VOA News: Luiz Ramirez: Future Role of US Troops in Afghanistan Debated

. Source:The New Democrat  The only thing that American troops in conjunction with NATO should be doing right now is helping to train and develop the Afghan military so Afghanistan can defend itself from domestic and foreign invaders including the Taliban and other terrorists groups. We’ve been there twelve years and have our own problems back at home economically and financially. That these wars…

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"In the twenty-first century, nothing is more indicative of U.S. empire than the global reach of the U.S. military. Much of this power comes from its approximately 800 military bases located in around eighty countries, accounting for about 95 percent of the world’s foreign military bases. No other country comes close to the U.S. level of worldwide military control. ... The United States probably has more military bases than any other empire in history, yet most Americans remain largely ignorant of their numbers and location. The history of these bases is an imperial history, tied to war, occupation, and military expansion. Wherever the U.S. military has gone bases have usually followed, giving the United States an ongoing presence long after the war or occupation is over.

The creation of bases has accompanied each wave of U.S. expansion. Military forts enabled continental conquest—255 in total—which functioned as foreign bases on land that was often still controlled by Native peoples. These forts operated as the military outposts of settler-colonialism and were targeted by Native peoples as violations of territorial integrity. The War of 1898 and subsequent occupation of overseas colonies resulted in a global basing system, and by 1938 the United States had fourteen military bases outside its continental borders in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, the Philippines, Shanghai, the Aleutians, American Samoa, and Johnston Island. ... The explosion of foreign bases during World War II would be followed by surges during the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, showing that wars and occupations continue to expand U.S. territory, even if the form of those acquisitions has shifted since the days of settler-colonialism and annexation. The contemporary number, which hovers around 800 to 900, is still an impressive network that places the military within striking distance of every spot on the globe. Historian Bruce Cumings calls the modern form of U.S. empire an 'archipelago empire,' small islands of U.S. control from which power can be projected anywhere in the world. It has become increasingly difficult to tell where the boundaries of the United States begin and where they end.

... For most U.S. citizens these bases are either invisible or accepted as a natural part of our national security apparatus. David Vine argues that Americans 'consider the situation normal and accept that US military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on US soil is unthinkable.'"

Stefan Aune, "American Empire," in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, 2018

Map source

i was born in taliban-controlled afghanistan and spent the majority of my childhood under the subsequent american occupation. my village was controlled by terrorists and warlords and patrolled by american soldiers who pretended they were 'peacekeepers' but, for the most part, were only interested in abusing local afghans and raping women and girls. i've both witnessed and experienced the sexual violence of my country's islamic fundamentalist factions as well as american occupying forces.

what i've seen both israel and hamas do to women in palestine and the occupied territories is eerily similar. i know people love to shout resistance by any means necessary! and similar slogans, but rape is not about 'resistance', it's about men exerting power and control over women. making excuses for it just goes to show how ready and willing 'leftists' are to throw women to the wolves as soon as they see an opportunity.

and if you think the men of hamas go home after raping their 'conquests of war' to treat palestinian women like saints, you haven't been paying attention to male violence throughout human history at all. the men who use war as an excuse to rape enemy women are going home to rape, beat and abuse their wives and daughters just the same.

ohmyfuckingshit a bunch of you are living in a fucking fantasy land about hamas. they are not the avatar of the invincible wave of history, they are not clearsightedly doing what needs to be done to decolonise the israeli occupation, their role for the last four decades when it wasnt being coddled and nurtured by israel as an alternative to fatah has been to do objectively manifestly insane shit providing israel with an excuse to exact crippling mass collective punishment on the palestinian ppl, and their vision for palestinian governance after the final victory it is totally and painfully beyond their power to achieve is somewhere between afghanistan under the taliban and turkey under erdogan

not only that but your "support" for them as a westerner is meaningless in the absence of extremely risky and difficult acts of aid ik not one of you is actually willing and able to follow thru on; the immediate, vital task at hand for westerners (especially americans) standing in solidarity with palestinian victims of israeli terror is to help bring an end to the status quo of munificent western aid for the occupiers. aside from any concerns about the status of civilians in resistance to colonialism, you are accomplishing nothing here beyond pointlessly alienating ppl

