All that can be seen from the air is a vast
blanket of snow

Index Research

1. Preface

The Obama-Clinton media Soap Opera meant that the winter disasters in Afghanistan remained widely unknown. Reports were written but not read. The Guardian leader (01.02.07) echoed the despairing tone of these reports.

“It is hard to be hopeful about Afghanistan. Sliding away from progress, the country has begun a fretful, violent descent towards calamity that all the efforts of Nato, aid agencies and Afghans seem unable to stop. To be pessimistic about Afghanistan's future is not to say that the world should walk away: it is to recognise that reality is very grim. What is being done now in the country, at great cost in money and lives, is not working, and must be improved upon if it is not soon to be abandoned in the face of confusion, obstruction and defeat.”

The US policy failure centres mainly in the opium growing areas. The US blames the Taleban without being ‘transparent’ about its own massive profit in opium drug trafficking.

Meanwhile, 1300 Afghans are estimated to have died from the cold this winter.

Unicef gives the following estimate: 3.3-6.6 million post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that should not have happened) in occupied Afghanistan).

Farhat Akram wrote in The Post.com.pk. (02.02.08) that “6.6 million Afghans do not meet their minimum food requirements, 60,000 children in Afghanistan are addicted to drugs and another 100,000 are disabled or severely affected physically due to prolonged conflicts in the country. There are about 8,000 child soldiers while an estimated one million are child labourers between seven and 14 years of age.”

300,000 animals have died since last December

Rory Stewart walked from Herat to Kabul through the desolate mountains of Afghanistan in another cold Afghan winter in 2001. Of modern administrators, he wrote: ”perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.” Rory Stewart, The Places In Between.

(click on the subject in which you are interested)

1. Preface
2. Winter In Afghanistan (Disaster and Death; General, Women, The Occupation)
3. Pakistan
4. Opium
5. Oil, Gas (A Wider Perspective: Global Oil Struggle, Oil and Gas in Afghanistan & neighbouring countries)
6. Aid and Trade
7. Human Rights
8. Some Afghan Deaths
9. References

More information concerning the occupation of Afghanistan (US-NATO, oil, contracts, US & coalition deaths) can be read in INDEX ON AFGHANISTAN, NATO FAILURE: A WINTER’S TALE, PART II, soon.

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SOURCE: http://indexresearch.blogspot.com/2008/03/index-on-afghanistan-disaster-winters.html or alternatively: http://tinyurl.com/29yygq

URL: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/03/05/index_on_afghanistan_disaster_a_wintera_2008

© 2008 Sarah Meyer