ccorday you make some of my points for me, regarding a widely hated government. I will once again reaffirm that any polling done in situations of combat, with fear on all sides, in a country with large areas that remain off limits, where suspicion is necessary for survival, where there can be retribution for being seen to speak to the wrong people, etc., etc., discredits the validity of any opinion poll or any election.

I also question the independence and credibility of the Asia Foundation, posing as a NGO when it has in fact served the U.S. national security state for half a century and received CIA funding. You will find this entry in Wikipedia:

The Asia Foundation began in 1951 as the Committee for Free Asia, which, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), was “an ostensibly private body . . . sanctioned by the National Security Council and, with the knowledge of congressional oversight committees, supported with covert indirect CIA funding” (CRS 1983). The Committee was comprised primarily of California businessmen who hoped to combat the expansive efforts of the Kremlin and push back the new communist regimes in China and North Korea through Radio Free Asia.

In 1967, the U.S. media revealed that the CIA was covertly funding a number of organizations, including The Asia Foundation, and all CIA funding ended. A commission authorized by President Johnson and led by Secretary of State Rusk determined that The Asia Foundation should be preserved. The Foundation began to restructure its programming, shifting away from its earlier goals of “building democratic institutions and encouraging the development of democratic leadership” toward an emphasis on Asian development as a whole (CRS 1983).

SourceWatch says the following about the Asia Foundation:

In 1967 it was revealed that they were receiving CIA funds. Victor Marchetti, once an executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, is less delicate — he says Asia Foundation was established by the CIA and until 1967 was heavily subsidized by them, even though some of their activities were legitimate.

“These days the National Endowment for Democracy model is preferred over those old, risky, secret CIA conduits, so in 1984 the Asia Foundation Act provided for funds from the Department of State. In 1987 the Foundation received $10 million from State and another $3.7 million from AID, in addition to private support (88 percent of which was in the form of donated books) and matching Asian contributions. We wonder if Asia Foundation is really out of the U.S. intelligence loop after all.”

***So what you need to do, sayke, is find a credible source that does not act as an arm of the State Department and CIA. In the meantime, I dismiss that poll altogether.***

The justifications used by sayke for prolonging the stay in Afghanistan beg one critical question among many: WHY AFGHANISTAN? Humanitarian assistance, security, well being, freedom from ethnocentric tyrants, etc., etc. Good. Laudable. Spot on! So when do you mobilize to protect Gaza and attack Israel?

You have added incentive from a GWOT perspective: right now events in Gaza, and the fact that the UN is doing nothing, the US is doing nothing, NATO is not bombing Israel like it did Serbia…all of this validates Bin Laden’s long standing accusations. Don’t you hate that in parts of the world people are now saying, “See, Bin Laden was right all along!”

The reality is that none of the justifications for a continued occupation of Afghanistan, as offered by sayke, really matter. Afghanistan is simply a beachhead in this ideological fixation known as the “war on terror” by a state anxious to maintain and expand its dominance worldwide. It satisfied the American public to assault Afghanistan as revenge for 9/11. I think you got ample revenge now…go home. Stop wasting the lives of your own, of Afghans, and of other nations in this absolute folly.

I too would like to read your complete response to Sayke and clarification of your response “yes, many years”.

Canadians don’t want our forces there because:
(a) there is an economic crisis, and we have already blown $18 billion on this adventure — that is a lot for us, we have less people than California;
(b) Afghanistan never attacked us;
(c) the Taliban never attacked us;
(d) we have been implicated in human rights violations, regarding handing over detainees we pretty well knew would be tortured, and,
(e) there are mounting rumours that our forces are protecting or engaging in an illegal trade in opium (incidentally, one source of these allegations was someone connected to the Minister of External Affairs, and she went on the record with this).

We also fancy ourselves as peacekeepers, rather than war mongers and counterinsurgents. Add it all up, and the public is rightly sick of the whole thing.

Anyway, if I get a chance to respond more in depth in the next 24 hours, the comment will appear here.

1) what exactly is “yes, many years” in response to? have you lived and worked in afghanistan? if so, cool =)

2) nobody i can possibly think of, let alone either of us, can speak for the afghan people, but they can speak for themselves quite well… and lots of people are carefully listening. http://asiafoundation.org/country/afghanistan/2008-poll.php is a good place to start learning about what they afghan people are *actually* thinking =P

3) attempting to delegitimize afghans who disagree with your position as less then “independent” does not serve your cause well. if you want to talk about whose opinions on this matter are legitimate – about who exactly is an “independent” afghan, well then by all means let’s talk! in that vein:

3.1) a vast number (at least a third of the country’s population) of afghans were born or at least partially raised outside of afghanistan. are they not “independent”? are their perspectives illegitimate?

3.2) the taliban engaged in genocide against pretty much every non-pashtun ethnic group (especially hazaras) in the country, and as such, those ethnic groups are deeply hostile to the taliban return implied by the possibility of an international community pullout. are the members of those ethnic groups less then “independent”?

