“A detailed year-end review found that the U.S. war ‘has returned to power nearly all the same warlords who had misruled the country in the days before the Taliban’; some Afghans see the resulting situation as even ‘worse than it was before the Taliban came to power.’ . . . The return of warlordism is a dangerous sign, as was the announcement by the new Justice Minister that the basic structure of sharia law as instituted by the Taliban would remain in force, though ‘there will be some changes from the time of the Taliban. For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes.’ Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif added that some new location would be found for the regular public executions, not the Sports Stadium. ‘Adulterers, both male and female, would still be stoned to death, Zarif said, `but we will use only small stones',’ so that those who confess might be able to run away; others will be ‘stoned to death,’ as before. . . . As the year ended, desperate peasants, mostly women, were returning to the miserable labor of growing opium poppies so that their families can survive, reversing the Taliban ban. The UN had reported in October that poppy production had already ‘increased threefold in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance,’ whose warlords ‘have long been reputed to control much of the processing and smuggling of opium’ to Russia and the West, an estimated 75% of the world's heroin. . . . U.S. and British intellectual opinion, across the political spectrum, assured us that only radical extremists can doubt that ‘this is basically a just war.’ Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed, among them, for example, the 1000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar in late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned the U.S. war, which is ‘beating the donkey rather than the rider,’ one speaker said to unanimous agreement. . . . The U.S., [Afghan opposition leader] Abdul Haq said, ‘is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans.’”
Lakdawala lecture, New Delhi (Noam Chomsky, ZNET, December 30, 2001)



[Edited by Azrael on 02-10-2003 at 01:51 AM]