JohnDubYa said:
Read the article. It appears that the Taliban are to blame for the violence. The government in the article is only accused of not doing enough to stop them.
Come on, you can read better than that. That particular article actually does
not ascribe the death of the aid workers to the Taliban; the main complaint is, in fact, the failure of the government to investigate the deaths and uncover the responsible party. On the other hand, the Taliban
are the most likely culprits, a
Human Rights Watch report from two days after the killings states that the Taliban claimed responsibility for them, and that they had been linked to other killings of aid workers. The CNN article (published almost two months later), for whatever reason, only mentions Taliban threats against aid workers.
What the CNN article
does mention is the fact that the reason that aid workers have become targets is that actions by the U.S. led forces have caused the Taliban to question the neutrality of aid organizations.
The real question is: why are the Taliban even in a position to mount effective attacks on anyone in Afghanistan?
According to the Human Rights Watch
World Report 2004, the world community has committed only 1/25 of the money, and 1/50 of the troops (both per capita) that were used to help secure and reconstruct Kosovo. This doesn't say much for Bush's leadership in creating an effective coalition.
In 2002, Bush repeatedly invoked the Marshall Plan as the model he intended to pursue in reconstructing Afghanistan, but I guess the Afghanis aren't important enough to him that he felt it necessary to "stay the course" on that promise.
That may be true, but that doesn't mean that Afghan life was better under the Taliban, as your post suggests.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is an implausible reading of my wording, it is not the reading I intended. I am not castigating Bush for having carried out a campaign against the Taliban, which is the assumption that seems required to make your reading sensible. I'm asserting that the campaign was followed through with staggering incompetence and empty promises.
The U.S. military is quite good at its job. Give it a well defined target, loose the leash, and chances are you've got a toasted target. And to the extent that Bush's campaigns have been reducible to these terms, they've been successful. Knock down the Taliban? Piece of cake, sir! Give Saddam the boot? No problemo! On the other hand, he hasn't been the kind of commander that could direct these attacks with any finesse, e.g. more Afghani civilians were killed during bombing than Americans were killed in the World Trade Center. Call it 'collateral damage' if you like, but the fact remains that these were human beings and, now they are dead, not liberated. I have seen no evidence to indicate why these should be considered 'acceptable losses'. If you're slaughtering innocents, even unintentionally, and don't alter your tactics, what shall we call you?
So then, in the aftermath, we have grand promises of a 'Marshall plan', and what do we get? A pitifully small garrison of troops which is entirely insufficient to secure a country with the size and complexity of Afghanistan, thus allowing local thugs to set themselves up as warlords in a reassertion of the historical status quo, and providing a lax enough environment for the Taliban to re-establish themselves within the country. This is accompanied by the most pathetic trickle of aid money to be accorded to any country in a similar situation in recent memory, which has at times left the country at the brink of starvation, and on the edge of a complete breakdown in medical care. Now to top it all off, we find out that the U.S. tactics have made it nigh impossible for neutral aid organizations to operate in safety, further reducing the options available to a desperate population.
And I'm supposed to take this situation as evidence of Bush's leadership abilities?
I have no reason to believe the U.S. attack on Afghanistan was unwarranted. The removal of the Taliban is a fine, fine thing. Just don't ask me to believe that the overall result is even close to what a U.S. campaign led with any real creativity and foresight could have accomplished for Afghanistan.
In recent months, there have apparently been a few victories in providing health care for Afghani children. These accomplishments were projects of the UN and the WHO. One of them, a program to deal with the skin disease leishmaniasis, was funded by Belgium. The other which treated over 4 million Afghani children for intestinal worms for less than US$500,000, got its greatest share of funding from Canada. The U.S. is not mentioned in these reports.
Ask many of the women living in Afghanistan their opinions.
As noted before: the removal of Taliban repression is a positive step. The expanded role granted to women in the interim government has been important, and the thought put into women's issues in the new Afghan constitution is obvious.
However, the consequences of the failure to adequately secure Afghanistan have fallen the most heavily on women. From the most recent Human Rights Watch http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/12/31/afghan6991.htm (January 2004):
Women and girls bear some of the worst effects of Afghanistan's insecurity. Conditions are generally are better than under the Taliban, but women and girls continue to face severe governmental and social discrimination. Those who organize protests or criticize local rulers face threats and violence. Soldiers and police routinely harass women and girls, even in Kabul city. Many women and girls are afraid to remove the burqa. Because soldiers are targeting women and girls, many are staying indoors, especially in rural areas, making it impossible for them to attend school, go to work, or actively participate in the country's reconstruction. The majority of school-age girls in Afghanistan are still not enrolled in school.
Over thirty-five schools in the south and southeast, mostly for girls, have been rocketed or burned [by Taliban groups] since August 2002.
Outside of Kabul, [warlord forces] are implicated in extortion, intimidation of political dissidents, rape of women and girls, rape of boys, murder, illegal detention and forced displacement, as well as specific abuses against women and children, including trafficking, sexual violence, and forced marriage.
Add to this the fact women are forced to deal with continuing malnutrition and lack of health care for their children.
I succeeded in finding a series of statistics for one measure of women's health: childbirth mortality. A 1997 estimate put the rate at about 820/100,000 (with a large margin of error). This was quoted in a http://www.phrusa.org/research/afghanistan/maternal_mortality_interp.html which found the rate in the region they studied (Herat) to be in the neighborhood of 600/100,000. A more recent UNICEF study put the rate at 1,600/100,000, though UNICEF also http://www.unicef.org/emerg/afghanistan/index_8182.html that significant steps have taken to improve this.
So the fate of Afghani women since the fall of the Taliban has been fairly mixed, but for the most part the positive aspects seem to have little or nothing to do with the U.S. and, some of the most negative bits can be reasonably attributed to Bush's lack of follow through. I expect better of my president.
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