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greed is good...,
2003-11-20 12:12:00
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Walking down the street without a permit? Such savages, these Anarchists!...,
2003-11-22 15:45:58
From the Dept. of Forgetting Afghanistan:
Paul O'Brien, advocacy officer at aid agency CARE, estimates there was a monthly average of 10 to 11 attacks on aid workers in Afghanistan from April to June. The figure has doubled since.
Aid workers have been trapped up in Kabul for a while now, and "calls by Karzai and the United Nations for increased international peacekeeping in unstable regions have so far fallen on deaf ears." Those would be, primarily, our ears.
We can't get international assistance in Iraq where the administration is essentially begging for it, and in Afghanistan, where we have international assistance, we won't allow for the expansion of the NATO mission outside Kabul to allow for the delivery of assistance. In the meantime humanitarian organizations have settled in for an indecisive debate about why they're being targetted and what can be done about it, which reminds me of Ed Luttwak's poorly framed criticism that NGOs which follow the money trail of the invading forces (this is, as he notes, the only one to follow) that provide the resources in the first place can't maintain a disinterested relationship to the political forces that elicit their involvement. If aid organizations are seen as legitemizing foreign occupation they become the targets: e.g. 'winning' in Iraq and Afghanistan require successful reconstruction, the independent agencies responsible for that end up as part of the war effort, and the solution - if there is any - if you want to unilaterally wage a successful colonial war to establish a pro-western democratic post-colonial government might be to end the pretense that you don't have to completely militarize the accompaning aid effort, if you're going to do it at all. This, then, would end the pretense of 'humanitarian' war altogether and the discussion could maybe take on some relationship to reality.
:: posted by buermann @ 2003-11-20 13:54:38 CST |
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