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Afghanistan: Disaster upon Disaster!

From "Not the Same as Being Equal" on truthout.org:

"Despite George W. Bush's claim that he's "truly not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden, the administration is erecting 10 "Wanted" billboards in Afghanistan, offering rewards of $25 million for bin Laden, $10 million for Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and $1 million for Adam Gadahn, an American member of Al Qaeda, now listed as a "top terrorist." That's 10 nice, big, literal signs that the administration is waking up, only seven years after 9/11 and the American "victory" that followed, to its "forgotten war."

When I wrote this piece for TomDispatch in February 2007, I'd been working intermittently since 2002 with women in Afghanistan - women the Bush administration claimed to have "liberated" by that victory. In all those years, despite some dramatic changes on paper, the real lives of most Afghan women didn't change a bit, and many actually worsened thanks to the residual widespread infection of men's minds by germs of Taliban "thought." Today, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where women outdo men when it comes to suicide.

To transfer those changes from paper to the people, "victory" in Afghanistan should have been followed by the deployment of troops in sufficient numbers to ensure security. Securing the countryside might have enabled the Karzai government installed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to extend its authority while international humanitarian organizations helped Afghans rebuild their country. As everyone knows, of course, that's hardly what happened.

Now, a promised new American surge in Afghanistan threatens to be too much, too late. Bent on victory again, Americans are easily manipulated by false information to call in air strikes and wipe out whole villages - men, women, and children - even with no enemy in sight. (In 2007 alone, the U.S. dropped about a million pounds of bombs on the Afghan countryside.) Just the other day, masses of men took to the streets to protest the death of 95 civilians, including 19 women and 60 children. Masses of men once grateful to the U.S. for overthrowing the Taliban, and hopeful of American help in rebuilding the country, are now turning against the Bush administration's ever more lethal occupation.

You don't see women among the protesters because they are at home behind closed doors, confined, just as they were before the American "liberation."

Read on here.

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