What are we fighting for in Afghanistan?
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What are we fighting for? A Guardian story that Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shiite men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation that President Hamid Karzai had promised to review, got a run in the Sunday Age yesterday but has not featured elsewhere that I have noticed. It is as if in Australia we do not want to think about what our soldiers are actually fighting for in that war because the truth is so horrible we know we should not be there at all! Maybe one of the two national television broadcasters will help expose the sordid truth of what democracy Afghan style is actually like by showing in the very near future the program going to air on the BBC’s Panorama this week. Panorama correspondent Jane Corbin shows what has really happened to women in a country where our team pretends liberated, women have cast off their burkhas and embraced the new democracy introduced by President Hamid Karzai’s government with its new Constitution promising equality and human rights under the law. Correspondent Corbin tells of how a staggering 60% of women are still forced into marriage as children — often as young as nine or ten, something that has not changed since the west intervened, despite Afghan law stating that girls under 16 should not be married. Noting that change for women is painfully slow in Afghanistan she observes people full of foreboding about what will happen after the presidential election if talks with the so-called ‘moderate’ Taliban go ahead. Keep the lie going. If there is one thing Kevin Rudd is not it is courageous in the “Yes Minister” meaning of that word. He is cautious in the extreme about doing anything which might upset anyone. The idea that a Rudd Labor Government would be in the business of introducing a capital gains tax on even the houses of the very rich is clearly preposterous. It is one of the few policies you can think of which might just be frightening enough to people to cost Labor the next election. So perhaps that is what Adele Ferguson and David Uren had in mind when they wrote the page one lead for Saturday’s Weekend Australian.
Under the headline “CGT slug for rich - Family Homes Face Tax” the Oz’s pair of financial wizards told how the Rudd Government was considering slapping a wealth tax on the country’s most expensive family homes. Surely fiscal fantasy has never before received such page one prominence but there it was with a spokesman for Treasurer Wayne Swan declining to comment on Treasury modelling on possible changes to the tax system being thrown in as if that somehow was proof of the dastardly plan. As we noted in Crikey’s Sunday Breakfast Media Wrap, Saturday morning was still young when Treasurer Wayne Swan’s office released a statement denying the Government was considering the tax. “There has been no request from the Government to the Australia’s Future Tax System review to model such proposals,” the statement said. “We are advised that no such modelling is being carried out by the review, and therefore no recommendation of this sort will be made to us by the panel.” The Government is not considering and “will not” consider the policy outlined in the report. “There will be thousands of stories between now and when the final report is released and unfortunately, like this one today, many of them will be incorrect.” This denial was eventually used on the omnibus Murdoch news.com.au website to replace the story taken from The Australian but nothing at all was done to make even a minor qualification on The Australian’s own web site. The original story was still being displayed in pride of place on Sunday afternoon as if the paper was defiantly making the point that Messrs Ferguson and Uren were right and Wayne Swan a complete and utter liar. I could find no trace this morning, either, of any kind of retraction on the Oz website. It is hardly the behaviour we deserve from a would-be reputable national daily. |
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11 Comments
Richard:
The fundamental illusion is that bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan or improving the rights of women were in any way related to the invasion and subsequent occupation. The decision to invade Afghanistan was made no later than July 2001 when the then Taliban government refused Unocal’s demands regarding the pipeline from the “stans” to the north. The events of 11 September 2001 were used as the pretext for the invasion. Osama bin Laden was no more responsible than I was.
Look at the plan of the American bases in Afghanistan: they exactly follow the route of the proposed pipelines. Australia’s tragedy is that we are continually suckered into these wars on behalf of the imperialist ambitions of others, first the British and now the Americans.
The time is long overdue for a serious debate about why we are in Afghanistan and whether our real interests are served by remaining.
Re the media non-coverage of the new Shiite laws. SBS news fully covered it. So, alas, this seems to confirm that even Crikey journos watch the same feeble stuff that passes for news on the commercial channels. Glenn Dyer today reports that 230,000 watched SBS news while 1.7 mil watched Seven news!
As it happens I watched the first 5 minutes of 7 (the tv was tuned to 7 when I first switched it on just before 6pm) and the first three stories were the usual banal non-news: so much so that I simply cannot remember them (hmmm the Geelong house fire, a car crash and…..maybe a cat up a tree?…) and then I switched to watch the ABC repeat of the movie show, killing time before the SBS news.
