Afghanistan, a primer

/ wastelands / afghanistan /
This piece is required reading regarding Afghanistan's history of the past three decades. Excerpt:

"...The Taliban were brought to the scene, two old ‘friends’ were highly instrumental, Pakistan and the USA. The Taliban entered almost every city with flowers thrown at them and thousands of people there to greet them with rapturous cheers. Once in Kabul, and fully in power, the Taliban showed their true colour – Life became hell on earth, literally. Some of the atrocities are well documented and I don’t think we need to dwell on this. This time people could not think what was better for them, many were resigned to the hell unleashed in the form of Taliban, accepting it as a way of life. This time, however, their predecessors were not wished for...

...The general public was told that the Taliban and Al Qaeda projects had gone terribly wrong for some reason and they had to be bombed out of power, as if people had any say in the process. The Taliban were indeed bombed out of power and they could certainly not put up any resistance as they had no power base among ordinary people – except in a few places in the South and South West of the country. Yet again, thousands of people were killed in the process of a project going badly wrong, the Empire once again whipped people into ‘enduring’ its designated ‘freedom’ – heavens forbid what could be in store. A taste of what could the Empire’s ‘enduring freedom’ mean are: bombing entire villages, night raids on villages in the middle of nowhere, arbitrary imprisonments in various secret US prisons in the Gulag called Afghanistan, torture, sodomising prisoners and death under extreme torture...

And a message from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), regarding the recent demonstrations:

"...People are fed up with many critical social issues and come out on the streets to protest. When people see that Karzai shakes hands with the most dirty enemies of the Afghan people, who first of all should appear in a court of justice; when people see that millions of dollars given in the name of the reconstruction of Afghanistan goes into the pockets of warlords and no one asks about their brutality (on the contrary Mr. Karzai frequently installs them in key posts); they have no other option but to protest and in many cases it takes a violent form.

The situation in Afghanistan is far more disastrous then what you may imagine. The Karzai administration has done nothing positive but just works hard to gather all the top fundamentalist criminals around himself. Even these days he is trying to portray some key Taliban leaders as “moderates,” and tries to share power with them. A few days ago through Sibghatullah Mojadeddi, the government announced amnesty for Gulbuddin and Mullah Omar if they surrender..."