Has the status of Afghan women improved since the 2001 war and 2005 elections?
Since 2001 women have suffered anew the dangers and deprivations of war, the increased militarization of society, and worsened male violence in the chaos of war. Misogynist warlords permeate the national government the Parliament, Cabinet, and the extremely conservative Judiciary. They have imposed restrictions on women comparable to those of the Taliban - to wit the Shiite Personal Status Law passed in summer 2009 which permits men to starve their wives if they refuse sex, denies women legal guardianship of their children, requires wives to have their husbands' permission to go outside, and allows rapists to pay their victims rather than face criminal justice.
Women activists -- including the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan, Malalai Joya (illegally banished from the Afghan Parliament for exposing the corruption and criminal past of many warlord Parliamentarians), and Afghan expert Ann Jones -- report that equal rights for women was a "feel good" fiction used to sell the 2001 war and to prop up the markedly corrupt Karzai government established in 2005.
President Obama's recent decision to escalate the war disregarded the fate of Afghan women, a point made obvious when he failed to cite their extreme plight in his December 2009 war speech at West Point. According to Joya, the mujahideen, the warlords in government, and the Taliban are one and the same for women: "It's as easy to kill a woman in my country as it is to kill a bird." (4)
Does U.S. military aid for development in Afghanistan serve humanitarian purposes?
Military aid for development crept into recent U.S. wars as the component of counterinsurgency (or COIN) which would win the hearts and minds of the civilian population under siege. Ten percent of the war budget in Afghanistan is allocated for "humanitarian" aid such as school and health clinic building, bridge repair, road building, and so on; and it is administered through USAID. A new investigative report on USAID Afghanistan development projects finds that the agency is understaffed in the field and fails to manage, visit or audit their programs -- a recipe for waste, corruption, fraud and extortion. Further, USAID projects have recklessly bloated budgets which are mismatched with the local development needs of villages and result in ineffective projects. Finally, it is alleged that project contractors pay up to 20% of project costs to the Taliban for security "a protection racket" which funds those against whom we are waging war.
The strategic goal of U.S. military aid for development is to support war objectives and, only secondarily, the lives of Afghan people. For this reason, even this pitiful percent of the war budget is problematic for humanitarian agencies. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now targeted by militants because they are associated with the U.S. military, given that military development projects resemble NGO projects. CARE International has testified to the endangerment that military development aid embedded within war has caused their agency. CARE's neutral status, which has allowed them safe passage to reach and rescue civilians, is gone the collateral damage of counterinsurgency strategy as codified in the 2006 Army Counterinsurgency Manual. A dozen prominent humanitarian agencies including Save the Children, CARE, and the Catholic Relief Services -- issued a report in spring of 2009 critiquing the "militarization of aid" as a contamination of and endangerment to the genuine humanitarian work in war. (5)
Historic Role of the United States
What role did the United States play in the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda?
The CIA initially supported Afghan fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas or mujaheddin with weapons and war resources against the pro-Soviet government in 1979 in order to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and fatally mire the USSR in their own Vietnam. After the Soviet invasion, the U.S. escalated its aid in weapons and war resources to the Afghan militants throughout the 1980s. USAID funded a companion strategy in the early 1980s -- the development of textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren which were filled with jihad images and text, including weapons, soldiers, landmines, and tales of heroic violent resistance to the Soviets. The books continued to be used through the 1990s and were still widely available in 2002, when the story broke. This inculcation of violence through US-funded children's textbooks was sustained in Pakistani refugee camps and madrassas filled with war-orphaned boys of the Soviet-Afghan conflict. The camp and madrass culture set the stage for the violence and misogyny of the Taliban, the next generation of mujaheddin.
The U.S. venture to build a militant anti-Soviet base in Afghanistan also generated the Al-Qaeda network. In the 1980s, tens of thousands of fundamentalist Muslims, among them Osama Bin Laden, were recruited by the CIA and its collaborators from numerous countries to military training camps along the Afghan/Pakistan border to join in the guerrilla war against the Soviets. The U.S. and Pakistan provided military trainers, weapons and war resources; and Pakistani and Afghan military leaders were secretly brought to military bases in the United States for warfare training. "What Washington was not prepared to admit was that the Afghan jihad, with the support of the CIA, had spawned dozens of fundamentalist movements across the Muslim world." (Rashid) (6) Virtually all leaders of Islamic terrorism and terrorist attacks over the past 30 years, including Osama bin Laden and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have their roots in the covert U.S. military training and aid to the Afghans in their war against the Soviets.
What role did Pakistan have in the present conflict and what are the implications of the spread of war to Pakistan?
The roots of Pakistan's current crisis with the Taliban go back to the early 1980s. CIA and Pakistan money, training and weapon support to the Afghan mujaheddin during their war against the Soviets enabled militant fundamentalists to build a base in Afghanistan, a country whose majority had belonged to a liberal Sunni sect. Pakistan then continued to support the Taliban in their takeover of Afghanistan from the mujaheddin and warlords in the 1990s as U.S. involvement waned. Pakistan's role in supporting the mujaheddin and Taliban has contributed to the war in Afghanistan burgeoning into a regional conflict. It assured that Taliban and Al-Qaeda driven from Afghanistan during the current U.S.-NATO war -- could escape into Pakistani border areas, towns and cities.
Pakistan is a highly militarized country with nuclear weapons, extreme inequality and poverty, a tense relationship with their nuclear rival/neighbor India, and an unstable government a very risky situation in which the United States is expanding the war into Pakistan through counterterrorism. Three and a half million people were rapidly displaced by violence in the SwatValley of Pakistan shortly after the Pakistan military began a US-supported offensive against the Taliban in that region. Dr. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar predicts that the Taliban will grow with recruits from the local Pakistani population as the military offensive continues: "the longer the war continues--and it has only just begun in this region--the better the chances that the Taliban will recruit from the refugees." (7)
What is the impact of U.S. drone attacks to date?
The CIA has launched scores of drone attacks in the tribal regions of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border over the past 1 years, aiming for "high value" Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The White House authorized an expansion of drone attacks in Pakistan timed to coincide with the December 2009 announcement to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Estimates of militants and civilians killed in the attacks vary wildly: One of the best approximations is that 750-1000 people have been killed since 2006, of which 32% were civilians, 20 were high-level Al Qaeda, and the remaining were lower level militants. The CIA drone success rate, as measured by its goal of assassinating top-level militants, hovers between 2 and 2.5%.
