More than 60 human rights groups and activists are sending the Foreign Affairs Minister an open letter calling for the Government to escalate support for those remaining in Afghanistan.
Concerns about a humanitarian crisis and potential economic collapse in the central Asia nation continue to mount, as poverty rates spiral in the wake of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban seizing control in August. The treatment of women is also under scrutiny, with the Taliban’s all-male Government already taking a hardline approach.
On Tuesday, United Nations Secretary António Guterres said that, despite Afghans having already faced decades of war and suffering, “they face perhaps their most perilous hour”.
Tens of thousands of foreigners and locals fled the nation in August – hundreds coming to New Zealand – after Kabul fell to the Taliban.
A collective of 33 human rights organisations and 28 activists, community leaders and academics are now calling for the New Zealand Government to step up its response. Among the collective is Amnesty International, Oxfam Aotearoa, the Afghan Cultural Association of Wellington, Save the Children, Tearfund, and World Vision New Zealand.
I don’t think western critics or feminists understand war.
When you lose a war, you don’t get to demand anything from the victors!
Don’t get me wrong, you all know me, I have zero time for religion and even less time for a bastardized Hill Billy mutation of 7th Century Islam and while I don’t and won’t justify the abuses the Taliban have committed to date, I find it an hypocrisy beyond hypocrisy that the West feels like it can criticise the Taliban’s violence and repression of women after a disastrous 20 year war especially when you compare America’s invasion of Kabul with the Talibans!
When America invaded Kabul, the fucking flattened it with bombs and then went on an arrest rampage where as many as 30% of everyone arrested was tortured by the Americans!
So sure, the Taliban have been violent and repressive, but they haven’t bombed Kabul flat and they haven’t tortured thousands of people like the Americans did!
For 20 years, we helped bomb a Bronze Age culture back to the Stone Age and called that progress.
We destroyed, tortured and radicalized the Taliban from a force of 11 000 when we invaded in 2001 to 200 000 now.
Turns out that every wedding party we bombed created 1000 new recruits.
Just because we’ve been defeated doesn’t mean our obligations stop, we have an obligation as the invader and occupier to help rebuild what we bombed and in doing so hope we have some leverage to call on the Taliban to protect women from the harshest excesses of Islam, you know like the way we always do with the Saudi’s.
That was funny because we never tell the Saudi’s anything.
We also, whether we like it or not, have obligations to the enormous human tide of refugees.
Not just those who worked and helped us during our occupation, (the fact that so many of them have been left to fend for themselves is outrageous), no we owe them PLUS another 1000 on top those numbers.
Why?
BECAUSE WE INVADED AND OCCUPIED ANOTHER COUNTRY WHILE COMMITTING TERRIBLE VIOLENCE!
We don’t just get to brutally prop up a corrupt regime and then wipe our hands clean once we’ve been defeated!
We must pay them more reparations, take in all those who helped us PLUS 1000 refugees from a nation we mutilated.
That’s the price of our tragic military misadventure and may the cost make NZers wince so that when the war bugle gets blown again by our military industrial complex buddies, muddle Nu Zilind recoils in horror at their taxes already paying for the refugees from our last foreign policy blunder!
Look, we have an obligation to raise funds to rebuild Afghanistan and take thousands in refugees, but this hypocrisy that we can lecture a people we damaged and occupied when our own invasion 20 years was far more brutal is the type of hypocrisy that undermines any high ground.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
Good call Martyn.
Where are the houses coming from for the 1000 repatriated Afghans?
We torture our own kids in NZ and the state doesn’t believe them. Unlike Ahamed Samsudeem, our judicial system for decades did not believe the Lake Alice victims, nor thought the marks on their bodies were worthy of an investigation until eventually the UN mandated it. Unlike Ahamed Samsudeem the Lake Alice victims did not get personal criminologists, cultural counselling, multiple lawyers while threatening to kill others and a 2 person police detail.