Palestinian liberation is a feminist issue. While this truism should need no elaboration, it has, as with so much that relates to Palestine, necessitated discussions, clarifications, analysis and documentation, again and again. Palestine rights activists have long been familiar with the all too common phenomenon known as PEP: Progressive Except for Palestine. Less known, but no less common in feminist circles is FEP, the Feminist Except for Palestine phenomenon. Books such as Evelyn Shakir’s 1997 Bint Arab recount incidents of FEP going back to the ’60s, with many Arab feminists being shunned by their American friends over their support for Palestinian liberation. FEP had one of its early expressions on a global stage at the 1985 United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya, when Betty Friedan, an icon of second‑wave western feminism, with its slogan ‘the personal is political’, tried to censor the late Egyptian feminist Nawal el‑Saadawi as she was about to walk up to the stage to deliver her address. ‘Please do not bring up Palestine in your speech,’ Friedan told el‑Saadawi. ‘This is a women’s conference, not a political conference.’ Sadly, little has changed in global north feminism’s rejection of the very humanity of the Palestinian people, as evidenced in their continued exclusion from national and global discussions of women’s issues. White feminism has continued to align itself with orientalist imperialist militarism; Ms Magazine cheered the Bush Administration’s US war on Afghanistan in 2001, calling it a ‘coalition of hope’, and suggesting that invasion and occupation could, indeed would, liberate Afghan women. The white feminists in the Feminist Majority Foundation, which bought Ms Magazine in December 2001, never consulted with Afghan feminist organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who denounced both religious fundamentalism and western intervention in Afghanistan, and who opposed the US attacks on their country. More recently, hegemonic feminism’s desire to exempt Israel from criticism led to the fragmentation of the Women’s March, the coalition of women’s and feminist groups that came together to denounce the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US. The co‑chair of the 2017 Women’s March was Brooklyn‑born Palestinian American Linda Sarsour, a grassroots organiser who had long championed Palestinian rights. When journalist Emily Shire asked in the New York Times ‘Does Feminism Have Room for Zionists?’, Sarsour responded with a resounding ‘No’. Many felt threatened by her outspokenness and visibility. Another Palestinian feminist, Mariam Barghouti, also asserted in a 2017 article that ‘No, You Can’t Be a Feminist and a Zionist’, and explained that: ‘When I hear anyone championing Zionism while also identifying as a feminist, my mind turns to images of night raids, to the torture of children and to the bulldozing of homes.’ In the wake of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, white feminists are denouncing the unsubstantiated accusations of sexual violence against Israeli women, without addressing the Israeli state’s amply documented gendered violence against Palestinian women, children, and men. ‘Feminism cannot be selective. Its framework comes from true and absolute liberation not just of women, but of all peoples,’ Barghouti continues, building on bell hooks’ analysis of feminism as a complete liberatory movement. ‘A feminist who is not also anti‑colonial, anti‑racist and in opposition to the various forms of injustice is selectively and oppressively serving the interests of a single segment of the global community.’ Simply, ‘feminism’ that aligns with regimes that engage in racial and ethnic oppression is gendered supremacy; no ideology that hinges on supremacy and discrimination is reconcilable with feminism.

one thing i have a bad mental map of is the actual progress of ww2, especially American involvement. Pearl Harbor wasn't bombed until the very end of 1941, and U.S. forces weren't engaged in actual fighting until Operation Torch nearly a year later (there had been plans to land forces in Europe as early as 1942, but they never went anywhere due to British opposition). V-E day was in May 1945, and V-J day a a couple moths later--the U.S. was only involved in the war in Europe for about two and a half years, and only in the rest of the war for about three and a half. Afterward, the U.S. occupations of (part of) Germany and Japan were only about four and seven years respectively.

(The in the time it took to lose the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. got involved in World War II, helped in it, occupied Japan and part of Germany, fought the Korean War, and later got involved in the Vietnam War. Insane that that particular war dragged on over four presidencies. It's apples and oranges to a certain extent, given the very different intensity of the two conflicts, but I think it also underscores the extent to which the U.S. went into Afghanistan with no clear strategic goals, and got stuck there for weird pathological political reasons.)

