigned. As one of three U.S. diplomats who resigned in March, 2009 in opposition to the Iraq war ( http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0303/032103wright.htm ), I had been wondering how long the next resignation from the U.S. government over war policies would take.

Six weeks ago, on September 10, 2009, U.S. diplomat Matthew Hoh sent a letter of resignation to the Director General of the State Department over his concern about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Hoh had served six years in the U.S. Marine Corps and had one combat tour in Iraq as a Marine Corps Captain and a second tour in Iraq as a Department of Defense civilian.

Hoh, who had been in Afghanistan five months as the Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. government is Zabal province, questioned “why and to what end” the United States is in Afghanistan. Hoh said that “Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state while encouraging and an ideology and government unknown and unwanted by its people.”… “The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led by non-Pashtun soldiers and police provide an occupation force against which an insurgency is justified.” “The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan contributes greatly to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.”

Hoh described the Afghan government as corrupt and said “Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.”

He commented that the US support “for the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the people from their government. The Afghan government’s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars appear legion and metastatic:

–Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;

–A President whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;

–A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and power brokers allied with the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation, and;

–The recent electoral process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government’s military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf?si…

Senior officials in the State Department including US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke tried to get Hoh to stay in the State Department arguing that if he “wanted to affect policy then he should be inside the state Department, not outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won’t have the same political impact.” Holbrook even said that he “agreed with much of Hoh’s analysis, although not his conclusion that the war wasn’t worth the fight.”

On Friday, October 23, Hoh decided not to remain in the State Department and made his resignation effective on that date saying he had decided to speak out publicly because “I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/matthew-hoh-afghanistan-resi…) Hoh’s resignation became public with the Washington Post article on October 27, 2009 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR200910…

I was in Afghanistan three weeks ago, returning for the first time since I helped reopen the US Embassy in Kabul in December, 2001. Eight years ago I had hopes that a short term United States presence might help the Afghan people out of the cycle of violence and that roads, schools and clinics could be built quickly before our “welcome” was worn out. The Bush administration’s diversion to invade and occupy Iraq short-circuited those hopes.

Now eight years later, there is little security in the country, despite 100,000 international troops, including 68,000 U.S. military, plus 90,000 U.S. trained Afghan soldiers. According to a senior Army logistics officer, Afghanistan’s roads are mined by insurgents forcing 180 U.S. military outposts to be resupplied by helicopters. “We don’t have freedom of movement on the ground,” a senior Army logistics officer says. “We’re resupplying between 30% and 40% of our forward operating bases by air because we just can’t get to them on the ground.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091027/us_time/08599193238600

In the three weeks since I left Afghanistan, Taliban forces breached the “secure” road in front of the Indian Embassy where 18 months ago they blew up virtually the entire building. Today, the Taliban exploded a car in Kabul at a United Nations guest house and seven were killed. http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091027/us_time/08599193238600

When senior policy makers will not be honest with decision makers, sometimes it’s the more junior government employees who have the strength of character and courage to tell their Presidents and Prime Ministers when they and their policies have no clothes.

Matthew Hoh and Lance Corporal Joe Glenton have proven to be voices of conscience for us all.

About the Author: Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.” (www.voicesofconscience.com). ]]> http://codepink.org/blog/2009/12/an-american-diplomat-and-a-british-soldier-tell-their-leaders-they-have-no-clothes-no-to-the-afghanistan-war-strategy/feed/ 0 http://codepink.org/blog/2009/11/grittv-womens-roundtable-on-afghanistan/ http://codepink.org/blog/2009/11/grittv-womens-roundtable-on-afghanistan/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:51:03 +0000 Paris http://codepink4peace.org/blog/?p=2503

CODEPINK’s Jodie Evans joins Kristen L. Rouse, founder of Veterans for Afghanistan; Nasrine Gross, President of Roqia Center for Rights, Studies and Education; and Yifat Susskind, communications director for MADRE on GritTV last week to discuss Afghanistan.

Also in the show, the bravest woman in Afghanistan, Malalai Joya.  She is currently touring with her new book, A Woman Among Warlords:  The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.  Check out her current book tour through the U.S.

I thought day one was as interesting as a day could get. But day two was more so. We went to the office of the NGO, Cooperation for Peace and Unity. It’s program director, Mirwas Wardak, talked for over an hour but it seemed like 5 minutes. Have you ever thought about “donor harm”? Sounds like an oxymoron but the US made it a reality. One particularly interesting example is what happened when the US donated money to the Muhajadeen to publish schoolbooks. Great idea! The only problem was that the books were a compendium of violent acts. “If there are five Russian soldiers and you kill two of them, how many are left?” Elementary school math. A little gore makes the brain work better?

