💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › chekov-feeney-the-tragedy-of-afghanistan.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 23:02:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Tragedy Of Afghanistan
Author: Chekov Feeney
Date: 2001
Language: en
Topics: Afghanistan, Northeastern Anarchist, war
Source: Retrieved on 16th October 2021 from http://nefac.net/node/146
Notes: Published in The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #3, Fall/Winter 2001.Chekov Feeney is an Irish revolutionary anarchist writer living in Melbourne Australia. He has visited and written about many of the most unfortunate parts of the globe in an attempt to understand the hidden foundations of suffering on which our world order is built.

Chekov Feeney

The Tragedy Of Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a tragic country. The Soviet-backed coup and subsequent

invasion in 1979 ushered in more than two decades of brutal war. During

the 1980’s, the US supplied at least USD 32 billion [1] of military aid

to the mujahadeen, the Islamic opposition to the Soviet regime. The US

explicitly channelled their funding to the most fanatical and violent

islamists in an attempt to cause the maximum damage to the Russians.

When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the Western states turned their

attention away from this barren wasteland. While the US had been willing

to pump billions of dollars of weapons into the country, their concern

for the oppressed population did not extend to the same generosity in

funding reconstruction. The UNHCR’s budget for Afghanistan in 1999 — as

part of the Common UN Appeal for Afghanistan — was $17 million[2]. The

decade after the Soviet retreat was dominated by constant war as the

heavily armed warlords fought it out for the meagre resources of this

forgotten land.

During the past 20 years about 2.5 million Afghans have died as a direct

or indirect result of the war — army assaults, famine or lack of medical

attention[3]. This makes up over 10% of the population or one death

every 5 minutes. Those who have survived have often been maimed by bombs

and landmines. A sign at the Dogharoon border post reads: “every 24

hours 7 people step on mines in Afghanistan”. UN estimates in 2000 put

the average life expectancy of Afghans at 41, and since then this has

undoubtedly sharply declined. Afghan children have one chance in five of

dying before their second birthday. Increasing repression has

accompanied the slaughter, and women in particular have found themselves

even further excluded from public life and locked in the prison of the

home by the fundamentalist ideology of the ‘holy warriors.’

Refuge

According to UN statistics the number of Afghan refugees living in Iran

and Pakistan is 6.3 million[4] or one refugee every minute over 20

years. These people have fled despite the fact that all they can look

forward to is a life of misery in one of the squalid and hopeless camps

across the border. So during this period of war some 10% of the

population has been killed and 30% have been forced into exile, a

tragedy on a monumental scale and one that has been almost totally

ignored by the West.

In the last year the harsh situation has become dramatically worse. The

worst drought in 30 years has seen the virtual extermination of the

country’s only productive resort — their livestock. Famine and

starvation are sweeping through the land.

The UNHCR estimates that there are at least one million Afghans starving

to death at the moment [5]. Now even the last chances of survival for

many of these appear to have disappeared as the neighbouring countries

are refusing entry to refugees and deporting ‘illegal’ immigrants. The

Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of the rare outsiders who has

taken an interest in this disaster zone: “I witnessed about 20,000 men,

women and children around the city of Herat starving to death. They

couldn’t walk and were scattered on the ground awaiting the

inevitable...In Dushanbeh in Tajikestan I saw a scene where 100,000

Afghans were running from south to north, on foot. It looked like

doomsday. These scenes are never shown in the media anywhere in the

world. The war-stricken and hungry children had run for miles and miles

barefoot. Later on the same fleeing crowd was attacked by internal

enemies and was also refused asylum in Tajikestan. In the thousands,

they died and died in a no-man’s land between Afghanistan and Tajikestan

and neither you found out nor anybody else” [6]. Afghanistan is fast

becoming a vast extermination camp, with armed guards on all the exits

so that nobody can escape.

The Taliban

The Taliban leaders were formed in Islamic religious schools while

refugees in Pakistan, and have continued to recruit students to these

schools based mainly upon the fact that they offer bread and the only

education available to the hungry masses. If the ‘civilised’ world had

spent a tiny fraction of the billions of military funding on providing

food and rational education to these victims, it is very unlikely that

the Taliban would ever have existed as a serious force. Instead they

channelled funds through Saudi Arabia and aid organisations such as

USAID [7], into these religious schools (although they would more

accurately be described as political training camps for a movement based

upon hatred and fanaticism).

