Let’s say you’re trying to rebuild a country shattered by 25 years of terrorism and brutal civil war. Corruption, political instability, and warlordism are daily sources of terror. Most of the country is completely dependent on foreign aid. Farmers cannot support themselves on traditional crops, and grinding poverty is the norm all throughout the countryside. But there is one glimmer of hope: a lucrative trade that now supplies 60% of the entire GDP and employs one out of every ten people in the country. What should you do?

Obviously, you should shoot the farmers and burn their fields until their only lucrative cash crop is eradicated!

Three years after the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations issued a dramatic plea for help yesterday, saying that Afghanistan’s opium crop is flourishing as never before and the country is well on the way to becoming a corrupt narco-state.

The UN’s annual opium survey reveals that poppy cultivation increased by two-thirds this year, a finding that will come as a deep embarrassment to Tony Blair, who pledged in 2001 to eradicate the scourge of opium along with the Taliban.

So alarmed is the UN that it is suggesting a remedy more radical than any that has been put forward before – bringing in US and British forces to fight a drugs war similar to the war on terror. It wants them to destroy farmers’ crops on a massive scale before they can be harvested.

— The Independent 2004/11/19: Afghanistan: a nation abandoned to drugs

Just what will they be destroying in this escalation of the drug war?

British officials point out that the Afghan economy is booming, that three million refugees have returned home and that four million children are in schools. But yesterday’s report reveals that the engine of economic growth is opium production. Last year Afghanistan exported 87 per cent of the world’s supplies. Opium is now the “main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among previously quarrelsome peoples”, according to the UN.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that the trade is also fueling many problems for Afghanistan. Narco-trade is helping to foster widespread corruption, political instability, gang violence, and possibly some hefty smuggling profits for Taleban militants in western Pakistan. So the answer is… to escalate a violent conflict to keep Afghanistan’s only cash crop traded completely on the black market?

There’s a lot to be disappointed in and outraged at in Afghanistan. While terrorist jihadis and murderous warlords have been using their US-supplied arms, and the Commisar’s eyes have been turned toward Arab targets, things have gotten pretty rotten–no matter how much the Prince President may piously declare that freedom is on the march. There’s a reason that the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the worst country in the world to live in, with the exception of Sierra Leone. But that’s because of things like these:

UN voter registration teams did have female staff members, but, again, security of staff and attacks by anti-government groups meant that registering women in remote areas was difficult. Women were targeted including in an attack on a registration bus in June 2004 in Jalalabad when three female staff members were killed; reports of threats by the Taleban and warlords to deter women from registering; and targeted killings of Afghans holding voter registration cards.

Amnesty International (AI) noted a pervasive lack of security during its mission to Afghanistan in August and September 2004. Women felt unsafe outside their homes in the presence of warlords, guns and the absence of rule of law.

…

A large number of women in Afghanistan continue to be imprisoned for committing so-called “zina” crimes. A female can be detained and prosecuted for adultery, running away from home or having consensual sex outside marriage, which are all referred to as zina crimes. The major factor preventing victims of rape complaining to the authorities is the fear that instead of being treated as a victim, they themselves will be prosecuted for unlawful sexual activity.

During its recent visit, AI found that a large number of female inmates in prisons across Afghanistan are incarcerated for the crime of “running away” and for adultery, as well as for engaging in unlawful sexual activity. Amongst many judges and judicial officials, there was a prevailing lack of knowledge about the application of zina law.

— Amnesty International News 2004/10/28: Women failed by progress in Afghanistan

A little while ago when NPR was running a similar story on the radio, they quoted some functionary from the Karzai government, who piously intoned–without giving any reasons–that if the opium trade isn’t brought under control, the experiment in democracy has failed. I don’t know; it seems to me that that should be the least of their concerns. How has Drug War imperialism come to warp our priorities so far beyond recognition that burning two thirds of a desprately poor country’s economy to the ground seems to be the only option anyone considers viable? Have they lost themselves so thoroughly in the twisted labyrinth of statist policy goals that they can’t see that they are effectively proposing a terror famine for the sake of controlling the trade in pain-killers? Have they flown so far off the handle that they just don’t care anymore?

This is statist nation-building–with militant misogyny, warlordism, and grinding poverty dragging the country down into hell, the US, UN, and UK prepare to inflict a political economy straight out of Mao’s Great Leap Forward on a nation of millions so that they never have to question their domestic policy initiatives. Is that sound in the distance freedom on the march? Does freedom wear jackboots?

I’ve mentioned a few times here already how brilliant and important I find Andrea Dworkin‘s work (in That Feminist Boy Thing (GT 2004/09/06) and Andrea Dworkin, Feminist Icon (GT 2001/07/03)); so I was glad to catch (through Feminist Blogs, no less!) feministe’s post today on Andrea and her critics. She quotes at length from an interview of Dworkin by Michael Moorcock, where Dworkin, inter alia, sets the record straight on the all intercourse is rape slander (she doesn’t believe that and has never argued for it). There’s more too; read the whole thing and follow the links.

