Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan: “On the Kandahar Massacre”

Intensifying and expanding the resistance until the total and unconditional expulsion of the occupiers and the defeat of the puppet regime is the only principled method of confronting the war crimes of the occupying forces

American imperialist occupiers once again butchered children, women, and elderly men in Afghanistan. A group of American occupying soldiers and officers attacked the poor huts of villagers and slaughtered seventeen children, women, and old men––wounding several others and burning twelve bodies––in the Panjawai district of Kandahar on midnight of the 11th of March. The leadership of the occupying forces depicted this unforgivable crime as the result of mental illness of one of their soldiers, offered a mere empty token of apology, and declared the usual: that they would lead an investigation into this matter.

Definitely this war crime, like the other war crimes of the occupiers, is something that does not emanate from the personal mental problems of one or more of the occupying soldiers or officers; it is the result of the overall nature and characteristic of such forces. It should be noted that the imperialist occupation, and the imposition of a puppet regime over the peoples of an occupied country, is itself a great imperialist war crime. Therefore, a just response to the war crimes of the imperialist occupiers and their satraps, is not to legally prosecute the officers and soldiers responsible for these crimes, to take personal revenge against them as individuals, or the unjust efforts of freeing some prisoners, but the further intensification and expansion of resistance, until the total expulsion of the occupiers from the country and the destruction of their puppet regime.

Hamid Karzai the head of the puppet regime, while he is constantly telling the participants and supporters of this regime that soon a “long-term strategic agreement” would be signed with America (an agreement that actually has no other meaning other than prolonging the condition of occupation), has declared the crimes of the occupiers in Panjawai to be a deliberate and obvious act of terrorism and has demanded the trial of the perpetrators. However, it is clear that according to the previous agreements between the American occupation and its puppet regime, and specifically between George W. Bush and Hamid Karzai, that every American soldier and officer in Afghanistan has legal sanctity; they only can be put on trial in the US, according to the constitution of that country. Hamid Karzai while he is carrying “Shah Shojaian Sword” of national treason, at the same time is showing his servitude in empty and meaningless “nationalistic” gestures towards his imperialist masters in order to “prove” his political competency in their court.  

Petition to Obama: WE WANT YOU OUT! Time to listen to the people of Afghanistan!

Commander-in-Chief Obama delivering a speech aimed at "keeping hope alive" among demoralized American foot-soldiers

Global Day of Listening – “We want you out” petition

To all the leaders of our world, the leaders of the US-led coalition, the Afghan government, the ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’ and  regional countries:

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America’s 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Afghanistan: Measuring what the US/NATO occupation and Karzai regime have done to women

This young woman was violently attacked for appearing in public without a male--a violation of the strict Sharia law enforced by the US-supported Karzai regime.

29 November 2010, A World to Win News Service

Recent  reports by both human rights groups and Afghan officials indicate that violence against women in Afghanistan is on the rise and that this has been the trend since the beginning of the occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. and other Nato countries.

A report published in April 2009 by the women’s rights organisation Womankind said that 80 percent of Afghan women suffer from domestic violence. Other reports put this figure as high as 87 percent. Afghan minister of women’s affairs Hassan-Banu Ghazanfar recently said that it effects 90 percent.

November 25 marked the International Day for the Eradication of Violence Against Women. This violence is global and not particular to Afghan women. In the world as a whole the vast majority of women face violence in one or another serious form during their their lifetime. The facts about violence against women even in the most developed countries are shocking. Rape, physical and sexual abuse by the husband or boyfriend, harassment and worse at work places, the trade in women and sex slavery are only some of forms of anti-woman violence. These facts suggest that this is not just a remnant of the past but that world capitalism even in its most developed stage is a source of oppression, discrimination and violence against women.

So there is not single country in the imperialist-dominated  world where women have escaped from oppression and violence. This article focuses on Afghanistan not only because these women have suffered severe oppression by the various fundamentalist rulers over the last three decades, and not only because the level of violence and other sorts of oppression is so extreme, but also because the imperialist powers have occupied the country under the pretext of liberating Afghan women.