For all the unsuccessful help and resources that Ahamed Samsudeem received, many others in NZ could have benefited instead. Now we have him dead and 7 stabbed victims.
Time to concentrate on NZ victims and stopping the cycles of abuse here!
Some good points,- look after our own back yards….
Spray and walk away
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018722375/the-tragic-results-of-nzdf-s-failure-to-clean-up-after-bamyan
Interesting take and hard not to agree!
Yes not hard to agree
I emphatically do agree
With Richard Slade below, not comment above…wrong slot
Yes, the right thing. And after all, we did help to create the Taliban.
Indeed we did !
Did the US actually lose to the taliban or did they just say ‘screw this, we’re gonna focus on imperialist China’
Technically you only really lose a war if the enemy fully occupies your country, executes or imprisons all your leaders and completely destroys all your military capability, so realistically the US didn’t lose the Afghan Campaign of the Forever War, they merely made a strategic withdrawal with the option of future bombings, drone strikes, killings, sanctions etc reserved. NZ lost by getting involved in the first place, it cost our country lives & a lot of money, but we certainly don’t owe anyone anything, if anyone has any complaints, take it up with the CIA, it was always their war. The Afghans got their country back, that is reward enough.
The current religious fundamentalist Prime Minister of Afghanistan can order the destruction of a statue and be put on a UN Blacklist as a terrorist?
The current secular President of America can order a revenge attack that slaughters a family of 9 including children and not be a terrorist?
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-us-news-08-29-21/h_2bd817e241b383fb2d746202ef5ed752
What’s the difference?
Is it because Biden is a white guy like us?
Is that why we tolerate his murderous rampage?
Did the American POTUS order the drone strike?
Are you claiming the only violent action ordered by that Taleban leader was to destroy statues, really?
The US military now admits they hit the wrong car.
“The strike was investigated by U.S. Central Command, which has not disclosed the rank of the commander involved. Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, delegated authority to strike, officials have said.”
“Did the American POTUS order the drone strike?” SPC
Yes
“We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
“We have some reason to believe we know who they are,”the president said, adding that he had instructed military commanders to develop plans to strike IS “assets, leadership and facilities.”
“We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place of our choosing.”
https://www.euronews.com/2021/08/27/biden-warns-isis-we-will-hunt-you-down-and-make-you-pay-for-deadly-kabul-attacks
“Are you claiming the only violent action ordered by that Taleban leader was to destroy statues, really?” SPC
As far as I, or anyone else knows. Yes.
By the way, that man has a name.
His name is Mohammad Hasan Akhund. Hasan Akhund is the Taliban Prime Minister of Afghanistan.
Everything I have been able to find out about Hasan Akhund, is that ‘Mullah’ Akhund is a religious and political leader not a military one.
Mullah Akhund was put on the UN terrorist watchlist in 2001, for ordering the destruction of the Bamyan statues, when he was the Deputy Prime Minister in the first Taliban Government.
Al Jazeera, reports that Akhund has authored several works on Islam.
(SPC, If you have any information about Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund that indicates that he was involved in any violent crimes or even military activities, now would be the time to let us know, otherwise I might have to presume that you are an ignorant racist blowhard.)
You claimed the Taleban leader was on a UN blacklist only for destroying statues and nothing else – you are aware the world regarded the Taleban regime (a deputy PM no less in 2001) as an accomplice to the attack in New York for hosting al Qaeda.
You claim Biden ordered the drone strike on the car and I informed you that “Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, delegated authority to strike.”
You seem to blame Biden for what his military does and yet presume that no murders occurring in Afghanistan (back in 2001 and reported now in September 2021) have anything to do with its PM.
Yes that last bombing was a terrible irony and completely painted the picture of the terror if the allied invasion.
There are international organisations that manage processing of food aid and refugee resettlement wherever it is needed in the world. And we provide money for that and take a share of the refugees.
