NATO forces raided the home in Nangarhar of Afghan parliamentarian Safia Siddiqi Wednesday night, in the course of which they killed her brother-in-law. In response, crowds in Nangarhar blocked a major thoroughfare in protest. The Dari Persian press says that crowds came out to demonstrate all over Nangarhar Province, chanting anti-American slogans and demanding that foreign troops be expelled from the province.
MP Siddiqi told the Persian press that “no one in Afghanistan is safe–not even parliamentarians and the president himself.
Meanwhile, some statistics on Afghanistan from a new Pentagon study of the past 6 months, as reported by the NYT:
NATO is operating in about 100 districts of the country (the vague equivalent of counties).
Number of Afghans in 92 districts (assessed for their relationship to the Federal government) that actively support the government of Hamid Karzai: 0
Number of districts out of 92 that are neutral toward the government: 44
Number of districts sympathetic to the insurgency in March 2010: 48
Number of districts that had been sympathetic to the insurgency in June, 2009: 33
Increase in violent incidents from Feb. 2009 to March 2010: 87 percent.
None of these statistics look particularly good to me.
Enquiring minds what to know: Was she targeted? By whom? Or are there so many raids that it was a ‘random’ event?
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I find those stats a little encouraging, if the Administration starts making decisions on Afghanistan based on evidence.
These stats tell a simple story: Pashtoons do not want to be subjugated by a colonial ruler. If our foreign policy brain trust is able to discern this lesson, we may actually pull out of that war, starting next Summer.
Once our leaders decide to apply the values in our Declaration of Independence to the people of Afghanistan, perhaps we will replace the science of subjugation with the discipline of development. There’s still time.
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Re the “… no one is safe in Afghanistan…” that was clearly demonstrated not so long ago when some U.S. leaders were mooting the possibility of adding Karzai’s brother to the kill/capture” list…
[…] the angry legislator let them have it (“…no one in Afghanistan is safe — not even parliamentarians and the president himself”) and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting […]
[…] the angry legislator let them have it (“…no one in Afghanistan is safe — not even parliamentarians and the president himself”) and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting […]