Why? Because US has thwarted, not supported, democracy there.

By Murray Dobbin,
TheTyee.ca
Aug 27, 2009

“History repeats itself,  first as tragedy, second as farce.” — Karl Marx

The Afghan presidential election will prove to be simply irrelevant. The U.S., whose imperial hubris renders it ignorant of other cultures and societies, invaded Afghanistan with the stated purpose eliminating Al Qaeda (remember them, the few hundred armed followers of Osama bin what’s-his-name?). In doing so, they repeated the same blind arrogance of their imperial predecessors, the British and the Soviets.

Getting in was easy. Getting out on their own terms — with a credible pro-Western government in place — is proving almost impossible.

Ironically (and imperialists tend to lack a sense of irony), the U.S. made their defeat in Afghanistan a virtual certainty by their previous meddling which featured the creation of the mujhideen as an anti-Soviet proxy fighting force. In doing so, the U.S. elevated to political and cultural primacy the kind of oppressive and violent Islamic fundamentalism that until then had never been a dominant feature of life in Afghanistan.

In their zeal to rid the region of Soviet influence, the U.S. created in Afghanistan a country overflowing with arms and weapons where bullets rule and ballots are a joke. The U.S. has slowly awakened to the grotesque morass they have entered, and the presidential election was supposed to be key to an exit strategy it desperately needs. But this is sheer fantasy. There is no exit strategy, unless you visualize the last U.S. helicopter, with desperate Afghanis clamouring to get aboard, lifting off from the roof of the U.S. embassy. That was the eventual U.S. exit “strategy” in Vietnam. And it may be the only one available here.

If you’re having trouble with that image, take into account the fact that the humiliating retreat from Vietnam began with a dramatic decrease in public support for the war — exactly what is happening in the U.S. Two recent polls reveal that a majority of Americans now think the war is not worth fighting. Almost twice as many want a troop decrease as support Obama’s commitment to an increase. By a two to one margin, Americans do not believe the election will result in “effective government.” Almost as many think the U.S. is losing the war as believe it is winning, despite media complicity in the White House public relations spin.

FULL ARTICLE

Andrea Peloso, who wrote about going fridge-free for our Jan/Feb 2009 “food revolution” issue, has recently launched a blog on the same topic. Check it out!

In years to come, Richard Heinberg suggests, we may mark July 11, 2008, as the day peak oil passed from future possibility to present reality. Welcome to peak oil, one year in. Is it as you expected?

Peak Oil Day

MuseLetter 207 / July 2009 by Richard Heinberg

[...] Maybe it’s a stretch to say that the production peak occurred at one identifiable moment, but attributing it to the day oil prices reached their high-water mark may be a useful way of fixing the event in our minds. So I suggest that we remember July 11, 2008 as Peak Oil Day.

We are now approaching the first-year anniversary of Peak Oil Day. Where are we now? The global economy is in tatters, yet oil prices have recovered somewhat (they’re now about half what they were in July 2008). World energy consumption is down, world trade is down, the airline industry is shrinking, and most of the world’s automakers are on life support.

It is too late to prepare for Peak Oil–a year too late, in fact. Now the name of the game is adaptation. We are in an entirely new economic environment, in which old assumptions about the inevitability of perpetual growth, and the usefulness of leveraging investments based on expectations of future growth, are crashing in flames. Even if economic activity picks up somewhat, this will occur in the context of an economy significantly smaller than the one that existed in July 2008, and energy scarcity will quickly cause most green shoots to wither. [...]

Continue reading.

By Eric Margolis
Winnipeg Sun

PARIS — Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 “terrorists” killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people — most of Swat’s population — made refugees.

Pakistan’s U.S.-rented armed forces have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad they don’t do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians, however, is much safer and more profitable.

Unable to pacify Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes (a.k.a. Taliban), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan’s media, the rest civilians.

Pashtun, also improperly called Pathan, are the world’s largest tribal people. Fifteen million live in Afghanistan, forming half its population. Twenty-six million live right across the border in Pakistan. Britain’s imperialists divided Pashtun by an artificial border, the Durand Line (today’s Afghan-Pakistan border). Pashtun reject it.

Many Pashtun tribes agreed to join Pakistan in 1947, provided much of their homeland be autonomous and free of government troops. Pashtun Swat only joined Pakistan in 1969.

As Pakistan’s Pashtun increasingly aided Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, U.S. drones began attacking them. Washington forced Islamabad to violate its own constitution by sending troops into Pashtun lands. The result was the current explosion of Pashtun anger.

I have been to war with the Pashtun and have seen their legendary courage, strong sense of honour and determination. They are also hugely quarrelsome, feuding and prickly.

One quickly learns never to threaten a Pashtun or give him ultimatums. These are the mountain warriors who defied the U.S. by refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden because he was a hero of the anti-Soviet war and their guest. The ancient code of “Pashtunwali” still guides them: Do not attack Pashtun, do not cheat them, do not cause them dishonour. To Pashtun, revenge is sacred.

HAM-HANDED

Now, Washington’s ham-handed policies and last week’s Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan’s second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan’s Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan’s other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a “Taliban takeover of Pakistan” are pure propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided.

Nor are Pakistan’s well-guarded nukes a danger — at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan’s nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein’s bogus weapons.