The women of Afghanistan and those who supported the former regime should simply be recognised as having refugee status should they get out of that place. In that we stand by human rights.
We’ve already given more aid to Afghanistan than many other nations, and the idea that we can leverage concessions from the Taleban in return for aid is not plausible.
“We’ve already given more aid to Afghanistan than many other nations,….” SPC
Only, if by ‘aid’ you mean the $300 million we’ve spent on the war.
Do some research.
“According to a report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aid work in the region spanned infrastructure projects such as building schools and classrooms, police stations and hospitals. Funding went to supporting the development and training of teachers. New Zealand also sent police to help train Afghan police recruits — training more than 3000 of them.
New Zealander Alan Pearson was part of a team from Prime Consulting International that worked alongside farmers in Bamiyan province as part of a humanitarian project, partly funded by New Zealand.
“Our work was very much targeted at the grassroots needs of the people. We taught those farmers to do their jobs in a more sustainable manner,” says Pearson, who is the group’s chairman. That meant heading out into the fields to teach farmers how to drive tractors and developing seeds that were better suited to the environment.
Within three years of the project, the farmers average income had increased by 35 per cent, wheat yields were up by 80 per cent and potato yields improved by 32 per cent, according to Prime Consulting.
Pearson says the farmers they helped will still have their new skills, and the seeds that were developed for the region remain.
“People always need food, and they probably need it even more now,” he says.
Other New Zealand companies Sustainable Energy Services International and Infratec built solar mini group networks for villages in Bamiyan that provided electricity supply to villages that either didn’t have power or had relied on standalone generators. Infratec says the project provided power for roughly 30,000 people. It is now being run by a national utility company.
New Zealand also partly funded projects such as the development of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. The organisation worked to improve the lives of minority groups, fought for better conditions in prisons, prosecuted cases others would not take on and catalogued the impact of the ongoing war.
Chief of the Defence Force Air Marshal Kevin Short says those who served played a role in helping the people of Afghanistan, particularly in Bamiyan, through security, infrastructure, agriculture, renewable energy, health or education. “We changed the lives of many people, especially women and children.”
https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/the-valley/archive/primary/MFAT-Communications-Package-Development-achievements-through-NZPRT-September-2013.pdf
Chief of the Defence Force Air Marshal Kevin Short says those who served played a role in helping the people of Afghanistan, particularly in Bamiyan, through security, infrastructure, agriculture, renewable energy, health or education. “We changed the lives of many people, especially women and children.”
If that is true, then we already have the projects we need to complete and the contacts in the community to complete them. But this time not as occupiers but as guests.
We should ask our NZDF volunteers and interpreters who served in the war, if any would be prepared to volunteer to go back to Afghanistan without their guns, to complete the aid projects they claimed to have been working on before the Taliban takeover.
Our war with the Taliban is over, they won we lost. we need to get over it. We need to go back there in peace. That is if we were ever really there for the welfare of the Afghanistan people, as Air Marshal Kevin Short claims.
.
We went there in war, now the war is over, instead of turning our backs on the Afghan people we need to send a peace mission paid at the same level as our our military mission. After decades of war, we could (and should), fund a mini-Marshall Plan, as a template for the reconstruction of the country, that our bigger allies could follow.
Admittedly such a mission would be dangerous and even life threatening,
It is easy to play the hero when you are carrying an armalite, Charlotte Bellis is in staying in Afghanistan at the invitation of the victorious Taliban authorities armed only with a camera and a microphone. If Charlotte Bellis can do it, others can too
I think the first project we could offer to the Taliban authoriies and administrators is to complete the clearing up of our dangerous left over war refuse that is still killing Afghan children.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018722375/the-tragic-results-of-nzdf-s-failure-to-clean-up-after-bamyan
The tragic results of NZDF’s failure to clean up after Bamyan
“Here’s a shepherd injured picking up a device … here’s a child who’s been playing with a device and it’s gone off …
…..We are responsible for the deaths and injuries of 17 civilians. And our military has known about this for some time.”
