The Real Voices That Matter....The Afghan People

You know, those people who live in the country we are talking about. You know, those people, who really do matter more than me or any other American talking about their country?

Look at This

More recently, Rashid said emotions on the ground had been aggravated by major mistakes by the Bush administration's failure to honor its promise to reconstruct Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion.

"The Afghans thought the US presence meant they would help rebuild the country," Rashid said. "That didn't happen."

Rashid also said that Afghani unhappiness with Americans has been increased by Washington's decision to give money and arms to selected warlords.

"These warlords morphed into corrupt businessmen, drug dealers, and politicians," he said. "It is now hard to get rid of them."

Rashid warned of a potentially serious dilemma within the Afghani army, in which "an anti-American sentiment is growing strong."

The worries about more troops coming are real:

I met Hayit Allah pushing a wheelbarrow close to his mud-wall compound. He was an elderly man with a wiry spryness, and still worked in the dusty fields with his four sons.

But he was not worried about it, he said, and believed more foreign troops would be a bad idea.

His neighbour Haji Rabat, also a farmer, endorsed this view. He thought that deploying more US forces in Afghanistan would be a big mistake.

"Every time the Americans send more troops they create more problems with us," he said. "The only way to resolve this conflict is to negotiate with the insurgents."

"It is not good to have more American troops in Afghanistan," said Idris, who works for a local non-governmental organisation involved in reconstruction projects.

"They don't know much about our culture and they can't communicate with the local people."

But Idris would support more troops if they focused entirely on the training of the Afghan army.

His friend Jawed, however, believes that foreign forces are the source of Afghanistan's insecurity.

"In the last eight years they have gained nothing," says Jawed, who also works for a non-governmental organisation.

"Day by day the security situation is getting worse. The Taliban are fighting the international forces and if they increase troop numbers then it will only get worse."

And this:

Eight years on the Afghan people again feel betrayed. Many no longer see the US as a force for good but instead blame their presence for the escalating war. As General McChrystal himself pointed out in a speech in London last week, a Taleban roadside bomb that kills civilians does not necessarily bring opprobrium upon the Taleban but instead on the US military — the logic being that if the US military were not in Afghanistan the bomb would not have been planted.

It is this change of mind among the Afghan people about the US after eight years of disappointment that looms especially large in the internal White House debate. As one senior official put it: “In 2003 and 2004 the Afghans were buying what we were selling. I am not sure they want to buy what we’re selling any more.”

And how does the youth feel?

Well, according to International Relations Lecturer at the American University in Kabul Oliver S. Mains, young Afghan adults are in no mood to get deeply involved. Mains, mainly by using his own students as a field study on all Afghan young men and women, argues that his students are highly skeptical about US intentions in their home country and cynical about the abilities of their own government in Kabul, and that this has caused them to feel apathetic about the August 20th election. He states that many of his students distrust the US presence in the country, believing that the US is just using Afghanistan for self-serving, strategic geopolitical reasons and using the Afghans as pawns. Instead of believing that the US is there to bring freedom and progress they feel the US is holding them down, and with the lack of political and military progress since the 2001 invasion they have a lot to complain about.

And this stinging critique:

Analysts have repeatedly warned that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is turning ordinary Afghans against US-led foreign troops and eroding fragile public support for the West-backed Karzai government.

Because of the US military presence, many Afghans see security as a far-fetched dream.

“They should just stay in their bases,” Shinwari said.

“More troops won’t bring peace. We need economic development, not soldiers.”

Fazil Hakim agrees, ridiculing US claims that the troops are seeking to maintain security.

“Wherever the troops are there’s instability,” said the 36-year-old.

“They bring problems with them.”

As the US troops move along the Afghani villages, feelings of insecurity are getting severer.

“When [the Americans] drive along the roads they don’t let anyone overtake them,” Shinwari said.

And this sobering perspective here:

With less certainty about America’s continued commitment, there is a growing sense that the only sure way to peace is through negotiations with the Taliban. “They are the sons of this country, it is right to negotiate with the Taliban,” said Mohammed Younnis, a shopkeeper in Charikar who sells tea, sugar and grains.

“This government is Afghan, and the Taliban are Afghan; they should build the country together,” he said.

This one hit my soul

Mirza Mohammed Dost stood at the foot of his son's grave, near a headstone that read, "Raheb Dost, martyred by Americans."

His son was no insurgent, Dost said. He was walking home from prayers on the night of May 5 when he was shot and killed on a busy Kabul street by U.S. security contractors.

"The Americans must answer for my son's death," Dost said as a large crowd of young men murmured in approval.

More on that

As the war escalates in Afghanistan and the U.S. seeks to win over a wary public, incidents such as the one that left Raheb Dost dead raise uneasy ghosts of the Iraq war. With more than 70,000 security contractors or guards in Afghanistan and billions of dollars at stake in lucrative government contracts, the consequences of misconduct are significant.

A June report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan cites serious deficiencies among private security companies in Afghanistan in training, performance, accountability and effective use-of-force rules.

The report says U.S. authorities in Afghanistan have not applied "lessons learned" in Iraq after a 2007 incident in which Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. Iraq revoked the firm's license, and five contractors face U.S. federal manslaughter and weapons charges.

And yeah, those contractors, we forgot about talking about those tonight.

And let's not even bring in the Taliban factor, and their strength aggrandizing by the day it seems.

The people of the nation, from the youth to up, are expressing their disapproval over American presence over there now more than ever so (helped by those great contractors and A-holes of the last Administration of course).

And it doesn't help when the most important voices of all on this topic, the Afghan people, see that we are bringing more troops without the primary thoughts of training Afghan forces immediately.

It's an intricate issue, no doubt about it. But the answer is a simple one.

And it isn't the one issued by Obama tonight, in the minds of the Afghan people.