On Afghanistan

By now, Malalai Joya should need no introduction. If you haven’t read the interview with her in the current edition of Overland, or the except of it in The Age last Monday; if you didn’t catch her on Q&A on Monday night or speaking to John Faine in the Conversation Hour, or even picked up a copy of her autobiography Raising My Voice, then I hope you were lucky enough to catch one of her sessions at the MWF.

On Saturday night, Joya addressed a packed BMW Edge, speaking frankly about life in Afghanistan today. 10 years of occupation has doubled the misery of the Afghan people, she claimed. The US-led invasion that was instigated as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and justified since with references to the dire situation for women and children (Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, according to UNIFEM) and the serious human rights abuses perpetrated by the Taliban, has not made things better for the Afghan people, Joya claimed. In fact, they have made them worse. If, in the time of Taliban rule, some women in Kabul were mildly better off, certainly nobody listens to their voices now. They are lashed in public, raped by corrupt police, shot. Women sell their babies for loose change because they cannot afford to feed them. Men are hung for being pro-democratic, and then their bodies are harvested for organs.

“Democracy never came from bombing a wedding party.”

Afghanistan has billions of dollars in mineral resources, Joya explained, that could be exploited for the benefit of the people. However, they also have the second most corrupt regime in the world, so the Afghan people don’t see any of the benefits from these resources. The money goes straight into the pockets of the already wealthy, powerful and ruling elite. In attempting to bring about democracy and bring down the Taliban, the NATO forces have, in Joya’s words, ‘propped up’ a regime of ‘criminal war lords’. These war lords only differ from the Taliban in their fiscal approach, not their anti-democratic or anti-humanitarian mentalities.

Joya does not deny that things are bad. After years of underground activism and persecution, she knows better than anyone that they are devastating. But the Afghan people are ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ now because foreign military forces are occupying the country. The people dropping bombs and killing civilians in air strikes are NATO forces. In fact, some of the worst massacres, she claimed, happened in Afghanistan after President Obama came into power. Nobody wants to believe that a superpower like the US would lend its support to these kinds of travesties, and yet 14 countries are allied with them over the war in Afghanistan. The lawlessness that exists because of their presence is their excuse to stay longer. They are currently scheduled to leave mid 2014, but they are now talking about setting up permanent military bases in the country. This is part of the reason why Joya believes they are not in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people but for their own strategic interests. ‘I do not believe it is a war on terror,’ Joya said, ‘simply war crime.’

The most striking thing about Joya’s speech – and the part of her message that I think is most crucial, and perhaps what is lost in the contemporary mainstream coverage about Australia’s presence in Afghanistan – is her focus on what the people of Afghanistan want. Neither the war lords currently in power nor the Taliban act in the interests of the people, she says. To assume that the Afghan people want these corrupt and violent war lords in power – and further, to assume that outside forces negotiating with them at gunpoint could possibly bring about democracy – is naïve, as though a population would choose to be exploited, to be tortured, to be oppressed. And yet by trying to work within the existing power structures, she claims, the NATO forces are actually uniting the enemies of the people against the people.

“Democracy without independence or justice is meaningless.”

Afghanistan needs honest helping hands, Joya said – they need schools and they need hospitals. But through the military occupation, the money and power falls into the pockets and hands of the corrupt. The media never reports the internal resistance, to not only the Taliban and the war lords, but to the NATO forces themselves. The question is always asked: ‘But what will happen if the troops leave?’ Except, Joya said, that nobody asks what is already happening while NATO forces occupy the country. Civil war in Afghanistan is not a possibility; it is an actuality. But if the foreign troops leave, she said, actually leave, the backbone of the corrupt regime will break. And then, finally, perhaps the people of Afghanistan will be able to liberate themselves.