Anti-NATO protester in Chicago this week. Photo by Michael Kappel.
I've blogged this week about how Human Rights Watch's front page in recent days differed little from Kremlin propaganda -- and indeed reinforced it, as we can see on RT, the Kremlin's mouthpiece.
My blog was reprinted in the Russian newspaper inosmi.ru with the usual raft of hate comments from the FSB bots and the real people who make up the "aggressively obedient majority" Putin base in Russia.
I've been watching to see what HRW would do to update its website from the May 14 week-long top story about NATO's victims in Libya in keeping with "the line" I was told they'd be taking with the NATO summit, which was to raise women's rights issues.
Something told me they wouldn't be raising this issue like Laura Bush raised it in the Washington Post yesterday -- focusing on the Taliban's original threat and impending threat to women in Afghanistan. Of course, the former First Lady is utterly (and rightly) discredited in the eyes of HRW and other "progressives" because they see her associated with her husband's unjust war in Iraq, which in fact took resources away from the fight in Afghanistan.
I wondered how HRW would address the fundamental challenge of the Taliban, however, even if they were highlighting all last week NATO's victims in Libya -- singing along with the choir of Code Pink and RT. Of course, at the UN, we've seen Russia cry tears exclusively for NATO's victims in Libya, and not the victims they helped create in Syria and elsewhere.
So here it is, NATO: Rights Key to Afghanistan's Security, a work of art by "progressives" twisting themselves into a pretzel to figure out how they can "Blame NATO First" in a situation essentially created by the Taliban and its allies in Al Qaeda and Pakistan's ISI.
If the Taliban threatens women's rights after NATO troops pull out in 2014, HRW piously intones, this will be "NATO's legacy". Not the fault of the Taliban and its guest Al Qaeda which NATO went in to fight in the first place, but NATO's fault:
“Many Afghans worry that NATO’s departure from Afghanistan will put basic rights under increasing threat,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Unless urgent steps are taken to address Afghanistan’s governance crisis, NATO’s legacy may be a country run by abusive warlords and unaccountable security forces.”
Abusive warlords who commit MOST of the killings and unaccountable security forces that seem to be supported by those warlords or Pakistan's ISI -- mentioned secondarily, after NATO.
So let's translate that into some frank talk: "NATO, you are pulling out of Afghanistan because your domestic populations can't stomach this war anymore with all the deaths of their own soldiers, some of them responsible for atrocities like the killing of Afghan villagers, and inability to defeat an insurgency on their own mountainous turf, so we're going to blame you if that insurgency overruns all the Western-funded programs to support development and human rights...because we can. Because you're near, and they are far."
And not surprisingly, in its statement, HRW is focusing on the corrupt and mismanaged government of Hamid Karzai, and calling for monitoring not of the Taliban's crimes against humanity -- the many suicide bombings, militant attacks on civilians, throwing of acid on girls in schools -- you know, all those really monstrous atrocities -- but is calling for monitoring of the Afgan National Army, which of course is likely to be corrupt and abusive, as all things run by corrupt and abusive client states of the US are corrupt and abusive. But it's like the old days in Latin America, when the left steadfastly refused to see or condemn the violent communist guerillas threatening the right-wing dictators and helping to enable their abuses while committing their own human rights violations.
In the old days, Americas Watch, as the Latin American program of Human Rights Watch was called them, would carefully produce such reports as Violations of the Laws of War by Both Sides of the Conflict in El Salvador -- or Nicaragua or Guatamala. That kind of balanced perspective has long since been overthrown at HRW as it has migrated to the "progressive" left in the last decade, however.
If they were to produce a report they were featuring today that had "violations of the laws of war by both sides of the conflict" for Afghanistan, it would show a scale utterly weighted down on one side by the Taliban and the Haqanni network as they commit 85 percent of the killings of civilians in the war -- i.e. it's like a kind of civil war underway that NATO only occasionally weighs in on, and tries to prop up one side which is corrupt but nominally secular and developing.
