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Time out for a flashback, prompted by the Karzai regime’s continuing use of their Western financed and trained police force against Afghanistan’s energetic young news media. Once again, the greybeards are abusing the rights of those younger and more vulnerable than themselves.
Policemen, new to their calling, are turned into bullies, beating up on other young men and women whose only crime is a desire to inform the public.
What does this say about our own authorities in the West? Our greybeards have deployed more than 30,000 US and NATO soldiers, most of them young men and women on their first experiences abroad. They’ve been told they’re fighting for democracy in Afghanistan, not propping up a regime that is steadily, shamelessly encroaching upon free speech and freedom of expression.
It’s not only Karzai who is shaming his country’s new democracy. Stand up Messrs. Bush and Blair and Harper. Your silence effectively condones the increasing repression of the news media in Kabul and across Afghanistan.
With the aid of our Afghan colleagues, skyreporter.com will soon begin cataloguing these abuses. But right now I’d like to take you back a few years, to December of 2001. The Taliban had just fled Kabul, forced out by a U.S.-led coalition bent on tracking down the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities.
This is the story of one young man’s betrayal by his elders, in this case, by his Taliban commanders. Have a read and reflect a moment. If we ignore the lessons of the Taliban’s abuses of authority, we’ll be condemned to see the same cruelties inflicted against other young people, including our own.
Remember: an Afghan journalist, Ajmal Naqshbandi, was one of the last victims of Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah, before the old warlord’s own death last weekend. Seven other reporters were punched, kneed in the groin or rifle-butted by Hamid Karzai’s police – our police – in Kabul on April 17th.
DATELINE: Kabul, Dec. 21, 2001
Some 38 days after the Taliban’s sudden retreat from Kabul, gruesome reminders are still being found of the crushing power that hammered loose the extremist regime’s grip on the city and its people.
This morning the body of a young Taliban soldier was pulled from the ruins of a house in the city’s Wazir Akhbar Khan district. Neighbours said the sprawling, two-story structure had been hit by a bomb from an American warplane the evening of November 12th, just hours before the Taliban withdrawal.
Built as a private home, it had been confiscated by the Taliban several years ago. Its owner and resident, Haji Azam, had been ordered to take his family and go. The building then became a guesthouse for the Taliban military. If that fact alone didn’t place the address on the Pentagon’s target list, the next-door neighbour did: Mullah Niazi, the Taliban regime’s governor of Kabul.
But the corpse discovered today was nothing like an illustrious kill for the U.S. air campaign. It seems clear he was yet another young Afghan, not long out of his teens, who had been sacrificed to the idiot warlords who have savaged this country.
The dead man’s identity card names him as Abdul Malik, a 23-year-old labourer from the Showal Kot district of Kandahar, the Taliban’s former stronghold in Afghanistan’s southwest. His father was a farmer called Dad Mir. Abdul Malik’s age and humble origins indicate he was probably a low-ranking soldier. He could well have been the guard or gatekeeper of the guesthouse.
His body was found at ground level under a huge slab of concrete. He was in his bedroll, tucked in a foetal position. Had he been awakened by the bomb’s blast two stories above and to the rear of the building, and tried to protect himself by drawing his legs in to his chest? Or had he been sleeping soundly, and crushed instantly by the upper floors’ collapse?
Those questions didn’t matter much to the medical examiner supervising the body’s removal. He simply noted the address of the cratered ruin on his clipboard and tried to ensure that the corpse was properly and swiftly dealt with. That wasn’t easy, since rigor mortis had long since set in. The body wouldn’t fit in to the makeshift coffin, lined with cotton matting, brought along for the pick up.
So the coroner and his driver bundled what was left of Abdul Malik into a few blankets, and stuffed him in to the back of their hatchback. The neighbours watched quietly. No one mumbled a bitter word, no one laughed. Even the children, watching from nearby, spoke softly. On his final departure from his last post, Abdul Malik was an Afghan again, not just one of the hated Talibs.
