How Come Hawks Only Care About Human Rights When There's A War To Hype?

By Steve Hynd

Ben Smith at Politico is responsible for a piece that really ticked me off today.

As President Barack Obama prepares to make the case for sending more troops to Afghanistan, some allies are urging him to return to a line of argument little heard since the Bush years: the United States has a moral obligation to protect the Afghan people, particularly women, from the Taliban.

...as Obama moves toward sending additional troops � reportedly more than 30,000 more � to the country, supporters of the policy are urging him to stress human rights in an effort to revive support for an increasingly unpopular war.

�The audience that has gone sour on the war the most is his own liberal domestic base, and those people are the most susceptible to the argument that we should be in Afghanistan for reasons that go beyond simply national security and homeland defense, but to include trying to do things to help the Afghan people,� said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who led Obama�s first Afghan review earlier this year.

At which point I found myself yelling: "you chinless, no-good, self-promoting, cynically warmongering hack, Reidel!" at the screen. Reidel has been instrumental in the current AfPak policy's formulation, being head of the February/March review which ended with Reidel standing in front of reporters at an official press conference in which the notion of Afghan human rights wasn't given a mention at all. Ever since, it seems that no-one in the mainstream can write a news report on Afghanistan or put together a TV segment without Reidel's presence. He's been ubiquitous. But he hasn't been a vocal proponent for human rights in the many interviews and soundbites he's given. His last interview for the Council On Foreign Relations, for example, was entirely concerned with how "sticker shock" and Obama's delay in granting McChrystal more troops might inhibit support for the occupation, not for Afghan rights. And his formulation now shows that he's still not interested in the Afghan people's plight per se, just in the way that plight can be manipulated in the American media to prop up support for a badly envisioned and badly maintained occupation.

Ben Smith, who got his start writing for the very rightwing NY Sun, and has a string of rightwing hit pieces to his credit, goes on to compare Obama's "realism" favorably to Bush's cynical faux-idealism, so well employed to lead America and its allies into wars where they were supposed to be "greeted like liberators". And he even manages to get a quote from an anonymous Clintonista to the effect that calls for humanitarian interventions are good for getting rid of "obstructionist actors". Not a lot of sign of genuine worry about humanitarian issues there, either - it's all about how they can be hijacked to make the case for military interventionism.

Smith does manage to get a couple of quotes from people who really do worry about Afghans as support for his cynical war-hyping, though.

�The public will be more inspired to stick with the president if he also taps into the deeply held view that America should stand for something larger than narrow self-interest,� said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, who said Obama should warn that withdrawal would leave Afghans �to an awful fate.�

�The American people want a foreign policy that makes them safe, and they want a foreign policy that makes them proud,� he said. �The administration will win support if it appeals to both of these desires.�

..."The administration and the media haven't included the Afghan people into the debate, particularly the women," said Esther Hyneman, a board member of the Kabul-based Women for Afghan Women, which is holding a press conference in Washington Tuesday to attempt to refocus the conversation on human rights and support the dispatch of more troops to the country. "Americans don't know anything about the Afghan people and what they need and want," she said.

What Smith is carefully not mentioning is that "leaving Afghans to an awful fate" will be just as true if Karzai's central government is in charge as if the Taliban are.

Seventy women have set themselves on fire in the Afghan province of Herat alone this year, to protest abusive marriages. Over 40 have died. Although the Afghan constitution protects women's rights, enforcement is as near nil as makes no difference.  A combination of poverty, illiteracy, domestic violence and lack of freedoms continue to drive attempts at self-immolation in what is a decades-old problem. It's not the only one: This year the Afghan Women's Minister told reporters that trading women as currency and forced marriages are too old, too strongly entrenched, customs still and that only the most strongly evidenced rapes ever come to court. In January, the country's only female mayor said that she thought that women's rights were going backwards again after improving up until about 2004. As for children, a May 2009 said that child labor was a "growing concern" throughout Afghanistan, with as many as one in four children under the age of 14 engaged in some form of work.

That the warlords attendant on the current Kabul government are just as bad for human rights as the Taliban was attested to in a 2002 interview reprinted at The Afghan Woman's Mission website:

The people of Afghanistan are really terrified of the Northern Alliance being part of any official government in Afghanistan. The period between 1992 and 1996, when they were in power, was really the blackest period in the history of Afghanistan. Coming back to your question of what was the worst time, that was really the worst time and what made it even worse and more tragic was that there was not any attention given to the situation. The Afghan people will not forget that time. People will not forget that the hospitals, schools, museums, and 70 - 80 percent of the capital city of Kabul were destroyed during that time. Many cases of rape, women's abduction, forced marriages happened at that time. That would happen again, if they take the power.

And they have taken power, in large part - propped up by the deal-making Karzai and his international backers. More recently, Sonali Kolhatkar of theAfghan Women's Mission made the connection between the US and its mysoginist allies explicit in an op-ed for Foreign Policy In Focus.

One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they'll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement.

What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed the same men, now called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed government as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the judiciary, and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women's rights over eight long years.

Any token gains have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in Afghanistan's constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women's rights activists, the legalization of rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women's imprisonment for so-called honor crimes � all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are protecting against the Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children killed in U.S. bombing raids, which has also increased the Taliban's numbers and clout, and it makes the case that for eight years the United States has enabled the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their miseries.

This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their country.

What Reidel, Smith and the other cynical manipulators are being careful not to mention is that furthering humanitarian causes in Afghanistan means removing our support from the current oppressors, more than helping support them against the past and perhaps would-be future ones.