But To Some People, We’re The Bad Guys In Afghanistan
Now Terry Glavin Gatlings quite a few:
One Picture Is Worth 90,000 “Secret Documents” Published By WikiLeaks.
Aisha is an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by a Taliban butcher for the “crime” of running away from the beatings she routinely suffered at the hands of her husband’s family. Aisha’s picture appears on the cover of Time magazine this week, provoking controversy.
Lost in all the self-serving and cowardly Code Pinkish yesbuttery and the handwringing about the propriety of a major magazine running a photograph so shocking – can we not at least stop for a moment to notice that Aisha, in the full flower of womanhood, is unspeakably beautiful in spite of her disfigurement? – is the fact that she wants the world to see her face. By her own account, she wants the world to see what the Taliban’s resurgence means to Afghan women, and to see the obvious implications of the “negotiated” solution to the Afghan struggle that is so de rigueur in bourgeois-left circles in the rich countries of the world…
Not so fortunate, in the matter of the concurrent media hubbub arising from WikiLeaks’ recent sticking-it-to-the-man document dump, are the uncounted ordinary Afghans whose exposure to reprisals and terror has been so disgracefully overlooked in all the crawthumping about the implications for “our” security interests and “our” troops in the WikiLeaks affair. Once again, a round of applause to the self-congratulating WikiLeaks archgeek Julian Assange…
Do read all of Mr Glavin at his best. Wish we had more like him. Plus from Brian Platt, another good fellow, at The Canada – Afghanistan Blog:
…
How the hell has it come to be that when stories of moral atrocities committed by the Taliban against Afghan women are prominently displayed, it’s the self-styled progressive bloggers who are the first to chastise us that we cannot let our emotions distract us from the national security interests of the war?…
More earlier on WikiLeaking:
AfPak WikiLeak: Biased, er, exposure?/Dead Afghans Update
Leaked AfPak docs: Journalistic ethics? Shmethics! Plus: “Shame on [Canadian] us”–and the NDP
Mark
Ottawa
