Bush's foreign policy results - Afghanistan

Reuters - Tank battles rage in Afghan city

WP - Combat Claims Afghan Cabinet Minister

President Hamid Karzai said in a statement issued Sunday night that he was "deeply shocked" by the assassination and offered condolences to Khan and the rest of Saddiq's family. Saddiq, who was minister of civil aviation and tourism, was appointed to the position by Karzai as a political gesture to his powerful father.

Khan and Karzai, however, have been at odds virtually since the country's coalition government was formed in late 2001 under a U.N.-brokered accord after the collapse of Islamic Taliban rule.

From India - Afghanistan has been restored to warlords and heroin traders without achieving the stated objective of that restoration, the arrest of the man responsible for 9/11.

Pilger had laid it out - Afghanistan - The Reality vs. Bush's Hoax

I visited Afghanistan for the first time earlier this year. In a lifetime of making my way through places of upheaval, I had not seen anything like it. Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and heat their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to mark 'Year Zero'.

There is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan. My footsteps echoed through the once grand Dilkusha Palace, built in 1910 to a design by a British architect, whose circular staircase and Corinthian columns and stone frescoes of biplanes were celebrated. It is now a cavernous ruin from which reed-thin children emerge like small phantoms, offering yellowing postcards of what it looked like 30 years ago. Beneath the sweep of the staircase were the blood and flesh of two people blown up by a bomb the day before. Who were they? Who planted the bomb? In a country in thrall to warlords, many of them conniving in terrorism, the question itself is surreal.

More than US$10 billion has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7, 2001, most of it by the US. More than 80% of this has paid for bombing the country and paying the warlords, the former mujaheddin who called themselves the 'Northern Alliance'.

The post-Taliban government is a facade it has no money and its writ barely runs to the gates of Kabul, in spite of democratic pretensions such as the election planned for next year. Omar Zakhilwal, an official in the ministry of rural affairs, told me that the government gets less than 20% of the aid that is delivered to Afghanistan. "We don't even have enough money to pay wages, let alone plan reconstruction", he said. President Hamid Karzai is a placeman of Washington who goes nowhere without his posse of US special forces bodyguards.

In a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July, Human Rights Watch has documented atrocities "committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001" and who have "essentially hijacked the country". The report describes army and police troops controlled by the warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons the widespread rape of women, girls and boys routine extortion, robbery and arbitrary murder. Girls' schools are burned down. "Because the soldiers are targeting women and girls", the report says, "many are staying indoors, making it impossible for them to attend school [or] go to work".

In the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they drive they are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even an unrelated taxi driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a 'chastity test', squandering precious medical services to which, says Human Rights Watch, "women and girls have almost no access, particularly in Herat, where fewer than one per cent of women give birth with a trained attendant". The death rate of mothers giving birth is the highest in the world, according to UNICEF. Herat is ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld endorsed as "an appealing man... thoughtful, measured and self-confident".

"The last time we met in this chamber", said Bush in his State of the Union speech last year, "the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new minister of women's affairs, Dr Sima Samar." A slight, middle-aged woman in a headscarf stood and received the choreographed ovation.

A physician who refused to deny treatment to women during the Taliban years, Samar is a true symbol of resistance, whose appropriation by the unctuous Bush was short-lived. In December 2001, Samar attended the Washington-sponsored "peace conference" in Bonn at which Karzai was installed as president and three of the most brutal warlords as vice-presidents. General Rashid Dostum, accused of torturing and slaughtering prisoners, is currently defence minister. Samar was one of two women in Karzai's cabinet.

No sooner had the applause in Congress died away than Samar was smeared with a false charge of blasphemy and forced out. The warlords, different from the Taliban only in their tribal allegiances and religious pieties, were not tolerating even a gesture of female emancipation.

Today, Samar lives in constant fear for her life. She has two fearsome bodyguards with automatic weapons. She travels in a blacked-out van. "For the past 23 years, I was not safe", she told me, "but I was never in hiding or travelling with gunmen, which I must do now... There is no more official law to stop women from going to school and work there is no law about dress code. But the reality is that even under the Taliban there was not the pressure on women in the rural areas there is now."
The apartheid might have legally ended, but for as many as 90% of the women of Afghanistan, these 'reforms' - such as the setting up of a women's ministry in Kabul - are little more than a technicality. The burka is still ubiquitous. As Samar says, the plight of rural women is often more desperate now because the ultra-puritanical Taliban dealt harshly with rape, murder and banditry. Unlike today, it was possible to travel safely across much of the country.

"During the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were secure", Marina, a leading member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), told me. "Some people even say they were better. That's how desperate the situation is today. The laws may have changed, but women dare not leave their homes without the burka, which we wear as much for our protection."

Marina is not her real name. RAWA is a heroic organisation that for years tried to alert the world to the suffering of the women of Afghanistan. RAWA women travelled secretly throughout the country, with cameras concealed beneath their burkas. They filmed a Taliban execution and other abuses, and smuggled the videotape to the west. "We took it to different media groups", said Marina. "Reuters, ABC Australia, for example, and they said, yes, it's very nice, but we can't show it because it's too shocking for people in the West." The execution was shown finally in a documentary broadcast by Britain's Channel 4.

That was before 9/11, when Bush and the US media discovered the issue of women in Afghanistan. Marina says that the silence today in the West over the atrocious nature of the US-backed warlord regime is no different.

"Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies were put in front of their houses", Marina told me. "Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11, 2001."

Of all the great humanitarian crises of recent years, no country has been helped less than Afghanistan. Bosnia, with a quarter of the population, received $356 per person Afghanistan gets $42 per person. Only 3% of all international aid spent in Afghanistan has been for reconstruction the US-led military ?coalition? accounts for 84%, the rest is emergency aid.

Last March, Karzai flew to Washington to beg for more money. He was promised extra money from private US investors. Of this, $35 million will finance a proposed five-star hotel. As Bush said, "The Afghan people will know the generosity of America and its allies."

More recently from Pilger - "There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth."

When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.