Hi Julia, I hope you're well. I was listening to an interview recently & saw in the comments a person bemoaning that the interviewee had the "right" opinion on the issue being discussed, & how it's a shame he has "wrong" opinions on a few other issues & therefore his opinion on anything can't be taken seriously. That one opinion really encapsulated for me the anti-intellectualism & fear of discussion that's so prevalent recently, especially on the left. Have you noticed this? Is there a way out?

I've absolutely noticed this and I think the way out is the cultivation of a culture that values and welcomes the vigorous debate of ideas from good faith participants, the end of the culture of publicly shaming and defaming those you believe to be of good character and whom you otherwise view legitimately as comrades because of political disagreements. This is difficult and unpleasant work, but we know what the alternative is because we've seen it- do nothing leftists intellectually and socially paralyzed by their fear of committing wrongthink or mingling with those who might, who have no allegiance to ideas at all and only to sides, whose idea of politics is totally divorced from their concept of power and much more closely aligned with their concept of vibes. Our tradition on the left is one that includes boisterous public disagreement with thought leaders and ordinary people alike, and we have seen in more than one sense the potential consequences of leaning away from that. But even more on the basis of praxis than principle, this mindset gives us nothing and quite literally robs us of the ability to do meaningful work. Sides had self proclaimed socialists literally arguing for the continued longterm American occupation of Afghanistan in a war where America had unquestionably funded the creation, training, and professionalizing of its current enemy- sides in this sense need to die.

Every now and then I play a game in my head called "How would you win 9/11?" Not in the Mark Wahlberg sort of way but from the perspective of "if I were not a neocon ghoul, how would I handle this and avoid/postpone the sandbox forever war?"

Hard mode: Bin Laden has to still escape the battle of Tora Bora alive.

Extreme mode: you still have to invade Iraq at the behest of Reagan Era advisors still mad about Iran 30 years ago.

Easy mode I would just play the PR machine hard with the launch of Enduring Freedom. Like Panama, I'd hit hard and all at once with a coordinated force. The American people would need blood quick, and looking like a strong president is imperative for your first term, especially after such a hit to the American Ego.

Definitely approving the Ranger battalion's deployment to Tora Bora is the best path here, but the key is to pull out just as fast as we went in once we get our guy. Keep it feeling fresh, like Panama or Desert Storm. Afghanistan frankly has very little advantages for any army (according to most imperialist conquests of the area) so leave the government to the people that live there. The important part is that Americans feel that NYC has been avenged.

Hard mode means you don't get Bin Laden til 2011 as per current day, and therefore need to do a bit more cleanup during enduring freedom. Frankly my methodology here isn't much different than the current US anti-terror doctrine of airstrikes and deploying elite squads for night raids.

When you're fighting an asymmetrical war, using small units and remote explosions to hit key points (putting the "terrorism" in "counterterrorism") and match guerrilla fighters both costs less and beats the bad publicity of shipping corpses not old enough to drink home in flag wrapped caskets.

A low-impact campaign (read: less of a full on occupation) like this with US logistical support (and the input of people who're actually experts in Afghan geopolitics) would hopefully allow the US to avoid the protracted war with the insurgency that lasted literally 20 years and ended with the Taliban stronger than ever. Give it a couple years, call it a success, and hunt down the big guy until you get him in 2011.

Extreme mode isn't ideal (We shouldn't have been in iraq) but putting Bremer in control was really the nail in the coffin. I would demote him to janitor and find someone who understood the situation instead. Why build a highway next to an existing road? The obvious way to rebuild a country you bombed into fine gravel is to take advantage of the infrastructure you left behind.

I personally would've avoided treating Ba'athism like we could just denazify iraq, and rather pull key leadership and left the rest relatively intact so as to better rebuild the country. Allowing the military to remain standing (and in fact work as a method of reconstruction) and set up a client state that could keep Iran on its toes, sort of like how Iraq was before Desert Storm. Which still wouldn't be ideal but at least we'd significantly lower the chances of outright spawning ISIS through American cultural and administrative incompetence. There are no good imperialist wars but there are ways to not completely bungle it too.

