August 17, 2021
“Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?”
‘The Battle of Naseby’ by Thomas Macaulay
After 20 years of B-52 carpet bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers, 20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of countless Afghan villages, the killing up to one million Afghans, spreading the opium trade around southeast Asia and Europe, abetting wide scale torture…. after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night.
Taliban – more accurately the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – has been slandered by almost every western news outlet and wrongly called a terrorist movement linked to the late Osama bin Laden. Heavily-propagandized Americans, Canadians and British have been inundated by this torrent of government lies against Afghanistan’s Pashtun (Pathan) people.
I was in Afghanistan with the newly created Taliban in the early 1990’s. I walked from Pashtun village to village and had tea with the local chiefs, known as ‘maliks.’ The Pashtun treated me as an honored guest and welcome visitor. These rough mountain warriors were the descendants of the fighters who had defeated four British invasions the previous century. My book ‘War at the Top of the World’ examines the beginning of our Afghan War.
The fathers of these Pashtun fighters were the men who formed the anti-Soviet ‘mujahidin’ (holy warriors) that defeated the mighty Soviet Red Army with the secret help of US, British and most of all Pakistani intelligence. Everyone in south Asia knew better than to mess with the Pashtun Afghans, including their blood enemies, Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara.
An old Hindu prayer goes, ‘Beware of the fang of the cobra, the claw of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Pathan (Pashtun)’
Taliban had just been created when I was visiting the usually off-limits frontier Tribal Territories on the Pakistan-Afghan frontier and the Khyber Pass leading into Afghanistan. After the hurried Soviet pullout, Afghanistan fell into civil war or anarchy. Armed gangs attacked caravans and raped many Afghan women, mostly in the Pashtun region. In Islam, rape is a grave, intolerable crime.
As chaos spread, a one-eyed village preacher, Mullah Omar, a maimed veteran of the anti-Soviet struggle, organized a group of his young religious students, known as ‘Talibs,’ to protect the local village women and defend the caravans. As the late Benazir Bhutto told me, she ordered Pakistan’s Home ministry to arm the Talibs.
At that time, the Afghan Communists were waging a war to keep control of the countryside and, most important, the nation’s lush opium fields, which financed the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and Communist Party. Once Taliban defeated the Tajik-Communist alliance, opium production in Afghanistan fell by over 90%. Until then, Afghanistan was the world’s leading producer and exporter of opium. This narcotic was then exported with full Communist approval to the Soviet Union/Russia, Iran, Central Asia an onward to northern Europe. Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, many Communist dominated, ran most of the drug trade.
Taliban crushed the Afghan drug trade and ended some of the attacks on women. But its members were mostly rough-hewn mountaineers of the very old school. They often treated women badly, as was the custom, but certainly far less brutally compared to the often-murderous way girls and women were mistreated or murdered in India, a US ally, or by US air raids on Afghan towns and villages.
Afghanistan’s urban education system was heavily infiltrated by the Afghan Communist Party which used female education as a way of infiltrating government. A major reason for Taliban’s hostility to female education was that it was viewed as a communist plot.
Today’s Taliban is a younger generation of mountain people, better educated and less narrow-minded than their rustic elders. I was invited by its leadership to attend peace talks in Doha. Meanwhile, one hopes that American right-wingers do not get the US to stage new military operations against Afghanistan to prolong this 20-year conflict. Let the Afghans sort out their own messy ethnic issues without interference by their neighbors. A new coalition government that includes non-Taliban leaders like former president Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar should be encouraged and supported. War criminals like Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum should be prosecuted.
We have to stop drinking our own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist propaganda and try to accept that what we are so far seeing is the liberation of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2021
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Compare to India Girls and Women were treated well in Taliban is weird and beyond any ones imagination. The article further added the women were frequently mistreated and murdered in India, this is fantasy. I wonder whether the writer is aware of the mistreatment of women in islamic countries? For example Iran, the satanic nation, the Khomeini rule never allowed women leave their homes unaccompanied, unable to attend school, unable to work unless allowed by by their husband even allows they are only able to work in jobs that are open to women and were mandatory to were hijabs whenever in public. Many women in Iran are facing punishment for standing up for themselves against this oppression ,including beating, torture and prison time. One woman was held in solitary confinement and sentenced to 10 years for being part of this movement. Another woman who simply participated in peaceful march in Teheran on International womens day was arrested and sentenced to 121 days in an Iran prison. These women are being submitted to cruel and unusual punishment for the simple act of of fighting back against wrongful oppression.