3.3) the vast majority of pollable afghan women, especially those who have had the spine to get an education, understandably fear the possibility of an international community pullout. are afghan women – especially educated ones – less then “independent”?

4) i’d like to hear from some of your “independent” voices – you know, the ones that want the international community to leave. are they pashtun/sunni/patriarchal supremacists? if so, why in the name of everything good would you possibly consider their opinions legitimate?

5) how many people hate the international presence here, and what is their justification? how many of these people are above-mentioned ethno-sectarian supremacists? if you actually look into it, you’ll find that the actually ideologically-rooted opposition to the international community’s efforts (as opposed to the pervasive for-profit violence) emerges from a pretty consistent and narrow demographic of afghan society… but if you disagree, by all means cite your sources!

as i said before, many afghans are deeply disappointed in our efforts here. that does not translate into hate – it translates into ambivalence, apathy, hopelessness, and grinding corrosive corruption.

we were welcomed early on, and for quite some time thereafter. the educated elite still welcomes us. the idea was sound and lauded by all, but these republican apparatchiks made a hell of a mess of it… so as usual, it’s up to us to clean it up =/

also: i’m not trying to sell anything. please don’t try to delegitimize my side of this conversation by insinuating that i have commercial motives – i could just as well accuse you of being on the isi’s payroll. it’s not constructive.

i do, however, think it’s really too bad that so many canadians want to withdraw their resources, and i don’t understand why. we need all the help we can get over here…

Anytime we hear from independent voices — not the people in your office, and decidedly not yourself, and from people who have been there more than a few years…they were born and raised there ;-) — we get a very different picture from the one you paint. On the other hand, at least you were honest enough to hint at how you might be positioned there. (While IPs can be faked, I will assure other readers for you: your IP does say that you are writing from Kabul, Afghanistan.)

But whatever you do, don’t come and try to sell an imperial mission on a site such as this one. Some polling you might want to check: the overwhelming majority of Canadians wants an immediate or extremely rapid withdrawal of Canadian forces from Afghanistan…that is how impressed we are with the entire ridiculous, pointless, unwarranted adventure. Even our very right wing Prime Minister maintains a commitment for us to exit by 2011 no matter what — but we’ll make sure it’s much sooner.

the british general who said the war was as good as lost was right, of course, but not in the way he’s commonly misinterpreted, and not in the way you think. he was advocating for political settlements with various taliban-aligned factions and saying that they could not be militarily defeated, which is neither new, nor surprising, nor the consensus held by analyists here.

many afghans are deeply disappointed in the international community’s efforts – it’s undeniable that we’ve let them down, but that just means we’re undeniably responsible to help them build a secure, free, sustainable, and dignified future here. i think people here are more disappointed then anything, and they have a right to be. this has been a republican-party-led operation, and as such it’s been ill-concieved, virtually unplanned, and terribly implemented!

that does not detract from the worthiness of its cause, however. you invoke “ordinary afghans”, but i dare you – ask any afghan women whether they want the taliban to come back! or ask any hazara or tajik or uzbek – or hell, *any non-pashtun* afghan…! or any pashtun who can read…

remember, the taliban are sunni pashtun ethnosectarian supremicists, and conquered afghanistan with massive support (hundreds of truckloads per day) from the saudis etc channeled through the pakistani government. they engaged in systematic genocide against every minority they could whup, and without the massive and ongoing outside support they’re receiving, they would fade away as surely as the karzai government would.

and as for digging wells – i’ve been to villages where they barely had any metal. i’ve been to villages where they thought we were russians, and honestly suspected that cell phones were magic from the devil. this doesn’t mean they were helpless, but there’s ignorance aplenty here – i’ve hung out with some serious buses-don’t-run rednecks over here, and the one thing they needed more then anything else was water… so i don’t talk about wells lightly.

of course, they’re massively overpopulating and destorying their water tables by having 10 kids per family, so in some cases even very deep wells won’t save them. hell, i’ve been to places where nobody should live – places with essentially no ecosystem capable of even supporting goats, let alone people… there are some utterly desolate places around here, and water resource management is a huge part of ensuring that these places won’t be completely depopulated in five years.

in sum, i don’t think you have any sense of the actual problems most afghan people are facing. the most significant of these are 1) jobs, and 2) security (from goons, corrupt police, the taliban, the US army, whoever). remember, this is the 4th poorest country in the world, and that’s *after* the international community has been active here for several years. it’s no wonder they’re disappointed…

we in the international community (but especially the US) are now responsible for the afghan people. after the soviets left we abandoned them to civil war and externally-funded religious fanatics, and the same would happen if we abandoned them again. this is how the vast majority of afghan people perceive the situation. feel free to look the asia foundation’s polling if you don’t believe me!

in the meantime, please don’t claim to speak for “ordinary afghan people”. quote your evidence, by all means, but remember – we live in a world of shifting signposts, and neither of us are afghan, or grew up under the taliban…

but some of us speak the language and have worked and lived here for years ;)

I am also sure my analytical expertise would be more useful to them than what they are getting now, if the above is any indication. Dig them some wells? I see that you think of them as helpless and ignorant people all round then. Nice liberator.

