Terry Glavin on Afghanistan....

Terry Glavin has just published an article for Norway's Human Rights Service....essential reading...

The one Afghan woman whose name is likely to be known in the fashionable parlours of the west is Malalai Joya. The BBC calls her “the bravest woman in Afghanistan.” Spain's primetime 20 Minutos calls her "the world's most beautiful female politician.” The claims she makes for herself: “I represent all the suffering people in every corner of my country," and her own voice is “the voice of all Afghan women.” But what Joya says is exactly what the west’s isolationist intelligentsia wants you to hear: The Afghan people want all those imperialist soldiers to leave, the entire enterprise has been a fraud, a failure and a lie, troops out.

Joya became instantly famous in 2003. In a fiery speech to the Afghan parliament, she called her fellow MPs a pack of war criminals. Ever since, she’s been a fixture at anti-globalization protests and “anti-war” rallies, far from Afghanistan. Her recent memoir, ghostwritten by a Canadian “anti-war” activist, is earning hagiographic notices in the posh newspapers of Europe and North America, as well as in all the usual counterculture webzines. Her message: Troops out. Damn the consequences.

This is what you should expect to hear from the celebrity figurehead of an irrelevant neo-Maoist sect – (Joyas) the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan enjoys far more support among the rich white liberals of San Francisco and Toronto than it ever did in Afghanistan - but to Afghan feminists, Joya is no longer just a marginal character, and she’s not just a nuisance anymore, either.

Joya has been conscripted to a project that requires a silencing of the voices of Afghanistan’s feminist mainstream and civil society majority. In the United States, Joya’s most active support base is Code Pink, which claims 250 chapters and 100,000 members. Like every other “anti-war” outfit, Code Pink has consistently and falsely claimed to champion the cause of Afghan women.

Code Pink was caught red-handed last October, when a reporter with the Christian Science Monitor witnessed an encounter between some outspoken Afghan women and a Code Pink propaganda-gathering delegation in Kabul. Shinkai Karokhail, a women’s rights activist and an Afghan MP, told Code Pink: "International troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety." Said Masooda Jalhal, a former Afghan cabinet minister: "It is good for Afghanistan to have more troops – more troops committed with the aim of building peace and against war, terrorism, and [committed to provide] security – along with other resources."

The controversy was short lived, even though the way that Code Pink manipulated the testimony it took from Afghan women was exposed in a six-part blog series written by Sara Davidson, one of the eight Code Pink delegates who travelled to Kabul. Code Pink published its report and submitted its petition in person to U.S. President Barack Obama: Troops out.

What will happen if Karzai’s “peace at any cost” formula gains traction in the world’s rich countries, if the “anti-war” movement prevails and NATO countries grow weary of it all and decide to concentrate only on Al Qaida, and leaving Afghanistan to the men in black turbans? Says Wazhma Frogh, a young Afghan human rights activist: “The answer to that question will be a life-or-death matter, for many thousands of women in my country, and men as well.”

Please read the whole thing...