He leaves behind only the young face on an identity card, a remnant of the Taliban’s ideologically debauched, spiritually debased Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - a graphic reminder of how the young are so often recruited to the schemes of older, crueller minds. And, in this case, abandoned to die alone as almost all the party leadership escaped to misrule again.
Now this country’s new leaders will try to distance their people from this legacy. In Kabul tomorrow, the twenty-seven men and two women of the interim governing council will pledge to ensure that future governments never again drag Afghans in to the purgatory of totalitarianism, or the hell of civil war.
All of Afghanistan will be watching and listening closely. Hopes are very high, but few people here would bet that Abdul Malik will be the last young Afghan given up to the criminal futility of war.
6 Comments
Thanks Arthur for getting at the real root of the problem .
Young Afghanis are dying while the elite erect bigshot ville .
Young Canadian soldiers are dying while Harper has several government residences to show the rewards of power .
Young Afganis have food , shelter and educational needs while their ambassador to Canada builds luxury into his Montreal life .
YES young Canadians have food , shelter and educational problems while our cabinet ministers and bigshots laugh at critics of their $9,000 / hour Challanger jet taxis .
The answer is to make every politician answerable directly to the exact grassroots that elected him/her . i.e. Is your representative making you his #1 person to talk to or are you somewhere down his list of persons to talk to ?
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Keith, you're right. Accountability to the public seems to have been forgotten by our own political Wazirs.
It's important, though, for all of us that accusations of wrongdoing be backed up by solid evidence. An earlier comment referred to one claim which has a dubious background. At skyreporter, we only go with what we've double-sourced and verified.
Arthur, I agree with your comment that evidence has to be provided to back up any information that is given here.
"The United States was long aware of the connection between the warlords engaged in poppy cultivation and their contribution to the menace of drugs in outlying areas. However, it did not wish to arrest the development: Washington used the structures of narco-mafia and the narco-traffikers as a counterweight against the Soviet status quo in the region." Afghanistan, Amalendu Misra, page 132
I still need to find the source for my earlier comment regarding the involvement of the CIA in the narcotics business in Afghanistan during Cold War.
I hope the above source removes the concern that my comment was not backed up with a solid evidence.
The fact that we have an electoral system in place does not necessarily mean that we have democracy. Needless to say, parties vying to win during elections are basically concerned about getting enough votes to take office. The problems of the people voting become a concern only when they serve to promote a party platform for the elections.
In a power structure, where the elite is busy solidifying their positions to remain in power, people in the middle are helping the elite maintain their power, and people at the bottom are busy struggling for survival, you cannot possibly have social justice and as such you can't claim the country to be democratic as social justice is one of the foundations for a true democracy. Having said that, as long as such a power structure is in place in any society, there is little hope for a change for the better.
Now, given the context of Afghanistan, I think the West thought and still think that they can "bomb peace, security and development," among other things, into Afghanistan. Well, the result speaks volumes for that line of thinking and strategy.
Sounds pretty pessimistic, doesn't it? Well, think about it and tell me if it is not true.
I have to tell you, I am loving this daily dialogue from you and some of the readers. This place remains one of the most fascinating on earth, for all its problems, perhaps.
Well, two themes seem to unite us here - a refusal to accept official propaganda or excuses, and a determination to find a better way. The Afghan people are entirely capable of rebuilding their country, but it's clear they'll have to be relieved of the burden of the corrupt regime that is holding them back.
In it's best day, in 1976, Afghanistan had a 90+ % illiteracy rate.
So now after all these years of war and chaos, who do we have waiting in the wings to replace the corrupt ones already in power? No one in Afghanistan at the moment.
And the ones outside the country are divided in 4 groups
- Those that heard the call; went back and are doing their best against all odds to rebuild the country.
