stick

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Look what I found, Jbor.  I wasn't looking for it or anything:

"Let's hope the worst predictions of chaos in Afghanistan never come to
pass. Last week those of us who didn't support the bombing campaign got much
stick from the pro-war writers. What do you have to say now, they asked us?
Well, although I don't support the war I would be completely delighted if
Afghanistan was left in a better state after the war than it was before. It
would be wonderful if America began to silence the missiles and to engage in
a reconstruction program and diplomacy. If the refugees could go home and be
fed, I would be thrilled."

Just what we were talking about! And I called you 'crazy.'  I forget
sometimes that you represent a lot of folks out there. Wanna read the rest?



The Independent
November 22, 2001

These Refugees Are Our Responsibility
by Natasha Walter

There was a time when everyone agreed that it was harrowing just to watch
the news. When everyone talked about how they cried when they saw the
pictures, how they were having nightmares, how they couldn't stand to think
about the grief of the people they saw on television.

It was, indeed, a traumatic time, and the grief then was genuine. But now
it's not so fashionable to say how disturbing you find the news, even if you
have rarely seen anything so tragic as, for instance, that man on television
last night holding two starving babies for whom their mother had no milk, or
the little girl walking barefoot in the dust of a refugee camp that holds
tens of thousands of desperate people. Why aren't we talking about how we
cry when we see these people? Why don't we say that they haunt our dreams?

They are far away from us, it's true, but their grief still rises from
television screens and news reports. And this time around, we are
implicated. These people are suffering from terror visited on them from the
West. Yes, I know they have also suffered over the years from the evils of
their fundamentalist rulers but we now share the blame for their plight. If
it were not for the missiles the West has sent into Kandahar and Kunduz,
these children whose faces we now see in our newspapers would not have had
to take to the roads, desperately trudging the hills and deserts and sitting
in tents on a bare plain.

And don't think that just because they have suffered so much during the last
generation that their grief is any the less now. Or because they don't get
obituaries in The New York Times that each of the civilian lives lost in
Afghanistan isn't as precious to their loved ones as the people who died in
the Twin Towers.

Frankly, that's the way that terrorists think, that some civilian lives
matter less than others, and that some - or even hundreds, or even
thousands - of innocent people can be expended in the pursuit of the
"greater good".

If the West can claim responsibility for the joy of the citizens liberated
from the Taliban in Kabul, then it must also admit responsibility for the
misery of the civilians fleeing the bombs into dismal refugee camps in
southern Afghanistan. Let's hope that Tony Blair's rhetoric is for real, and
that we won't walk away from them.

But despite his insistent words, it looks very possible that the United
States might soon start to turn away from the wider problems of aid and
nation building in Afghanistan. Certainly the American media, so tortured by
suffering within its borders, has been curiously unmoved by the human
suffering in Afghanistan. And if it doesn't keep up the pressure, not just
in the short term but down through the years to come; well, do you expect
that George Bush will go it alone?

One American government adviser, Richard Perle, said yesterday, "I don't
think any outside power has a responsibility in Afghanistan. People have to
take responsibility for their own destiny" - as though the women whose
neighborhoods have been flattened should have known better, anyway, than to
live in downtown Kandahar. I mean, why didn't they choose Massachusetts,
especially in the fall? Dumb or what?

And look at what Clare Short said earlier this week to the International
Development Select Committee. "The civil-military liaison is not working
particularly well at all," she said of the aid operation in Afghanistan.
"The communications are there, but they are not being taken seriously enough
at a high level." Ms Short has been a supporter of the bombing campaign;
there is no reason at all for her to speak against the American
administration unless she had seen evidence that compelled her to criticize
it.

Aid agencies are saying the same thing. Some of them have said that ground
troops are now essential to restore the order that the bombs have destroyed.
A spokesperson from Oxfam in Islamabad was heard on the BBC yesterday
arguing that multinational forces were needed immediately, to secure the
passage of thousands of tons of food into the central highlands of
Afghanistan - food that must be brought through in the next two weeks.

Why would anyone be surprised if the American government is reluctant to
facilitate such an operation? The American government has always been clear
that it has one target in this war: destroying al-Qai'da. And it hopes to
keep its hands clean, no matter how many people suffer, by using the
Northern Alliance and other factional leaders as its ground troops. They
will carry out the punishments, the massacres and the beatings while the
Americans watch through their fancy reconnaissance hardware.

Let's hope the worst predictions of chaos in Afghanistan never come to pass.
Last week those of us who didn't support the bombing campaign got much stick
from the pro-war writers. What do you have to say now, they asked us? Well,
although I don't support the war I would be completely delighted if
Afghanistan was left in a better state after the war than it was before. It
would be wonderful if America began to silence the missiles and to engage in
a reconstruction program and diplomacy. If the refugees could go home and be
fed, I would be thrilled.

But even if all that were to happen - not such a small if, after all - that
doesn't mean that those of us who opposed the bombing campaign were wrong.
Many of us were arguing, as I said early on, not for inaction, but for more
targeted and less spectacular action. For negotiation, diplomatic pressure,
bribery, blackmail, intelligence work, sanctions, education, aid, even (some
of us) for small-scale special forces operations. If these means had been
tried and seen to fail, then we would have been wrong. But they were never
given a chance.

There were always alternatives to war. The only support that the Taliban
ever received came from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As we see now, the
Taliban's support within Afghanistan was shaky and the foreign members of
al-Qai'da were even more isolated. Once the West had got Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia to dissociate themselves from the Taliban and al-Qai'da, it's
possible to imagine that the terrorists could have found themselves out in
the cold sooner rather than later, and wide open to arrest or assassination
operations. The Times yesterday quoted a former Afghan foreign minister
saying that such a strategy would have taken just a couple of months to
work. Of course, this could be complete nonsense. Or it could be bang on.
We'll never know now.

We'll also never know now if a strategy to attack the root causes of Islamic
terrorism - causes such as the American military presence in Saudi Arabia or
the poverty and chaos of a nation like Afghanistan - would have worked
better without any bombs to help it along. Because all the early talk of
diplomacy, negotiation and intelligence were quickly overshadowed by the
dust raised by daisy-cutters and B52s. The Americans - and our government,
as its cheerleader - chose this war in the face of real alternatives.

That's why we should be disturbed when we hear the tales of the victims of
the war and why we shouldn't forget their desperate faces.