The Canberra Times Editorial (14/10/23, p, 50) says Western governments have punished the impoverished people of Afghanistan for far too long. The education of women and girls is important. But isn’t having access to heat, to shelter and food even more so?
The implication is that it was/is appropriate to PUNISH the people of Afghanistan. WHY? The Editorial hints that ‘Western’ collective punishment of the population of Afghanistan was/is justified because women and girls are denied “education” by the Afghan government.
What the Editorial doesn’t say though, is that the US funded the Mujaheddein proxy army of terrorists that attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government of Afghanistan in 1979-80; AND provided the anti-female and anti democratic propaganda materials that the Mujaheddein subsequently implemented. Moreover the US did that while organising, funding, training and arming the terrorists to depose the democratic Afghan government. The result has been some 42 years of bloody internal conflict, civil war, destruction and impoverishment of the nation and oppression of women and girls.
In 1979 Afghanistan had an all inclusive society that respected and protected religious and ethnic minorities and women’s rights. Its economy was necessarily state controlled to protect against predatory western corporations that were destroying its economy in the name of ‘free trade’ and open market policies.
The BRICS nations implement similar policies to protect their populations from similar US and Western corporate financial and economic predation today.
Afghani women were protected under law; having received the right to vote in the 1920s. In the 1960s the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. There was a mood of tolerance and openness as the country moved toward full democracy.
Women contributed to national development. In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. By the early 1990s (i.e. just after the Russian military left Afghanistan having built civilian infrastructure like roads and schools; which the US hasn’t done in the 20 years that its military occupied Afghanistan) an estimated 70% of schoolteachers, 50% of government workers and university students, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women.
In mid 1979 the US organised, funded, armed and trained a proxy army of Mujaheddein terrorists to overthrow Afghanistan’s democratically elected government. NOTICE that the US did this before the democratically elected Afghan government asked the Soviet Union for military assistance to fight the US organised Mujaheddein terrorists. The result was 42 years of war, strife, societal impoverishment and abuse of ALL Afghanis and especially of girls and women whose human rights have been diabolically abused throughout that period: https://www.globalresearch.ca/womens-rights-and-us-hegemony-from-afghanistan-to-syria/5572196?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
US interventionism successfully sought to destroy the Afghan secular state and undermine women’s rights; and was instrumental in closing public schools and replacing them with koranic schools. Textbooks, with primers filled with jihadi terrorist vrhetoric, were developed at the University of Nebraska and used in Afghanistan’s school system's core curriculum by the US and its proxies.
Zbigniew Brzezinsk said publicly that on 3 July 1979 'president Carter signed the first directive for the secret support of the opposition against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.'
He also said: 'on the same day I wrote a note, in which I explained to the president that ‘this support would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.'
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/29/zbig-m29.html
The Soviet Union didn’t INVADE Afghanistan. It was invited by Afghanistan’s government to INTERVENE to fight against a PRIOR covert US proxy terrorist invasion of Afghanistan.
The US has subsequently organised, funded, armed and trained similar proxy terrorist armies in Central and South America and in Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Sudan and other places.
More recently, in 2014, the US not only organised the putsch that overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, but it also organised, funded, armed and trained a military force bigger than any national NATO military force other than that of the US, designed with the intention to make war on Russians in the independant Russian republics in the Donbas; AND then to invade Russia.
But I digress.
In 1992, after the Russian military left Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin overthrew the Afghan government but were removed in turn by nationalist Taliban forces in 1996. As its Mujaheddin proxy had failed and the Taliban had virtually eliminated the CIA’s drug crops in Afghanistan and was not amenable to US pressure to allow the installation of an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, the US used the ridiculous pretext that Osama Bin Lardin was responsible for the 911 False Flag event in New York, to justify invading Afghanistan directly in 2002.
The US invasion evicted the Taliban government and the US military spent 20 years occupying and exploiting Afghanistan and enabling the CIA to recreate its drug crop production and distribution networks.
Attacks against women and girls increased at a frightening pace under the US occupation. In 2012, female casualties increased by 20 percent over the previous year, and then by 61 percent in 2013.
ANY implication that Afghanistan’s current Taliban government is responsible for the oppression of Afghani females is disinformation. The US bears that responsibility.
Moreover, any suggestion that the people of Afghanistan deserved ANY “punishment”, let alone COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, for ANY reason is false and disgusting, though typical of USans and their proxies in Australia and elsewhere as recent and previous coverage of Israel's periodic bombing of Gaza attests.
As the Canberra Times says it “Serves The National City and Through it The Nation” it must know these historical facts and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Ron
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