– Special to The BRAD BLOG by David Swanson in Afghanistan…
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Ramazan Bashardost finished third in 2009’s openly fraudulent presidential election. When the first-place finisher, Hamid Karzai, failed to beg, borrow, or steal 50% plus one he was required to participate in a runoff. When the second-place finisher bowed out, Bashardost was entitled, under the Afghan Constitution, to be in that runoff. It never happened.
Bashardost is currently a Member of Parliament here, having previously served as Minister of Planning. Bashardost was educated in France and speaks fairly good English, as well as a number of Afghan languages. He’s an opponent of war, a harsh critic of President Karzai, and someone on the inside who tries to represent the suffering people of this beat-down, kicked around country.
I interviewed Dr. Bashardost for a couple of hours in his office on April 4th, a day of some significance to US advocates of nonviolence. Bashardost is an admirer of Gandhi’s model for social change. In the clip embedded below, I asked Bashardost what he would say if President Barack Obama were in the room.
Bashardost’s message to Obama is that the ongoing war in Afghanistan is losing U.S. taxpayer dollars, losing U.S. soldier lives, and losing America’s values.
He says that U.S. tax dollars are spent to pay U.S. soldiers to guard corrupt Afghan officials, war lords, Islamists, and criminals who rape children in fancy palaces and buy $100,000 cars. The Taliban, he says, kill U.S. soldiers even without ill-will toward the United States, because the soldiers are between them and these officials. This war, Bashardost explains, began in 1994, and American soldiers have now gotten into the middle of it.
So, who benefits? Bashardost suggests that U.S. lobbyists and President Karzai may benefit from this war, but that the people of Afghanistan do not. But, then, I suspect President Obama knew that already…
This man extinguishes the fallacy that hi-tech warlords from afar have swooped into Afghanistan with bombs bursting in air to help Afghanistan.
He says that warlords from afar occupying Afghanistan after invading it are not helping that violated nation.
That is not really debatable.
However, that is the big debate in the “enlightened land” those warlords call the homeland.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bashardost’s astute observations will not resonate in the corridors of power.
Afghanistan is, in a sense, no different from the scores of countries the U.S. has occupied by force over the past sixty years. Those “interventions” have never truly been about the democratic aspirations of the peoples of those brutalized nations.
U.S. policy was and is about Empire, the military-industrial complex and the maintenance of a global capitalist inequality. It was and is about the interests of what Noam Chomsky refers to as “the substantial people.”
So, while it’s great that David Swanson is exposing the truth about who benefits and who suffers inside Afghanistan, this video message should appropriately be directed to the American people.
Pres. Barack Obama, who sits on the wrong side of the global class divide, won’t be receptive to what Dr. Bashardost has to say.
My father did not live to witness what a colossal disappointment President Barack Obama would turn out to be. Barack Obama harnessed a mandate for change to repair the damage caused by President George Bush, to further Bush’s agenda to whore away the nation of the United States into a looting ground for thieving war-profiteers and taxpayer-funded cash-trough for multinational corporations to pork away threatened resources, and loose-cannon mass-murdering war machine.
Well said Adam. The toxins of power are surging.