What I Learned in Afghanistan .....About the United States By Dana Visalli

I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that
I learned so much....about the United States. I was in
Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meet-
ing with a large number of Afghans working in humani-
tarian endeavors—the principal of a girls’ school, the
director of a school for street children, the Afghan Hu-
man Rights Commission, a group working on environ-
mental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that
we met with had in common was, they were penniless.
They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by
philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 bil-
lion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occu-
pation of that country ten years ago1, so I naturally
became curious where this tremendous quantity of mon-
ey and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to
me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,”
and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Hu-
man Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN
report titled “Silence is Violence,”2 that the situation for
women there was growing more violent and oppressive
each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its
Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in
2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several
reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep
one American soldier in that country for one year. We
will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which
will cost a neat $100 billion a year.3

...

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan
at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the
Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent
case in which a ten year old girl was picked up by an Af-
ghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to
the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her
home semi-conscious and bleeding, after conveying to
her that if she told what had happened he would kill her
entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the
tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand sto-
ries like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number
of self-immolations—women burning themselves to
death—in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape
the violence that pervades many women’s lives—under
the nine-year U.S. occupation.4

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality
and lawlessness are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this
respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which
indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened
conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.

Once one understands that the U.S. military presence
in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people,
the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other ma-
jor U.S. military interventions in recent history arises. In
Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of
France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point
the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese
surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence,
on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly
quoted the U.S. Declaration of Independence ("All men
are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Lib-
erty, and the pursuit of Happiness...”).5

{more follows about human cost of the well documented US government's practice of butchering the weak around the planet for corporate profits and geo-strategic positioning}

From http://www.methownaturalist.com/32-What%20I%20Learned%20in%20Afghanistan%20Part%20II.pdf

Do you want to spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements.” You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards, rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand your obedience, and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your one precious chance at life.