Plant Trees, Not Bombs, In #Afghanistan

 

An airstrike kills a few more hungry Afghans, out bird hunting with rifles. Yawn, responds the American public.

Elsewhere an orchard is planted and nurtured in the belief that Afghan children will survive to eat its fruit. If you share this optimism, you can plant some trees, too.

There are twice as many troops in Afghanistan now than there were when the Obama administration came into office. Yet every time I'm in a liberal enclave like Brunswick, Maine or Cambridge, Mass. I see lots of cars with messages for peace and Obama campaign bumperstickers side by side. (You could read Chris Hedges here on how very dangerous this willful ignorance on the part of liberals could turn out to be.)

Much will be made of the fact that at the 13 year mark, Afghanistan is the longest running war ever for the U.S., with no end in sight. Those with a sense of history may remember that the U.S. funded proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war, helping to create the very Taliban forces that are far from vanquished in 2013. Perhaps because the U.S. military regularly pays them to keep the supply routes open to truck in the fuel needed to occupy Afghanistan and to continue to battle -- the Taliban.

Are women and girls better off for having NATO forces swarming around battling warlords for more than a decade? This is the grandiose claim of liberals who still claim Afghanistan is a "good" war. Most informed sources say: no. In news this week:

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission office in the southeastern zone on Monday said incidents of violence against women had increased in Paktia, Paktika and Khost...Shamim blamed the increasing violence against women on insecurity, social norms and delay in investigation of their cases by the judiciary.

"Imperialism and fundamentalism have joined hands," observed ousted legislator Malalai Joya in an interview for Democracy Now!  She has survived seven assassination attempts thus far, and continues to travel and speak out about conditions of life under the NATO-sponsored regime of Hamid Karzai. 

"...consequences of the 12 years of occupation of U.S. and NATO, unfortunately, was more bloodshed, crimes, women rights, human rights violations, looting of our resource and changing of our country into mafia state, as during these 12 bloody years tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by occupation forces and terrorist groups. And they have changed Afghanistan to the center of the drugs. That’s more than 90 percent of opium produced from Afghanistan, as I believe opium is even more dangerous than al-Qaeda and war as it destroy and spoils the life of Afghans. Around two million Afghan addicted, most of them are women and children. And also, there’s a report Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world. And according to UNIFEM, Afghanistan is the worst place to be a woman."

An Afghan woman holds up a poster during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, April 14, 2012. A group of Afghan women protested against domestic violence. The poster reads: “Where is justice?” Photo by Musadeq Sadeq. Afghan Women's Writing Project.

You can read the testimony of less famous Afghan women and girls at the Afghan Women's Writing Project, to get the true flavor of their experience under military occupation that empowers the most brutal among them. 

The US government has been shut down for seven days as of right now, but the war for control of  Afghanistan has not skipped a beat.