Midway through Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which maps generations of Afghan and Afghan American lives against over a century of entwined wars, sits what appears to be a résumé. Entitled “Occupational Hazards,” it meticulously records the everyday labors of an Afghan man: [...] his “[d]uties included: leading sheep to the pastures”; from 1977–79, “gathering old English rifles” left over from the last war while being recruited into a new war; in 1980–81, “burying the tattered remnants of neighbors and friends and women and children and babies and cousins and nieces and nephews and a beloved half-sister”; [...] becoming a refugee day-laborer in Peshawar, Pakistan; in 1984, becoming a refugee in Alabama, where he worked on an assembly line with other Asian migrants whom the white factory owner used to push out the local Black workforce; and so on. Dozens of events, from the traumatic to the mundane, are cataloged one by one in prose that is at once emotionless and overwhelming. [...] Kochai interviewed his father for the résumé’s occupational trajectory [...]. An Afghan shepherd [...] is displaced by imperial wars and then, in the heart of empire, is conscripted into racialized domestic economies [...]. [M]ethodically translating lived violence via a résumé, a bureaucratic form that quantifies labor in its most banal functionality, paradoxically realizes the spectacular breadth of war and how it organizes life’s possibilities. [...]

---

In this collection, war is past, present, and plural. In Afghanistan, Kochai recounts the lives of Logaris and Kabulis, against the backdrop of the US occupation, still dealing with the detritus of previous wars - British, Soviet, a­nd civil - including their shrines, mines, and memories. In the United States, Afghan Californians experience the diasporic conditions of war -- state neglect of refugees combined with targeted surveillance -- amid the coming-of-age of a second generation that must confront inherited traumas while struggling to build political solidarities with other displaced youth.

These 12 stories explore the reverberations between historical and psychic realities, invoking a ghostly practice of reading. Characters, living and dead, recur across the stories [...]. Wars echo one another [...]. Scenes and states mirror each other, with one story depicting Afghan bureaucracies that disavow military and police violence while another depicts US bureaucracies that deny social services to unemployed refugees. History itself is layered and unresolved [...]. Kochai, who was born in a refugee camp in Peshawar, writes from the position of the Afghan diaspora [...]. In August 2021, the US relegated Afghanistan to the past, declaring the “longest American war” over. Over for whom? one should ask. [...] War, in other words, is not an event but a structure. [...]

---

In Kochai’s collection, war is not the story; rather, war arranges the scenes and life possibilities [...]. Kochai carefully puts war itself, and the warmakers, in the narrative background [...].

This is a historically incisive narrative design for representing Afghanistan. Kochai challenges centuries of Western colonial discourses, from Rudyard Kipling to Rambo, that conflate Afghanistan with violence while erasing the international production of that violence as well as the social and conceptual worlds of Afghans themselves. Instead, this collection moves the reader across Afghans’ transcontinental, intergenerational, and multispirited social worlds -- including through stories of migrations and returns, homes populated by the living and the martyred, language that enmeshes Dari, Pashto, and Northern California slang, as well as the occasional fantastical creature [...].

---

Like Kochai’s debut novel 99 Nights in Logar (2019), this collection merges realism and the fantastic, oral and academic histories, Afghan folklore and Islamic texts, giving his fiction a dynamic relation to history. Each story is an experiment, and many of them are replete with surreal or magical elements [...].

As in Ahmed Saadawi’s 2013 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, a nightmarish sensorium collides with a postcolonial body politics [...].

In a recent interview, Kochai said that writing about his family’s experiences of war has compelled him to explore “realms of the surreal or magical realism […] because the incidents themselves seem so unreal […]. [I]t takes years and decades to even come to terms with what had actually happened to them before their eyes.” He points not to a documentary dilemma but to an epistemological one. While some scholars have argued that fantastic genres like magical realism are often conflated with exoticized imaginaries of the Global South, others have defended the form’s critical possibilities for rendering complex realities and multiple modes of interpretation. Literary metaphors, whether magical or otherwise, are always imprecise; as Afghan poet Aria Aber puts it, “you flee into metaphor but you return / with another moth / flapping inside your throat.” [...]

Kochai does not “escape” into the surreal or magical as fictions but as other ways of reckoning with war’s pasts ongoing in the present.

---

Text by: Najwa Mayer. “War Is a Structure: On Jamil Jan Kochai’s “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.”“ LA Review of Books (Online). 20 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

I have complicated feelings about the COD fandom fetishizing “barracks bunny” because of the sexual violence that women in the military face.

