Afghanistan? Anyone paying attention? No? Watch this
posted by MedfordTim 02/25/2008 06:27:19 AM EST
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No one has watched events on the ground in Afghanistan more closely than the American Sarah Chayes who was born in Washington D.C. She has lived in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, near the southern border with Pakistan, since the weeks following 9/11. Back then, she was an NPR reporter covering the Taliban. But she soon left an award-winning career in journalism to live and work as a private citizen in Afghanistan. For almost seven years she has been helping to rebuild that country's civil society." - Bill Moyers
See Bill's interview with this amazing woman - and learn some things about Afghanistan you might not have known. A few excerpts below.
All quotes from Sarah Chayes. Emphasis mine.
Their government is shaking them down. I have people telling me, "We get shaken down by the government in the daytime, and shaken down by the Taliban at night. What are we supposed to do?"
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Well, every government official that I know is participating. So, with the exception of President Karzai himself, personally. How can he possibly not know? If I know. But it's not just them, what about us? We put-- us, the international community, we put these people into power. They wouldn't last a day if we weren't backing them up and propping them up in a way. So my question is, why is it that we don't begin putting some pressure on them to treat their citizens with common decency?
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Well, we're paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it's actually U.S.-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops. Now if I were the government of Germany or France, I'd have a hard time putting my troops in that kind of equation. I would demand from Washington, that Washington require a lot different behavior from Pakistan.
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We're going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don't ask them anything about how they're governing. We don't demand-- all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we've fed them money, we've fed them arms, and then we say to the people, "okay, you're supposed to hold your government accountable." they're looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, "you want us to hold them accountable?" So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.
