Its title, Five Flawed Assumptions of Obama’s Afghan Surge, says it all, and the piece itself summarizes concisely points that this site and many others have been arguing for months:
1. Expanding the ground war against the Taliban will in no way guarantee us any greater success in finding and confront members of Al-Qaeda.
2. We cannot build an Afghan National Army capable of defending its national sovereignty within a few years.

3. We cannot work with President Karzai.

4. A an alleged withdrawal date will not exert pressure on President Karzai, who has been forging alliances with the expectation that we will leave eventually anyway.

5. Pakistan may take on insurgents that challenge its own government, but it never has, and probably never will fight members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban on the border if they are merely using the region to launch attacks into Afghanistan.

Conducting a war under these realities is a lot harder than waging one under the false assumptions the Obama administration has presented.

Surprisingly, the Time article does not even offer an “on the hand” argument. This article is firmly against Obama’s Afghanistan policy, in more decisive terms than any publication of its stature. It’s worth checking out.

The most recent Time issue also includes a typically wishy-washy editorial from Joe Klein, who does include a gem of a sentence in which he calls Obama’s deliberations over the war: the struggles of a highly intelligent, dispassionate man to find a rationale for a mission that is crucial but slightly crazy, a decision that will define his presidency.

Amen.

Kerry said he had asked U.S intelligence agencies “for the smoking gun”, and had not gotten “the hard and fast” evidence.

A few days ago we found out why: the CIA has been keeping Brother Karzai on their payroll since 2001, turning a blind eye to his criminal operations in exchange for helping local contribute paramilitary forces to the NATO effort and acting as a go-between with the Taliban.

The CIA is not exactly a saintly organization, and having A.W Karzai cooperating with the U.S is probably quite helpful, especially during his brother’s presidency.

Yet this is another example of hypocricy from an administration that demands “accountability” and “reform” from the Karzai administration while openly paying off one of its most vice-ridden figures.

In her new piece for The Nation, Ann Jones has ripped the heart out of the argument that we should continue our mission in Afghanistan to prevent the plight of women. As someone who has worked with women there, Jones comes to this conclusion out of frustration at the Karzai administration, the extremist judiciary and the misogynistic rural warlords who have done so much to retard the advancement of women that there are not many steps backwards for women’s rights to take.

Jones kicks off her depressing account of the Afghan woman by treating us to the country’s constitution, which promises , “The citizens of Afghanistan–whether man or woman–have equal rights and duties before the law.”

While some in the west might see the borrowed language of equality and freedom, the Afghan court interprets the phrase to suggest that men have a right to work while women have a right to obey their husbands. Not like rural women are really bringing class action lawsuits to challenge that assumption in the first place.

Next, Jones explains how President Karzai signed the Shiite Personal Status Law through run of the mill horsetrading with different conservative blocs. He didn’t think twice about selling out women’s rights (his own wife, a doctor, is rarely allowed to leave home). This law, also known as the Marital Rape Law includes the following provisions:

1. Husbands are authorized to deny food to a wife who does not provide sexual services once every four days (assuming the man has four wives, the maximum allowed under the law).

2. Only under rare conditions can women inherit, divorce or have guardianship of their children.

3. Women cannot marry without permission, and may be forced into marriage, beginning at the age of 16. (It apparently took a serious lobbying effort from women in Parliament to up the age from nine)

4. Women cannot leave the home except for “legitimate purposes”, as defined by their husbands or fathers.

5. Raping a woman outside of marriage is considered a property crime, requiring monetary restitution to the aggrieved man, not the victim.

In case anyone was wondering, the Afghan Supreme Court has declared the law constitutional. After its passage, even a female member of Parliament (one not under the control of her local warlord) forlornly conceded, “without a written law, men can do whatever they want.”

The marital rape law brought to mind the great philosophical challenge to democracy: what to do when, as in Nigeria, a law can be passed calling for a woman to be stoned to death for adultery, even if she was a rape victim?

Anyone who has traveled abroad, or even in parts of the United States, knows that sexism is a matter of gradation, and that women face appalling conditions all over the world. But the stuff coming out of Afghanistan is hard to match in its monstrosity.

Here is the reality: right now female activists are murdered when they go public. We aren’t just talking about rabble-rousers though- popular local TV performer Shaima Rezayee, who was shot and killed after complaining of her gender driven ouster from television, and an actress, Parwin Mushtakhel fled Afghanistan after her husband was murdered for letting her out of the house.

According to UNIFEM, 87% of women are beaten regularly at home, and rape is nearly as prevalent, although women are unlikely to be forthcoming about rape, since it can land them in jail for adultery. UNAMA researchers concluded after one case, “For women, “human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper.”

Because it is U.S trained policemen who are hunting battered and raped women to throw them in jail, one can understand why the U.S plan to accelerate police training and arm more local men doesn’t exactly have women fired up and ready to go.

Interestingly, Jones makes the case that in pre-Soviet Afghanistan, half of the nation’s doctors and civil servants, along with three-quarters of the teachers were women. Jones suggests that the endless cycle of violence has permanently elevated ruthless, violent men to power in Afghanistan, and destroyed the civil institutions where women once played a prominent role.

Unfortunately, Jones doesn’t have an easy answer- she opposes staying the course and escalation, and admits that life wouldn’t get better under the Taliban.

