Sunday morning I set the alarm for 5:45 a.m. in order to get ready, do the mandatory Cracker Barrel breakfast before starting on the road trip that included the Sage & Big A meet and greet. The station that is set to come on as the alarm is normally an "adult contemporary" kind of station. I haven't heard them play any Michael Bolton songs in years but should he ever make a comeback, they would probably include him in the playlist again but until then, they make due with some Beyonce or American Idol contestants. That kind of radio station.
Sunday morning, however, they air some kind of a talk program prior to 7 a.m. and as soon as the alarm went off, I was very intrigued in the topic - the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. A heavy topic to try to cut through the grogginess but it worked a lot faster than their music ever has. They were interviewing Sanoli Kolhatkar who wrote the book Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. The person they were talking about as I woke up was Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman who is very against the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and who was voted into the Afghan parliament but was suspended from it due to her outspokenness about the criminals and warlords who were on there and the U.S. support of such a government.
Time Magazine voted Joya as one of their 100 Influential People of 2010. However, Kolhatkar told the host that Time magazine did Malalai Joya a real disservice by the last paragraph in the short piece about her (and a great video to go with it): I hope in time she comes to see the U.S. and NATO forces in her country as her allies. She must use her notoriety, her demonstrated wit and her resilience to get the troops on her side instead of out of her country. The road to freedom is long and arduous and needs every hand. Joya believes that her country now has three enemies - the U.S., the Taliban, and the corrupt government. She wants the U.S. out because it's easier to fight two than it is three.
The 10-15 minutes of this program that I heard was a real eye-opener and the reason behind my lightbulb moment: The U.S. isn't there to help the Afghans. They are there to find Bin Laden. They are there to help influence the creation of a government that is on our side in order to help find his location even if this government is corrupt. This reminds me of Moby Dick with the U.S. government (perhaps doing things that they think the public wants...or judging from the ever falling percentage of Americans that think we should be in Afghanistan, wanted) as Ahab and Bin Laden as the whale.
The real change that Joya is striving for has to come from the people themselves (although keeping criminals out of government would be helpful). I have a real appreciation for people like her and others that have such a deep belief that they risk their lives to make it happen. I don't know what that's like. I don't even know if I have that in me. However I do sincerely hope she and the others can do it.
Sidenote to Big A: My apologies for using Oprah buzzwards (i.e., a lightbulb moment) but in this case, it fit.
3 comments:
Heavy listening for the predawn hours of Sunday, but still better than Michael Bolton!
Certainly, helping the Afghans was tangential to our desire to eliminate a base for terrorists. The "Hearts & Minds" stuff which came after the Taliban government was rousted had more to do with a Clintonesque "Nation Building" desire than anything else, and came about largely because nobody wanted to bug out and leave a vacuum to be filled by god knows what.
Cheers.
This reminds me, I have to set my alarm clock for a different time. For some reason, the local station that wakes me up gave my wake-up time slot for the farm reports. I would rather here Michael Bolton than the future price of hog bellies which oddly enough, are in short supply this year.
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