Category: activism

“This video, “Return of the Warlords”: Afghan Elections Marred by Fraud, Warlord Dominance,” was just produced by my great friend Rick Rowley of BigNoise Films. He is simply the best un-embedded journalist in the field today. If we had a sane nation with a democratic media, Rick’s reporting would appear on network news in the US and not just on Al Jazeera. Rick’s story will appear in full tonight on Al Jazeera English.” Jeremy Scahill. Watch video.

Zoya is a member of the radical underground organization Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. She fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion but later returned to her country to document life under Taliban rule. She ha…s been an outspoken critic of the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan. Watch interview.

As the occupation of Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the antiwar movement here in the United States has organized several actions this week calling for an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dozens of rallies and protests are being held across the country today. We speak to David Swanson, who was among sixty-one people arrested Monday at a protest outside the White House. Watch video.

The election sheds a great deal of light on this, of course. Not simply because of the massive fraud in the election, although that’s an indicator of something going on, but it’s relevant because President Hamid Karzai was forced to make deals with all of the warlords throughout the country–to give them even more privileges politically than they already had, in some cases carving either new provinces or parts of provinces under the control of the warlord in question, and in other cases assuring warlords that they wouldn’t face any legal action for their war crimes or for any other crimes they might be guilty of.

And in every case, he assured them that no move is going to be made to diminish their de facto power in the provinces. This, of course, is the essence of the problem that the so-called government and the foreign military presence face in trying to combat the Taliban. Full article.

Perhaps more than any other major corporate news outlet, The New York Times played a central role in promoting the Bush administration’s fraudulent case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The “reporting” of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon basically served as a front-page fiction laundering factory for Dick Cheney’s fantasy of a “mushroom cloud” threat from Saddam Hussein looming on the immediate horizon, topped off with a celebratory slice of yellowcake. More recently, the paper’s propagandists, William Broad and David Sanger, have aimed their sights on reporting dubious claims about Iran’s nuclear program.

Readers of the Times, therefore, should take with a huge grain of weaponized salt the paper’s “review” of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Rethink Afghanistan. With no sense of the painful irony of writing such jibberish in the Times, reviewer Andy Webster declares that the film could “use balance, something in short supply here.” Full article.

Last week in Pakistan I met a receptionist at the World Food Programme in Islamabad. It was brief – I was presenting myself for an appointment, and I do not know if she was Gulrukh Tahir, one of five people killed there today by a suicide bomber.

But I can picture her foyer; it must be wreckage now. I remember smiling at the guards who checked my bag when I entered the fortified compound, the same guards who were evaded by a man suspected to be Pakistani Taliban. His target was a United Nations agency charged with getting food to disaster zones and preventing hunger in poor communities. In Pakistan, some of its beneficiaries are the millions displaced by the Taliban’s conflict with the government. Full article.

cindy sheehan rocks!

“A few hundred people massed on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, wearing orange jumpsuits and hoods, holding photos of wounded children or carrying coffins. They chanted antiwar slogans, acted out waterboarding and pretended to die on the sidewalk. Those who refused orders to leave the area (including ubiquitous activist Cindy Sheehan) were arrested.” Full article.

The fierce opposition here is revealing deep strains in the alliance. Even at its current levels, the American presence was fueling a sense of occupation among Pakistani politicians and security officials, said several Pakistani officials, who did not want to be named for fear of antagonizing the United States. The United States was now seen as behaving in Pakistan much as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said.

In particular, the Pakistani military and the intelligence agencies are concerned that DynCorp is being used by Washington to develop a parallel network of security and intelligence personnel within Pakistan, officials and politicians close to the army said. Full article.

excellent advice from william polk, expert on counterinsurgency: “Even in the tactical short run, I believe, trying to defeat the Taliban is not in America’s interest. The harder we try, the more likely terrorism will be to increase and spread. As the history of every insurgency demonstrates, the more foreign boots there are on the ground and the harder the foreigners fight, the more hatred they engender. What actually brought all the insurgencies, including the one in Vietnam, to a halt was the withdrawal of the foreigners.” Entire letter.

ISLAMABAD – A suicide bomber who killed five staffers at the U.N. food agency’s headquarters in Pakistan on Monday was dressed as a security officer and allowed to enter the heavily guarded building after he asked to use the bathroom. The United Nations announced it was temporarily closing all its offices in Pakistan after the noontime bombing, which blew out windows and left victims lying in pools of blood in the lobby of the three-story World Food Program compound. Full article.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Hundreds of militants attacked American and Afghan troops in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, opening fire on an outpost from multiple locations with rockets, mortars and heavy-caliber machine guns, according to an initial U.S. military report on the battle. At least eight American troops and two members of the Afghan National Security Force died — the largest number of Americans killed by hostile action in a single day in more than a year, according to CNN records. Full article.

MY STATEMENT FOR PRESS CONFERENCE

My name is Mara Ahmed. I am an activist filmmaker and I found out about Rethink Afghanistan back in April this year when it was featured in The Nation as “Ten things you can do to oppose the war in Afghanistan.” It’s produced by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films and the whole idea is to start a grassroots movement that will educate the American public, develop resistance against the war and get Congress people involved.

