Sally spins Afghanistan

Afghanistan under US occupation has been very very good for Sally Armstrong's career. Her writing about the country has vaulted her into the top ranks of "Afghanistan experts," those privileged voices entrusted to explain to us what's really going on over there. Her explanatory career has garnered her honorary degrees and an Order of Canada.

Ms. Armstrong has a lengthy feature in yesterday's Globe and Mail bemoaning the imminent US troop withdrawal. After 18 years of occupation, thousands of US lives lost, hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives lost, and a bill that runs into the trillions, Trump's ill-advised capitulation threatens all the gains made by women in Afghanistan!

I have no doubt at all that some Afghan women have prospered under the US occupation. Like the Toronto-born 27 year old Afghan woman who finds herself Communications Director for "elected" President Ashraf Ghani. Armstrong makes much of the fact that the "elected" President has been sidelined by the current negotiations between the US and the Taliban. The reason he is sidelined is because all concerned (ie the US, the Taliban, and everybody at that recent summit in Russia) are fully cognisant of the fact that Ghani is a US installed cipher, or "stooge," if you will.

Here's the lowdown on that 2014 election as reported in the New York Times. Not even a hint of voter fraud in Armstrong's numerous references to that election.

Reading Armstrong's story one gets the impression that the Taliban are an occupying power, and the US Marines are some sort of benevolent feminist militia in the country. No Sally; the Americans are the occupiers - "Taliban" is what we call the Afghans fighting to end the occupation.

One also gets the distinct impression that Afghan history started in 1996, the year Sally first began reporting from there. Afghanistan, or at least its women, have made great progress since the US invasion of 2001. And compared to 1996, that's probably true.

But Afghanistan did have a history before 1996. The Afghan refugees that my family sponsored to Canada were a part of that pre-Taliban history. Mom and Dad were both university professors in Kabul during that prehistoric era. Alas, the government of Afghanistan at the time was a little too chummy with the commies in Soviet Russia next door, so it became America's mission to rid Afghanistan of its secular government and support whatever warlords or religious nutters were willing to take it on.

If the status of women in Afghanistan was ever a concern for the Virtuous West, we should have left well enough alone from the get-go. Instead, we did all we could to destabilize that secular government, and eventually it was the Talibs who successfully filled the power vacuum.

Here's a different slant on the Afghanistan story, by Mathew Hoh, who first encountered the country as a US Marine.


My suggestion for a balanced news diet is that the reader engage both stories and then make up their own mind.