CPAU is researching the sources of radicalism and, guess what? We are part of the problem! Bad governance with no accountability (eg, Karzai) and the presence of international forces (eg, US) create radical Afghans. (Go to www.cpau.org and get an eyeful) This is not to say that Afghans love the Taliban. They don’t. They just hate their government and foreign occupation—the way we have been doing it—more so!

We keep hearing about security, justice, education and economic development, mostly in that order. In every case, though, security is the overarching concern. The Taliban, oddly, offers a perverse kind of justice and therefore enjoys a loyalty that is otherwise hard to comprehend. Though more often than not the justice they deliver is itself unjust, it is swift.

People see the Karzai government as a huge engine of corruption where the wealthy and powerful get away with whatever they want, often at the expense of the people. Here’s the rub: people KNOW that the occupiers are going to leave before the Karzai government can make them secure. As a result, many maintain “good” relations with the Taliban in anticipation of the time when the Taliban inevitably will be resurgent.

To say this country and its problems are complex is to define understatement. Most of the people with whom we have met believe that civil war will follow a withdrawal of foreign troops if their own military is not effectively trained. They want us here–but don’t.

Mirwas is convinced that Pakistan is at the core of our dysfunctional policy. The sanctuary that Pakistan provides the Taliban on its borders, he insists, serves to empower the Taliban. They believe that the US will not risk endangering its relationship with nuclear-loaded Pakistan. And Pakistan keeps the Taliban fat and happy, essentially flipping the US the middle finger.

That said, nothing can really change for the good if the government continues to be controlled by dishonest, corrupt people, especially when those people are being supported by the country’s biggest donor—the United States.

On that cheerful note, we left for a meeting at a UN compound where the women who work there regularly get death threats. As a feminist, I am often frustrated by the shallowness of my country’s commitment to women’s rights. By comparison, the UN’s commitment is deeply shallow! Yet these intrepid UN representatives in Kabul are pushing forward on their investigation into how women are being used—and abused—in the enduring conflict that is Afghanistan.

It is a myth that women voted in any appreciable numbers in the last “election”, seen by everyone with whom we spoke as a total fraud. In fact, there was a massive failure around the participation of women in the election. The civic education necessary to bring them into the process was virtually absent. One in ten women’s voting places, which are separate from men’s, were not even staffed. There were voting stations that never even opened which nonetheless had huge tallies. Fraudulent elections do not define democracy—or, sadly, maybe that’s exactly what they do.

The UN spokespeople, with whom we met, have the daunting task of trying to build civic and professional options for women in a country where women are not even perceived as a real constituency. One of the most blatant examples of that reality is the Shia Personal Status Law. Signed into law by Karzai in the spring, it infamously legalized marital rape. The law also made it illegal for a female to exit her home without the company of a male family member. Illegal for a woman to speak in public with a male not related to her. And it even created an official Vice and Virtue Police.

Enraged, an astonishing group of 300 women did the unheard of, risking their lives and mounting a protest outside one of the mosques built by Mullah Ayatollah Mosheni, a warlord whose puppet in the Parliament, Mohammad Taj, is the principle backer of the law. Many more women tried to join the protest but were blocked by Mosheni supporters from getting there. Over 1,000 angry men poured out of the mosque and started throwing stones at the women. Fortunately, the police had the sense to intervene before the demonstration turned tragic.

Karzai agreed to listen to the women and form a commission to revise the law. No woman was on the commission and no woman has been allowed to see the results. Karzai is not alone, Richard Holbrook routinely holds meetings in the region without so much as one woman participant. Apparently he never read the UN Security Resolution #1325 which states that “all parties to a conflict” must be represented in political negotiations. Your tax dollars at work! We have to start demanding, “Where are the women?”

Women in Afghanistan who assume roles outside the home run a serious risk of being assassinated. They are being killed simply because they are women and the rising acceptance of this phenomenon should horrify any civilized person. Afghan culture virtually dictates the abuse of women. Physical and economic security is an Afghan woman’s main concern. And the US is only pouring bucket-loads of money into too many wrong places.

