Taliban atrocities

Get Pissed Over the Taliban

January 13th, 2012

I'd been avoiding the topic of the marines' pissing on Afghan bodies (presumably Taliban casualties) in the last few days mostly because I thought the issue was already getting way too much ink. Yes, desecration of bodies is both unlawful and unethical -- and these Marines have been identified and will be punished. It was an isolated incident and is not representative of our soldiers' conduct in the field (If it were, you can bet the media would be running this circus 24/7 with a steady perp walk of assorted Marine miscreants). Case closed.

But if I may use this occasion to point out some small feature of this war in Afghanistan, it is that while incidents like these from our side are given worldwide coverage, the Taliban's serial violations of the Geneva Conventions merit almost no reporting at all.

When was the last time you heard a news report on the Taliban's refusal to wear uniforms? This is a basic requirement of any armed force, allowing armies to distinguish who they are fighting and avoid civilian casualties. The Taliban don't do it. Hell, no jihadist movement in the world does it.

Then there's the Taliban's habit of commandeering homes...More >>

Bar Graph. Afghanistan Civilian Casualties May 2011

June 18th, 2011

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is concerned about the steep rise in civilian casualties in May 2011. According to their count, anti-government forces were responsible for 82 percent of civilians killed that month.

We take a different perspective. Of course, we're mad as hell about the civilians casualties. But we have a different method of assigning responsibility for these deaths.

We don't blame homeowners engaged in self-defense when their family members are murdered by home invaders. We don't blame cops when hostages are killed by kidnappers. We're on the side of the firefighter, not the arsonist.

Since the Taliban continue to target Afghan teachers, police, politicians, farmers, women, children and anyone else who gets in their way, they are responsible for all civilian casualties in May or anytime before or since.

If they would put down their weapons and stop threatening civilians, it would not be necessary for NATO and Afghan security forces to go in after them -- sadly, resulting in accidental civilian deaths in the war zone.

Our bar graph illustrates this reality:

Afghanistan civilian casualties Taliban NATO May 2011 ...More >>

Aisha Restored. Her Nation Remains Scarred By Psycopaths

October 13th, 2010

aisha nose afghanistan woman taliban usa politics propaganda Remember Aisha, the Afghan woman whose Taliban husband chopped off her nose and ears? Here's Aisha today. American reconstructive surgeons will be helping restore her injured face.

Needless to say, the episode has been most instructive in the difference between the psychopaths who want to rule Afghanistan and Western forces who want to help this poor and wounded nation.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist.More >>

Telling Lies About Aisha

August 21st, 2010

Among the many defining features that unite the left and the right wings of reactionary isolationism in the rich countries of the world, abject moral squalor is perhaps the most noticeable and repulsive. It thrives by a cunning parasitism that requires of its ruling-class host only an acquiescence to its self-flattery as "the anti-war movement." All it requires of the rest of us is to be complicit in the lie.

In this way, moral leprosy has metasticized, and like so many undead zombies, "anti-war activists" require nothing but their own pathological solipsism to survive, and only a steady feed-supply of lies and deceptions to corrupt every debate about Afghanistan they choose to infect. Nowhere is this degeneracy more painfully evident than in the way the gangrene has spread throughout the public debates about the young Afghan woman Bibi Aisha, whose beautiful, disfigured face ended up on the cover of Time magazine a few days ago.

Remember that it is in the context of the prevailing "troops-out" sentiment now so deeply embedded in the western establishment along...More >>

Hazaras in Afghanistan. A Quiet Genocide

August 11th, 2010

genoicide hazara Afghanistan politics human rights Last summer, I had the good fortune to work with a young Afghan law student, Farshad*. He was my research assistant in a study I worked on to do with the legal rights of a minority in Afghanistan.

Farshad was perhaps ill-suited to research. He wanted action; he wanted to change his country and he was possessed with a very real sense of urgency when it came to the future of democracy in Afghanistan.

He barely had the patience to sit through interview after interview, many of them with conservative-minded mullahs whose views on women’s legal rights were hardly enlightened. He was forceful and passionate, and had robust ideas about transitional justice and legal reform. He wanted some justice for Afghan victims of human rights abuses, and particularly, for those of his own persecuted ethnic group, the Hazaras.

And he had his own story to tell, that illuminates much about the pain of persecution and war but also exemplifies the defiance so many Afghans embodied during the repression of the Taliban years, as the rest of the world turned its head the...More >>

Cowardly Yesbuttery Does Not Help The Taliban's Victims

July 30th, 2010

The Propagandist is proud to welcome award-winning journalist and author Terry Glavin to the front ranks of our contributors. As an early signatory of the Euston Manifesto and co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, Terry has helped reinvigorate a movement that stands for democracy, freedom, equality, internationalism and historical truth. In his first essay for The Propagandist, cross-posted from Chronicles and Dissent, Terry takes on critics who would abandon Afghanistan and the WikiLeaks controversy.

Aisha is an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by a Taliban butcher for the "crime" of running away from the beatings she routinely suffered at the hands of her husband's family. Aisha's picture appears on the cover of Time magazine this week, provoking controversy.

Lost in all the self-serving and cowardly Code Pinkish yesbuttery and the handwringing about the propriety of a major magazine running a photograph so shocking - can we not at least stop for a moment to notice that Aisha, in the full flower of womanhood, is unspeakably beautiful in spite of her disfigurement? - is the fact that she wants the world to see her face. By her own account,...More >>