“Oh!
wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?”
‘The
Battle of Naseby’ by Thomas Macaulay
After 20 years of B-52 carpet
bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers,
20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of
countless Afghan villages, the killing up to one million Afghans, spreading the
opium trade around southeast Asia and Europe, abetting wide scale torture….
after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing
cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night.
Taliban – more accurately the
Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – has been slandered by almost every western
news outlet and wrongly called a terrorist movement linked to the late Osama
bin Laden. Heavily-propagandized Americans, Canadians and British have
been inundated by this torrent of government lies against Afghanistan’s Pashtun
(Pathan) people.
I was in Afghanistan with the
newly created Taliban in the early 1990’s. I walked from Pashtun village
to village and had tea with the local chiefs, known as ‘maliks.’ The
Pashtun treated me as an honored guest and welcome visitor. These rough
mountain warriors were the descendants of the fighters who had defeated four
British invasions the previous century. My book ‘War at the Top of the
World’ examines the beginning of our Afghan War.
The fathers of these Pashtun
fighters were the men who formed the anti-Soviet ‘mujahidin’ (holy warriors)
that defeated the mighty Soviet Red Army with the secret help of US, British
and most of all Pakistani intelligence. Everyone in south Asia knew
better than to mess with the Pashtun Afghans, including their blood enemies,
Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara.
An old Hindu prayer goes,
‘Beware of the fang of the cobra, the claw of the tiger, and the vengeance of
the Pathan (Pashtun)’
Taliban had just been created
when I was visiting the usually off-limits frontier Tribal Territories on the
Pakistan-Afghan frontier and the Khyber Pass leading into Afghanistan.
After the hurried Soviet pullout, Afghanistan fell into civil war or
anarchy. Armed gangs attacked caravans and raped many Afghan women,
mostly in the Pashtun region. In Islam, rape is a grave, intolerable
crime.
As chaos spread, a one-eyed
village preacher, Mullah Omar, a maimed veteran of the anti-Soviet struggle,
organized a group of his young religious students, known as ‘Talibs,’ to
protect the local village women and defend the caravans. As the late
Benazir Bhutto told me, she ordered Pakistan’s Home ministry to arm
the Talibs.
At that time, the Afghan
Communists were waging a war to keep control of the countryside and, most
important, the nation’s lush opium fields, which financed the anti-Taliban
Northern Alliance and Communist Party. Once Taliban defeated the
Tajik-Communist alliance, opium production in Afghanistan fell by over
90%. Until then, Afghanistan was the world’s leading producer and
exporter of opium. This narcotic was then exported with full Communist
approval to the Soviet Union/Russia, Iran, Central Asia an onward to northern
Europe. Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, many Communist dominated, ran most
of the drug trade.
Taliban crushed the Afghan
drug trade and ended some of the attacks on women. But its members were
mostly rough-hewn mountaineers of the very old school. They often treated
women badly, as was the custom, but certainly far less brutally compared to the
often-murderous way girls and women were mistreated or murdered in India, a US
ally, or by US air raids on Afghan towns and villages.
Afghanistan’s urban education
system was heavily infiltrated by the Afghan Communist Party which used female
education as a way of infiltrating government. A major reason for
Taliban’s hostility to female education was that it was viewed as a communist
plot.
Today’s Taliban is a younger
generation of mountain people, better educated and less narrow-minded than
their rustic elders. I was invited by its leadership to attend peace
talks in Doha. Meanwhile, one hopes that American right-wingers do not
get the US to stage new military operations against Afghanistan to prolong this
20-year conflict. Let the Afghans sort out their own messy ethnic issues
without interference by their neighbors. A new coalition government that
includes non-Taliban leaders like former president Hamid Karzai, Abdullah
Abdullah and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar should be encouraged and supported. War
criminals like Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum should be prosecuted.
We have to stop drinking our
own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist
propaganda and try to accept that what we are so far seeing is the liberation
of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.
Eric S. Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright
© Eric Margolis