America’s Failed War of Attrition in Afghanistan

House destroyed by US air strike

The Nation, November 22, 2010

by Jeremy Scahill

At the end of the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal this weekend, the leadership of the Afghan Taliban issued a statement characterizing the alliance’s adoption of a loose timeline for a 2014 end to combat operations as “good news” for Afghans and “a sign of failure for the American government.”

At the summit, President Barack Obama said that 2011 will begin “a transition to full Afghan lead” in security operations, while the Taliban declared: “In the past nine years, the invaders could not establish any system of governance in Kabul and they will never be able to do so in future.”

While Obama claimed that the US and its allies are “breaking the Taliban’s momentum,” the reality on the ground tells a different story. Despite increased Special Operations Forces raids and, under Gen. David Petraeus, a return to regular US-led airstrikes, the insurgency in Afghanistan is spreading and growing stronger. “By killing Taliban leaders the war will not come to an end,” said the Taliban’s former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, in an interview at his home in Kabul. “On the contrary, things get worse which will give birth to more leaders.”

Former and current Taliban leaders say that they have seen a swelling in the Taliban ranks since 9-11. In part, they say, this can be attributed to a widely held perception that the Karzai government is corrupt and illegitimate and that Afghans–primarily ethnic Pashtuns–want foreign occupation forces out. “We are only fighting to make foreigners leave Afghanistan,” a new Taliban commander in Kunduz told me during my recent trip to the country. “We don’t want to fight after the withdrawal of foreigners, but as long as there are foreigners, we won’t talk to Karzai.”

Why the US military is losing the war in Afghanistan

US soldiers giving weapons training to Afghan police recruits. More and more of them are taking these weapons with them when they defect to the Taliban.

The Independent UK, November 20, 2010 

 

Be Under No Illusion, NATO is in No Shape to Make Progress in this Graveyard of Empires

by Patrick Cockburn

If Iraq was bad, Afghanistan is going to be worse. Nothing said or done at the Lisbon conference, which is largely an exercise in self-deception, is going to make this better and it may well make it worse.  It is not just that the war is going badly, but that NATO’s need to show progress has produced a number of counter-productive quick fixes likely to deepen the violence. These dangerous initiatives include setting up local militias to fight the Taliban where government forces are weak. These are often guns-for-hire provided by local warlords who prey on ordinary Afghans.

The US military has been making much of its strategy of assassinating mid-level Taliban commanders, but one study on the ground showed that many of these are men highly regarded in their communities. It concluded that killing them infuriated local people and led to many of them being recruited by the Taliban.

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, will tell NATO leaders today of his plan to start handing over responsibility for security in some areas to the Afghan government in 2011. This sounds like wishful thinking on the part of General Petraeus and his selection of target dates is primarily to avoid accusations that NATO has no idea when or how it will get out.

The Taliban currently controls or has influence in half of Afghanistan. While US reinforcements have been pouring into Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the Taliban have been expanding their enclaves in the north.

Report from Afghanistan: Behind Enemy Lines

The Independent (UK), November 14, 2010

The prospect of a negotiated peace is dismissed almost outright. . . . “There are no al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan any more.”

James Fergusson

The sound of a propeller engine is audible the moment my fixer and I climb out of the car, causing us new arrivals from Kabul to glance sharply upwards. I have never heard a military drone in action before, and it is entirely invisible in the cold night sky, yet there is no doubt what it is. My first visit to the Taliban since 2007 has only just begun and I am already regretting it. What if the drone is the Hellfire-missile-carrying kind?

Three years ago, the Taliban’s control over this district, Chak, and the 112,000 Pashtun farmers who live here, was restricted to the hours of darkness although the local commander, Abdullah, vowed to me that he would soon be in full control. As I am quickly to discover, this was no idle boast. In Chak, the Karzai government has in effect given up and handed over to the Taliban. Abdullah, still in charge, even collects taxes. His men issue receipts using stolen government stationery that is headed “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan”; with commendable parsimony they simply cross out the word “Republic” and insert “Emirate”, the emir in question being the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Omar.

The most astonishing thing about this rebel district and for Nato leaders meeting in Lisbon this week, a deeply troubling one is that Chak is not in war-torn Helmand or Kandahar but in Wardak province, a scant 40 miles south-west of Kabul. Nato commanders have repeatedly claimed that the Taliban are on the back foot following this year’s US troop surge. Mid-level insurgency commanders, they say, have been removed from the battlefield in “industrial” quantities since the 2010 campaign began.