LaVena Johnson, Ana Basaldua Ruiz, Vanessa Guillen, countless other unnamed women. All of these soldiers were murdered or “committed suicide” after being raped/sexually assaulted/sexually harassed in the military.

The barracks bunny stereotype is a violently, murderously misogynistic stereotype that gets women killed.

And not just women in the military - wherever troops go, sexual violence, trafficking, and femicide increase.

A Marine at Camp Pendleton abducted a 14 year old Indigenous girl after purchasing her from an unnamed pimp and keeping her in the barracks to rape her! He kept her on that base for 24 hours before she was rescued and last week was charged with sexual assault. Military bases are highly guarded places. How would he have been able to keep a child in the barracks to rape without the knowledge and collusion of his fellow soldiers?

(Read more here)

Indigenous women and girls go missing and are found murdered at astronomically high rates because of racism, colonialism, and systemic abuse of Indigenous women/girls under both of those things.

The objectification and fetishization of Asian women by Western men is the direct result of Western militaries sex trafficking Asian women and girls in Asia before/during/after WW2 and forcing them into prostitution. Once these Asian women had been forced into prostitution, they had no other choice but to keep doing that and as time went on, this created a sex tourism industry in Asia specifically for foreign white men.

(Read more here)

In some cases, Western soldiers even took over the disgusting sex slavery camps the Japanese military enslaved Korean women/girls in during WW2 and kept those women imprisoned to serve the Western soldiers who were there to “liberate” them.

I could write a whole separate post about the sexual violence experienced by women and girls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other places in the Middle East at the hands of Western soldiers. That wasn’t very long ago and it’s still going on today! We remember!

(Read more here)

(And you might be like: ofsappho, why do you care? I care because I have immediate family on both sides that survived Japanese occupations during WW2. I care because my family was directly impacted by the US chasing out the Japanese from Manila and what they did after. I care because there is a history of violence/abuse in my family of American soldiers exploiting native Filipina women. Real people, real women are affected by this issue and have been for decades.)

What I want most of all is for people to educate themselves on this. There’s a reason why these issues are hidden, overlooked, covered up, not spoken about, and that’s to enable this systemic abuse and permit it to go on.

If you are still able to stomach writing about barracks bunnies after researching this, then that is your choice and I accept it.

"How much safer has construction really gotten? Let’s take a look.

Construction used to be incredibly dangerous

By the end of the 19th century, what’s sometimes called the second industrial revolution had made US industry incredibly productive. But it had also made working conditions more dangerous...

One source estimates 25,000 total US workplace fatalities in 1908 (Aldrich 1997). Another 1913 estimate gave 23,000 deaths against 38 million workers. Per capita, this is about 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly 17 times the rate of workplace fatalities we have today...

In a world of dangerous work, construction was one of the most dangerous industries of all. By the 1930s and early 1940s the occupational death rate for all US workers had fallen to around 36-37 per 100,000 workers. At the same time [in the 1930s and early 1940s], the death rate in construction was around 150-200 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly five times as high... By comparison, the death rate of US troops in Afghanistan in 2010 was about 500 per 100,000 troops. By the mid-20th century, the only industry sector more dangerous than construction was mining, which had a death rate roughly 50% higher than construction.

We see something similar if we look at injuries. In 1958 the rate of disabling injuries in construction was 3 times as high as the manufacturing rate, and almost 5 times as high as the overall worker rate.

Increasing safety

Over the course of the 20th century, construction steadily got safer. 

Between 1940 and 2023, the occupational death rate in construction declined from 150-200 per 100,000 workers to 13-15 per 100,000 workers, or more than 90%. Source: US Statistical Abstract, FRED

For ironworkers, the death rate went from around 250-300 per 100,000 workers in the late 1940s to 27 per 100,000 today.

Tracking trends in construction injuries is harder, due to data consistency issues. A death is a death, but what sort of injury counts as “severe,” or “disabling,” or is even worth reporting is likely to change over time. [3] But we seem to see a similar trend there. Looking at BLS Occupational Injuries and Illnesses data, between the 1970s and 2020s the injury rate per 100 workers declined from 15 to 2.5.

