Reply #5: Afghanistan: Five Years Later

[Disturbed]

Afghanistan: Five Years Later
by Stephen Zunes


Barnett Rubin, America's foremost scholar on Afghanistan, described the country as not having “functioning state institutions. It has no genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government. Most of the country's meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles.” According to Rubin, the goal of U.S. policy in Afghanistan “was not to set up a better regime for the Afghan people, but to recruit and strengthen warlords in its fight against al-Qaida.”

While women are now allowed to go to school and leave the house unaccompanied by a close male relative-­rights denied to them under the Taliban-­most women in large parts of Afghanistan are afraid to do so out of fea of kidnapping and rape. Human Rights Watch reports that, despite the ouster of the misogynist Taliban, “Violence against women and girls remains rampant.”
The security situation in the countryside is so bad that groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres-­which stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet war and occupation of the 1980s, the civil war and chaos of the early to mid-1990s, and the brutal repression of the Taliban through 2001-­have completely withdrawn from the country.

Yet the Bush administration continues to be in denial about the worsening situation in Afghanistan. President Bush recently declared that Afghanistan was doing so well that it was “inspiring others … to demand their freedom.” And Vice President Cheney has referred to the rapidly deteriorating Afghan republic as a “rising nation.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld earlier described the new Afghanistan as “a breathtaking accomplishment” and “a successful model.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1014-22.htm