Interesting interview on Democracy Now! today with Sarah Chayes.She provides more reasons to question the whole US/Pakistan alliance - and it's purpose. NPR did not run this story.
Chayes is a former NPR correspondent who covered the US invasion of Afghanistan - among other things. She has also written a book - "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban."Now she runs the Arghand cooperative - Hand-crafted products from Kandahar. "The idea of Arghand ... to add value to Kandahar's legendary fruit crops, to transform them into something stable and light, suitable for export." Also - "It’s about grassroots. It’s about building democracy on whatever level you can in a cooperative, where there are good relations with producers, where there’s a collective decision-making process, and where we can honor a lot of the traditional licit crops that Kandahar has been known for for millennia."
Sarah Chayes on Life in Afghanistan After the Taliban and Why She Left NPR
SARAH CHAYES: ...And the problem has been that we didn't really provide to Afghanistan what we said we would. We said that -- we, the U.S. leading an international coalition -- said that we were there to not only dismantle the Taliban, but begin to lay the foundations of a respectful democratic country that would carry Afghanistan forward into the community of nations, as it were.
But what happened was that our other motivations of the so-called war on terror ended up trumping those goals, so that instead of supporting thoughtful, educated leaders and helping bring them to power and helping develop that capacity for leadership, we basically recruited thugs, who were supposedly helping us in the war on terror and were meanwhile abusing, robbing their own citizens. And so, what you see now is just a terrible disaffection. It’s not an ideological opposition to the United States as a Western country. It’s just exasperation with the government that we ushered into power.
...there were U.S. Special Forces that were embedded in a group, a kind of tribal militia, which was directed to put pressure on Kandahar from the south. President Karzai also had U.S. Special Forces with him. He was coming down toward Kandahar from the north. The Taliban surrendered to him. They left. Al-Qaeda left the city. The city was in the hands of President Karzai and his chosen representative, and then these U.S. Special Forces urged this warlord to take the city by force from President Karzai.
...I knew that President Karzai had designated a certain person whose name is Mullah Naqib to be governor of Kandahar. And then, suddenly this warlord is in the city. And then, there’s this huge and angry standoff, which is being played out on the airwaves of the BBC actually, of their Pashto Service, and this warlord is saying, “No, I’m going to be governor of Kandahar.”
...The Karzai appointee...said, “Okay, this other guy is going to be governor. I’m too old to be governor.” And I knew that something had happened. And then I rode into the city maybe two days after this with somebody who had been with this warlord, so I asked him, “Well, how did it go? How did you guys happen to go and take Kandahar? And He was a very young kid, you know, so he’s kind of all excited and enthusiastic. You know -- Speed! Speed! -- we went up the road, you know. And then I said, “Well, what What about the Americans who were with you?” He said, “The Americans? They told us to do it.” I thought, “You have to be kidding me.”
And that, I thought, was a really emblematic story to tell that would help show us the direction this thing was going in, because it seemed to me -- remember, this was before Iraq, Afghanistan was it -- and I saw the eyes of the world riveted on how we were going to operate in Afghanistan, how Afghanistan was going to turn out, was going to be crucial to what happened in the next decade or the next half-century even, you know.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s saying the U.S. Special Forces had put this other warlord up against the U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai.
SARAH CHAYES: Right, exactly. So the United States was working at cross purposes with itself, number one. Number two, you’re already constraining the power of the person that you have designated to be president. You’re saying, “Okay, you can be president, but you can’t name -- you don’t have the power to name your own governor.” And this dogged President Karzai for the first two years of his administration, when he was trying to limit the powers of some of these warlord governors that we had brought, we had allied with them.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. government had.
SARAH CHAYES: The U.S. government, that’s right, had allied with these guys, supposedly in the interest of the war on terror, and President Karzai was trying to limit their power and constrain them or even remove them, and he was told repeatedly that he couldn’t do that. And so, now he’s pretty much given up trying.
...I’m not sure we were working with the Taliban, but we were clearly working hand-in-hand with the Pakistani government, which had created the Taliban movement. And that was another piece of massive self-contradiction in our policy.
...So if we work hand-in-hand with Pakistan, we’re actually working with a government that is bent on undermining Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: And, though it’s not your subject, Pakistan providing nuclear material to North Korea.
SARAH CHAYES: Of course, of course. To North Korea and to Iran, I believe, also. I mean, A.Q. Khan, the guy who’s considered to be the father of the bomb in Pakistan, it’s manifest that he has been involved. I mean, the whole nuclear trail leads back to him, and there is no way he is a rogue actor acting on his own. Pakistan doesn’t function that way. The Pakistani government is a very closed system in the hands of the military, basically, I would say, military and military intelligence establishment.
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