Australians get the news/politicians/policies they deserve. Actually possibly better than they deserve.
The soldiers are fighting to remove a totalitarian regime of a party that pours concentrated acid on women’s faces for refusing to wear burkas, or stones them for being alone with a man they’re not married to. No one ever said total emancipation to our modern standards was going to be achieved overnight.
On a scale of abuse, witholding a husband’s part of the marriage contract, from a woman who (to a mediaval way of thinking) is witholding hers, stops well short of allowing husbands to rape their wives whenever they want. If that’s where the law draws the line now, it’s probably a big improvement in conditions for women.
James time to take off your tin-foil hat. There was absolutely no public support for an invasion of anywhere until the 9-11 attacks occurred and therefore never would have been.
Re CGT Slug For Rich…despite the denial from the Treasurers Office on Sunday morning, in QT in the House of Reps this afternoon, 18hrs after the Govt said there was no such tax being considered, Turnbull and his cronies continued the now rebuked story. This is, as the PM rightly pointed out, yet another example of the Oppositions absurd intention to shamelessly persue a known disproven rumour. The intention being to scare, to encourage thinking by those who do not or cannot think for themselves, that this horrible, mean spirited, sneaky Government is secretly bringing in taxes, not for just a certain section of the community but to give the impression every (home owner) will be effected. Such is the lack of ideas, alternate policy and disorganisation of the failed Liberal Party led by a failed,dishonourable, unreliable power happy fool. Is it any wonder poll after poll indicates the disembowelling of the Opposition were an election held. Is no wonder they fear an early election, despite what the shrieking Pyne would try and convince us. He fools noone but himself.
I seem to recall there was a great deal of public support for the Afghanistan operatoin following Tony Blair’s moving speech to the Security Council. Every word he spoke was a lie, but that’s Tony Blair for you. Afghanistan was the invasion that should have been done properly; instead for resources it got the leavings of the Iraq operation. That’s not having oil for you.
We (the white West under the Hegemon) broke it (Afghanisan) more than 30yrs ago!. Talk of how to fix it is so perfect an analogy of Vietnam that it beggars belief. Some lunatics still refer to N Vietnam invading S Vietnam. The recent statements by Robert Gates “I was based in poakistan training & arming muhjahaddin” don’t seem to register, nor the recent Oz article by someone described, aparently with neither shame nor irony, as a “muhjadhaddin handler” in the 80s.
Like gods, the Taliban would not exist were it not that they serve the purposes of the ruling classes, wherever, whenever,whoever.
Get real, get out and stop interfering. Prior to 1982,Afghanistan’s most lucrative export was green sultanas.
When, oh when, will we admit to ourselves that as long as we support the USA in its wars to make the world safe for US corporations, then we are in fact the real unleashers of terrorism upon a defenceless world. As for the Australian, assuming that Rupert Murdoch has fulfilled basically the same role as Goebbels in the nineteen thirties, should we describe him as a war criminal and perhaps also his editors and reporters who led the cheer squad for war.
I see. The whole world was just fine until the evil US came along. Great analysis, guys. Keep it up.
JmesMcD - given that amerika has attacked, invaded, destabilised, subverted, bombed, shelled, mined harbours and financed insurgents in (at least) 27 countries since 1955, errr .. yes.
Unless you can think of another country with such a record of inept, ignorant and self damaging interventions in other countries. Just in case you are as ignorant/partisna as you seem, amerika was funding muhjahaddin in Afghanistan under Carter, two years before the Russians intervened to stop the slaughter of teachers, doctors & engineers in the benighted hinterlands beyond the ring road of Herat-Kandahar-Ghazni-Kabul-Mazar.
Jose, no tin foil hat required. You do in fact make my point. The 9/11 “attacks” were designed precisely to garner the public support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan which otherwise would have been lacking.B
but even if the official conspiracy theory were true, you know, the one about 19 Muslim fanatics taking over four planes, evading the US air defence system, defeating the laws of physics in getting three buildings to fall into their own footprint at virtually free-fall speed etc etc, that is not a justification in international law for invading Afghanistan.
As a country that presumably aspires to function according to the rule of law then we need to take cognisance of such matters. Joining the phoney ‘war on terror’ (when the principal purveyor of terror is the US government) is not in Australia’s vital interests.
The debate on our participation in that war is intellectually shoddy, and I repeat my argument that it is long past time when that was remedied.