THE REAL DANGER

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad’s military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

If this continues, at some point patriotic Pakistani soldiers may rebel and shoot the corrupt generals and politicians on Washington’s payroll.

Equally ominous, a poor people’s uprising spreading across Pakistan — also mislabelled “Taliban” — threatens a radical national rebellion reminiscent of India’s Naxalite rebels.

As in Iraq, profound ignorance and gung ho military arrogance drive U.S. Afghan policy. Obama’s people have no understanding what they are getting into in “AfPak.” I can tell them: An unholy mess we will long regret.

“…our (Western) moment of feminist leadership is over now, for good reasons. We know by now what our problems are as women in the West, and we know the blueprint for solving them. What we lack now is not analysis, but the organizational and political will to do so.

“So the leadership role is shifting to women in the developing world. Their agenda is more pressing, and their problems, frankly, are far more serious than ours - which makes it much more urgent for them to develop theories appropriate to the challenges they face.”

“Capitalism is on trial. And you have an organic, grassroots, sort of spontaneous revolt against the elite - which is actually what we’re hearing with this rage at CEOs, and bonuses and government collusion with the elites. Rage is an opportunity. The rage is there, and the country is seething, the world is seething with rage. The question is, where is it going to be directed? I feel there’s a moral responsibility for the Left and for progressives to provide an alternative in this moment that is moral, that is principled, that is just, that is hopeful, because if we don’t, then that anger is so easily directed at ‘those damn Mexican immigrants,’ at ‘the first African American president.’ So I feel a tremendous sense of urgency. It’s not just, ‘Hey, our time has come.’ It’s, ‘We’d better get our act together because this anger is going somewhere.’”

By Michael Skinner
The Bullet (Socialist Project)
April 25, 2009

The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.

My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.

Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”

Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan State

It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.’s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.

Continue reading…

“Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward is not to abandon hope but to find more appropriate homes for it — in the factories, neighbourhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.”

“Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia’s criminals.”

Global Symposium on Engaging Men and Boys on Achieving Gender Equality
Rio de Janeiro
March 29 – April 3, 2009

PART ONE: PREAMBLE
We come from eighty countries. We are men and women, young and old, working side by side with respect and shared goals. We are active in community organizations, religious and educational institutions; we are representatives of governments, NGOs and the United Nations. We speak many languages, we look like the diverse peoples of the world and carry their diverse beliefs and religions, cultures, physical abilities, and sexual and gender identities. We are indigenous peoples, immigrants, and ones whose ancestors moved across the planet. We are fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, partners and lovers, husbands and wives.

What unites us is our strong outrage at the inequality that still plagues the lives of women and girls, and the self-destructive demands we put on boys and men. But even more so, what brings us together here is a powerful sense of hope, expectation, and possibility for we have seen the capacity of men and boys to change, to care, to cherish, to love passionately, and to work for justice for all.

We are outraged by the pandemic of violence women face at the hands of some men, by the relegation of women to second class status, and the continued domination by men of our economies, of our politics, of our social and cultural institutions, in far too many of our homes. We also know that among women there are those who fare even worse because of their social class, their religion, their language, their physical differences, their ancestry, their sexual orientation, or simply where they live.

There are deep costs to boys and men from the ways our societies have defined men’s power and raised boys to be men. Boys deny their humanity in search of an armor-plated masculinity. Young men and boys are sacrificed as cannon fodder in war for those men of political, economic, and religious power who demand conquest and domination at any cost. Many men cause terrible harm to themselves because they deny their own needs for physical and mental care or lack services when they are in need.

Too many men suffer because our male-dominated world is not only one of power of men over women, but of some groups of men over others. Too many men, like too many women, live in terrible poverty, in degradation, or are forced to do body- or soul-destroying work to put food on the table.

Too many men carry the deep scars of trying to live up to the impossible demands of manhood and find terrible solace in risk-taking, violence, self-destruction or the drink and drugs sold to make a profit for others. Too many men experience violence at the hands of other men.

Too many men are stigmatized and punished for the simple fact they love, desire and have sex with other men.

We are here because we know that the time when women stood alone in speaking out against discrimination and violence – that this time is coming to an end.

We also know this: This belief in the importance of engaging men and boys is no longer a remote hope. We see the emergence of organizations and campaigns that are directly involving hundreds of thousands, millions of men in almost every country on the planet. We hear men and boys speaking out against violence, practicing safer sex, and supporting women’s and girl’s reproductive rights. We see men caring, loving, and nurturing for other men and for women. We see men who embrace the daily challenges of looking after babies and children, and delight in their capacity to be nurturers. We see many men caring for the planet and rejecting conquering nature just as men once conquered women.

We are gathering not simply to celebrate our first successes, but, with all the strength we possess, to appeal to parents, teachers, and coaches, to the media and businesses, to our governments, NGOs, religious institutions, and the United Nations, to mobilize the political will and economic resources required to increase the scale and impact of work with men and boys to promote gender equality. We know how critical it is that institutions traditionally controlled by men reshape their policies and priorities to support gender equality and the well-being of women, children, and men. And we know that a critical part of that is to reshape the world of men and boys, the beliefs of men and boys, and the lives of men and boys.

FULL ARTICLE