In her book, “The Punishment of Virtue” Sarah Chayes wrote that, “Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time.”
Too few Canadians have attempted to peel back the layers of Afghanistan’s complexities; and have rather, swallowed whole the portrayal we are fed by our mainstream media of a dark, dangerous and backwards country. Or, many have unquestionably accepted the propaganda of the “anti-war” movement, or more often, not noticed what it is that the pacifists fail to mention, not least of which is what will happen when the international community turns its back on Afghanistan and there is more bloodshed, not less.
This situation of manipulation and misinformation has led to the viral spread and ultimate entrenchment of some persistent myths about Afghanistan and Afghans among the Canadian public. It’s hard to know where to start in attempting to debunk these myths, but I rub up most often against those regarding Afghan women. So I’ll start there, posting...More >>
Foreign Policy has an amusing photo essay up comparing dictator fashion trends, called The Devil Wears Taupe. As they point out,
Not all the world's dictators are clotheshorses, but as these leaders show, sometimes politics, power and polyester combine to make fashion magic.
There’s Fidel and Raúl Castro who “have for decades set the standard in dress for guerrillas-turned-autocrats”, Robert Mugabe’s “tie and pocket square always perfectly matched”, or Chávez’s “three favorite red outfits, ranging from dictator-classic to resort wear” to the platform shoes sported by Kim Jong-il to add those couple of extra inches needed when one's job is to keep the masses in perpetual fear. Whether you've got to get dressed to plan an election fraud, oversee a torture session, or give a 14 hour speech, you've got to get the style that says, "I control you" just right.
I see Islam Karimov, who usually wears a simple navy suit and red tie, didn't make the cut. Too Hilfiger pedestrian I guess... he lacks that certain je ne sais quoi in his wardrobe needed...More >>
By way of an update, I never did receive a response from Ann Jones to the questions in my open letter to her last month. That's when I sought some clarifications around Jones' dismissal of the Time magazine cover of 18-year-old Bibi Aisha, who had been mutilated by Taliban order. Jones had suggested Aisha was lying because she was "traumatized". She claimed she knew Ayesha, and criticized those who "demonize" the Taliban.
However, today I received some answers from Women for Afghan Women, the US and Afghanistan-based organization which housed and cared for Aisha for nine months, and arranged for her medical treatment in the United States. Esther Hyneman, a board member and full-time volunteer with WAW, writes in the Huffington Post:
Ann Jones' claim in the Nation that she "know[s]" Bibi Ayesha (after conducting a single interview with her) is a somewhat disingenuous attempt to cast doubt on the veracity of statements by Time magazine and Women for Afghan Women (WAW) that Taliban were responsible for the monstrous crime perpetrated against this young woman.
In the last 24 hours, the Taliban have struck in almost every province of Afghanistan with a series of coordinated attacks. Innumerable IEDs have been found and some have detonated, grenades thrown into polling stations (many of which are in schools), civilians abducted and cars of election workers hijacked, rockets launched at polling stations, and armed attacks against voters, the police trying to protect them, and elections workers. The death toll is mounting. Last I checked, 95 people have been killed. The Taliban have proudly declared that they've attacked 150 polling stations.
And yet, people went to vote.
Everyone knew in advance that the Taliban would shower the country with violence on election day. And still, they showed up at the polling stations, some people traveling long distances from their villages to reach district centres. In Badakhshan province, 4,000 people erupted into a demonstration when a polling centre ran out of ballots.
In the days that followed September 11th, 2001, most of us had dizzying question marks hovering in our minds in the hazy chaos of this tragedy, as the dust was still falling, both literally and figuratively. Who did it? Why did they do it? What does it mean for the future? The world was going to change, that would be certain, but the view ahead was foggy.
But not for one person.
Christopher Hitchens was already rigorously scanning the facts and forging insights, as he poured down to the page his biting, take-no-prisoners analysis in his usual profilic ouput. Only one day after the towers came down, Hitchens' pen was cutting through the fog, as well as predicting what would come next, from the hassles in airport security to the "great deal of pugnacious talk to be endured in the next few days." On September 12, 2001, in a moving and respectful reflection he wrote in the Evening Standard,
Much of what is said by the cable bombardiers will be worthless, or bluff. But the overused words "civilized world" seem to me
The Propagandist salutes its contributing writers who are clobbering the enemy on all fronts with hard-hitting political commentary. Here's a roundup of the latest.
Tehran's Evin Prison is indelibly linked with the most gruesome abuses of human rights, involving Iranian dissidents foolhardy enough to resist ideological conformity by thinking and acting for themselves. Evin, by all accounts, is a place where cruelty is the norm, where torture is routine, where mass executions are held as the sun rises in the sky, and where suspicious deaths -- such as that of the blogger Omidreza Mirsafayi, in March 2009 -- are dressed up as suicides...
