In HRS Internasjonal: Peace At Any Cost

"Peace at any cost." Those were the exact words Afghan President Hamid Karzai used last week to describe the intent of a Taliban peace-talks plan that the UK, the US and Japan are pegged to bankroll as a new exit strategy from Afghanistan. British foreign secretary David Miliband must have winced.

Miliband prefers to describe the plan as kind of international trust fund. The idea is that Karzai might draw from it to bribe jihadist commanders out of the Taliban chain of command. It’s an attempt to find what Miliband calls the “the right balance of military muscle and political outreach,” but for Afghan feminists, secularists and democrats, the long, lingering dread of a squalid sell-out, all dressed up in the guise of peacemaking, is fast giving way to a gnawing, horrible fear.

"You cannot buy off your enemies,” Ahmad Zia Kechkenni, a senior adviser to Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main challenger in last year’s fraud-riddled elections, told me the other day. “When your money is gone, they will go back to fighting.”

In Paris, London, Washington and Ottawa, in all the places where young Afghan progressives would expect to find their closest friends and allies, “peace” is the conceit that animates every conversation about Afghanistan. The words on all the protest placards are “troops out.” If Europe and the United States cook up a sordid sell-out, there will be no one to stand in its way.

“Troops out” is not what Afghans say, least of all those Afghans who you would think European liberals would be proud to call their friends. . . But these are not the Afghan voices we hear, and there are reasons why.

I enumerate those reasons in the essay. If we must blame it on the "fog of war," then the least we should do is have a look at who's running the fog machine that most effectively obscures the Euro-American view of the Afghan people and of their brave women's rights leaders, who they really are what they actually say.

Code Pink has been especially busy at the machine's nobs and levers lately. The recent scam operation they ran in Afghanistan has been child-safety-certified by no less than Jane Fonda, queen mother of the decadent liberal American bourgeoisie, who pronounces on the testimony so grossly misrepresented by Code Pink millionaire matron Jodie Evans this way: "Bottom line: everyone she met with wants the U.S. Military out of their country." A lie, hovering in a cloud of lies that gets a look-through thanks to a whistle-blower in Code Pink's ranks, Sara Davidson. Sara thought she was being a good and loyal hippie dove when she traveled to Afghanistan with Code Pink, but discovered too late that the only role Code Pink wanted her to play was that of a useless, idiotic dupe.

Lauryn Oates, meanwhile, is an actually-existing feminist who is returning to Afghanistan in a few days (we'll be meeting up in Kabul) to complete only the latest of more than dozen field assignments she's undertaken among the women of that country. Lauryn is no dupe.

Elsewhere, Code Pink has been busy performing fabulous and elaborate public-relations stunts for that peace-loving, Protocols-of-Zion-believing death cult known as Hamas. This comes as no surprise to Omri Ceren, "but there's something particularly unseemly about ostensible feminists shamelessly marching in a gender-apartheid protest."

Ah, but Omri, don't you see? It's all for peace. Peace at any cost, peace at any price, peace in our time.