The Propagandist's Allies are resurgent, moving forward on all fronts. Here are the latest dispatches:

• What future for Afghan woman jailed for being raped? Afghanistan: where victims are jailed for "adultery by force" -- the force of their attackers, to be precise.
• Let's reframe the Israel debate. "The terms we use undermine Jewish rights to our ancestral homeland. ‘Settlements’ and ‘West Bank’ reinforce a sense that the land has always been Arab, and paint Israelis as colonialist imposters. Yet, until their ethnic cleansing in 1948, Jews had always lived beyond the Green line."
• Zero Tolerance to Prejudice. The rest is commentary. More shenanigans from the London School of Economics.
• Released Burma Dissident: We’re On a Leash. The junta's release of political prisoners should not be seen as a generous concession, but as a long-overdue and very incomplete restoration of some measure of justice.
• Shocker: Pakistan can't come up with a suspect in kidnapping and murder of journalist who criticized Pakistani intel agency. I'm so surprised over this.
• Mercedes-Benz uses mass murderer to sell cars. So what else is new?
• Christian Love. Not what is used to be. Or maybe this is what it has always been.
• Canada sells the oil sands to China. Then complains about ‘foreign interference’ Let's review what's really going on.

Confusion to our enemies!

For more than half my life, I've been a self-appointed one-woman ambassador for Afghanistan, pointing out to anyone who would listen that there is more to Afghanistan than kalashnikovs, burqas and poppies. In no doubt sometimes irritating persistence, I've tried my level best to convey to fellow outsiders the Afghanistan that I know, a country where resilient, brave, complicated people just go on living their lives amidst the calamities that have befallen them, when our media in the West tends to focus more on their victimization, their hostile deviants, or the spectacular break-down of their state. Both pictures are valid parts of the story, but the shrouding of Afghanistan's beauty as embodied in its people, landscapes, history, arts and rich culture, is a deficit in our understanding of Afghanistan, and it's one of some consequence. It's an imbalance I believe has helped fuel indifference towards a people we can more easily then say, hardly exist.

War is woven into the fabric of everyday life in Afghanistan, but so are dinner parties, over-the-top weddings, giggling school girls, men on the street bickering over endless cups of chai sabz, students bustling in and out of university classes, families watching generator-powered Bollywood soap operas together in the twilight, rubab concerts, and love-stricken teenagers sending each other flirty text messages. It's often easy to forget the violence pervading the country, when one is so swiftly absorbed into the rhythm of the daily life that must go on, in wartime as in peacetime.

But the violence sometimes sharply and suddenly penetrates the ilusory seamlessness of everyday life, with painful reminders of the demons still looming over this society trying so valiantly to move on. When this happens, my enthusiastic descriptions of the 'other Afghanistan,' the beautiful and brave Afghanistan, feel fabricated, somehow fraudulent. The increasing frequency of bombs going off closeby, of assassinations, kidnappings and 'complex attacks' on places one frequents casually and often as in 'normal life' like hotels, grocery stores, malls, restaurants, embassies, and offices causes a slide towards the mindset of being in a warzone. The requisite constant state of alertness and often well justified paranoia, the fretting anxiety for the safety of oneself and others, can start to subsume the assertion that Afghanistan is also a place of good and of beauty. Read more

On September 1st, Human Rights Watch issued a news release, Taliban Should Stop Using Children as Suicide Bombers:

The Taliban’s use of children as suicide bombers in Afghanistan is an egregious affront to humanity that should cease immediately, Human Rights Watch said today. In the latest incident, on August, 27, 2011, residents of Baharak district in northeastern Badakhshan province captured a 16-year-old wearing a suicide vest as he was on his way to blow up a local mosque.

Yesterday, the Taliban responded to the accusations from what they called "propaganda media outlets" in a statement on their English language "Voice of Jihad," denying the consistent and overwhelming evidence that they regularly recruit, coerce, force and trick children into blowing themselves up. The Taliban response is illuminating in several respects, from their delusionally euphemistic term "martyrdom-seeking operations of Mujahideen" in place of suicide bombers, to their stated reasons for not using children. They claim to not use children, not because it's revolting and inhuman, but because children are not tactically useful. The response reveals the Taliban's stunning lack of human empathy in that there is no wholesale rejection of the idea of children as collateral, a give-away that in their worldview, everyone is fair game:

children are not able to perform such huge and amazing missions, nor they are able to bring to conclusion the martyrdom-seeking operations as an effective military tactic against the given military targets. ... Martyrdom-seeking operations need a strong resolutions, military training and deep Islamic knowledge and motive. Children do not have these physical and mental capacities to carry out the task.

