[Peace-discuss] Fwd: What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States

[John W.]

Thought some might be interested in this....




*THE WISDOM FUND
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May 6, 2010
LewRockwell.com

*What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States
*by Dana Visalli

[Dana Visalli is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp,
Washington.]

. . . I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in
Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago,
so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and
resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in
Afghanistan "to help Afghan women," and yet we were told by the director of
the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report
titled "Silence is Violence," that the situation for women there was growing
more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation
since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations
there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep
one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000
troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300
bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan
people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the "30-year
war" there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which
there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent
to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much
corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We
were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic
incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the
US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul.
It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just
an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not
decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a
recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army
commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He
brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to
her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The
human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell
us "a thousand stories like this." There has been a rapid rise in the number
of self-immolations - women burning themselves to death - in Afghanistan in
the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women's
lives - under the nine-year US occupation.

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are
on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience
elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened
conflict, insecurity, and violence against women. . . .


*MORE <http://www.twf.org/News/Y2010/0506-Learned.html>
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