Why did the US attack Afghanistan?!?

A recent report by the ICOS (International Council on Security and Development) indicated that 92% of the 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar provinces know nothing about the 9/11 attacks on the US. Click here to read the article.

Many are shocked to hear this finding…interestingly enough, I am shocked to hear that they are shocked!

Why would you expect those people to know anything about it at all?!? How many of the hijackers were Afghans? How many of them were born or raised or even trained in Afghanistan? Did Afghans finance them at least? Do Afghans know them at least? If the answer to these questions point to no such links between Afghans and the hijackers, why did the US attack Afghanistan after the events of 9/11? Here is another shocking piece of information that I can foretell. I bet that not many Americans would be able to answer this question correctly if you were to take a random sample of ordinary Americans off the street.

If you were to conduct such a survey, I am confident that the closest they would probably get to would be something along the lines of “Well, they attacked us first in 2001!” Incorrect! Many around the world do not know that it was not they (the Afghans) who attacked the US in 2001. They were not even friends or relatives of Afghans. Their leader was a Saudi-exile who happened to be sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Or as this Reuters articles correctly states the reason for the attack was the Taliban government’s “sheltering al Qaeda leaders who plotted the 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people.”

What IS really shocking is that even this statement, the most correct response you can ever get, will have a hard time justifying the attack and the common negative perceptions of Afghans around the world.

Firstly, this statement assumes that Al-Qaeda leaders “plotted” this attack, which is being increasingly questioned by many and has not been proven. In fact, the Taliban agreed to handing over Osama Bin Laden if they were provided with a proof and they were willing to having him tried in a third party neutral state (the ICC obviously did not exist then), which was refused by the then US president George W. Bush.

Secondly, even if this link was established more firmly, the attack was not grounded in international norms, but a policy by George W. Bush that he would not distinguish between a terrorist organization and nations harboring them. By the logic of this policy, the US could legitimately attack any country that harbored terrorists. Without mentioning any country names, one can think of multiple cases where the US is and will always be unwilling to act upon such policy.

Lastly (perhaps a lot less controversial to many than my first two points), linking the people of Afghanistan with the policies of the Taliban assumes that the Taliban were democratically elected. What many people forget is that the people of Afghanistan were more the victims in all these years than anyone else. And all they get from every single actor is more victimization, more killing, more mines, more tanks, more 3K pound bombs, and the like. There is obviously some charity too (perhaps a small fraction of the military industrial complex), but even that fails to reach the people it is supposed to.

Now you tell me who is the victim and who is the villain? Are you still shocked by the finding that the big majority of Afghans have never heard of the 9/11 or the twin towers?

Want to change something? Call your local representative to reduce the bombs and increase the food, or even better to increase unskilled jobs (Visit and support www.jobsforafghans.org).

Where do the aid $$ go?

Nothing new to many, but here is a recent piece on where the millions, rather billions, of aid dollars go. And this is supposedly the "good" money being used in good projects by the USAID.

Here is my favorite quote: "at least 92 percent was going to security and salaries for expats."

Read more here the NPR story.

Where are the taxpayers???

We are nine years in the war in Afghanistan and nobody still has a clue where the billions of dollars, literally coming out of the pockets of good American taxpayers, are spent. After all America is a model democracy and the mismanagement of billions going unaccounted for here leaves no hope of accountability and transparency anywhere else...pretty grim...one of those sad but true realities of life.

According to the website of SIGA (The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction), this organization was set up six or seven years after the war "to provide independent and objective oversight of these funds" being used in Afghanistan. The first question is why so late. The second question is why it took SIGA two years to find out that nobody knows where the money is spent. The third question, perhaps the most important one, is what is going to happen as a result of this finding. Although it is pretty late, it is till not "too late" to get our acts together, follow the money, coordinate our efforts (not just those coming from within the US but internationally) and give Afghans and the taxpayers the biggest bang for their buck. It doesn't seem like too much to ask, but without the united voice of the taxpayers, who are the only ones who have a true claim to these billions, there is little hope for change.

Read the NPR article for more details...click here.

Meet the terrorists of tomorrow

Afghanistan has been a battleground for self-serving interests at least since I was born. In fact, even before I was born, it was the buffer zone between British India in the South and the Soviet Union in the North, resulting in three major Anglo-Afghan wars. Then there was the Soviet invasion in 1979, then the Mujahideen in 1992, then the Taliban in 1994-5 and now the whole world is fighting their wars on this war-ridden land.

In all these events, some Afghans have always exhibited loyalty, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, to one group or another, but I would rather call them being "used" by foreign interests. Their being used repeatedly, however, is not that surprising to me. At the end of the way, they are getting something out of it too even though it may cost them their lives in this world and for those who believe in the hereafter, severe punishments there. They are not likely to succeed in anything else anyway, so fighting is their only profession for which they get paid.

What really is surprising to me is the behavior of those who attempt to use them. Have they never heard the saying 'what goes around comes around?' Are they too naïve to realize this or do they suffer from some sort of amnesia or is there some cost benefit analysis that I am entirely missing out on? Do they think that the world is too brainless to believe that they are truly fighting terror and too blind to see their active role in creating terrorists in an endless cycle of defeating one by the other?!? The freedom fighters of today are the terrorists of tomorrow and this trend will go on without some sort of awakening of the public or a moral rebirth among the “enlightened” few.

Meet the terrorists of tomorrow. Click here to get "enlightened"

Here is my favorite quote on enlightenment from this article:

"The Defence chief admitted that when Australian troops arrived in Oruzgan they did not understand the complex ''tribal dynamics'' but now had a more ''enlightened'' view."