In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC, Bernie Sanders has backed the Obama administration's recent decision to halt the withdraw of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that he supports President Barack Obama's decision to keep troops in Afghanistan, prolonging the war beyond 2016. ... During an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday morning, host George Stephanopoulos asked Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, whether he backs keeping U.S. troops in the country. "Well, yeah, I won't give you the exact number. Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan army needs," he said.
Bernie Sanders Supports Keeping Troops In Afghanistan, Amanda Terkel, Huffington Post
Nobody was listening to her, not Hamid Karzai and not the West. But somebody has to start listening, because this is what so many ordinary Afghans believe.
The Afghan Road, New Yorker (March 2004)
Kathy Gannon is talking about the speech by Malalai Joya at the 2003 Loya Jirga. Malalai Joya had risen to speak against the warlords. She said that the warlords had turned Afghanistan into the nucleus of national and international wars. That they were the most anti-women people in the society. Malalai Joya had lived under the Taliban. Consider what she said: the warlords are the most anti-women people in Afghan society. And that they wanted to bring Afghanistan to that state again.
At the Jirga of 2003, Malalai Joya had called the warlords criminals, and the most anti-women people in society. The warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf had been sitting right behind her when she rose to speak. If the crimes of the Afghan warlords were to be placed at our feet, what would be our response? What would we say ourselves? They should be taken to national and international criminal court, she said.
Human Rights Watch called the warlords “the world’s most serious human rights offenders.” First-person view of Afghan collapse, Kathy Gannon, Associated Press
The Afshar atrocities of 1993 may have started over political posters, the Human Rights Watch report suggests. Posters of Hazara leader Abdul Ali Mazari, of Wahdat, put up around Kabul. Posters of the harshly fundamentalist Ittihad leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. It became a fight for control of Television Hill, heights used to shell the city. It became the Afshar massacre. Ittihad forces, and Jamiat, destroyed the Hazara neighborhood of Afshar near the hill. "They should be taken to national and international court", Malalai Joya says. "They are all recorded in the history of the country." "This is what so many ordinary Afghans believe", Kathy Gannon adds. "The truth is that most Afghans want these factional commanders and officials involved in this fighting to be held accountable for the crimes committed during this period-along with those involved in Soviet-era and Taliban-era abuses," Human Rights Watch says. Afghan support for prosecuting officials for these crimes is stronger than American support for prosecuting officials for torture.
In one particularly grisly attack, five women from the Hazara ethnic group were scalped. Their attackers were not Taliban; this was still two years before that radical Islamist militia took Kabul. The assailants were loyal instead to one of many warlords battling for control of the city: Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
Afghanistan Unbound, Kathy Gannon, Foreign Affairs
Human Rights Watch points out that many of the men named in their reports, now officials in the U.S.-backed government, are implicated in widespread land-grabbing schemes. "Simply put, many of the warlords involved in abuses in the early 1990s are repeat offenders," they say. This is the government we had given to Afghanistan. The men we had chosen to install and make wealthy. About Sayyaf, who has an especially bad history of land theft, Kathy Gannon tells what she had once seen. The crimes of the warlords had once been thrown at her feet.
I remember Sayyaf and his men all too well. One day in 1993, after a particularly brutal bout of shelling in the Afghan capital, I went to an area Sayyaf’s men had just left. An old man grabbed my sleeve and threw down a shawl full of bloodied hair on my feet. Then he dragged me into a foul-smelling room to show me the bodies of five women Sayyaf’s men had raped and scalped because they were of a different ethnicity, the Hazaras. It was their hair that lay on my feet.
First-person view of Afghan collapse, Kathy Gannon, Associated Press
She blames foreign interference for the country's suffering and disputes the notion that intolerance, brutality and the severe oppression of women began with the Taliban. "But this is a lie, more dust in the eyes of the world," she writes. "In truth some of the worst atrocities in our recent past were committed during the civil war by the men who are now in power."
Lifting the veil, Jennifer Moreau, Toronto Globe and Mail
Some of the worst atrocities in our recent past, Malalai Joya says, were committed by men who are now in power. We might think about our own national situation. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont once shepherded through the near-unanimous consent, Republicans and Democrats alike, for James Comey as director of the FBI.
“It is a shame that such an important and highly qualified nominee to lead the FBI had to wait an unprecedented 38 days to be confirmed, but I am glad that Senators finally came together to ensure that the FBI has a confirmed leader at the helm,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who presided over Comey's confirmation hearings.
James Comey confirmed as FBI director, Rachel Weiner and David Nakamura, Washington Post
We have, as our nation's chief law enforcement officer, a man who had once given a significant sign-off and approval of waterboarding. Approval of waterboarding, by a law enforcement official, can count as highly qualified here. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont voted yea.
Bernie Sanders is a relatively dovish internationalist, by United States establishment standards. Hillary Clinton, a relatively hawkish internationalist. This is in a country where our chief law enforcement officer had once signed off on waterboarding as legal. President Barack Obama, in a policy decision, will extend the stay of United States military forces in Afghanistan. On Friday, Hillary Clinton had supported the decision. On Sunday, Bernie Sanders had. In Afghanistan, what now should the United States really do?
For Joya, trying these men for war crimes is the key to improving the situation in Afghanistan. She calls for an end to the war by pulling out all U.S./NATO troops, sending real humanitarian aid to people who need it and disarming the warlords.
Lifting the veil, Jennifer Moreau, Toronto Globe and Mail