TomDispatch has a valuable piece by Ann Jones, whose new book, Kabul in Winter, Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, begins thusly: “I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I was a New Yorker who had always lived downtown, and for a long time after the towers fell I experienced moments when I couldn’t get my bearings… Four thousand collateral civilian deaths in Kabul brought no consolation for the death of thousands from around the world in the fallen towers of the city that had so long been my home. I thought America had lost its bearing too. So I left.”
Today’s piece wonders why Afghanistan, post-Taliban, has devolved into a state of chaos.
She writes:
The story of success in Afghanistan was always more fairy tale than fact — one scam used to sell another. Now, as the Bush administration hands off “peacekeeping” to NATO forces, Afghanistan is the scene of the largest military operation in the history of that organization. Today’s personal email brings word from an American surgeon in Kabul that her emergency medical team can’t handle half the wounded civilians brought in from embattled provinces to the south and east. American, British, and Canadian troops find themselves at war with Taliban fighters — which is to say “Afghans” — while stunned NATO commanders, who hadn’t bargained for significant combat, are already asking what went wrong.
The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.
Read the rest here.
