[Peace-discuss] Afghan policy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There are so many things wrong with this -- from what's necessary to lobby the 
president to the fact that the president is making war decisions contrary to the 
Constitution -- that it's possible to miss the fact that what he's doing is what 
the German leaders were executed for after WWII.  --CGE]

	October 18 2009
	CodePink Founder Jodie Evans Challenges Obama
	Up Close and Personal on His Afghanistan Policy

Armed with the signatures of thousands of Afghan women asking him not to send 
more troops, Evans told Obama that women must have a seat at the negotiating table.

	By Don Hazen
	AlterNet

Everyone in the universe by now knows that the progressive anti-war group 
CodePink has plenty of chutzpah. But co-founder Jodie Evans really doesn't mess 
around. She went straight to the top and challenged Barack Obama face-to-face on 
his visit to San Francisco on Thursday night at a high-priced fund raiser at the 
Westin St. Francis hotel.

Armed with the signatures of thousands of Afghan women who don't want Obama to 
send more troops, and for the U.S. occupation to come to an end after a 
reconciliation process, Evans had an intimate on-on-one with the president, 
where she told him explicitly that women need to be at the table in any 
negotiations to alter or end the war. She was wearing a pink shirt with "End The 
Afghan Quagmire" written on it, and showed her sartorial splendor to Obama.

Evans told me later that the evening at the Rain Forest Action Network 
fundraiser at the Bentley Reserve that Obama was friendly and listened carefully 
-- you can see in the video that he has his arm around her -- but that he didn't 
quite get her message at first. According to Evans, when she raised the issue of 
women and war, he said, "Well we have Hillary and the Ambassador. And I said no, 
the Afghan women. And he said oh. "

How did Evans manage to have this little chat with the President? Well, the old 
fashioned way. She paid for it. Realizing that they had an opportunity to get 
through to the Commander-in-Chief unfiltered, a supporter forked over $30,400 
for two tickets to attend the super-intimate gathering, where only the crème de 
la crème of big money donors were hanging with the president.

Earlier in the month, Evans recently visited Afghanistan over a ten-day period 
along with a group of CodePink activists, and she was clear in a recent AlterNet 
article about what she saw -- a humanitarian crisis: "The United States has 
spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in eight years of military action: what 
have we achieved? Most of the country is in worse condition, the bordering 
countries are less stable and death fills the air. According to the United 
Nations, Afghanistan is ranked 181 out of 182 countries for human development 
indices. Life expectancy has fallen to 43 years since the U.S. invasion. Forty 
percent of the population is unemployed, and 42 percent live on less than $1 a day."

There is a schism among American feminist groups, where some -- particularly Ms. 
Magazine and its parent group The Feminist Majority Foundation -- support 
escalation in Afghanistan as a strategy for protecting women's rights. But many 
other women -- particularly activists like the women of CodePink, who have a 
long anti-war history -- think that is a huge mistake and insist that most of 
the women in Afghanistan do not want more military, more war. It makes their 
lives even worse, if that is possible, while the discredited President Karzai, 
whose re-election seems fatally tainted by fraud and corruption and the warlords 
who control chunks of the countryside, shows little interest in supporting 
women's rights -- a recent law "explicitly legalizes marital rape as well as 
forcing women to dress and make themselves up (while in the home, of course) 
according to their husband’s demands, outlawing the ability to leave the home 
without a husband or a good reason to do so, and automatically granting custody 
of children to the male relatives (fathers or grandfathers)," according to the 
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

In a recent CodePink video interview, Afghan Parliament member Roshanak Wardak 
makes the position clear: "Most of the women do not want more troops -- they 
need support to sustain their lives." The CodePink delegation spoke with 
journalists, doctors, activists, NGOs, members of government and average Afghan 
women. The main message they heard is they "want the U.S. investment to reflect 
what is needed to bring peace. They need investment in the people of Afghanistan."

"In truth, 90 percent of U.S. funding to Afghanistan is used for military; only 
approximately 10 percent has been used for any kind of development"...