Good luck, keep your head down.

the notion that we’re imperially dominating afghanistan seems patently absurd to me, and not just because the karzai regime only usefully controls about 1/3rd of the country ;) i work on a project that is 90% afghan-staffed, and have quite a few afghan friends, and the *last* thing any of them want is for the taliban to come back!

what they want is security and stable economic growth – peace and jobs, basically. according to the asia foundation’s polling, this reflects the desires of the general populace, and makes perfect sense to me. the vast majority of the afghan people expect the international community to deliver on this, and we must not fail to do so.

the alternative is the return of the taliban/isi, who are detested by pretty much everyone who can read, and would imperially dominate this place in a way that makes us look like the liberators that the afghans thought we were in 2001-2005.

resistence against the US is generally bought and paid for by the pakistani government, drawing on the resources of a vast and ever-churning movement of dupes, fanatics, opum lords, and ethno-sectarian supremicists. the taliban pays better then the government does – but if they didn’t, guess how much of a resistance there would be?

the taliban is, in essence, a combination of the 700 club, the cia, and khmer rouge – anyone who seeks to legitimize their war need only ask one thing: what, exactly, are they fighting *for*?

i’m not excusing US tactics here – far from it… but i dare you to tell any afghan hazara or tajik or uzbek that the US should never have overthrown the taliban. hah!!

you should come out here for a while – i’m sure your analytical expertise would be very useful to people here.

or maybe you could dig them some wells…

The details of her biography matter in some ways, not as something for us to laugh at either. They matter because they are the focus of the huge outpouring of emotion from those who knew her, since that emotion then makes everything else drop away: imperial domination, resistance by other human beings, attacking a country (Afghanistan) that never attacked the U.S., rushing in to remove the Taliban (who also never attacked the U.S.), then staying in the hope of doing a giant social and cultural makeover, expanding U.S. interests over Afghan territory, etc. So the emotion and personal details matter in explaining how people lose sight of all this, and instead assimilate Loyd into other pre-structured stories that their culture has taught them: women trying to make it in a man’s world; America reaching out to help people; or, St. Joan of Arc (see comments on the videos of Loyd I put on YouTube).

Also, there is a second side to this, and I mentioned this to you in recent days to alert you to the kinds of messages coming in here even before her death was announced. There are the mirror image American jihadists in the civilian and military political structure of the U.S., and in HTS, who will want to seize on the emotional outpouring, and the golden details of Loyd’s personal biography, to create a martyr. It will also help to whitewash Ayala’s own macho act of frontier American Justice — imagine, a mercenary, standing in judgment, dispensing justice. Incredible irony. Indeed, as soon as the news of Loyd’s death spread, so did the mass of “Ayala is a goddam American hero” messages begin to pollute whole screens of comments. Finally, making a martyr of Loyd helps to renew and reinforce the romance of empire that motivate people into furnishing themselves as new bodies for HTS.

What is really sad is that those who in the past, and recent days, rush here to proclaim the goodness of Loyd are totally missing the point of all the posts, which are about stepping back and analyzing the Loyd story in the much wider scheme of imperial encounters and conflicts in Afghanistan. They have no questions about Salam, he is just an “animal” (look for that as a keyword, it comes up again and again, and it is disgusting racism juxtaposed with individuals’ supposed appreciation of Loyd’s work in “building bridges”). By the way, I have no reason for either doubting and denying that all of what they say about her is true. My point has always been that what was at work in her attack was a lot more than a clash of two personal biographies.

(I also don’t deny that she died in the worst way I can imagine, which is another blow for those closest to her. What I am denying is that this is all that matters. I could flood this blog with descriptive accounts from people in the several wedding parties that the U.S. Air Force bombed to shreds…how the survivors had to go up in the trees to retrieve pieces of flesh from their relatives, to free a torso impaled on a branch, to collect eyeballs from the dirt, so they could have a funeral.)

That is why, again, I will not hand over this blog to those who want to engage in personal rants, or who cynically exploit Loyd for making some ghoulishly cheap shots at those who attack HTS and what it represents, especially as some of us are already conscious of how this blog has already been identified in the media as “a platform for critics” of HTS. It will remain that, and others have their own places where they can rant, American jihad style.

I agree with what you wrote in your revised message. I know you’ll say that there all kinds of anthropological issues that come up in this Loyd story. My problem is that there are too many people who only want to see this as a “Loyd story” and they go around injecting all sorts of stuff about her personal biography as if this were like some soap opera. I think, if this is going to be a story about one person, then better we move on to the way bigger stories. You’ll say I’m Stalin in reverse here: one death is a statistic, and the death of millions is the tragedy. I have no problem with that.

See ya later.