- Those that are capable and want to help, but don't feel secure enough to go back
- Those that saw the opportunity, changed their colors and now are cashing in like bandits as they are in bed with the corrupt officials
- And those that have made a life for themselves outside the country, love and care for Afghanistan, but will not go back.
I suppose I fall in the 2nd category mostly because so much of my family is still in Afghanistan and they say "don't waste your time or risk your life, we are condemned here, don't come back . . . . . yet."
I suppose best thing is to ride this wave until the next generation is ready to take over.
I know that the people in the West want instant results, but as Arthur knows, in Afghanistan change takes place in a snail's pace. The Communists found this out when they tried to bring wholesale changes overnight. Some how the West expected burqa bon fires after the Taliban. Give it time; I think it will get better.
We had the loser King, we had the misguided President, we had the Communists, we had the in-fighting Mujahiddin and civil war; we had the criminal Taliban. We have experienced it all, what else can be thrown our way?
Drugs are a problem, corruption is a problem, lack of accountability is a problem indeed, but it has become a culture now and so embedded that it will take a long time to cleanse the place. Lets not have the naïve belief that
Somehow by replacing all these people the tide will turn instantly. It won't because due to life conditions there, almost everyone is vulnerable and susceptible to being conned and bribed. $30 per month for a government official is a recipe for disaster, especially when they don't get paid for months at a time.
Afghanistan is not a failure, just not managed properly. I have hope because it is still far different & better then under the Taliban.
Kamran, while nobody will dispute your analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and the historic reality that has given rise to current situation, I must say that the current situation IS different than Taliban's regime, only in that one oppressive regime was replaced by another, and this time it has the shameless backing of the so-called "international community", too. And therefore to call it "better than under the Taliban" would be a mistake, because the two contexts are entirely different.
For one, the Taliban were totally isolated because the US in particular lost interest in them despite the initial potential that Taliban had, in the eye of the US, to facilitate the billion dollar gas pipeline from Turkmenistan. Whether they were good or not, was not a concern at the time.
The current regime has the backing of all the rich countries in the world. Their armies are in Afghanistan. These countries always criticized any anti-western regime from the communists to the fundamentalists for their failure. How come they are failing Afghans? When are they going to be accountable for what they have been doing in Afghanistan?
Arthur, our people must be relieved of a corrupt regime that is holding them back by catering to foreign funders, and they must also be relieved of useless foreign troops, who add more difficulty to the situation. Foreign troops are creating a dependency syndrome.
The same way that Afghans despise the interference of Pakistan, Iran, Former Soviet Republics, Russian, Saudi Arabia and other non-western countries, they also despise the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan. We know that they are not there to aid Afghans. If they truly cared about Afghans, they would have been present between 1992 and 2000. They refused to provide even the so-called humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan, then.
Do Western countries become humanitarian in certain periods of human affliction and turn their back at other times?
We want Western countries to know that we are aware of their brutal and inhuman history of colonialism or attempts at that in Africa, Latin America and Asia. We are also aware of their "Western cultural logic" embedded in their foreign policies as well as their racist "White Supremacist" attitudes towards third world nations.
Dear Aziz,
I am sorry but I disagree. This regime has major problems no doubt, but to say that it is an "oppressive regime" following the oppressive regime of the Taliban is a major overstatement.
There are functioning branches of government, military, schools and universities, a system of government in place, a new parliament etc. etc.
Now as I said before, there are management issues and certainly some characters that need to be thanked for their services and sent packing, but there is no way in hell this government is as bad as the Taliban.
People were banned to even smile during the Taliban so please lets not compare the two regimes.
You know Karzai, you see him, and he exists. Do you really believe Mullah Omar existed? How many Mullahs were running the show in every branch?
And lets not say that the US was detached from the Taliban. Only in April of 2001 Colin Powell promised the Taliban $43 million dollars for their so-called drug war. Even AFTER 9/11, the US offered the Taliban plenty of opportunities to survive. Kept saying "give us Osama, we have no problems with you".
