Three Big Lies About Afghanistan

I know, I know, the mere mention of Eric Margolis renders right whiners borderline apoplectic (like I care).

I consider that a benefit, frankly.

I love the writings of Eric Margolis. Thanks for linking to this piece. I learned a lot from it. Some of it surprising, but it fits in with what we keep learning to be the duplicitous marketing job of the US on their war-making. How very sad that Canada is now willing to assist.

Excellent post! I just read Tim's too, and posted a short comment.

I've only been coming to POGGE for a couple weeks, but have enjoyed reading it. When I went to the Margolis piece linked here, I was so disappointed. He does present facts which are sorely missing in most media, but as well adds opinions which well, just don't mesh.
The Taliban did outlaw drug production, but were no where near as successful as Margolis claims. the us aid was primarily to stop the poppy crop. The US never really considered the Taliban a potential ally, more like a jerk you have to try to live with because getting rid of him would cost too much. 9/11 turned that into a bargain.
Yes the Taliban said they would turn him over to a nuetral country for trial, but they also said they couldn't find him. Nevermind that, bin Laden commanded as much fear/respect as the Taliban, and they needed him to keep the Northern Alliance at bay. Now he can paint the northern alliance as bad as he wants, there is no one over there that really wears the white hat.
Now closing girls schools for fear of communism, thats bizarre. I suppose that's why they don't send girls to school in rural Pakistan, or girls in Iran are often denyed education (neither cases are universal), because the commies are coming through your daughters.
Media sources arn't going to get into the complexities of tribal relations not because the reporters don't understand, or the media wants to hide it from us, but because it too complex to accuratly convey in a single newspaper. Maybe a couple months of university, but a couple of newspaper articles? no way.
I am a long way from right wing, but that article read too much like a Taliban apologist. The Taliban weren't a terrorist organization, but neither were they a government of any kind (no formal recognition by any country expect pakistan, and they reconsidered after 9/11). The military forces in afganistan need to remember that this is nation building, that they are there to help everyone. Building a country there is doable. It won't be a wetern democracy, but it will be something, something better than the pure chaos and anarchy that was there before. The invasion was necessary, and trying to build a new country, is the moral extension of necessary war.
Now, i'm going to bed before I get real incoherent

Margolis is bracing to read, and he's a lot more clear-sighted about foreign affairs than most of our stay-at-home pundits or the currently embedded journalist-visitors to Afghanistan, but I share some of Yeti's reservations about his slant on specific groups there.

That's the first time, eg, I've ever heard Ahmad Shah Massoud referred to as a KGB collaborator - during the eighties, Massoud was certainly one of the great native leaders of the mujahideen resistance to the Soviets, although he was never allied with the ISI (Pakistani)-backed forces or bin Laden and eventually became their foe.

It's worth remembering that Margolis is an old anti-commie himself, certainly no leftie - it's his pride in serious foreign reporting that usually keeps him honest and an irritant to the right establishment in North America. But like Yeti, I'm wondering whether his own ideological bias isn't leading him here to make the Taliban sound more sympathetic than they really are.

I oppose the Americans' adventures in Afghanistan because I'm suspicious of their purposes and skeptical of their competence (as is Margolis). It's hard to believe they are ignoring the much more serious problems across the border in Pakistan, and yet it is hard to see any intelligent diplomacy on that front at all.

It's not that I don't believe anything needs to be done, just that what is being done at the moment is mainly wrongly gauged and directed.

skdadl and Yeti - I just finished writing this in an email:

Margolis is not always right or consistent and writing fixed length pieces (~350 words) doesn't allow for much context. (But he provides an interesting alternative perspective.) I certainly don't see the piece as being apologist for the Taliban so much as an attempt to put the Taliban into some historical perspective without enough space to do it well. I can fill in the historical context but it's a 500+ word comment and I don't have time to do links etc. I probably won't do it unless there is more response. Pity because there are huge implications for the Canadian military and the budget.

Yeti and skdadl have made the point pretty clearly - I think Margolis' anti-com pedigree may be showing through here. It is a very good idea to point out all of the viciously anti-women regimes the US supports, but I don't quite like how that's deployed in their defence here.

His conclusion - that attempts ought to be made to reach out to moderates affiliated with or in the Taliban - makes sense. The rest of it, a bit sketchy. I certainly wouldn't, based on current information, compare Karzai's "democratic in quotation marks" government unfavourably with the Taliban just because it's been less effective. Elections in Afghanistan may be a somewhat strange concept (when people refer to him as the king) but a representative mandate is not to be sneered at. I'm worried about it, absolutely, but I'd rather build on that than the foundations of the Taliban.

Anyway, I don't mean to have some "arrgh, said something nice about Taliban, knee-JERK" reaction, but I don't really agree.

Quite frankly I think it's refreshing to hear another point of view on Afghanistan. I'm getting a little sick of the rah rah from mainstream Canadian media.

The "anti-com" label bothers me. Haven't you labelled him "anti-comm" as an easy way to dismiss him? It sort of reminds me of how liberals/progressives are dismissed regularly, just because they are liberal/progressive.

I would suggest someone email Eric Margolis you're criticisms and see what he has to say. Let the man defend himself.

margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com

Also after the Communist and before the Taliban wasn't Afghanistan ruled by Warlord thugs who were in fact worse than the Taliban? And aren't a few of those warlords now in the Karzai "democratic" government?

First I'm a little gratified that I'm not the only one with problems about that article, and I think I will forward them on to him.
As for reaching out to moderates in the taliban, it has been done. There are former Taliban officals in the elected govenment. (pause for shock). They of course have abandoned the remaining Taliban, are seen as traitiors and collaborators and heretics and infidels and whatever else there is. There have of course been assination attemps and car bombs.
And for the whole anti-commie thing, well, the cold war is the root of so much trouble everywere, as a result of Amercan "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" foriegn policy during the 70's and 80's. However when the enemy of my enemy is the shah of Iran, or Saddam Hussien, or the Taliban, maybe you really need to take a peek under the burka before you hop into the sack with your new friends.

PS - I remember one thing I wanted to say in my first post - Saying the Taliban fought communists is like saying Musselini made the trains run on time. It's the one good thing you can say about some very bad people.

Fair enough, Peter W - I don't like shorthand labels either (especially when someone slaps one on me), but as Yeti says, some of the old Cold Warriors can't seem to help putting themselves back into that box. Margolis has never made any secret of his scorn for what he considers the naïveté of the left, although he has had more fun lately, I think, tweaking the noses of the right.

And if he wants to know what we're saying about him, he would always be welcome here, of course. We go public, don't we?

Back to Massoud: Confidential skdadl sources have confirmed skdadl's suspicion that the lying slander against Massoud dates back to the 1980s and to the ISI, the Pakistan intelligence agency very much involved in directing (some might say misdirecting) American arms into Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the creation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Massoud was if anything a more effective fighter against the Soviets than the unholy alliance of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, but he kept himself and his people independent from them. At one point he negotiated a temporary breather (a few months) in the fighting with the Soviets, which the ISI leapt upon as an excuse to slander him, but then the war was on again.

The Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISI jealousy and hatred of Massoud's independence lived on, people will recall, to Sunday, 9 September 2001, when he was assassinated by (it is believed) two al-Qaeda agents posing as Moroccan journalists.

Small Dead Animal's recent take on Margolis was hilarious, apoplectic conservatism at its best.

Even funnier? All the comments that couldn't seem to get to saying how Margolis is wrong.