As Mark Danner explained to Bill Moyers the other night, though, sometimes the journalist is just the journalist. There’s nothing worse than a writer squeezing in a half-baked solution to close out a well thought-out fact piece (my paraphrasing). Ann Jones is one journalist, and while her perspective deserves more credence than most, there are probably some foreigners and locals that would claim she understates the heightened malice the Taliban would bring. But her article is too comprehensive to recreate in one diary without heinous copyright infringement, so I’ll simply encourage people to check out the whole article.

***

As a post-script, it always bears mentioning that hypothetical conversations about “the Taliban taking over” completely disregard the fact that the Taliban or various anti-American insurgents dominate most of the countryside

Read Janos Marton’s entire blog post at outofafghanistan.blogspot.com

Abdullah was born in Kabul in 1960, and graduated from medical school there with a degree in ophtalmology in 1983 (Ophtalmology deals with eye disease and surgery). Like Karzai, he is an ethnic Pashtun.

After finishing his residency, Abdullah worked in the Ophthalmology Hospital for Afghan Refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan and also became the Director of Healthcare for the Resistance Front. In 1986, by which time the Soviet Occupation had turned especially sour, Abdullah became the Special Advisor and Chief Assistant to Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was not only a legendary insurgent against the Soviets, but he led the Northern Alliance military resistance against the Taliban. Some suggest it was no coincidence that he was murdered by Al-Qaeda before the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Abdullah himself served as Defense Minister from 1992-1996. After the Taliban take-over, Abdullah served as Foreign Minister of the government in exile, and was a key diplomat to the west until the war in Afghanistan began in 2001.

Abdullah was Minister of Foreign Affairs for then-Chairman Karzai’s transitional government, and became his first Foreign Minister, a position he held until 2006. Interestingly, Abdullah pushed for Afghanistan to adopt a parlimentary system, arguing that presidencies outside the United States too often led to autocracies.

This isn’t the most detailed biography, but then, we don’t get to vote. We only get to know who our potential partners are, Abdullah’s background makes me inclined to root for him over Karzai

Janos Marton blogs at outofafghanistan.blogspot.com

Last week President Obama conducted the fifth strategy meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan. Looking how quickly the U.S. is sinking into this hole, I decided to do a little bit of poking around of my own in New York City to get a sense what Afghans living here had to say about what was happening.

As expected, many expats were either extremely reluctant to comment or were decidedly politically correct- one of them even quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King to me. But it was interesting nonetheless to head out Kissena Boulevard, in Queens, which is home to almost 10,000 Afghan expat families.

Many of the Afghans in NYC fled Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the country from 1979-89. In recent years, continuous fighting between NATO-led troops and militants in Afghanistan has prevented many of these families from returning to their homeland. “What’s the point?,” asked Ahmad Waish, a law enforcement officer in New York who hasn’t been back home for 30 years. “The Americans may shoot me, thinking I am an Afghan fighter,” said Waish who was dressed in a traditional Chapan (Coat) with a Keffiyeh around his neck, “And the fighters may attack me saying I am American.” Waish has also been unable to visit his father who lives in Kandahar. “My father can’t go outside – he will be bombed to pieces.”

Outside the Masjid Saliheen at Kissena Boulevard the streets empty out ahead of the evening prayers. Men in beards and tunic-pants hurry to make it to the mosque in time. Two blocks down, in a park across the street, three men sit in a circle playing Chess or Shatranj on a board made of stone. “We are veterans of war,” says one Afghani who did not wish to be named, referring to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban and the American forces. “We have seen so many killings, homicides. We don’t support war in any form. War is destruction,” he said, adding he was against any troop increase in Afghanistan. As he moved his pawns across the chess board, his companions – a Hispanic immigrant and another Afghani from Kandahar puffed silently on their cigarettes. “I remember the first time America attacked Kabul – the rockets firing- bombs left and right in the city. Sometimes I feel like the war was imposed on America – Sept 11 forced America into this war.”

Other Afghanis like 27 year old Yama Qadari are weighed down by a similar sense of war fatigue and are against putting more boots on the ground. “If there was actually any progress on the ground, then why would we need to send more troops to the country?” asks Qadari, adding there needs to be a cohesive strategy to end the carnage in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan started off as a multilateral effort in 2001. At present, there are 39,000 NATO troops along with 65,000 Americans. If the President decides to dispatch another 45,000 more U.S. troops, the longest American war would also potentially turn into its deadliest. “Afghanistan for the last 30 years has been at war,” added Waish. “ Most people under 30 were born under bullets. Children were born under war. What is the condition of people like that? Their main instinct is ‘kill in order to survive.’”

Others expressed cynicism at the President’s Peace Prize. “What peace are they talking about,” asked Akram Jalali, a former medical worker in Queens.” Everyday there are bombings in Kabul, people are dying all the time, they don’t know the meaning of peace,” he fumed. “People are suffering, innocent civilians are dying. Anyone who has been reading the papers knows the carnage there,” said Waish. Meanwhile, as the Chess game continues in the park, one of the Afghani immigrants sums up the feeling in the community. “Everyone here is tired,” he said. “If only people paid more attention to the teachings of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.”

Despite the gloom surrounding the state of affairs in Afghanistan, some immigrants like Yama Qadari are hopeful for the future. He smiles as he says “No country is beyond repair.”