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

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

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

Nir Rosen is Mel Gibson, Pee Wee Herman and Kanye West caught at a Michael Jackson boy-party.

On January 31, 2011, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan sent an open letter to Afghanistan's Minister of Justice, Habibullah Ghalib, expressing outrage and demanding justice in the case of the stoning to death of a couple by the Taliban in Kunduz province in August 2010, as well as calling for increased efforts to expand the rule of law and entrench a functional justice sytem in Afghanistan. The letter was also sent to Canada's Ambassador to Afghanistan, William Crosbie, and to President Hamid Karzai. An excerpt follows:

We cannot convey in strong enough terms our shock and condemnation of the continued barbaric practice of stoning, captured so horrifically on a video clip recorded with the cell phone of a participant to this crime. The clip gives to the world graphic evidence of the stoning of 25-year-old Siddqa and her lover, Khayyam, in the northern province of Kunduz in August, 2010. It is our understanding that no one has yet been brought to justice for this abomination. Of course, those responsible include the large crowd of participants and onlookers who engaged in this frenzied sport of bloodlust that ultimately and so brutally took the lives of two innocent people.

The Taliban are apparently increasingly sensitive to public relations, as shown by their recent irate response to a UN report showing that the psychopathic Islamo-fascist militia of demons is responsible for three quarters of civilian deaths in the Afghan conflict. In a statement released to the media, the Talibs professed that,

The Islamic Emirate considers the latest United Nations report as a self-fabricated figure and believes that this is also a propagandist effort for covering the American brutalities like the past nine years in Afghanistan. 

After terrorizing the civilian population for five years in power followed by eight years as insurgents, the Taliban should hardly be surprised by these numbers. No one else is it seems.

In August 2010, Amnesty International called for the Taliban and other insurgent groups in Afghanistan to be prosecuted for war crimes on account of their systemic and deliberate targeting of civilians. At that time, Amnesty noted that,

Attacks by the Taleban and other anti-government forces accounted for more than 76% of civilian casualties and 72% of deaths.



In the first half of 2010, the executions and assassinations of civilians by the Taleban and other insurgent groups increased by over 95% to 183 recorded deaths compared to the same time last year.  The victims were usually accused of supporting the government.

This is not a new trend. Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said three years ago that,

Suicide bombings and other insurgent attacks have risen dramatically since 2005, with almost 700 civilians dying last year at the hands of the Taliban and other such groups ... The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians. Even when they’re aiming at military targets, insurgent attacks are often so indiscriminate that Afghan civilians end up as the main victims.

As for the latest UN report, in 2010 there were 6,215 civilian casualties from conflict-related incidents (including 2,412 deaths and 3,803 injuries), of which insurgents are responsible for 76%, and Afghan and NATO forces responsible for 12%. Over half of the deaths caused by Taliban and other militants (55%) were caused by suicide bombings and home-made bombs.

While the Taliban appear to be in public denial over the carnage they've caused, perhaps their fussing signals an awakening to the reality that slaughtering innocents, using children as suicide bombers and spotters, enslaving women, raping boys, blowing up buildings and generally being brutes has done little to endear them to the locals, not generally being the traits people look for in a governing power. At least they know now that someone is counting.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist 

As the Taliban now run shadow governments in all but one of Afghanistan’s provinces (the Panjshir) amounting to a government-in-waiting, and one by one NATO governments announce their withdrawal dates, there is a glum resolve here among many aid workers that one day very soon the government we may be dealing with in Kabul will be a Taliban one. And so some are starting to seek engagement with the Taliban now, hoping they might be more accommodating than the miserable years of 1996-2001, when the overwhelming majority of organizations fled, and those who stayed, worked within bizarre and frustrating restrictions, many of which barred aid to women and girls. Overall, the restrictions and the fickle and unpredictable behaviour of the host government then meant aid simply could not reach all of the most vulnerable, and many lives were lost as a result.

With the possibility that the Taliban will return to power in whole or in part, humanitarian and social justice organizations are being counseled in some cases to be “neutral” towards the Taliban.

Here is why neutrality on the part of aid workers and aid organizations is impossible:

1. Neutrality is the approach argued for in order to preserve the ability to deliver aid in Taliban-held territory, without endangering the aid beneficiaries and aid workers. The problem with this argument is that the Taliban kill beneficiaries and aid workers anyways. Three days ago, they beheaded two Afghan women in Helmand province who ran micro-finance programs for women. On a weekly basis, Taliban kidnap Afghans who work for both national and international NGOs. They regularly assassinate nationals who run aid programs, work as drivers or guards for aid organizations, and set up illegal check points on highways across this country where they search for Afghans who have English names in their mobiles’ address books or documents identifying them as affiliated to NGOs or to any foreigners. They pull these individuals aside from the line-up of cars, or from the passengers on a bus, and they shoot them, sometimes with their family members looking on. The majority of the Afghan victims of the Taliban are not affiliated to NATO and have done nothing to cause the Taliban to believe they are parties to the conflict. They are perceived as enemies simply for delivering aid, because that aid is rendered possible by the NATO presence here, and their overall aim is to destabilize Afghanistan. Read more

Here in Kabul, there is a lot of talk about negotiations with the Taliban, as the new Peace Council has been formed. Most of what I hear from Afghans is sharp criticism over who sits on the Peace Council, including of the nine women who were appointed. Their ability to protect women's hard-fought for rights has been questioned by women leaders. Many people question the legitimacy of the process, and particularly, the credibility of those who have been appointed. The exact method of negotiations is unclear, and there is anxiety over a presumed lack of transparency.

The progressive member of parliament for Badakhshan, in north eastern Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi, shares some of her reflections on talking to the Taliban, in the article below. She asks whether Karzai's government has the right to forgive the Taliban for their crimes, without the agreement of their victims: a very fair question, and one which nobody in the Afghan Government has yet bothered to answer.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.

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This myth is taken on by Guest Myth-Buster Melissa Roddy, and is the fourth in a series on popular myths about Afghanistan. For Myth #1, read Popular Myths About Afghan Women, Myth #2 is The Afghan Women's Movement on International Forces, for Myth #3, read The Myth That Afghans Don't Want Us There. Myth #5 is Afghanistan is Backwards and Irreparable, and Myth #6 is Afghanistan has never been conquered by outside forces.

Myth #4: Western military involvement in Afghanistan is all about American geopolitical interests there.

The Truth: Many people, especially folks who think they know a thing or zip about Afghanistan, believe that the International Coalition is only there to support American lust for cheap natural resources. This is wrong on sooo many levels. Let’s review a few.

If petroleum – the mineral most favored by the Bush Administration – were the primary motivation for stationing NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, then why would former President Shrub have diverted a majority of the resources necessary to secure the country (including soldiers, supplies and money) so early in the game to Iraq? 

Answer: Even he’s not that dumb. There really is an Al Qaeda, and the Taliban really did give them safe haven in Afghanistan to train and plan acts global terrorism. In fact, said training took place in the Aynak Valley. 

NATO is in Afghanistan to rebuild and stabilize the country. It’s really true. If petroleum was the agenda, rest assured, the Shrub-in-Chief would have put more effort into preventing a return of the Taliban, which consistently targets anyone working to develop the country and improve the lives of its citizens. Read more