Afghans on the road to liberation

By Carsten Kofoed, Free Afghanistan Blog of Denmark

October 5, 2009

On October 7, eight years have passed since the USA attacked Afghanistan. The "War on terror" had begun. Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, with its strategic location in oil and gas rich Central Asia and with borders with both Iran and China, had been proclaimed the perpetrators of September 11. The USA shouted for "retaliation", but Afghanistan’s Taliban government had neither attacked the USA nor supported others in doing so. Therefore, the US aggression against Afghanistan is an illegal war of aggression violating the UN Charter. Nor has the UN Security Council endorsed it. Afghanistan was and is not a center of terrorism. The White House is.

Kabul was captured in November 2001, and a puppet regime of exiled Afghans and the drug barons and warlords of the Northern Alliance was installed. The Taliban, who in 1996 had ended the bloody civil war, brought peace and security to Afghanistan after almost 20 years of continuous war and started a rebuilding process, which was counteracted by the US-led UN sanctions, were driven away.

NATO and Denmark became involved in the subsequent occupation. Since January 2002, Denmark has been increasing its number of occupation troops in Afghanistan, so it is now more than 700. Twenty-six Danes have lost their lives down there, while several billion Danish Kroner have been spent on gunpowder and bullets – and a single well and some schoolbooks for the sake of the propaganda image. While about half of the Danes are against the war, all parties in the Parliament, except the Red-Green Alliance, are for. Despite this, the anti-war movement in this country is incredibly lame.

However, the resistance struggle in Afghanistan is certainly not lame. It has been increasing in both width as well as strength, and the Taliban now appear to be its undisputed main force, running their own shadow administrations of justice, police and education – including education of girls. According to the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), the Taliban now have a "permanent presence in 80 percent of Afghanistan", and another 17 percent of the country is seeing a "substantial Taliban activity". More than 100,000 foreign occupation troops are now in Afghanistan with US demands for more. The number of killed occupation troops is the largest ever. The Karzai regime is thoroughly corrupt, incapable of fighting the resistance movement and is seen as treacherous by most Afghans, which also the massive popular boycott of the sham elections of August 20 – a total collapse of the NATO-controlled "democracy" – showed. The scandal at Copenhagen Airport during Obama’s recent visit to Denmark, when the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, almost forced his way into the Air Force One, showed a superpower in acute crisis.

All this is thanks to the Taliban, who are so misunderstood in the West, but who to the majority of Afghans, based on experience, first and foremost signify peace, security and justice – in contrast to NATO and its Westernized exiled Afghan lackeys. Therefore, the Muslim Afghan people are with the Taliban. What do the Taliban want after liberation then?

The leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, stated on September 20, marking the end of Ramadan:

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has distinctive and useful plans for the future of Afghanistan under the shade of the just social system of Islam after the withdrawal of the foreign forces. They include rehabilitation of social and economic infrastructure, advancement and development of the educational sector, industrializations of the country and development of agriculture."

Whether this will turn out to be possible, time will tell. However, the fact is that the Taliban are the Afghan force, which today has the broadest popular support and the best opportunities to bring forward a free Afghanistan. The preconditions – peace and security – they have shown to be able to deliver.