Dude, their national sport is polo with a goat carcass. And not because that’s awesome but because it’s traditional. I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to note that standard Afghan practice doesn’t begin to live up to American political ideals, or even to observe that they fall reprehensibly short of those ideals.
From a leftist perspective, saying ‘country A sucks’ is not an assault on country A’s sovereignty, and belief otherwise is the result of rightwing strawmanning on par with ‘political correctness.’
Also, please note that “rape”, the sex crime, is derived from “rape”, the practice of invading a land and taking everything valuable; the word was adapted when people began to recognize the inherently criminal nature of forced sex and needed a euphemism to discuss it. It is much more likely that noted liberal egghead Cockburn is using this older meaning rather than saying Afghans should get fucked, but I will concede that perhaps he meant both.

Cockburn the elder is a publicity – seeking pig, his statements only carry the intellectual weight we are willing to grant them.

But in the current context, this is meaningless. As American observers, the question we need to answer is “what are the implications for American Security of events and governance in Afghanistan and what actions should America take there to secure those interests?”.

This is not about the Afghan people, their culture or their history. This is about US. If it is US policy to prevent a nation’s decline into failed state status, we need to see an equivalent level of activity in Somalia, Congo and Nigeria. I am not persuaded that al Quaeda needs “safe havens” for training or plotting attacks on America. If there is a cogent argument that the Taliban represents a threat to American security, I haven’t seen it. And while the Pakistani government is indeed institutionally fragile, the risk is that of a military coup and not an Islamic Extremist takeover.

No one, from Obama on down, has been able or willing to provide an explanation for why America needs to spend so much time, effort, blood, capital and influence on Afghanistan, and yet they insist that escalation and greater commitment is the right course of action.

When we begin to have a real, substantive discussion about American interests in South Asia, we will make progress toward resolution. Until then, we have no greater influence on our nation’s actions in that theater than the Soviet, or for that matter the Afghan citizens did…

mikey

I remember 1980 very well. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year or so earlier was met by hysteria in the West, and a very well financed covert operation — one of the biggest of its kind — by the CIA to build up resistance to the Soviets and the pro-Soviet Afghan government the Soviets were propping up. In doing so, the U.S. worked closely with SAVAK (until the Shah fell) and Pakistan’s ISI.

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea “that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets.” (link)

At the time, it was quite clear that the Islamic fundamentalists and warlords backed by the U.S. were for overturning even the minimal moves by the Afghan government against the feudalistic practices in the countryside, particularly those aimed against women. It made even the U.S. press when U.S.-backed fundamentalists attacked teachers and schools. This was the prelude to the later Taliban “tactic” of throwing acid in the faces of Afghan schoolgirls.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet invasion was universally condemned… except by the pro-Moscow Communist parties of that day, the small Trotskyist Spartacist League, and… Alexander Cockburn. Not exactly a lot of people. Yet, their reasons were not too different than those espoused decades later by Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, speaking of the crimes of the Taliban against women. But at the time, they were vilified. If anyone wants a snapshot of how people thought at that time, check out the mediocre but interesting as an historical document movie, Spies Like Us (a John Landis-Dan Ackroyd comedy, 1985).

Rather than pro-rape, Cockburn was against the idea that any man could stone to death his wife or daughter if they were raped, and the U.S. then was on the side of those who wanted the freedom to do this, so long as they opposed “godless Communism.” I’ve looked to find an article from Cockburn online that was written at the time, but can’t find one. That’s a very selective comment by Kaplan, and it certainly does not jibe accurately with the stance Cockburn was taking at the time.

It may inconvenient to note this, but there were people in Afghanistan that wanted modern change, and even after the last Soviet troops left in 1989, anti-Mujahdeen forces fought on until the fall of Kabul in 1992. Why was that? Especially when the Soviets had been so brutal?

Perhaps they were fighting, in part, because of reforms, such as this degree from Oct. 1978:

Compulsory education for girls. Bride price was abolished. Minimum legal age for marriage for girls was set at 16.

People interested in the history and status of women in Afghanistan should check out the website of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan. Very enlightening to see what a purely Afghan domestic organization, both anti-Soviet and anti-fundamentalist/anti-U.S. (and against, now, both Karzai and Taliban) have to say, and what they document.

I’m just going to ask you guys to reconsider how you’d be reacting to this if, instead of Alexander Cockburn, someone like Max Boot or Fred Kagan had said such a thing.