The entrance to our next stop was surreal. In front was an open sewer—ubiquitous in Kabul—with rubble and garbage strewn in every direction—also ubiquitous in Kabul. The street was badly rutted and unpaved—the norm in Kabul. We entered the battered looking building to find a tiny dark room that lead to some rather odd, old stone steps that took us down into a beautiful garden. The backside of the building was almost Victorian. We reentered another part of the building to find ourselves in a conference room dominated by a huge table with 14 very cushy leather chairs around it. In came Mirahmad Joyenda, a Member of Parliament who doubles as the head of The Foundation for Civil Society and Culture. Did he ever have an agenda!

He thinks Afghanistan needs more troops but only in consultation with the Afghans. He believes that any additional troops should be dispatched to the borders—especially the one with Pakistan. Security is his main priority. The only way real way for the country to become secure is through building the nation’s military and police. And that is not going to happen unless the government offers more pay than the Taliban offers. Even with that, the cost of one US soldier in Afghanistan equals the cost of 60-70 Afghan soldiers. He said Pakistan is a major source of support for the Taliban.

He wonders how we could get 400,000 troops trained in Iraq in less time than it has taken to train 60,000 Afghan troops, many of whom are lured away by the Taliban for higher pay. In a country where 60% of it people live on less than a dollar a day and the illiteracy rate approaches 75%, is it any wonder that the Taliban can be so attractive?

There are 42 countries doing “work” in Afghanistan. He said none shares information or intelligence with the others. Many are there purportedly to alleviate women’s status. Yet he thinks women outside Kabul are worse off now than they were in 2000. The former head of the Afghan Women’s Network in Kandahar was murdered last month for implementing a music program in the girls’ school where she taught.

Our next stop was the Afghan Civil Society Forum where its director, Aziz Rafee, a very gentle, soft-spoken highly intelligent man, gave us a tidy list of crises facing Afghanistan today. Afghans do not trust their government or each other. They live in deep poverty where a family of five needs at least $200 a month to get just their basic nutritional needs met. Yet they can expect to earn no more than $50 a month. Seventy-five percent of families have only one worker. Think what our economy would look like if 50% of the population—women—were out of the work force. Dependent on outside countries for much of what is supplied in the country, the government cannot provide even a small percentage of the country’s technical or industrial demands. Afghanistan cannot even pay for its own elections.

Echoing what the MP told us, there is no coordination among the dozens of countries plying their forms of good will in Afghanistan, a victim of conflicting, uncoordinated agendas. There needs to be some entity coordinating all the aid aimed at Afghanistan that rarely hits its mark.

The Taliban, whose core mandate is to prevent effective government, is represented in Parliament but I was unable to find out the exact number. But they do form a critical mass. Aziz told us that 100% of the Taliban in Parliament is Pashto, a tribe from the south. Karzai and 85% of the Ministers are Pashto as well. Eighty percent of the money spent by government goes to the south and only 20% goes to the north. One ethnic group with so much control makes a unified country nearly impossible.

As a victim of war—he lost his wife to the Northern Alliance and his 18 year-old son was paralyzed in an attack—he spoke movingly about the need for justice, a concept sorely lacking in his country. To have justice Afghans need security. To have peace, they need justice, education and nutrition. With Karzai, he says, justice is not even on the horizon.

From Jodie Evans:

I am just returning from my 10-day trip to Afghanistan. As we left, a farm was bombed and eight members of a family were killed. Eight U.S. soldiers also lost their lives in an insurgent raid on their outpost. And today marks the 8th anniversary of the US Invasion of that war torn country.

We have spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in those 8 years and what have we got for all that time, money, and suffering? Most of the country is in worse condition, the Taliban have been growing in strength and number, the bordering countries are more unstable and death fills the air.

We went to hear what the women of Afghanistan thought about the push for more troops. We spoke with journalists, doctors, activists, NGOs, members of government, and average Afghan women. Most of the women do not want more troops. Instead, they need support to sustain their lives. They want that money spent on what we really need to bring peace: investment in the people of Afghanistan.

Everything we have done in eight years has no plan – just short-term solutions with long-term catastrophic effects. Afghans want education, jobs, healthcare, infrastructure. They want us to send troops of doctors, teachers, engineers and business leaders – not more soldiers. Yet we have continued to support a situation that fuels insurgency instead of a sustainable culture. Ninety percent of the funding to Afghanistan is used for military spending and only 10 percent has been used for development. Obama already authorized an additional 21,000 troops this year and Gen. McChrystal is expected to ask for an additional 40,000 troops.

Member of Parliament and gynecologist Dr. Roshnak Wardak speaks about the situation in her province. We have to do all we can to stop another surge. As Americans, we need to stand with the women of Afghanistan and fight for development, not troops.