Thought you’d want to hear about this, Charles. RAWA isn’t a violent organization, so this won’t amount to a secularist insurgency against NATO forces or anything.
What I’ve learned about conventional political structures from the lack of aid to RAWA is that people like groups with guns~trappings of traditional authority. The U.N.’s structure is much closer to that of a private warlord army ~ same lack of grassroots mobilization.
Comments?
]]>When I wrote this post 7 years ago, I believed that the ideal thing to do would be to offer as much solidarity and material support as possible to grassroots non-governmental women’s organizations, particularly RAWA, who were willing to stand up to the warlords; but that an expansion of U.N. peacekeeping
forces (ha, ha) was a second-best solution in a sorry situation that seemed more politically viable. I no longer believe that; I think that the kind of practicality
I was thinking of at the time is actually a sucker’s bet, and also that, even setting aside considerations of strategery, absolutely the only thing that the U.S. government and NATO and the UN can do for Afghanistan is to leave as soon as possible (and for their political leaders to start paying reparations out of their own pockets; but don’t hold your breath). I do still strongly support material support to RAWA and non-governmental grassroots opposition, to the rape-legalizing Afghan government, to the warlord thugs that the U.S. government has armed and politically empowered, and to the Taleban thugs that the U.S. government has been taking out
by massacreing civilians who happened to live in the same neighborhood; but I don’t waste my breath anymore on NATO peacekeeping.
At the time I wrote this post, I working a lot with the Feminist Majority Foundation (who were supporting our campus group in Auburn). I was influenced by the policy proposals coming out of their Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls (formerly Campaign Against Gender Apartheid, re-named after the American War, ugh, in the name of governmental diplomacy). I was more or less an anarchist by this time, but a relatively new one, and hadn’t thought through a lot of this stuff yet. I opposed the war on Afghanistan from the start, and I recognized the gynocidal nature of the U.S. government’s warlordist Northern Alliance allies, so I was trying to sort through a nasty problem that I didn’t know an obvious solution to, and by way of political inertia I tended to go along with proposals from other politicos around me, that would at least disarm them, without paying enough attention to the way that the occupation actually operates. Within a few months of when I wrote this, I became deeply involved in anti-war organizing in Auburn, had made up my own mind on a lot more issues, saw my mistakes, and became much more root-and-branch on a lot of things.
]]>I am confused. Do you agree with RAWA that a coalition of nations or the U.N. can send peacekeepers to Afghanistan? Doesn’t that violate your opposition to statist war?
Just curious. I know this post is older. You may not have been an anarchist when writing it.
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