Afghans were fortunate the Taliban didn't listen otherwise they would still be in power. And in November of 2001 when the US had TOTAL air superiority over the skies of Afghanistan, they looked the other way when Pakistani military personnel and REAL Taliban were being airlifted at night from Kunduz.
The fact that US' hand picked man Hamid Karzai still negotiates with the Taliban and wants them in the government shows that there never been a detachment from the Taliban.
Dear Kamran, by describing the political game of the US and its allies in the region, you yourself indicate the problem.
Karzai's power barely extends beyond Kabul. I am sure you have heard of his other nickname "mayor of Kabul". Even that is nowadays dubious: does he really have control of Kabul?
I don't know what it takes to call a regime oppressive, in your opinion? Do you think that the fact that we have some sort of government structure run by thugs in place would really help us in any way, with foreign advisors sitting in every single ministry? Don't you remember that we had a similar type of government during the Soviet's occupation? In fact, now to think of it, at least that government had, in certain ways, a much better control of the situation, in comparison to the present administration. Did the communist regime work?
A puppet government is a puppet government, and it has never worked in Afghanistan.
Dear Aziz,
Afghanistan has always had horrible governments. As I mentioned before, on our best day, we had over 90% illiteracy. Nepotism, tribalism, favoritism along ethnic lines, preferential treatment along family lines and connections have always played in a role in who got what and where he/she ended up.
There were some rare cases of certain people making it on their own merit, but for the most part it was a selective process. And certain branches of government were off limits completely to "ordinary" people.
So that culture remains today. Now the coin has been flipped and since 1992 the ordinary people have been at the helm exercising their own selective and discriminatory process and for former Kabulis and people in power, it has been a bitter pill to swallow.
But my definition of an oppressive regime is inline with most people's definition. The fact that Arthur Kent can openly go to Afghanistan with his cameras and crew and film and photograph things openly is one small difference between May 21, 2007 and May 21, 2001. I hope that gives you a small sampling of how it is not the same as the time of the Taliban.
Dear Kamran,
Far from making our comments turn into "who is right" and "who is wrong" type of thing, I must say this: why would we have to define oppression in terms of what Arthur can and cannot do in Afghanistan. (I hope Arthur doesn't take this personally.)
I am double-checking. Do you mean to say that we have freedom of speech promoted from outside and thus it is a good thing? Do you mean to say that we have enough foreign troops in Afghanistan that enables Arthur and other foreign journalists to report from inside of Afghanistan without fear?
Journalists could report from Kabul during Taliban regime as well, although I must admit that there were a smaller number of them present in Kabul at the time. In fact, the number of foreigners having been abducted have risen significantly recently,or at least they are more at the risk of such abductions.
Supposing that what you say is true, what has it got to do with the urgent needs of ordinary Afghans, who, as I mentioned before, need to have access to really basic needs.
As another Afghan has so truthfully written from Afghanistan, we do not necessarily need skyscrapers in Afghanistan. Are they supposed to be a sign of "progress" and "modernity" for us? They don't cater to our needs. They house foreigners, especially journalists, NGO and UN staff as well as business persons, who are ironically there to "help" Afghans from their "first world" enclaves in Kabul and other major cities, outside whose walls, Afghans are starving.
I, too, used to be under the impression that only we had the problems of nepotism, favoritism or preferential treatment, and that first world countries didn't operate on that basis. Try getting a job in a first world country without having the right connections...Also, pay attention to the hierarchical power structure, with white men on top, then white women and at the bottom people of colour. Having said that, I don't mean to approve of nepotism, favoritism, or preferential treatment in Afghanistan, but I am just saying that we don't exclusively own them.
I am surprised that in your earlier comment you so proudly talked about Afghans' struggle against Soviets, and at the same time you give me the impression that it is okay that our country is being occupied and totally run by outsiders now. What is the difference between then and now?