Source of safety improvements

Improvements in US construction safety were due to a multitude of factors, and part of a much broader trend of improving workplace safety that took place over the 20th century.

The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.

The subsequent rising costs of worker injuries and deaths caused employers to focus more on workplace safety. According to Mark Aldrich, historian and former OSHA economist, “Companies began to guard machines and power sources while machinery makers developed safer designs. Managers began to look for hidden dangers at work, and to require that workers wear hard hats and safety glasses.” Associations and trade journals for safety engineering, such as the American Society of Safety Professionals, began to appear...

In 1934, the Department of Labor established a Division of Labor Standards, which would later become the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to “promote worker safety and health.” The 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which legalized collective bargaining, allowed trade unions to advocate for worker safety.

Following WWII, the scale of government intervention in addressing social problems, including worker safety, dramatically increased.

In addition to OSHA and environmental protection laws, this era also saw the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”"

-via Construction Physics (Substack newsletter by Brian Potter), 3/9/23

if you’re comfortable, could you dive more into your military family/background? like just lil facts or something, whatever you wanna share! i just love learning about stuff like this, learning about other peoples lives, especially because im a huge maladaptive daydreamer and into creative writing, n my current obsession is the military / SAS and im just curious about what things are actually like, from a personal perspective.

and if not that’s perfectly okay!! ❣️❣️

i cant say too much because the family members that have served, many of them have signed different kinds of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements, so i haven’t been told too much) but I can talk about some of my dad’s experience. My dad was in the Navy and he was a machinists mate nuclear. He worked on a submarine and worked on some things and witnessed some things he had to sign NDAs for. He managed to meet a couple of SEALs and had in depth conversations with them. My dad easily dehumanizes folks due to his time in the service, too. He was never special forces, but it’s very important even basic bootcamp teaches you to dehumanize folks. that’s the point of it!!

My dad’s dad was also navy, although i don’t remember his specific rate (rate = job, it’s the navy version of job/MOS or “military occupational specialty”) but i do remember it involved fighting, he was a ww2 if i remember right. My mom’s dad was air force, also a ww2 vet, he was a pilot of some sort, retired now. old bastard is somehow alive 😭 (my parents were born in the 60s).

a hard topic.. one of my babysitters (who is a family friend) is a veteran who went to afghanistan. (reminder im american). he didn’t come back the same and not all of him came back.. and he came back very.. violent if that makes sense?? he never hit me, his wife, or his kids, but he is very dehumanizing. he was some sort of special forces and this guy is messed up.

growing up, my dad wasn’t like.. strict, he wasn’t around too much, but you could tell the military changed his life. he always refers to the family as a team instead of individuals (the military does that to you, strips you of individualism and gives you the team mindset). he’s a great leader and he’s one of my role models as a human being in the real world. i grew up and got educated by him and the internet about the military, so i know quite a lot. if you have any specific questions about literally anything, i can try my best to answer!!!

i’m also going into the military and i’m open to questions abt that :-)

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame on the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)

You say you wish Ronen (and presumably other Israeli Americans) showed the same outrage for the attacks on Gaza as they do for the attacks on Israel.

I’m curious, do you hold White Christian Americans do the same standard? When they remember the lives lost in 9/11, do you require them to mention the 70,000 civilian lives lost in the war in Afghanistan, which was started as a result of that attack? Does it put a ‘pit in your stomach’ when they don’t, or do you simply go about your day without thinking it worth mentioning?

Because as a Jew I’ve never supported Israel, but I’m starting to wonder why Israel is held to a far higher standard than any Western nation that retaliates against terrorism. The loss of innocent lives is terrible and should be condemned, but why is it worse than the innocent lives lost in Afghanistan? Is there something in particular about Israel that you and other left-wing Westeners don’t like?

As far as I can see, Ronen’s country was the victim of a terrorist attack. He reacted with sorrow and anger and supports his country as it seeks to punish those responsible and rescue those taken hostage. But why is he deserving of condemnation for an emotional response when Americans and Westeners can mourn and be angry about their citizens killed by terrorists without attracting any of the same vitriol? The West has done terrible things in the Middle East, and yet when the Middle East strikes back against its enemies only Israel and its people are not allowed to be angry.

