We have all written about what we DONT want to see happen in Afghanistan: war, intervention, etc. I am interested in hearing what people would like to see happen in Afghanistan realistically. I was interested to read the interview with Adil, leader of the Afghan Labor Revolutionary Organization ... In it he calls for the following: Left and Right unite to support former King Sahir Shah ... What do people think about this?
This "people" sez:
See what I wrote in my last "Re: Agenda (was Re: ideologues)" post. I read the same article you read (a real find), posted by Charles Brown to Proyect's list. While I have no idea who the ALRO is and what slice of the Afghani people it represents, this article did provide a good deal of food for thought. In a "pie in the sky" world, I think it would be great if the end-state of trouncing the Taliban in Afghanistan was some sort of politically stable, coalition-backed gov't with popular legitimacy. But a massive U.S. aerial attack to provide "air cover" for the Northern Alliance and special ops certainly isn't the midwife of such an end-state. I'm not even sure bonafide multilateral economic sanctions (crucially entailing Pakistan) and bonafide "humanitarian intervention" (UN troops under international command) would accomplish any such end-state. While in the past I have almost always opposed "humanitarian interventions" _in theory_ as well as _in practice_ (with the possible exception of what never happened in Rwanda -- of course no thanks to the US and the French), in this case _in theory_ I'd support it, just because just about anything is better than the extant state of affairs in Afghanistan. But _in practice_ it looks like the U.S. assault from the skies and possible tit-for-tat chemical and biological wafare on the ground is going to lead to the seemingly impossible -- putting Afghanistan in a sorrier state than it already is. It looks like the U.S. war machine is going to make such an atrocious mess of things that Afghanistan won't even be safe for UnoCal in another 10 years.
(Another interesting thing about that article which I alluded to in my last post is that the author claims that Bin Laden's "state within a state" is more militarily efficacious than the Taliban and their minions, who will probably just flee to the redoubts of the Hindu Kush ... as well as his claim that the reason the Taliban won't give bin Laden up is that they don't have the coercive capacity to do so).
But you raise an important question -- should the U.S. anti-war movement be endorsing a program of genuine multilateral "humanitarian intervention" to ensure the enthronement of King Zair Shah ? I'd say no way, only b/c such an outcome seems so radically unlikely, and would only whet the appetite of Wolfowitz and company to pound Iraq more than the U.S. has been pounding Iraq. My current convinction is that the line has to be "no military intervention in Afghanistan" (including the Delta Force hunting down Bin Laden, which is a moot point anyway), period. I'll save my disagreements w/the knee-jerk anti-imperialist left for private conversations such as those which prevail on this list (although the knee-jerkers seem far and few between around here).
I must say, however, that as pressing as anti-war activism is right now, I personally feel more reluctant to join the ranks than I usually do -- and it's _not_ because the left "makes causal arguments" about why 9-11 happened (thus "insulting" the "American people"), but because in my more deluded and hopeful moments I think some good could come out of this for the Afghani popular masses. But then I slap myself and ask, who the hell am I kidding ? And in that vein, I've got a local demo to go to ASAP.
Just some half-informed thoughts from this quarter.
John Gulick