The female photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested kept in Evin prison was tortured and raped by the authorities is a good example
how the women are treated in Iran also in most of islamic countries in
middle east.
Hi Eric,
I am blown away by the recent events, and immediately turned to your column for your perspective, since what is going on here, is more than what the majority of us uninformed can grasp, but I suspect that you can size things up.
What do you make of all these weapons and undestroyed infrastructure left behind by the US forces? Will the best of this be sold to the highest bidder? Do the Afghan forces have the knowledge and support infrastructure to operate the weapons? I’ve seen a few recent videos suggesting that they are all pot heads, so I suspect that is not the actual case, given how successful they are as fighters, so the origin of those videos may be suspect, imho.
Is this a debacle of unprecedented preportions in this part of the world? What do you think this will mean to how the Russians and Chinese manage this part of the world?
Looking forward to your analysis of this situation as it evolves.
South Korea and Tiawan have to be feeling pretty uncomfortable just about now.
The old saying “Better late than never” comes to mind. The West should never have invaded Afghanistan. Although we will never know for sure, it is hard not to believe that the Taliban would have turned Bin Laden over after some serious and good faith negotiations. If the case against him was that good, the Americans should have been able to make it. The government officials who propagated the war caused a generation of misery and death. Who now cares about the veterans who have returned home? Our Prime Minister has said we “can’t afford” to look after them. What a disgrace. I can’t speak for the States, because I’m a Canadian, but we need a law here that Canadian troops cannot be deployed outside our borders except under extraordinary circumstance and after a full Parliamentary debate.
Please let us expose and resist the deep state official narrative past and present, spun by the US Federal bureaucratic experts at twisting of facts, motives, and the planning of outcomes, subsequent to deceptions behind unjust actions against the people of nations such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, including Germany in two World Wars and others
Eric knows about afghans and Afghanistan more than the us past 3 govts know , he should be the new usa ambassador to Afghanistan
“After 20 years of B-52 carpet bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers, 20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of countless…”
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This approach seemed to work successfully, in Iraq, didn’t it.
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“after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night.”
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Apparently Ghani left for UAE with $175M, one source noted. He denies this.
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“The Pashtun treated me as an honored guest and welcome visitor.”
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I understand it was this honour that prevented them from turning Bin Laden over to the Americans in the first place. With the anniversary of the ‘twin tower’ attack coming up, Biden still refuses to release all classified information that shows the Saudi involvement. Time for everyone, except the politicians, to boycott the celebration.
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“An old Hindu prayer goes, ‘Beware of the fang of the cobra, the claw of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Pathan (Pashtun)’”
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My dad always said they were the most scrawney, toughest, most wiry people on earth.
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“opium production in Afghanistan fell by over 90%.”
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This almost prompts the idea that the Afghanistan war was started by the Mafia.
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“Today’s Taliban is a younger generation of mountain people, better educated and less narrow-minded than their rustic elders.”
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I hope this is the case, but I’m not holding my breath; I think they will remain in the 14th century. There may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Afghanistan has a wealth of Lithium which will play well in the future.
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“We have to stop drinking our own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist propaganda…”
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With newspapers being substantially owned by half a dozen organisations, this will not occur. It will become increasingly difficult to obtain ‘real’ news. News organisations are into marketing and not unbiased reporting.
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The aftermath of the American withdrawal has not finished. The Americans ‘snuck out in the middle of the night’ and even the Afghan commander did not know they were leaving, I understand. Those wanting to leave are hindered by bureaucratic ‘red tape’; Canada, following the American lead, is also making it difficult. Trudeau Jr. is like pop, only different. I suspect the Taliban will deal with those that remained in a very harsh manner. We’ll see how this shakes out in the next few weeks.
96% of the media is owned by six corporations, most with direct ties to the war industry. This is why I have to go here or RT to get the truth.
Hi Ben, glad to see you are still around.