Marilyn Vogt-Downey, Oct 4, 2013
The people of Afghanistan do not ask that the US government do anything for them except get out of their country. The twelve years of military attacks and occupation have caused Afghanistan to become a country of widows and orphans without homes, education or community services. The US occupation only strengthens the control of the war lords and the mafia government of drug lords and war criminals and the Taliban. This is the message of Malalai Joya brought to an audience at the Community Church in Manhattan on Friday evening October 4. The Taliban was a creation of the US government during the Soviet occupation whose clutches on Afghanistan society now are only strengthened by the presence of the US military forces. See here for example.
Malalai gained international renown when, as a young woman from provincial Afghanistan elected to the first Afghanistan congress under US occupation, she stood up and denounced the warlords who were among the new occupation government and congress. “Why are these war criminals now in our government when they should be tried and imprisoned for the massacres and destruction they have carried out?” she asked. She was immediately expelled from the congress and there have been six assassination attempts against her.
Malalai is currently on aspeaking tour of the United States sponsored by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) a coalition of organizations and individuals who call for an end to US military intervention in Afghanistan. Her recent book, A Woman Among Warlords documents her life and her experiences standing up for truth, justice, and national liberation for the peoples of Afghanistan against US and other foreign occupation and military intervention that “have driven Afghanistan back to the stone age.”
Malalai has made so many enemies among the warlords, the Taliban, and the rest of the Karzai “puppet government” of the United States because she exposes the lies of the occupation regime, documenting how women have not been freed through US war and occupation,. The US war has only led to the growth of a mafia government that enriches itself through the sale of drugs, bribery, fraud, and the theft of Afghanistan’s natural resources. Under the US occupation, Afghanistan has become the source of over 90% of the world’s heroin and, she says, the majority of the heroin users in Afghanistan are women and children who now live in wretched poverty, which now engulfs 20 million of Afghanistan’s 24 million people.