Maybe you don’t have any answer, but if you do and are willing to respond I would like to know. What is the difference between an Israeli ‘coloniser’ responding to being a victim of terrorism and an American ‘coloniser’ responding to being the victim of terrorism? Why does one attract criticism and hatred and the other not?

I don't speak for anyone else but my personal answer to this question is yes. Unequivocally. I haven't been talking specifically about the Iraq/Afghanistan wars this week because that's not what's happening right now, but yes. People mourning/honouring victims of the 9/11 attacks should absolutely also be mourning the (by some estimates) nearly a million innocent people who died in the Middle East in the wars started as retaliation for that attack, in some cases in places like Iraq that had literally nothing to do with it at all. If someone feels sadness in their heart every day for the 9/11 victims and feels nothing for the innocent Muslim people who paid the price for something they had nothing to do with, I feel very comfortable saying that person has fallen prey to American imperialist propaganda campaigns or is just outright racist. The hoopla that followed 9/11 is almost beat-for-beat what is happening right now, all over again. We learned nothing. Once again our leaders are dehumanizing brown people, cheering on imperialism and violent colonial occupation, and using a terrorist attack to manufacture consent for war crimes. (Anyone wanting more info on how they do this should read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.)

The loss of innocent Palestinians is not worse that the loss of innocent Afghans. They are the same. They are both being murdered as payback for something they didn't do and their deaths were/are both being cheered on by the Western war machine because it makes money for defense contractors and because it's politically convenient to see brown people as expendable pawns in the game of Risk world leaders are always playing. So yes, I absolutely do condemn both and mourn for both.

Additionally, I know you didn't ask for sympathy but I know how difficult this is. I know it's a lot more complicated than white online leftists like to make it seem, and I know a lot of Jewish people personally who are struggling right now, as they have before, with their complex feelings for the state of Israel. I hope you're taking care of yourself, as best you can in these awful circumstances.

I think that the only real reason so many people are so willing and quick to denounce the IDF’s anti terrorist activities and conflate it with larger social issues that shouldn’t even be technically related is maybe because what Israel is doing as a means to defend itself similar to how we Americans originally responded in what we needed to do in response to 9/11.

We just wanted to take down the terrorists for such a heinous crime on our people.

The issue though is that people are looking at the consequences of our wars on terror rather than their baseline goals. They look to our actions in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan post-2001 rather than the end goal of stopping terrorists, rather successful or not.

Basically, what these people are saying is that “the world had gone though one War on Terror and we all know how that went” in an attempt to discredit and denounce the whole affair, purposely ignoring the underlying objective of stopping armed and dangerous criminals that launched a heinous attack

This attitude of course is potent and corrupted by such bigotry that it frankly damages their arguments if anything

At least that’s what I think

I think there are a number of reasons,

the Iraq War is a big one in the US and UK (and the rest of Europe to a lesser extent) there's a lot of people, particularly on the left for whom any American/western involvement of any kind in a war in the Middle East is bad and always always will be because of Iraq you saw it with Libya and Syria back under Obama

I think however there's more than that, I think for Arabs and Muslims Palestine has long been an emotive issue and there's just that which we're seeing in Turkey but also from communities inside the UK or the US

I think the idea of the occupation is very emotive for a lot of people, in the 1990s there was a wave of correcting long standing historic wrongs and bring peace, you saw it in Northern Ireland, you saw it in South Africa, Americans and Europeans were involved in protests and sit ins etc in the 1980s and 90s for those causes, and also for Palestine. And I think the failure of the Camp David Process in 2000-2001 mixed with conflating American policy in Iraq with Israel (because of GWB's stated support for Israel, while being cold toward Arafat in his first term) lead to the Western peace camp to get more radicalized

I think antisemitism has ALWAYS fed into that, and lead to a lot of distortion and dehumanization, basically I think starting in the 1990s if you went to college for liberal arts and were at all political criticizing Israel was a way to get nearly automatic approval. And in the 90s it started off with reasonable criticisms you'd hear from most American Jews and many Jews of the Israeli center and left, settlements, occupation, Palestinian free movement, check points etc. But as every year goes by the need to one up and one up grows till you have groups cheering a truly horrific terrorist attack, mass murder etc.