However, they flourished and as they progressively took over between

1994 and 1998, they were generally accepted by the populace, at least

among their fellow Pashtuns, who saw in them the most realistic hope of

security, albeit at the expense of freedom. The dead have little freedom

anyway. They were formed explicitly as a reaction to the rule of

warlords, a return to ‘pure,’ unifying religion [8]. They were well

organised, relatively free from complicity in most of the hated warfare

and drug trading of the previous 15 years and were relatively well

educated in this country where rural illiteracy runs as high as 90%.

However, while the Taliban’s harsh regime initially appeared capable of

offering some hope of security and stability, Afghans quickly learned

that they could expect more of the same brutality. The Taliban forces

indulged in massacres in the towns which ‘welcomed them’ (the euphemism

which they use to describe their conquests of opposition towns). In 1998

the Iranian consular staff was among the thousands of people massacred

after the fall of Mazar-i Sharif to the Taliban. They come from

Afghanistan’s largest tribes, the Pashtun who make up about 35% of the

population. They have been accused of brutally imposing their harsh

religious laws on other tribes, but it is women who have suffered most

at the hands of their horrific religious regime.

While they may have largely failed in their promise to provide security

and peace, their failure to provide food and work for the population is

at least as important. The Taliban have, like all governments,

concentrated primarily on supplying their own forces. So now during this

time of mass famine they are the only people with food and resources.

The fundamentalists’ blatant attacks on women and individual liberties

might have been tolerated by the people of this traditionally

patriarchal and strictly religious society, if they were able to provide

bread and safety. However, there were no solutions to these problems in

the Taliban’s religious code, and their abject failure to even address

the economic problems of the people cost them any real support amongst

Afghans. As the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan state:

“The people of Afghanistan have nothing to do with Osama and his

accomplices [they] have no plans for socioeconomic reconstruction. Nor

do they have a decent concept for the country”[9]. The Taliban have

constantly faced serious opposition in Afghanistan, especially from the

marginalised non-Pashtun peoples. However, a people devastated by 20

years of extreme suffering and starvation have hardly the capacity to

mount effective opposition to this band of heavily armed and ruthless

soldiers. For there to be any hope of replacing them, there would have

to be a massive flow of resources to the impoverished Afghans. If they

were supplied with food, education, health and civil infrastructure,

they would not tolerate long the burden of Taliban misrule. However,

this course of action, which would actually damage the men of violence,

is not even remotely considered by the US warlords. Instead they propose

a storm of death and destruction against the very people who are, in the

words of Afghan-American Tamir Ansay, “the first victims of the

Taliban”[10].

A war of the rich states against Afghanistan will inevitably lead to the

deaths of millions of Afghans who have as little responsibility for the

Taliban’s or Bin Laden’s acts as the workers of the World Trade Centre

had for the much greater crimes of the US government. The first demands

of the US included an order for Pakistan to stop food aid from crossing

into Afghanistan [11] — essentially a call for mass murder on a scale

that dwarfs the bombings in the US. War against Afghanistan will

especially hit those who are already the gravest victims of the

‘fundamentalists.’ The only people with the facilities to evade the

West’s weapons of mass destruction, especially starvation, are the

Taliban soldiers and it is them and the fundamentalists like Bin Laden

who are most likely to gain in strength with every bomb that falls on

this shattered country.

The idea of the richest states in the world going to war against the

most destitute and helpless is monstrous. If you feel that innocent

people shouldn’t be slaughtered then you must oppose this barbaric war,

or become complicit in another of the great crimes against humanity

perpetrated in the name of Western ‘civilisation’ in the few tragic

centuries of capitalist global expansion.

[1] The menace of Islamic fundamentalism and the hypocrisy of

imperialism Lal Khan Pakistan, October 2000

www.marxist.com

[2] UNHCR report on Afghanistan march 1999:

www.unhcr.ch

[3] UN report quoted by Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf June 20,

2001 The Iranian

www.iranian.com

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Helga Baitenmann, “NGOs and the Afghan War: The Politicisation of

Humanitarian Aid”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 12 (1990), pp. 1–23

[8] UNHCR report quoted on Afghanistan 1998

www.unhcr.ch

[9] Revlutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan at

rawasongs.fancymarketing.net

[10] See article at www.salon.com

[11] Noam Chomsky in interview with Belgrade radio B92 at: