By Shavana Abruzzo
By now, the evils of the mujahadeen are known to just about everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock.
Yet, nine years after a US-led invasion booted the Taliban from its bloodthirsty pedestal — and coinciding with al-Qaeda’s warning to dispatch female Afghan suicide bombers to the west — a cock-eyed London conference on Afghanistan has concluded that disarming the extremist militia group is as simple as bribing it with the Free World’s hard-earned cash.
Hosted by Britain, the United Nations and the Afghan “government,” the wobbly-kneed pow-wow drew the foreign ministers of more than 70 countries who set a 2011 deadline to woo — with grand hopes of peace and reintegration — insurgents in the junkie nation where opium production has soared since 2001, women and children continue to rot, and the regime of two-faced President Hamid Karzai is in bed with reputed terror mongers.
Days before the symposium, Karzai reinstated Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum — one of Afghanistan’s most flagrant warlords — as chief of staff to the commander in chief of the Afghan army, after Dostum lost the job in 2008 for failing to cooperate with an investigation into the shooting of an adversary.
During the conference, Karzai appealed on behalf of the Taliban leadership, a deposed but re-emerging force notorious for consolidating its control with systematic massacres and drug-peddling.
The Independent confirms the latter in an April 29, 2008 story about Afghanistan’s drug problems, reporting: “The [drug] smugglers claimed they are ‘untouchable’ because their bosses include cabinet-level officials in the government”; a blight advanced with each financial injection of international aid.
Naturally, the Free World and its allies are at a loss over how to deal with another nutty Islamic nation running amok on primal instincts, without a cohesive agenda for its maintenance and survival, where political parties and allegiances are ever-clashing, and whose Muslim brotherhood couldn’t care less — notably, neighboring Iran which declined to attend the London conference despite sharing a 582-mile border with Afghanistan, and close ties with its disparate ethnic groups.
Foreign rehabilitators of Afghanistan should read James Michener’s well-researched and prophetic book, “Caravans,” written in 1963 and set in 1945 Kabul.
An excerpt about the narrator’s sighting of a pair of “fierce tribesmen,” one rugged, the other wearing makeup and effeminately clinging onto the latter’s arm, reads: “…It was this phenomena that accounted for the curious behavior of the men: having removed all women from public life, the Afghans realized that feminine traits were nevertheless desirable, and so allocated them to men…”
Failing that, the United Nations should heed its own lengthy catalogue of Taliban atrocities, particularly the warnings of its own investigators, one of whom in a chilling 2001 report describes how executioners “skinned from head to chest” a young man named Mahr Ali, and dumped his body behind the former office of the relief organization, Oxfam, in the village of Bedmushkin.
Clearly, the remote and primordial land remains unchanged since Michener wrote his book, from which another divinitory passage reads: “…I noticed at the doorway to the mosque, three mullahs…with fierce eyes who appeared to be guarding the holy place and condemning me, a non-Muslim for passing so near. When I looked at them politely, they stared back with undisguised hatred and I thought, these are the men who rule Afghanistan.”