And yet Abdullah, operating within Katyusha rocket range of the capital and with a $500,000 bounty on his head has managed to evade coalition forces for almost four years. If Chak is in any way typical of developments in other rural districts and Afghanistan has hundreds of isolated valley communities just like this one then Nato’s military strategy could be in serious difficulty.

Killing Reconciliation: Military Raids, Backing of Corrupt Government Undermining Stated US Goals in Afghanistan

The Obama administration says it is backing a strategy of “reconciliation with the Taliban”. But just back from Afghanistan, unembedded investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley say night raids by U.S. Special Operations forces are alienating many Afghanis, strengthening the insurgency, and undermining US attempts to win “hearts and minds” in the war. Video from interview on Democracy Now in New York City.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:
For the complete interview, transcripts and more information, visit http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/29/killing_­reconciliation.

Afghans say US/NATO forces ‘as bad as the Taliban’

If the US-led Nato counterinsurgency strategy depends on winning civilian ‘hearts and minds’, they’re losing badly

Guardian UK,  12 October 2010

Many Afghan civilian deaths have involved British troops opening fire on unarmed drivers or motorcyclists near convoys. Photograph: Ministry of Defence/AP

Last week marked the ninth anniversary of the United States’s invasion of Afghanistan, and the beginning of the 10th year of the current international engagement there. In the coming months, the US, Nato and its international allies will take a hard look at the current military counterinsurgency strategy, and the prospects for peaceful reconciliation. Both strategies are likely to be challenged by the absence of key ingredient to their success – Afghan trust in international efforts.

My organisation, the Open Society Foundations, recently asked 250 Afghans across Afghanistan who or what they thought was contributing to the escalation of conflict in Afghanistan, and, in particular, whom they blamed for the high civilian casualties and other civilian losses that have been such a flashpoint among the Afghan population.

Despite statistics suggesting insurgents are disproportionately responsible for civilian harm, our analysis found that Afghans blamed international forces as much, if not more, than insurgents. Few spoke warmly about the Taliban. But the vast majority described international forces as equally brutal toward civilians, and equally, if not more responsible for civilian casualties, detention abuses and other concerns.

They said international forces were often indiscriminate, and that many civilian deaths could have been prevented through better targeting, intelligence or coordination. “When an accident happens, or there is an attack against Nato troops, then Nato troops react and start firing on people. They never think about those around them as human. They think every person on the street is their enemy,” said a man from western Herat province.

“Liberating” the Women of Afghanistan

[With “liberators” like these, who needs oppressors?  This article breaks down the deceitful justifications of the US war in Afghanistan.-ed.]

By Huda Jawad

09 August, 2010

Countercurrents.org

TIME magazine must be experiencing a severe case of amnesia, judging by the cover of this week’s issue which asks, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan .” At best, this effort by TIME is irresponsible slick journalism; at worst, it is one of the most blatant pieces of pro-war propaganda seen in years. The world owes Afghanistan’s women an honest answer as to why we apathetically allow their condition to deteriorate from horrible to simply unspeakable. Instead, TIME is willingly deceiving readers into thinking that the condition of Aisha – the woman pictured on the cover – is a product of the Taliban 10 years ago. It is not. Aisha’s scarred face is a heart-wrenching reflection of the state of Afghan women today in the year 2010, and under the absurd assertion of democracy and the presence of thousands of US and NATO troops in the country.

Aisha was attacked by the Taliban last year, the same time that thousands of foreign troops were running around the country under the guise of liberating it. TIME is repeating the inexcusable and now redundant mantra used by the Department of Defense and by just about every neocon politician: We’re in Afghanistan to save the women. Here’s the problem: as US troops remain in the country and have dominated it for the past 10 years, violence against women in Afghanistan has been increasing – not decreasing. The actions of the Taliban have been reprehensible and the farthest thing from Islamic doctrine; however, TIME magazine and Katie Couric (who gave a humiliating endorsement of the cover and succeeding article) seem intent on fueling the fire of Islamophobia using such images.