NEWS & LETTERS, December 2009
After 8 years of war
San Francisco--Over a 100 people crowded into a room to hear Zoya, a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), on Oct. 25. We here print excerpts of her talk.
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...Afghanistan is now a free country: free for the rapists of women and children, free for the warlords, for drug lords, terrorists and occupation forces. It is not free for the people of Afghanistan. There is an Afghanistan not seen in the image presented in the U.S. news. There is resistance to the bitter realities created by the war; there are human rights organizations and others trying to help.
In the last eight years, billions of dollars poured into our country. Most of it was for the foreign troops. Obama is now considering whether to increase them. What is their objective? Why are they here?
In 2001 the justifications were: first, to liberate the women of Afghanistan... Women are oppressed by their families. Domestic violence is related to the political situation. For example, when a young girl was raped by a member of Parliament, there was no justice for her... President Karzai pardoned rapists of yet another girl because they were connected to warlords... Schools are supposedly open, but on their way to school girls have acid thrown in their faces, or are abducted, raped and/or forced to marry warlords' soldiers or the Taliban.
The second justification for the 2001 invasion was to bring democracy to Afghanistan. But today Afghanistan is a mafia narco-state and the world capital of opium... The recent election was a sham from the beginning. Karzai and Abdullah are the same donkey but with a different saddle... RAWA, because we believe in democracy, is against both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. We cannot work openly in Afghanistan, and still struggle semi-underground...
The third justification was to fight terrorism. Yet the Taliban is getting stronger, mostly because of U.S. policies. Afghans had high hopes eight years ago for peace and security. But U.S. support for the Northern Alliance crushed that hope...
More troops are not a solution for Afghanistan, they mean more civilian deaths, that's all... The U.S. should not only withdraw their troops, they should disarm the private armies, disempower the warlords and all fundamentalists they have been supporting in the past three decades... After eight years of U.S. presence, the terrorists are more powerful in Afghanistan and the region than they were in 2001 and the Taliban are present in 80% of Afghanistan and kill civilians through their suicide bombings.
The people's power and the anti-war movement in the U.S. needs to be stronger, more active. You should expose the real nature of this war and put pressure on your government. We need your solidarity, your human, financial and political solidarity.
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