While it is true that the highest number of Afghan combatants killed have been in the southern portion of the country (around Kandahar) and along the eastern border (between Jalalabad and Khost), you must make a fairly large leap to say that this is evidence of attempted genocide or ethnic cleansing. It is also untrue to say that there was no constructive goal in Afghanistan. I will say there is nothing directly constructive about war, and in that sense, you are right. War is destructive by it’s very nature. However, to say there is no constructive goal is entirely untrue. Following the cessation of hostilities, or, at the very least, a minimalization of hostilities, the goal is to ensure that the current Afghan government is viable, not only in creating a system of laws and constitution that protects the rights of it’s people, but to defend itself against those that would remove it from power, both foreign and domestic. While this goal is a long way from coming to fruition, it comes closer each day, and is a very constructive thing.

On the subject of the Taleban, I absolutely agree with you. It can never be defeated by the United States, or by any other group, because it is a marriage of Islam and Paxtun tribal structure. I don’t believe the defeat of the Taleban is the goal, however. I would say, rather, that the goal concerning the Taleban is only to prevent/disrupt their ability to train terrorists, and help terrorist organizations from carrying out attacks. The Taleban are not inherently dangerous, any more than a group of Christians are. Misguided anger leads to western civilization becoming a scapegoat for all things that stand in opposition to Islam, and that anger, combined with religious fanatacism and zealotry lead to attacks on innocent people.

One thing I will agree with you wholeheartedly on, without a caveat, is the spread of filth throughout the country. This is also true in Iraq. On and around bases, in places where Americans frequent spring up profiteers. These natives flock to a willing consumer with anything they think will sell, including pornography and sex. Rampant sex will, regardless of location, result in the widespread contraction of venereal disease. In this I blame human greed, whether it be American, Afghan, or any other people.

Even with the terrible things that have happend in Afghanistan since the U.S. introduced a military presence again, the important thing to look at is the life of the average Afghan. After removing the Taleban from power, the people are experiencing freedoms many have never known. Women need not have a male escort when they leave the home, people may fly kites again, and countless items necessary to technological advancement and communication have become legal for the citizens again. Computers and satellite dishes, outlawed under Taleban rule, are no longer illegal. These allow for the flow of information and capital, and in a cyber technologically minded world, are necessary for societal advancement.

Welcome to Zero Anthropology! I am pleased to have a student with such critical, albeit ideologically tinted, awareness of global political processes. The framework and substance of my response to your optimistic reading of devastated Afghanistan is available in the above text (paragraph 5-9). Not only was Afghanistan not “handled well” by the major players in the Cold War, the country’s prospects for a state—albeit a soft state—format were fatally compromised by these competitors. By 1978 the infant state structure of Afghanistan had barely begun to walk when the US-USSR swords cut its legs off. The USSR wanted to install a socialist apparatus in Afghanistan. The United States, on the other hand, intervened for the sole purpose of dishonoring the USSR without any regard for the fragility of the state of Afghanistan and the political and economic welfare of its people. As a result Afghanistan rapidly declined into increasingly smaller and independent political and economic pieces. The country is currently on the verge of disintegration. Soon you will see a division of south (Paxtun) and north (non-Paxtun) to be dissolved in few years into additional fragments. The larger divisions and the prospective fragments are moving away at a rapid rate from Kabul, a former center which has lost its magnetic pull.

From the start the military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States has been an ethnic cleansing project aimed at the Paxtuns—essentially the region south of the Hindukush. As such this bloody occupation had no constructive objectives in Afghanistan. Since World War II every place touched by the dark minded and Zionist controlled American imperial stupor has turned to dust. This bloody and dark minded imperium has become an expert at creating divisions—from Korea to the Near East to Middle America to parts of Europe. Afghanistan is the latest victim of this expertise in evil.

The Taleban resistance is fundamentally a synthesis of Islam and Paxtun tribal structures which will never be defeated by the United States. The American violent coercive presence has produced in Afghanistan bottomless wells of disrespect, hatred, and contempt for the perpetrator. This cultural energy will sooner than later drive the occupiers out of Afghanistan. (See President Jimmy Carter’s latest analysis of the so called “war” in Afghanistan). In the meanwhile the massive Euro-American cultural presence winged by the American military has produced nothing but cultural sewage in Afghanistan. In addition to housing the totally corrupt American made and funded government, Kabul, a city which was a relatively clean and secure home to less than one half million residents during the late 1970s, now contains more than four million people living under truly primitive pre-industrial conditions. The city is an open sewer. There is no sewage and piped water system. The city is full of whore houses servicing the Americans and almost four thousand NGOs (more than one hundred thousand civilian occupiers) force feeding helpless Afghans with cancerous Euro-American capital. The disease of AIDS has been introduced by the Americans to Afghanistan since 2000; rates of HIV are skyrocketing in the country. Bagram air base is ringed by pornography and prostitution shops and other forms of Western cultural filth.

Thus, today Afghanistan is in far from a “better shape” than it was in 2000. It is an American made political and cultural ruin. For a variety of powerful moral, political, and material reasons, it will be for the good of the global system, especially its bankrupted American component, for the latter to leave Afghanistan and return to the declining and decaying social and cultural spaces situated in the historically weightless fantasyland from sea to shining sea.

I would ask what you think of the current occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. military. In the 9 years that the U.S. has been involved directly in Afghanistan, there have been marked changes in the country, and while many of them have been for the bad, I am of the opinion that the country is in better shape now than it was in 2000, and that the years to come will show an Afghanistan that is much more capable of governing itself in a manner that protects the rights of it’s people, not only within the Afghan borders but in the international community as well.