Again, I totally realize why HRW groups get into these pretzel-twists. They start with a viewpoint that international humanitarian law is something by which mainly states are bound, not non-state actors as such. That is, yes, non-state actors are increasingly found guilty one by one of such abuses at the International Criminal Court ("violation" is the term for when states don't break international law; "abuse" is the term when non-state actors don't follow its principles.)
But the center of gravity of the international justice jet-set is to look at states, not non-state actors, because they sign human rights treaties, terrorists don't, and they can get at them easily and effortlessly through the free Western media. The very notion of terrorism is a "destruction" of human rights, say some HRW divisions in their occasional and short statements on the subject. No need to keep stating the obvious -- terrorists are bad -- because what media will ever cover you then? Better to focus on liberal Western states that might not be fighting terrorism "the right way".
That center of gravity always tilts them to hate America first and hate NATO first in a situation like Afghanistan, even with the overwhelming awful atrocities of the enemies of NATO -- and all of us.
Increasingly over the years I've come to a depressing realization about these thinkers and doers in the international human rights movement -- it was never really about international human rights for them; human rights were always just a cover, a shield, a way-station, on their way to full-blown leftist and even Marxist radical agendas. That accounts for the awfulness of Amnesty International today, that has totally left behind its roots in concern for "prisoners of conscience" which were overwhelmingly produced by the communist countries. That accounts for how HRW has lost its way, to the point where Ken Roth now calls for pre-emptive credits of faith for "democratically-elected" Islamist governments.
The blood just doesn't get flowing with the same vigour for HRW when it comes to condemning all kinds of murderous non-state actors because they can simply be more successful in getting liberal media coverage and reactions from Western governments than they can of some deadly, entrenched medieval movement like the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Imagine a world if these groups and their mainstream media friends could use their incredible power to name and shame the Taliban, which is newly-PR conscious. Oh, but that would be simplistic and even wrong, like the Kony viral video, hmmm? That might *shudder* put them in the same place as the Christian right, eh?
So they don't even try.
I wish Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty would cover the NATO protests with a little more thought and depth than merely cutting and pasting the various idiotic one-sided anti-NATO slogans from lefty groups like The World Can't Wait. RFE/RL prides itself on being a news outlet and not a propaganda outlet, as does Voice of America, but increasingly one sees especially the younger correspondents of these US-funded stations simply replicating the hard-left Zeitgeist and not framing the issue with a larger advocacy even of the more centrist Obama Administration. I suppose as a politician influenced by his old and current DSA ties, even though this aspect of his biography has been studious scrubbed, Obama personally believes that all US wars are evil, capitalist, imperialist and racist inherently by nature and should just be closed down and war funds converted to human needs. Obviously he has had to temper his youthful "progressivism" now that his "community-organizing" has a national stage. My hope is that he would be tempered by reality when I voted for him.
Yes, some of what the US does is "wrong and immoral," in the words of anti-NATO protesters quoted by RFE/RL, and we should do better, because the world expects us to be better and we are held to a higher standard. And yes, the drones program has involved killing of innocent civilians who haven't been compensated because this program is run under the CIA, which keeps it secret and won't talk to the victims' lawyers. So that needs to change.
Meanwhile, the antiwar movement is as one-sided as it was in the 1960s and 1980s, focusing myopically only on US and Western crimes. As I noted, the Taliban kills the overwhelming majority of the civilians in Afghanistan. What's the left's plan when NATO leaves and the Taliban overruns Kabul and destroys secularism again?
I'm not suggesting we should stay, but I want to hear the left's plan for opposing terrorism in a world where Russia thwarts our efforts and dominates countries in Central Asia that are poor and vulnerable to spillover from the war in Afghanistan. I want a different world, too, where people don't mindlessly blame the US in wishing that "people aren't slaughtered in Afghanistan and Iraq and around the world just to make banks and just to make corporations rich." That's patently ridiculous. We've only impoverished our own country with these wars and they don't enrich banks in the simplistic manner in which the shriekers claim -- the terrorists and their supporters in Iran and other authoritarian regimes are the source of the problem. Again, what indeed is the left's plan for addressing this menace? What situation just like Vietnam and Cambodia are we waiting to see replicated in Central Asia and unfold around Afghanistan after our defeated troops leave?