Ms. Lauren is, unfortunately, right when she describes Dworkin as one of the most vilified and misquoted women in recent history. It’s worth taking the time to look at what she has actually had to say. So here’s your Dworkin for the day; it comes from an essay that’s been perhaps as important to me as anything else ever written: I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. It’s Dworkin at her best–a damning indictment and a call to arms, reflections on men and feminist activism that have literally changed my life, and the best argument for radical, unapologetic feminism that there is: a confrontation with the simple, heartbreaking, terrifyingly ordinary facts.

And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.

And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called the unacknowledged legislators of the world: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.

On male supremacy and militarism:

I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.

But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad–so uselessly and stupidly bad–because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.

I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.

And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die.

And, finally, on equality and bullshit excuses:

I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: Oh, that happens to men too. I name an abuse and I hear: Oh, it happens to men too. That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.

You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.

You really ought to read the whole thing.

I remembered the quote, and I knew he was lying when I saw it on Wednesday:

Mr. Kerry: Yes. When the president had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, he took his focus off of him, outsourced the job to Afghan warlords and Osama bin Laden escaped. Six months after he said Osama bin Laden must be caught dead or alive this president was asked, where’s Osama bin Laden? And he said, I don’t know. I don’t really think about very much. I’m not that concerned. We need a president who stays deadly focused on the real war on terror.

Mr. Schieffer: Mr. President.

Mr. Bush: Gosh, I don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. That’s kind of one of those exaggerations.

— Third presidential debate, Tempe, Arizona, 2004/10/13

No, it’s not. Thanks to the Daily Mislead, we have the sources ready at hand:

Q But don’t you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

— White House press conference, Washington, DC, 2002/03/13

You can see it for yourself: when the Bush League give speeches, they just lie.

From Pakistan, there is a horrifying and completely ordinary tale.

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran’s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village’s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy’s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

. . .

In Pakistan’s conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran’s duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. “Just like other women, I initially thought of killing myself,” said Ms. Mukhtaran, now 30. Her older brother, Hezoor Bux, explained: “A girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village. Nobody respects the girl, or her parents. There’s a stigma, and the only way out is suicide.”

A girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.

But there is something extraordinary, too: Ms. Mukhtaran survived, fought back, won a victory for justice and struck a fragile note of hope.

But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.

Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys – because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls’ school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class.

Unfortunately, that note of hope is fragile not only because of the terrible crime that Ms. Mukhtaran survived, but also because the Pakistani government is threatening to undo, by neglect, the remarkable victory that Ms. Mukhtaran won.

But the Pakistani government has neglected its pledge to pay the schools’ operating expenses. “The government made lots of promises, but it hasn’t done much,” Ms. Mukhtaran said bluntly.

She has had to buy food for the police who protect her, as well as pay some school expenses. So, she said, “I’ve run out of money.” Unless the schools can raise new funds, they may have to close.

Meanwhile, villagers say that relatives of the rapists are waiting for the police to leave and then will put Ms. Mukhtaran in her place by slaughtering her and her entire family.

Don’t let it end in tragedy. You can send contributions directly to Ms. Bibi by writing a check directly to Mukhtaran Bibi and sending it to:

Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

Or directly to Ms. Bibi by international post at:

Mukhtaran Bibi
Meerwala
Tehsil Jatoi
Post Office Wadowallah
District Muzaffargarh
Punjab
Pakistan

Any amount of money, no matter how small, helps. (Remember that theschools themselves were established on about US$8,500.) Do it. Now. It’ll mean a lot more than anything else you accomplish by sitting around on the Internet. After you’ve done it, you can read my kvetching about Nicholas Kristof below, but this is more important.

Read the rest of Horror and Hope …

Greetings citizen! Today, our vigilance protected the Homeland Security of America from yet another looming danger. Thanks to the great patriotic efforts of Midwest Airlines employees in Milwaukee, a flight of 118 innocent passangers was saved from the terrifying threat of non-Latin scripts:

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Midwest Airlines canceled a flight ready to take off for San Francisco after a passenger found Arabic-style handwriting in the company’s in-flight magazine and alerted the crew.

The plane, carrying 118 passengers and five crew members, had already pulled away from the gate at Mitchell International Airport Sunday evening. It returned to the gate, the passengers got off, security authorities were notified, all luggage was checked and the aircraft was inspected. Nothing was found.

The passengers were put up in nearby hotels and booked on a Monday morning flight.

The writing was in Farsi, the language used in Iran, said airline spokeswoman Carol Skornicka. She said she didn’t know exactly what the writing said but was similar to a prayer, something of a contemplative nature.

You can rest easy tonight knowing that the War on Terror protects our freedom, our way of life, and our prosperity–by holding up all business for a day and detaining over 100 people over scribbled prayers in languages you don’t understand.