What’s key at this pivotal moment, when a strategy shift is on President Obama’s table, is to increase the pressure for constructive non-military solutions to stabilize Afghanistan and strengthen Pakistan’s fragile democracy.

As a Pakistani American who grew up under General Zia’s dictatorship in the 1980s I have seen the consequences of a military strategy in the region, up close. I have seen rows of trucks carrying arms and ammunition into Afghanistan. I have seen Afghan refugee camps swell up as 3 million Afghans fled their country and crossed the border into Pakistan. I have seen the rise of Islamic rhetoric to support the “jihad” against the Soviet invasion. I have seen the consequences of a ruthless, American-supported military dictatorship in Pakistan.

The situation is equally dangerous right now and even more certain to devolve into a catastrophe. You have to understand that American presence in the region and American drone attacks are not minimizing terrorism or instability, they are creating it. For example, suicide bombings were unheard of in Afghanistan and Pakistan before the American invasion in 2001. Now they have become part of every day life. What we have conveniently lumped together and branded as “Taliban” is a mixture of many diverse elements. In Afghanistan, it’s mostly Pushtuns trying to regain control of their territory by ousting American troops. In Pakistan a country plagued by poverty and injustice for most of its population, there are elements of a class struggle involved – there is a strong desire for democratic governance in Pakistan as evidenced by the Lawyers’ Movement. And then there are those who have lost everything to drone attacks and they are naturally absorbed by the resistance to foreign occupation.

Instead of inciting more resistance and hatred, we need to pull out of Afghanistan and Pakistan NOW. We must stop drone attacks. We need to distinguish between our opponents and not fight a fabricated homogenous enemy. We need to negotiate with Taliban leaders who are interested in collaborating with us rather than detaining them at Bagram. We need to develop a regional solution to the instability and involve Pakistan, India, Iran, China and Russia by dealing with their concerns. And we must act NOW to change this course of action.

MY REACTION TO THE STATMENT: PAKISTAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

When I watched Rethink Afghanistan for the first time, I have to say I had reservations about wanting to be associated with it. Although I agree with its ultimate message that we need to get out of Afghanistan, I have serious problems with how it describes Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world. To me it’s becoming clear that this fear mongering about Pakistan’s so-called instability is going to become a convenient way of transferring the war yet again from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. Iran certainly seems to next in line – we have already started preparing the grounds for that war.

To me Obama’s Af-Pak approach is emblematic of how little we understand South Asia. Afghanistan and Pakistan are two different countries, with two very different sets of problems.

Afghanistan is a country of about 28 million. It is the 4th poorest country of the world. It has been ravaged by war for more than 3 decades – to give u an idea, the war in Afghanistan has lasted as long as the period starting with WW 1 in 1914 and ending with WW 2 in 1945. There are 1 million widows in Afghanistan with an average age of 35. When we started bombing Afghanistan in 2001, there were at that time 700,000 disabled orphans there – children who had lost their parents to war and who had been blinded or crippled by chemicals and land mines. This is the country we went to war with.

Pakistan is a country of 170 million people – the 6th most populous country in the world. For most of its life Pakistan has been ruled by military dictators. It’s a classic example of America’s Latin American model, now applied to South Asia. What this has meant to Pakistan as a country is that the military is highly privileged. It has been lavishly supplied with money and arms, and as an economic institution, the Pakistan Army has penetrated all facets of life in that country – from banks, to strip malls, to housing estates. Billions of dollars of American aid have gone into Pakistan, but the Pakistani people have not seen any of it. It has all gone into the military sector. This has created enormous imbalances inside the country and a huge amount of resentment toward the United States.

Yet in spite of all this there was a lawyers’ movement in 2007 which was eventually able to get rid of an American-backed dictator, General Musharraf. The same movement was also successful in restoring the judiciary and re-instating Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Just think about it. This was an immense achievement, with the pressure coming from middle class professionals, mostly lawyers and human rights activists.

The media in Pakistan is one of the most vibrant in the world. I was there in February of this year and I was amazed by the open, abrasive political debate raging on every news channel. Most of these political debates were being moderated by extremely loud and assertive women journalists. I had never seen anything like that in the US. Everyone in Pakistan is a news junkie and everyone has a political opinion – from the fruit vendor on our street to the chauffeur to our tailor to my cameraman. It’s quite extraordinary. So much so that I decided, on the spot, to interview a vast spectrum of Lahoris about American foreigh policy. That documentary will be coming out soon.

In short, Pakistan with all its problems, has a strong desire for democracy. It’s coming from the people, from the middle class, and it’s very palpable. In every free election that has ever taken place in Pakistan, the Islamic parties have never received more than 5% of the vote, last election it was 3%. The people of Pakistan are hungry for democracy, they are moderate, they are politically astute and they have waited a long time to be heard. It’s with them that the American government should form an alliance, not with the military or any other weak puppet govt.

Thank you.