Penfold says what they understand is that one of the children found something on the firing range, which is less than a kilometre from the village where they lived. They brought it back and were playing on a potato farm by the side of the road. “No one knows precisely how it happened but the device exploded and seven children were killed.”
They were from three different families, and were aged between five and 12.
“When you’re there you just sense this sadness, of these children who are missing, because of what happened in April 2014,” says Bingham.
There was an eighth child caught up in the explosion. He was just four at the time. He managed to untangle himself from the bodies of his friends, and ran away to hide in a cave for three days. During that time his family thought that he too, had been killed.
Penfold and Bingham first came across suggestions of this story in 2017 when the pair went to Afghanistan for a documentary called The Valley, which looked at New Zealand’s deployment in Bamyan Province from 2003 – 2013.
I know there would be a financial burden and a sacrifice, And there are many needy causes here, that $300m could go a long way to solve. But we had no objection to spending that much on winning the war. In my opinion, because of that we are now honour bound to spend at least that much on winning the peace. The alternative is complete collapse and famine, with consequences for the whole world.
The aid projects mentioned were of the 2103 era, and would have been completed already.
As for the mine clearing, we trained locals to work on this (and a related issue is whether we should help any of the women involved to leave Afghanistan).
“Reconstruction”, the country has been “modernised”, has improved infrastructure, since 2001.
“The alternative is complete collapse and famine, with consequences for the whole world.”
Why anymore than Libya, Syria, Yemen and Tigraya?
The alternative is complete collapse and famine, with consequences for the whole world.”
Why anymore than Libya, Syria, Yemen and Tigraya? SPC
A pretty weak what-aboutism there, SPC.
Did the NZDF have any armed occupying forces in those countries?
Yes we have a moral obligation to do what you say here Patrick. We did not go in to fight a war tho, the reason was because our allies ‘obliged’ us to join them in their war and so we did, under the guise of doing the sorts of projects mentioned so as not to get our hands too dirty. Now the allies are out, our obligation ends. So that is why we will not go back and finish the good projects we started, because it is not in our geo political interest to do so.
Good use of the pronoun “we” because by Christ “we” certainly couldn’t wait to get into this tar-pit with the bloody Americans yet again.
Just remember that it was the current Prime Minister’s mentour, Madame Helen Clarke, who got us into this mess.
Labour. Solving the housing crisis by sending it abroad…
Apart from invading and destroying much of Afghanistan for 20years, the US already created the Taliban in the late 70s to get rid of the Russians.
Also it doesn’t help to talk about “we” when NZ joins in warmongering. That is the servile action of “them”, the NZ ruling class, not NZ workers.
The attitude of NZ workers should not just be against war in general since the class war is the only war that involves the interests of workers. It should be against ALL imperialist wars and FOR wars of national liberation.
Revolutionaries align themselves with the masses. We must give critical support to all forces including the feudal patriarchal Taliban WHEN it is fighting against imperialist occupation, but give NO POLITICAL SUPPORT to any bourgeois faction, which includes the Taliban, that only wants to do deals with imperialism so that can get rich on the booty of cheap labour, opium and copper.
Only the revolutionary workers leading all the oppressed are capable of ridding Afghanistan from imperialism and from the reactionary bourgeois factions created by imperialism and fighting among themselves to get the franchise to rule the country on behalf of imperialism.
For a Free Independent State of Afghanistan as part of a Federation of Eurasian Socialist Republics!
It was Pakistan that created and armed the Taliban, financially supported by Arab states such as UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Except in Afghanistan barely any industrial working class let alone any “Socialist” Revolutionaries. In context of Afghanistan, the Taliban are the Revolutionaries. Western materialist atheist socialism never was nor never will be the answer to imperialist materialist capitalism. Islamo-Socialism is only path forward for Afghanistan.