Cultural relativism allows us to listen to the power-hungry gun-wielders of a society like the Taliban, and drown out those who, inconveniently, want the same things that we do: democracy, human rights, wealth, and the capacity to live a life of dignity and free of fear. It is easier to ignore the will of Afghan
The Propagandist stands on the shoulders of giants. Our methods have been around for at least as long as the first pamphleteer in time of war. As one of the greatest political writers of the modern era pointed out, it is a calling fraught with fearful complexity. Here we have an excerpt from "The Frontier of Art and Propaganda," George Orwell, broadcast on "Listener," the BBC Overseas Service, April 30, 1941.
You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides, and his feelings had to find their way not only into his writing but into his judgements on literature. Literature had to become political, because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty. One's attachments and hatreds were too near the surface of consciousness to be ignored. What books were about seemed so urgently important that the way they were written seemed almost insignificant.
And this period of ten years or so in which literature, even poetry, was mixed up with pamphleteering, did...More >>
It's just not been a good week for moderacy and enlightenment in religion.
Pakistan, already the site of one of the most vicious and nortorious gang rape incidents- that of the brave Mukhtar Mai, is experiencing what appears to be deliberate sexual violence perpetrated against Christian girls to "teach them a lesson":
A school teacher who said she was witness to the alleged rape told Compass that when she came across the madrassa students the evening of July 22, she overheard one saying, “We will teach these Christians a lesson they will never forget.”
“Three or four Christian girls were washing dishes near a pond,” Rana Aftab said. “These guys ran towards them, and the girls started running. One of them fell on the ground, and these madrassa students got hold of her and took her in the fields. I tried to stop them, but they were 15-16 in number.”
And as usual, justice for the rape survivors is not likely to be forthcoming in Pakistan's legal system:
[The police]
initially refused to comment, but eventually one admitted that they are under pressure from Muslims leaders and extremists to refrain from filing a First
As Amnesty International calls for the Taliban to be prosecuted for war crimes, in her latest article, Ann Jones has joined the critics of Time Magazine's cover of Aisha, the mutilated Afghan girl. She writes, "
the logic of those who use Aisha's story to convince us that the US military must stay in Afghanistan escapes me."
In my struggle to make sense of Jones' line of argument, I came up with a list of questions that I thought I would post here as an open letter to her. I hope she answers them.
1. It’s clear that Jones doesn’t like the US military or NATO, though she also acknowledges that “If we leave, the Taliban may seize power or allow themselves to be bought in exchange for a substantial share of the government, to the detriment of women.” What’s not clear is what she does like. What, in her opinion, should happen instead? And how?
2. Jones says she has a different story about Aisha than what Time reported. So in the purpoted ambiguity of the facts Jones outlines,...More >>
Margaret MacMillan, in "The Uses and Abuses of History" warns of how prone we are to manipulating stories of our past, in order to protect our interests in the present. In the case of the Canadian lens on Afghanistan, its the history of our own struggles for rights and freedoms that we ignore.
As we gaze upon the often deadly battle Afghan progressives wage to secure democracy, rights for women, and a more open society, we pretend those same battles never occurred here. It's as if it just were always so, not an incremental thing that occurred only as the culmination of a long, arduous struggle against the status quo. We deem the valuing of democracy, rights and personal freedoms is "ours" alone, inherent to western culture. This view makes it easier to dismiss the present-day ideological battle in Afghanistan, between the Taliban's death-cult and the masses who want the very same privileges we expect in our society: democracy, human rights, wealth, and the capacity to live a life of dignity and free of fear. As Adrian MacNair pointed out recently in...More >>
In her book, “The Punishment of Virtue” Sarah Chayes wrote that, “Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time.”
Foreign Policy has an amusing photo essay up comparing dictator fashion trends, called The Devil Wears Taupe. As they point out,
By way of an update, I never did receive a response from Ann Jones to the questions in 
In the last 24 hours, the Taliban have struck in almost every province of Afghanistan with a series of coordinated attacks. Innumerable IEDs have been found and some have detonated, grenades thrown into polling stations (many of which are in schools), civilians abducted and cars of election workers hijacked, rockets launched at polling stations, and armed attacks against voters, the police trying to protect them, and elections workers. The death toll is mounting. Last I checked, 95 people have been killed. The Taliban have proudly declared that they've attacked 150 polling stations.
The Propagandist salutes its contributing writers who are clobbering the enemy on all fronts with hard-hitting political commentary. Here's a roundup of the latest.
As Amnesty International calls for the Taliban to be prosecuted for war crimes, in her latest 
Margaret MacMillan, in "The Uses and Abuses of History" warns of how prone we are to manipulating stories of our past, in order to protect our interests in the present. In the case of the Canadian lens on Afghanistan, its the history of our own struggles for rights and freedoms that we ignore.
