[Peace-discuss] MSM tells us why we must kill

[C. G. Estabrook]

  The next justification for war
BY JASON DITZ

The continuation of the war in Afghanistan, some nine years after the U.S. 
invasion, rests upon endlessly redefining the goals and purposes of the 
conflict. With the WikiLeaks documents providing growing evidence of the 
catastrophic state of the conflict, Time magazine has jumped in, as it so often 
has, with a story designed to convince Americans that the war must continue.

The cover of Time’s Aug. 9 edition features a shocking photo of an 18-year-old 
Afghan woman whose nose was brutally cut off by the Taliban. The stories 
associated with the photo assure us that this will be the fate of many, if not 
all, Afghan women if the U.S. does not continue its occupation ad infinitum.

Of course using the canard of women’s rights as the justification for continuing 
this war is nothing new, but with the war growing more unpopular by the minute 
it is forcing war enthusiasts to ratchet up the rhetoric, and scare the American 
public, by hook or by crook, into abandoning their opposition to the conflict in 
the name of protecting human rights.

Ignoring for a moment the massive number of civilians – men, women and children 
– being killed regularly by the 150,000 U.S.-led international troops in the 
nation, one must remember that while Time has spun the photo as “what will 
happen if the US leaves,” the tragedy of young Aisha did not happen in some 
fictional, future Afghanistan unfettered by U.S. occupation. Rather this girl 
has lived 9 years, half of her life, in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, and the 
violence against her happened in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.

As Time magazine’s staff tours the TV talk circuit they are forever claiming 
that the U.S. military can and must be the guarantor of human rights, saying 
paradoxically that enormous progress has been made for women and Afghanistan 
while publicizing a photo that shows the fruits of that nine years of “progress” 
as something quite else entirely.

This is just another attempt to change the narrative in the face of the massive 
number of U.S.-inflicted civilian deaths, the full view of which we are finally 
beginning to see, and portray the opponents of the conflict as mean spirited and 
perhaps more than a little misogynistic.

Yet when I see the picture of young Aisha on the cover I don’t see a casus belli 
for the continuation of America’s ill-conceived adventurism in Central Asia. 
Rather, I see the ugly reality of nine years of failed nation building. 
America’s war has failed not only the American people, it has failed the Afghan 
people, and perhaps none quite so much as Aisha.

Violence against women in time of war is a virtual constant, and the solution to 
this violence cannot possibly be more of the same war that has for the past nine 
years failed to accomplish this goal, and failed to accomplish any of the other 
goals for which it is nominally being fought. Before we are cowed, once again, 
into accepting the “necessity” of this war, it is time to examine critically 
what we are being presented with.

Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com, lives in Saginaw.

Read more: The next justification for war | freep.com | Detroit Free Press 
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