J. William Fulbright, as astute a promulgator-of-empire in the guise of imperial critic as has ever existed, at least until Barack-the-Magnificent mounted the stage, often referred to "the arrogance of power" as a stumbling block to the achievement of the empire's objectives of seamless hegemony. When at a recent press conference our fearless leader designated the U.S. as 'the sole superpower' and noted that with such an august position came certain responsibilities, 'whether you like it or not,' he both acknowledged Fulbright's proto-critique and embodied the inherent arrogance of the contemporary ruling class. Those whose commitment to democracy supersedes any party loyalty need to find a different POV than the current President's in regard to Afghanistan, a view more in keeping with the ideas and witness of Malalai Joya.
Such an attitude as Barack Obama's is also insidiously on display in sophisticated and understated fashion in British Foreign Minister David Milliband's recent essay in the New York Review of Books, "How to End the War in Afghanistan." Whatever a complete litany of the likes of Milliband's and the President's positions would reveal, the underlying premise of such perspectives proposes that the United States and its English allies have the wherewithal, the right, and the actual intent to bring into existence a Western-style state inside of Afghanistan. Without doubt, any honest democrat must reject such posturing and double-dealing at every juncture, and even Democrats embrace these now predominant ideas at their peril.
For a stark and graphic contrast to such policy-wonk doublespeak as our President and the right honorable Lord Milliband propound, honorable democrats--perhaps as opposed to staunch Democrats enamored of 'Great Game' strategizing and one version or another of the corporate foreign policy agenda--might turn to the work of an inspiring heroine of recent Afghan history, Malalai Joya. Her magnificently lucid and frighteningly revealing A Woman Among the Warlords develops a multifaceted and seamlessly interwoven argument, supported by eyewitness testimony and empirical documentation, that modern globalized corporate governance hides a predatory monster that no more serves the people of the United States than in facilitates the lives and welfare of the benighted people of Afghanistan. While those who would be citizens must read and reread Joya repeatedly, in order to commit her searing rebuttal of U.S. policy and her horrific demonstration of our country's brutal complicity to memory, here we may outline three points that Joya makes, which together must underlie any development of an Afghan program that purports to call itself democratic, whether the Democratic Party supports it or not.
Her first contention is about accountability. This necessary taking of responsibility has at least two levels, the first of which concerns Afghan internal politics. At this level, the homicidal, fascistic, and self-serving warlords--almost all of whom now hold 'trusted' positions in the U.S. puppet regime currently in place--must face a popular trial for their crimes and then face the measured verdict of the people who have seen and felt their rapine, plunder, and genocidal killing for the past thirty years, from our origination of the Mujahadin as anti-Soviet agents to our propping of Hamid Karzai and his minions currently in Kabul.
At another level, this calling-to-account is about our own acknowledgment of the actual history of the region, from multiple British ploys that stretch back at least two centuries, to more recent depredations, such as the provision of 'textbooks' for jihad and female degradation to the Taliban in the 1980's, and, still more recently, the persistent elevation of dozens of butchers to positions of eminence and power--from the chief justice of the Supreme Court to most of Karzai's cabinet, to all but a handful of local and regional potentates now governing Afghanistan.
These two approaches to accountability, moreover, go hand in hand, since U.S. dealings with and underwriting of genocidal maniacs and thuggish and brutal gangsters, more than any other factor, contributes to the hamstringing of a democratic process in Afghanistan, where overwhelming popular support for the work of women such as Joya is the only thing that allows them to survive in the nest of noxious vipers that we nurture as if unaware that such venomous creatures must inevitably bite us if we continue to hold them close to our breasts.
Joya's second notion concerns the nature of democratic participation and its translation into action. Americans, perhaps lulled into a false consciousness that elections equal democracy, that Non-Governmental-Organizations equal equitably dealing with injustice, and that corporate reporting equals responsible journalism, truly believe that we have a functioning democracy in which majority beliefs rule--this in spite of the 'War on Drugs,' the travesty of America's schools, and the continuation, into the eighth year, of a war that an overwhelming majority of Afghans view as illegitimate and imperialistic.
She develops the case, with devastating clarity, that elections by themselves are inherently easy for the well-financed and corrupt to manipulate, that cooptation of NGO's is as easy as gutting the funding of organizations that insist on democracy and justice, and that a media owned by financiers and industrialists has not more a commitment to balanced dialog than Hitler had a commitment to honest dealing at Munich in 1938. Thus, despite a landslide victory in her own campaign for the National Parliament, the warlords trumped up sedition charges against her and had her removed from office; despite her consistent success in providing grassroots health care and excellent schooling for youngsters with minimal resources, her clinics and academies again and again lost the necessary financial backing to continue, since the racketeering killers in charge of government made sure that local funding was unavailable; and despite pretensions of 'fair and balanced' and 'all the news that's fit to print,' covering the gamut of American media outlets, an honest reportage has failed to emerge among established print and electronic news sources, even though copious documentation of the facts that Joya presents is available from a wide array of community and human-rights witnesses in the field.
In this view, the achievement of democracy can never emanate from on high. No imperial master can ever, or, truly, would ever mandate freedom. Only a committed struggle in which the voices and actions of community members--from Kabul to Kansas--unite in support of a human agenda and in opposition to a corporate agenda can ever bring about the creation of a just and decent existence for people anywhere on earth. In Joya's telling, such a view is not idealism, but a profoundly obvious and devastatingly accurate assessment of the path that we must follow if we want a future for our progeny that is other than, at best, a living hell.
Her final point, on which her other arguments depend, is about honest witness and developing the critical consciousness that only a commitment to speaking the truth permits. Her chapters on Afghan history, "A Bird With One Wing," concerning the squelching of grassroots efforts to achieve democracy in her nation by the British and the Soviets and the United States, and on the present conflict, "The Endless War," completely undermine a 'Great Game' and 'Strategic Interests' approach to any apt comprehension of contemporary Afghanistan. Unless what we want is a narco-terrorist state that must spread its poison throughout Central Asia, and thence to the rest of the world, the citizens of this country must learn the lessons that Joya teaches and bring her sort of diligence and courage to our own governing agencies, finding a way to insist that 'foreign policy expertise' and the age-old 'arrogance of power' are not the only way to conduct relations among peoples in the age of the internet.
In presenting her passionate and factually irresistible case, Joya completely eschews self-aggrandizement; refusing to seek asylum abroad, she continues to labor in Kabul and Western Afghanistan at profound personal risk, having survived assassination attempts and born constant threats to herself and her family without wavering in her unswerving dedication to a mass movement that brings women's rights, human rights, and democracy to Afghanistan in the present moment. Unsurprisingly, given the imperial connivances of the corporate media, all too few Americans are aware of her work. However, to borrow the phrasing of the President, "whether you like it or not," anything akin to a human, ethical, and sustainable policy that is in the interests of America's people, as opposed to the calculated advantage of an implacable ruling class, must come from a clear understanding and operationalizing of Joya's data and programs.
Without such a learning and action process on the part of the American people, the "Dust in the Eyes of the World" that she uncovers as part of U.S. imperial pronouncements will become as 'dust in the wind,' leaving us, or our children and grandchildren, to wither and die in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that continued corporate leadership guarantees. A Woman Among Warlords thus provides documentation and analysis absolutely critical not only to a deconstruction and dismantling of Big Business' brutal rule but also to the fostering of human survival on a planet in which mutuality, justice, and equity are the only plausible pathways to a future in which nuclear and other forms of terror do not utterly defenestrate the possibility of civilized existence.