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More Torture in Occupied Afghanistan
By Ted Rall
03/02/06 "ICH'
-- -- NEW YORK--"In one of the great deceptive maneuvers in U.S.
history," Bob Herbert wrote recently, "the military-industrial
complex (with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as chairman and C.E.O.,
respectively) took its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan and
launched the pointless but far more remunerative war in Iraq."
Herbert, one of the New York Times' better pundits, ought to know
better than to point to Afghanistan as the right fight at the right
time. But he's not the only Pollyanna of America's other dirty war.
During his 2004 presidential primary campaign Howard Dean said: "Our
military has done an absolutely terrific job in Afghanistan, which
is a war I supported...I believe that, had Saddam been captured
earlier, we might have been able to spend more time looking for
Osama bin Laden, which is the real problem." John Kerry took the
same position--Afghanistan war good/part of war on terror, Iraq war
bad/distraction--in his run against Bush.
And so has the citizenry. Public disgust for the Iraq War, news
coverage of which has been dominated by soaring body counts, torture
scandals and the outbreak of civil war, has become bipartisan--only
30 percent of Americans tell the February 27 CBS News poll that they
still support it.
The popularity of the occupation of Afghanistan, on the other hand,
is a given. The U.S. military backing of Afghan president Hamid
Karzai is so widely accepted that pollsters no longer ask voters
about it. Opposition? There isn't any.
Liberal magazines like The Nation and The Progressive, the Air
America radio network and the leftie blogosphere are packed with
ferocious insults and attacks on the Bush Administration about the
Iraq War, from how they conned us into it to their lack of postwar
strategic planning to the profiteering and looting that ensued. But
when Afghanistan makes one of its rare appearances in the leftie
media, it's invariably held up as the war Bush ought to be fighting,
the good war that got sidetracked when we went into Iraq.
Everyone loves Bush's war against Afghanistan, even though it was
based on just as many lies as his assault on Iraq: Osama bin Laden
probably wasn't in Afghanistan on 9/11 and was certainly not there
by the time bombs began falling. People approve even though, as in
Iraq, Bush didn't send enough troops--8,000 where 500,000 were
required--to provide basic security. Even though Afghans didn't
greet us as liberators. Even though, as in Iraq, he installed a
government composed of corrupt, violent and vengeful minorities,
guaranteeing sectarian bloodshed and civil war.
And even though the news from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan--if you can
find any--is as relentlessly bleak as that from Iraq. Afghanistan
suffers its own litany of roadside bombs, suicide bombs, massacres
of foreign aid workers, citizens terrorized by kidnappers and
rapists. It even has its own Abu Ghraib.
U.S. troops are jailing, torturing and occasionally murdering about
500 uncharged (and therefore legally innocent) inmates at a
top-secret makeshift concentration camp at a disused Soviet-era
machine shop at Bagram, about 40 miles south of Kabul. "Some of the
detainees," reports the New York Times, "have already been held at
Bagram for as long as two or three years." The paper says that the
Bagram camp is "in many ways rougher and more bleak" than the
notorious U.S. gulag at Guantánamo. "Men are held by the dozen in
large wire cages...sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until
about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines." And if
Abu Ghraib serves as a guide, check out what Army interrogator and
self-admitted prisoner abuser Anthony Lagouranis says about those
"terrorists": "90 percent of them were probably innocent."
It's widely accepted that the torture at Abu Ghraib, combined with
U.S. troops' rough and intimidating treatment of civilians on
streets and in their homes, motivates Iraqis to join, fund and
provide logistical support to a growing resistance movement. Now we
know that the same thing is going on in Afghanistan. When will
American public opinion catch up with reality?
Both wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are equally unjustifiable,
illegal, corrupt and unwinnable. Both make us less humane and less
safe. Anti-Iraq War liberals who have given the Administration a
free pass on Afghanistan have merely encouraged more abuse. "For
some reason," a senior Bush official marvels to the Times, "people
did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Ted Rall, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an
illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Visit his websigte
www.tedrall.com
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