[News] Afghanistan - Memo to America: Stop Murdering My People

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Memo to America: Stop Murdering My People

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/malalaijoya>Malalai Joya
http://www.zcommunications.org/memo-to-america-stop-murdering-my-people-by-malalai-joya

Source: 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-19/memo-to-america-stop-murdering-my-people/>The 
Daily Beast
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Amid increasing civilian deaths and resurgent 
warlordism, Afghan women's leader Malalai Joya 
writes that Hamid Karzai and the U.S. are losing 
credibility in Afghanistan day by day.

Almost every day, the NATO occupation of our 
country continues to kill innocent people. Each 
time, it seems, military officials try to claim 
that only insurgents are killed, or they 
completely deny and cover up their crimes. The 
work of a few courageous journalists is the only 
thing that brings some of these atrocities to light.

For instance, it was only after the reporting of 
Jerome Starkey of the Times of London that 
officials admitted to the brutal Feb. 12 murder 
of two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and 
several young men in a night raid at a home where 
a family was celebrating the birth of a child.

Night raids, air raid “mistakes,” firing on 
civilian buses and cars at checkpoints­the 
occupation finds many ways of killing the people 
of Afghanistan. The excuses and lies for these 
deaths are like salt in our wounds, and it is no 
wonder that protests against the U.S. military 
are growing. The Afghan people have had enough.

In recent weeks, there has been much talk about 
Hamid Karzai’s threats to join the Taliban and 
about his supposed differences with the American 
government. But for Afghans, Karzai long ago lost 
all credibility. The joke among our people is 
that Karzai doesn’t do or say anything without 
consulting the White House first. No amount of 
nationalistic rhetoric or demagoguery on his part will change this perception.

Everyone in Afghanistan knows that Karzai was 
placed into power with the backing of the United 
States and its allies, and to this day he relies 
on their support. His regime would not last a day 
without it. And Afghans know too well the reality 
of his corrupt government: It has delivered 
nothing to the country’s poor other than sorrow 
and destitution, while filling the pockets of 
drug traffickers, warlords, and its own corrupt officials.

Afghanistan has had puppet leaders before, rulers 
who served only the interests of foreign 
occupiers, whether British or Soviet. But Karzai 
may be the most hated puppet in our history; he 
has empowered some of the most brutal internal 
enemies of ordinary Afghans, warlords of the 
Northern Alliance like Sayyaf, Dr. Abdullah, 
Rabbani, Mohaqiq, Ismael Kahn, Dostum and many 
others. Even his two vice presidents, Fahim Qasim 
and Karim Khalili, are notorious fundamentalist 
warlords. The president’s brother in Kandahar, 
Ahmed Wali Karzai, is another thug in power whose 
links to the drug trade and the CIA have been widely reported.

Karzai made headlines by threatening to “join the 
Taliban,” but the reality is that for more than 
eight years he has had no problem working with 
fundamentalists who are the ideological brothers 
of the anti-women Taliban. In fact, Karzai 
himself used to support the Taliban when he was a 
minor tribal leader in Kandahar in the 1990s, and 
for years he has been negotiating to bring 
Taliban leaders into his puppet regime. Some of 
them are already serving in his regime, and the 
U.S. government has been encouraging these 
negotiations by creating the false categories of 
"moderate" and "extremist" Taliban.

He has also been reaching out to that most brutal 
warlord and criminal, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a 
mujahideen leader known for killing civilians and 
currently designated a terrorist by the U.S. 
government. Karzai recently appointed Abdul Hadi 
Arghandewal, an infamous leader of Hekmatyar’s 
party, as his minister in charge of the economy. 
These negotiations and flexible alliances by 
Karzai and the U.S. government are nothing new. 
For three decades, the U.S. has backed these 
criminals: Hekmatyar, al Qaeda and other 
fundamentalists in the 1980s, the Taliban in the 
1990s, and now Karzai and his warlord allies.

Progressive-minded Afghans want to break out of 
this circle of warlordism once and for all. It is 
ironic that Karzai talks about the possibility 
that a “national resistance” could develop in 
Afghanistan. He should know that the prime target 
of such a movement will be his own regime and its foreign supporters.

Our people are deeply fed up. They have organized 
many anti-U.S. protests in the past months and if 
the occupation continues, the resistance will 
only grow. More than eight years of occupation 
have made life bleak, and we are tired of being 
pawns in the U.S. and NATO’s game for control of Central Asia.

We can no longer bear the killing of our pregnant 
mothers, the killing of our teenagers and young 
children, the killing of so many Afghan men and 
women. We can no longer bear these “accidents” 
and these “apologies” for the deaths of the innocent.



We salute the anti-war movements in the NATO 
countries. Here, we will struggle to our last 
breath to stop this war that is tearing apart our beloved Afghanistan.



Malalai Joya, now 31, was the youngest member of 
the Afghan parliament, elected in 2005. In 2007 
she was suspended from parliament because of her 
consistent criticism of the warlords and other 
human-rights abusers in the Karzai regime. Joya 
has survived five assassination attempts to date, 
and has written her life story in the book 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/143910946X/thedaibea-20/>A 
Woman Among Warlords (with Derrick O’Keefe, 
Scribner, 2009). She writes from Kabul, Afghanistan.












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