An Afghani View of the War

By Geoffrey Cook, MMNS

Berkeley–Siddieq Noorzoy, a former Director of the Afghan Research Society, and Professor Wali Ahmad of U.C. Berkeley, took part in a colloquium, “Crisis in Afghanistan…” as part of a series of such events entitled “Af / Pak:  The  Birth of a Violent Acronym”  conducted over the Spring of this year here.

The younger Wali began by stating that this is not a War on Terror, it is a War of several nations. 

The U.S. and its Coalition are attempting to suppress the Taliban through occupation!  Can the Obama Presidency succeed by such a methodology?  In his judgment, Afghanistan’s isolation makes this a strategic blunder!

There is a lack of understanding of the culture of the region and its people externally.  It is a myth that this nation in the Hindu Kush is “a failed fractured state.”

Afghanistan has been a fairly recent historical phenomenon (carved from several disparate sub-nationalities as a buffer State between the Russian and British Indian Empires during the “Great Game” [which had great similarities to our Cold War of the last Century] but during the Nineteenth Century. 

Wali felt that the Pashtoons receive an overemphasis by those outside their Provinces on both sides of the Durand Line.

(Yet they represent over 50% of Afghanistan and 15% of Pakistan:  A theoretical nation in and of themselves, and the Taliban themselves could be conceived as a nationalistic entity!)  He was right to point out the divisions among the Pashtoons themselves.  Ahmad claimed that the Hazaris, another tribal subnationality, were continually pushing in a hostile manner against their Pashtoon neighbors. 

Today, the Karzai government has made the ethnic divisions even worse in a ‘divide and conquer’ internal policy!

By the Colonial period Afghanistan became a place not to go.

The Twentieth Century brought Modernity to the Mountains as The Afghani’s, also, found their internal nationhood.

He was critical of the U.S. government’s influence on Kabul, for the Professor considered that the U.S. had brought corruption to the countryside,    it had become a “Think Tank” conception:  A “Land of Barbarians!”

Professor (emeritus) Norzoy was quite intriguing, but as one  trained as a historian, your writer found his conspiracy theories more wishful feeling than based on hard history.  Certain of them may very well be true, but most are no more than wishful thinking.  Ultimately, only future evolving evidence will tell what the truth is (or untruthful) kernel of a theorem is.

It is a historical fact that Kandahar overlooks an unconquered land!

Something that intrigues your author, though, is that the  contents of the Black Boxes of the 9/11 airplanes were never exposed for public scrutiny!  It does sound like something should have been hidden!  This does poses the question “Was [did] 9/11 happen” as it was) presented?

Norzoy went so far to declare THAT we (the Neo-Con pro-Israeli government) planned for 9/11 before it happened!  Director Norzoy asserted that oil was central to the incident.  (Could the target have been more Iraq than Afghanistan?)  He, further, alleged that Nineteenth Century (Imperial) policies have not changed.  (The Metropolis has merely shifted from Western Europe to North America.)  The aggression of 2001 “…has to be looked at more carefully!”

It was an assault upon Islam!  The plans for this have been brewing.  “So much of the history of the world has been changed by September 11th!” 

He declaimed the War upon Afghanistan as illegal!  The Security Council of the United Nations (U.N) did not agree on its legitimacy, but the U.N. assumed Kabul was ruled by a terrorist Cabal. 

(Your author, though, is not going to argue for a moral superiority for the old Taliban State, no what the law of International aggression may be!) 

Our differences could have been settled amicably–

“Afghanistan did not attack America,” but a non-State sponsored element.  100,000 Afghanis have been killed!  The American “…public has to get involved!”
$75 billion U.S. dollars have been given the Karzai government with no accounting! 

(Today, a Conference is being concluded in the Afghani capital.  The donors have to make sure that the money goes to benefit the lives of the poor, or else, we shall have to contend with a second Talibani State!)

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