To even find yourself asking the Taliban to not force children to detonate themselves should make it crystal clear that you're no longer dealing with a rational actor with whom you can rationally negotiate. The case is being pled to the militarized and heavily multiplied equivalent of Charles Manson, to a psychopathic movement that is operating on a different plane altogether, one devoid of civility. It’s a plane we should never want to enter. Read more

Child marriage is nothing other than the institutionalization of child abuse. It's a system to keep women in their place so that when they are handed over to some old brute while they are still girls, by the time they understand the crime committed against them they are trapped in permanent surrender of their most basic rights. It's a disgusting practice and a smear on what we purport to be human civilization, in that it continues to occur at the behest of parents, relatives and communities in many countries at the rate of 100 million girls who will be married off over the next decade. I don't like it. And I explain why in this article at Butterflies and Wheels this week:

Last year, at a women’s community centre in Kabul I met Hamida.* A Herati, she was staying with relatives in the teeming capital, after her husband left her destitute when he left to go work in Iran, where she suspected he maintained another family. She had been married to him for seven years before divorcing him three years ago. In her married life, she had experienced extraordinary abuse at the hands of both her husband and her in-laws, with whom she lived. After making the courageous decision to leave her husband, she tried to return to her father’s household but was turned away, hence the reason she was boarding with an aunt and an uncle in Kabul, far away from her native Herat. A survivor of domestic violence, a divorcee, illiterate and uneducated, Hamida had lived a tumultuous life and bore the scars of years of drudgery in a joyless marriage.

Here’s the thing about Hamida: she’s 17. Sixteen when I met her last spring.

Read the full article here.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.

I keep a folder on my computer of attacks against girls' education in Afghanistan. It's full of stories of gas poisonings of girls' schools, murdered teachers, beheaded principles, arson of school buildings, acid attacks, and threats and 'night letters' warning communities to not send their daughters to school. It's a bulging folder.

Yesterday I added a new article, a story of less than 500 words in The Guardian reporting the murder of Khan Mohammad, a local man who headed the Porak Girls' School in Logar province. There are sparse details about Khan's life or the exact circumstances of his death, other than to mention that he was shot near his home and his son was injured in the attack. The rest of the article gives very basic background on the Taliban and discusses the findings of an unnamed February report on girls' education in Afghanistan (it's this report), as if to bulk up the story for lack of more to say.

It's tempting to file it away without further thought, just one more tragic story out of Afghanistan, for which there is never any shortage.

But Khan Mohammad's story was a triumph before it was a tragedy. Only the triumphant part was untold and unexamined by news audiences more hungry for blood and sorrow, or for the idolization of celebrity foreigners followed by scandal and swift tumbles from grace. Read more

It took barely 24 hours for the troops-out-of-Afghanistan chorus to break into an outpouring of editorials demanding the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan now that Osama bin Laden is dead. Now you have your prize, they smugly hummed, so let's call it a day. Though there is sometimes an underlying resentment that bin Laden was taken from this world--like when Chris Hedges says his "stomach sank" upon hearing the news--the stoppist opportunists are seizing what they can from the moment anyways.

The "bin Laden's done, now let's desist" argument suffers from numerous fallacies, the first of which is an appalling historical amnesia. It's not in the very distant past that the US already once washed its hands of Afghanistan prematurely after some fairly significant covert meddling in Afghan affairs, in the interest of their own foreign policy objectives.

As Afghanistan turned to face a post-Soviet world at the dawn of the 1990s, it found America's back turned, and much of the rest of the international commmunity followed suit. Into the post-Najibullah void poured the competing muj factions who unleashed violence and chaos over a population in desperate need of a functioning state, rather than a drawn out civil war. Civilians were subjected to a series of unstable muj governments throughout the early 1990s more concerned with imposing random elements of sharia law at their whim than with providing basic services and rebuilding a ravaged nation. And while the muj factions preached puritanical Islam in their rhetoric, their men were raping women and girls at will, pillaging communities, and decimating the country's infrastructure--one of the decent things that the Soviets left behind them. Far more civilians were killed during this period than during the years of Soviet occupation. But there were few outsiders left to witness the aftermath of arming so many uneducated Islamists to the teeth who had never demonstrated much interest or skill in governance. The US had tipped its hat to the Afghans for their usefulness in the now irrelevant Cold War, and wished them the best in their future. Read more

This is the sixth in a series on popular myths about Afghanistan.

