by Matthew Chavez
Daily Lobo columnist
It is now customary on Sept. 11 for commentators and news outlets to revisit the horrors and heroism of that infamous day. The selfless courage of America's first responders who defied terror is valorized, and the thousands who died are re-embraced in mourning.
But why, in a nation capable of such profound compassion, do we forget the other victims of Sept. 11, 2001 - the Afghans?
They were not the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 atrocities, but as a direct result, they suffered a campaign of terror comparable to those attacks in both civilian death and social destruction. The campaign was also comparable to Sept. 11 in the underlying attitude that the proper response to aggression is retribution against civilians.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Recent media memorials have neglected Sept. 11's Afghan victims, perhaps thinking the topic is either a political taboo or irrelevant to the story of America's suffering. If media outlets were to revisit Afghanistan, they would find a country ravaged by many familiar symptoms of U.S. intervention: the ascendancy of antidemocratic forces, chronic instability and violence, increasing gender oppression and a crisis of starvation and destitution bitterly condemned by humanitarian authorities.
"Afghanistan is essentially a devastated country," said Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission. Though there are new democratic institutions in Kabul, conditions in Afghanistan have either stagnated or deteriorated in many critical areas, Kolhatkar said.
"Women's maternal mortality rates (and) infant mortality rates are about the same as they were before the Taliban," Kolhatkar said. "The mujahedeen warlords that the U.S. had employed to fight the Soviets and then again to fight the Taliban, they're back in power, and these men have just the same sort of ideology against women as the Taliban - they're just less organized."
The regime the Bush administration installed in Kabul is largely composed of veteran warlords who share the Taliban's fundamentalist ideology. A disturbing new study by the Senlis Council, an international research organization, found that a growing Taliban insurgency is engulfing Afghanistan.
"Five years after their removal from power, the Taliban now have psychological and de facto military control of nearly half of Afghanistan," the study found.
The report stressed the role of the U.S. counter-narcotics campaign in Afghanistan in both fueling the fundamentalist insurgency and escalating the humanitarian crisis. Kolhatkar made a similar point about Afghanistan's exploding poppy production, which is now equal to 50 percent of Afghanistan's legal gross domestic product.
"The sheer poverty is forcing Afghan farmers into growing a crop that's much more lucrative," she said. "These warlords that the U.S. backed and brought back into power after the Taliban fell are drug lords and have been coercing farmers either into growing poppies or basically control large swaths of poppy farms themselves. So, in effect, the U.S. has been working with drug lords."
After spending almost $90 billion since 2001, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate released in June, the United States has surrendered half of Afghanistan to an Islamic insurgency, restored fundamentalists to governmental power and created the world's largest heroin producer. Yet the Bush administration continues to present Afghanistan as an exemplar of its "forward strategy of freedom" and a model for the "new Middle East."
"If this is what ... the most powerful minds in the world can come up with ... it's incredibly disappointing," said Anne Brodsky, author and professor at University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
Brodsky has visited Afghanistan five times since the United States toppled the Taliban, but her most recent trip in July and August confirmed that U.S. policies have introduced changes that are "superficial to the point where we are in danger of ... losing whatever good could have come out of the situation of defeating the Taliban."
Afghans have become disillusioned with a so-called liberation that has invited prostitution, alcohol consumption and satellite-broadcast pornography to their country, she said.
"Part of the rhetoric of this administration was that we were liberating Afghan women, that they took off their burqas and were dancing in the streets when the troops came in," Brodsky said.
However, she added, the reality has been otherwise: "We haven't listened to Afghan women about what they want and need. We haven't listened to the democratic voices on the ground. We've listened to people with power and money and guns and given them more power and money and guns."
The disgraceful conditions in Afghanistan are perhaps the most forceful refutation of the Bush administration's public disavowals of America's imperial past in the Middle East. Regrettably, Washington's relations with the Middle East remain an anachronism of failed and regressive policies that have estranged our country to an entire region. Condemning Afghanistan to perpetual poverty, injustice and bloodshed is a disservice to the memory of Sept. 11 and a betrayal of the thousands of soldiers entangled in yet another imperial occupation.