They don’t need any western support or to be influenced any virtue limp wristed ‘humanitarian’ help. This hasn’t helped them before.
The West just needs to fuck right off and let them do what they decide to do.
Mana Motuhake!
Fuck off with this Colonial White Christian Saviour mentality!
You’re not the solution! You are the problem.
It is ironic that the USA has many states that behave similarly to the Taliban to women, issues homilies about ‘right’ behaviour. Texas has just issued oppressive health standards for women’s fertility, Also:
…State legislatures across the South, Midwest and the Plains enacted 58 abortion restrictions, 25 of which would ban all, most or some abortions. This surge in abortion bans is a distinct departure from the strategy deployed by abortion opponents for decades, which was to adopt incremental abortion restrictions with the cumulative impact of denying care to patients and forcing clinics to close. This approach had led to passage of laws that were less likely to be challenged in the courts than outright bans….
(But good news.) …Moving in the opposite direction are state legislatures primarily in the Northeast and West, along with Illinois. These legislatures have enacted legislation that protects abortion rights and advanced measures that expand access to contraceptive services and sex education. In fact, more proactive legislation, including measures on sex education and contraception access, was enacted in the first six months of 2019 than abortion restrictions and bans. So far this year, states have enacted 93 proactive provisions, including 29 that protect abortion rights, 23 to decrease maternal mortality, 11 that increase access to contraceptive services and 15 that improve sex education….https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/07/state-policy-trends-mid-year-2019-states-race-ban-or-protect-abortion
USA is not united. It and the UK are a mish-mash of initiatives usually warlike or oppressive to ordinary citizens, thought up by men brought up as boarders in military-training colleges and/or bastions of wealth and advantage with emphasis on ruling class co-operation. Religion is drawn from a Hollywood or internet script that sets the morals of the nation’s young people. Ethics will have to become a basic study along with reading and comprehension if we want to have a coherent storyline to follow for a future fit for we fine, intelligent, educated advanced specimens of humanity.
We have our own fair share of religious nutter pro-lifer’s.
OI ! Some are not all religious nutters. And some of these secular types have come up with the wackiest theory’s ever espoused ! And we’ve got our fair share of that lot as well .
Great stuff and excellent points, Mr Bradbury !
BECAUSE WE INVADED AND OCCUPIED ANOTHER COUNTRY WHILE COMMITTING TERRIBLE VIOLENCE!
True enough but why? When this shit happens generally the government does try to minimise our invlovement while our military are all over it but the reason – we are subject to an imperial protection racket.
🙂
BINGO !!!
What’s this “We”?
The Tele – ban. I guess they don’t follow the 6 o’clock news.
Latest news from Afghanistan is that girls are banned from secondary school. Looks like half the country are quite happy to treat their women like door mats. I suspect that lots of commenters on this web site think that is perfectly alright.
You wanna purchase a one way ticket and set it all right over there?… your welcome to it. Some are doing the best they can thousands of kilometers away…………..
I used to dream about forever skipping high school, away from all those jocks and silly teachers.
And the money from opium that the western world will pump into the AG economy, with production under US occupation now more than quadrupled, will mean the boys will have enough coffers in the govt purse.
Kind of like NZ being run by black power, might actually be an improvement
Ahh… I can’t recall a whole lot of Afghans so desperate to get out of the country they were clinging to the wheels of planes when the Americans were in charge. Personally, I’d far rather live under US occupation than Taliban occupation. Typical Western elitist dross,
The new Idiot in Chief (that replaced the last Idiot in Chief), has already murdered 7 children in a drone strike.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/29/asia/afghanistan-kabul-evacuation-intl/index.html
Completely agree with Martyn. Disastrous conditions in Afghanistan are 100% due to Western interventions.
Perhaps excluding 50% of your population from contributing to your economy is not such a good idea and may also hinder develoipment – not exactly a Western intervention.
When NZ women stayed home nz was a much better place in many regards
Comments are closed.