I think it should be pretty easy to say that Hamas are bad people, monsters, and they shouldn't be in charge of any one, I think its the pro-Palestinian stand to say that an army of baby murderers and rapists shouldn't be the government of Gaza?

"Gaza is being pummeled now by Israeli bombs that are turning buildings to ashes. Israel’s own photos of the destruction are disturbing. Five hundred children are reported to have died in the bombings already. More will die soon, and countless will be seriously injured and psychologically traumatized. It is not the first time this has happened. Israel’s violence against Gaza has been a constant feature of life there. When Gazans tried to protest their condition in 2018, Israeli snipers shot them dead in cold blood. Was the shooting of medics and journalists not 'barbaric'? Was it not 'terroristic'? (Note that Hamas is said to deploy 'terrorists,' not 'soldiers,' while Israel has 'soldiers' even when they kill equal or greater numbers of civilians.) 

Moreover, Israel is the aggressor in the underlying conflict, because it maintains an occupation and siege against Palestine that violates basic international law. While international law does not permit violations in response to violations (meaning that Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights and sovereignty does not confer on Hamas the right to ignore the civilian/combatant distinction), Israel is not exactly 'defending itself.' If I enter and occupy your house by force, and you attack me using force in response, I cannot justly claim to be engaged in mere 'self-defense,' even if your own violence is grotesquely disproportionate to what the situation requires. 

A morally serious person does not just look at individual horrors perpetrated by only one party in a conflict. They look at the full facts of the conflict. Hamas’ crimes are great indeed (as a pacifist, I have zero love for Hamas and think they do terrible harm to the Palestinian cause), but here is the latest news out of Gaza:

Crowds of frantic people, some barefoot, rushed toward them, fleeing their just-destroyed homes. The ground shook with each strike from an Israeli fighter jet. 'People were crying for the children they had to leave behind under the rubble,' Mr. Ahmed, 32, said. 'They were begging us to go in and pull their children from the rubble — this was all they wanted, for us to go and pull their children out.'

Yesterday, 45 people were reported to have been killed after an Israeli strike on a Gaza apartment building. Eyewitness accounts from Gaza are harrowing, as people wait without water or electricity in fear of their impending deaths. 

It’s also harder than ever to argue that Israel’s killings of civilians are a mere 'tragic necessity.' The country has been quite open about abandoning 'precision' bombing in favor of 'destruction,' with its soldiers thirsty for 'revenge.' Already, more Palestianians are reported to have died in Gaza than the number of Israelis that died in Hamas’ attacks.

In the aftermath of a particular horrific act, as that thirst for vengeance takes over, it can be difficult to think straight. I remember the period after 9/11. People were angry and wanted to blow stuff up (to 'put a boot in their ass' as a song of the time put it). Many Americans didn’t particularly care whether the Muslims their country ended up killing had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. And as the U.S. unleashed absolute hell on Afghanistan and Iraq, our media paid little attention to the lives taken, even when the atrocities were just as disturbing as what Al Qaeda had done to us (see, e.g., our bombing of an Afghan hospital, where patients were burned alive in their beds). In the U.S., a defining characteristic of public discourse is extreme hypocrisy, righteously condemning the terror perpetrated by other countries while either ignoring or rationalizing the terror inflicted by our own mighty military machine. Defenders of Israel are quite similar, rightly being enraged by Hamas’ killing of Israel’s children but quick to justify the equally gruesome killing of Palestinian children as a mere tragic necessity. (Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir once grotesquely claimed that while Israel might 'forgive the Arabs for killing our sons…it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.' To which many a grieving Palestinian parent would surely answer: Who the hell forced you?) 

As an egalitarian socialist, I begin from the principle that every child counts equally. And I recognize that if you care only when certain children die, the idea that you are motivated by sympathy for children is called into question. Israel is currently carrying out acts in Gaza that are just as repellent as those committed by Hamas. It does so in the context of being the aggressor power in its conflict with Palestine. Nobody should be taken seriously who is not equally appalled by the violence rained down on Gaza as they are by the crimes recently carried out against Israel."

- Nathan J. Robinson, from "You Can’t Selectively Pay Attention To Certain Atrocities And Ignore All The Others." Current Affairs, 14 October 2023.