• Myth #1, read Popular Myths About Afghan Women
• Myth #2, read The Afghan Women's Movement on International Forces
• Myth #3, read The Myth That Afghans Don't Want Us There
• Myth #4, read Guest Myth-Buster Melissa Roddy's The Persistent Afghan Pipeline Conspiracy Theory
• Myth #5 is: Afghanistan is Backwards and Irreparable

Myth #6: Afghanistan has never been conquered by outside forces.

The Truth: of all the myths that permeate western narratives of Afghanistan, this one is perhaps the most enduring. This is partly because it is enthusiastically perpetuated by journalists, authors and other commentators, and partly because it is a potent part of the Taliban’s own internal and external propaganda. As Christian Caryl pointed out in Foreign Policy last year,

It's the mother of all clichés. Almost no one can resist it. It's wielded by everyone from thoughtful ex-generals to vitriolic bloggers. It crops up everywhere from Russia's English-language TV channel to scruffy Pakistani newspapers to America's stately National Public Radio. The Huffington Post can't seem to live without it, and one recent book even chose it as a title. Afghanistan, we're told, is "the graveyard of empires."

Several other specific examples of notable purveyors of this myth are found in this helpful compilation at OnViolence.

The myth also endures, I think, because it feeds an imaginary notion of the unknown world in the western consciousness, the romantic idea of an inhospitable swath of land in a forlorn corner of the world serving as the last great bastion against cultural assimilation and foreign penetration. The country is used to symbolize a giant middle finger swaggering at one group of greedy imperialists after another. Read more

Mariam Sadat is one proud woman. She’s proud to be Afghan, proud of her country’s progress in the last decade, and proud of the famously good fruits and nuts that grow from Afghan soil.

That’s why she called her rapidly expanding company, the Afghan Pride Association. While it’s a profit-making enterprise, it’s also a network of 350 women across three provinces in Afghanistan. The women are farmers and they are using state-of-the-art solar technology that Mariam has acquired for them to process high quality dried fruits and nuts native to Afghanistan, like pistachios, almonds, raisins and walnuts. Mariam sells the packaged products to shops and hotels, and she regularly does the exhibitions circuits in Kabul.

Over lunch in a Kabul restaurant in February, her two daughters in tow, she tells me about how she got the idea for this line of business when she was employed with the Afghan Women’s Business Council as a trainer. Travelling around the country to train women farmers for the Council, she witnessed how women in agriculture toiled long hours but then earned little income in return. Women were involved in every single stage of processing, from the planting, harvesting and sorting to the processing, and yet they had no control over their incomes and no access to the markets where the products were eventually sold. Their husbands kept the money that came from the women’s labour. “They do all the work, and have no decision-making power,” she said. Read more

Earlier this week I wrote about the Afghan Government's plans to seize control of independently-founded and operated women's shelters for women and girls who have fled violence and family abuse. Now you can take action, by signing the petition that has been launched by our friends at Women for Afghan Women.

Please sign and spread the word by posting the petition link to your Facebook page, tweeting it, and asking your friends to sign.

President Karzai could sign the regulation into effect any day now, so loud international outcry is urgently needed. Thank you for signing!

The first women's shelters in Afghanistan only opened in the last decade, but have proven to be critical refuges to women fleeing violence. Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world. The start of a network of shelters was the first crack of light into an otherwise dark void. The availability of shelters (14 in total now) is the very early beginnings of tackling a problem so pervasive as to often seem insurmountable.

In 2008, I worked on the first ever quantitative research into the levels of domestic abuse in Afghanistan. Our findings were nothing short of horrifying: in many places, a majority of women were facing regular abuse at home, whether sexual violence, physical violence, or psychological violence. Most marriages were "forced marriages" (distinct from arranged marriages), and abuse was often perpetrated by more than one family member, including female family members (30% of instances of abuse), such as a mother-in-law or sister-in-law. You can access the report, published by Global Rights, "Living With Violence: A National Report on Domestic Violence in Afghanistan" here.

Today, these shelters, which can sometimes mean the difference between life and death for women fleeing abuse, face their biggest battle yet. And it's not from violent and deranged wife beaters, insane clerics like Ayatollah Mohseni, or even the Taliban. No, it comes from the Afghan Government, the same government that is supposed to operate under a constitution that provides for the equality of men and women. Read more