As for the advancement of the human rights of women, much ballyhooed by American politicians and others, a report filed by the independent Afghan Rights Monitor in December 2012 tells a more accurate tale. It describes merely 10 of the many women assassinated in recent years because of their "work and ideals": "women's development activists, a doctor, two journalists, a provincial lawmaker, a teacher, and a police officer."
Assassinated only two weeks ago was a courageous veteran police lieutenant named Nigara, who once stopped a suicide bomber by grabbing him in a bear hug. Men on a motorcycle shot her in the neck from behind as she stood waiting for a government bus to take her to work. She was the senior policewoman in Helmand Province, having taken over the duties of her predecessor Islam Bibi, assassinated only three months earlier in the same popular drive-by style.
No Afghan has ever been brought to trial for any of these assassinations, nor does President Karzai ever speak out against them. The government keeps no record of its women employees slain in the course of duty.
Good neighbor Pakistan chose this moment to release from detention at an "undisclosed location" Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, longtime pal of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and formerly his second-in-command. Karzai campaigned for his release to facilitate the Afghan "peace process," but now that Baradar is free, his whereabouts are officially unknown. How do you suppose women in Afghanistan, or girls in Pakistan's Swat Valley, receive that news?
So that's the way the war is ending -- in waste, destruction, anxiety, conspiracy, and the evaporation of illusory achievements. A thousand diminutions mark the waning of Afghanistan, punctuated by the sudden violent death of women.
But even when the war "ends" and Americans have forgotten it altogether, it won't be over in Afghanistan. Obama and Karzai continue negotiations toward a bilateral security agreement to allow the U.S. to keep at least 9 of the biggest bases it built and several thousand "trainers" (and undoubtedly special operations forces) in Afghanistan seemingly forever.
It won't be over in the U.S. either. For American soldiers who took part in it and returned with catastrophic physical and mental injuries, and for their families, the battles are just beginning.
For American taxpayers, the war will continue at least until midcentury. Think of all the families of the dead soldiers to be compensated for their loss, all the wounded with their health care bills, all the brain damaged veterans at the VA. Think of the ongoing cost of their drugs and prosthetics and benefits. Medical and disability costs alone are projected to reach $754 billion. Not to mention the hefty retirement pay of all those generals who issued all those reports of progress as they so ambitiously fought more than one war leading nowhere.
Then there's the urgent need to replace all that retrograde equipment, so efficiently trashed, and recruit a whole new army, so that any month now we can start the next war. Let's not forget about that.
Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006) and War Is Not Over When It's Over (Metropolitan 2010), among other books. She wraps up a trilogy on war with publication next month of a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books: They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- the Untold Story, which Andrew Bacevich has already described this way: "Read this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account -- the war Washington doesn't want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans "support the troops.'"
Copyright 2013 Ann Jones
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