The media’s case for occupation

HAVE YOU seen the cover of Time magazine dated August 9, 2010? It's a memorable one.

WikiLeaks gave us over 90,000 pages of documents that detail atrocities no one learned about in the last decade from the cover of Time--or any other magazine or newspaper, for that matter. In response, Time gave us one cover girl next to the headline "What happens if we leave Afghanistan."

This young woman has a hole in her face where her nose used to be. For those who will take the time to read the article, they'll learn that her name is Aisha. She is 18 years old. Her nose and both ears were cut off by her husband after a verdict by a Taliban commander who wanted to use Aisha as an example to other girls should they follow her lead and run away from domestic abuse.

I can't help but wonder why they have this particular woman from Afghanistan on the cover during this particular month. And where has Time been all these years? Where were they with their "cover girl" from Afghanistan during the years that the U.S. was backing the Taliban? What about a cover girl in 1973 from Chile? Or in 1987 from Nicaragua? Or in 2008 from Palestine? Or one from Saudi Arabia, pick a year, any year?

The glaring omission throughout the cover article is that there is no critical analysis, no recognition, not even a single paragraph devoted to the role that oil reserves or natural gas supplies or minerals or strategic geographic locations or the toxic logic of capitalism play in the story of Aisha's life.

Had there been no mention of the Taliban or Afghanistan in the article, someone might have mistakenly believed she lived on an island with nothing but pineapple grass bracelets available for export. Yet if all that moved under the soil beneath Aisha's feet were tree roots and earthworms, she would be as unknown to us as the cover girls of Time we never saw.

Following in the tradition of the Taliban, the editors of Time are using this young woman for their own purposes. They're committing literary terrorism. They'll deny it, of course. They're a distinguished news organization with a longstanding tradition of critical analysis dedicated to exposing the root causes of injustice around the world. Especially those eight memorable issues with Hitler as the cover boy. Those issues were the epitome of critical analysis.

Time will spew statistics on how neoliberalism, as it drips from the gutters of capitalism, creates opportunities for people around the world. But for which people? For those who already had the money and power to begin with, sure. But for the rest (meaning most) of the world, what free-market policies, trade agreements, global financial institutions and profit-at-all-costs do best is erode the rights of people.

They erode the political rights of people to hold their leaders accountable to the needs of local communities. They erode the civil rights of people to equality and due process. They erode the industrial rights of people to safe and democratic workplaces. They erode the social rights of people to clean water, nutritious food and safe shelter.

What's a family or tribe or town to do when they don't have a say in their present or their future? Time was so eager, so very eager, to focus on Islamic fundamentalism in Aisha's story. Yet they never mentioned the role of economic fundamentalism that erodes the stability and security of communities to the point that people will grasp all the more tightly to whatever is within reach. The Koran in some countries. The Bible in others.

Time even admitted that Afghanistan wasn't always like this. Just 40 years ago, it was a place where in the cities "girls wore jeans to the university and fashionable women went to parties sporting Chanel miniskirts."

So why this young woman from Afghanistan? Why now? Because millions of people around the world have 90,000 pages of additional evidence that show that the emperors not only have no clothes, the emperors have no common sense. Time is banking on our individual and collective conscience, our shared humanity, to look at Aisha's face and believe that we are helping the people of Afghanistan by staying the course.

SO HOW do we, the people, stand in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan? How do we, the people, prove we are allies in their struggle for self-determination, for the right to decide their present and their future?

We begin by recognizing that the root causes of Aisha's horrendous experience do not include a lack of dead people in Afghanistan. And then we admit that staying the course insures one thing: more dead people. More dead moms, dads and children from the U.S., Britain, and Afghanistan.

What the root causes of Aisha's story do include are poverty and economic fundamentalism. Corporations, economic policies and a capitalist system that prioritizes profit over all else is not the answer. A system that will burn grain because it can't be sold at a profit instead of feeding people with that grain is not the answer.

Governments continuing to fund U.S. and British soldiers to stay the course in Afghanistan will insure the one thing that soldiers have always insured, whether in Chile or Nicaragua or India or Iraq: safe passage for the rich and powerful to profit from natural resources, leaving the local people as poor as they ever were.

"What's our oil doing under their soil?" my neighbor's bumper sticker wants to know. That's a good question. There are organizations working with the people of Afghanistan to meet the needs of the people of Afghanistan. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is one such organization. Mercy Corps is another.

One critical component of any antiwar movement must include recognizing the common sense fact that our emperors don't: social change isn't real social change when it's pounded into you with missiles and machine guns.

Another good question: What else could we be supporting with the $130,000 per minute that we're currently spending on atrocities in Afghanistan? Add on an additional $130,000 per minute for Iraq. That's $260,000 per minute. Depending on how fast you read, we could have purchased a couple of homes for the homeless by now. Instead, we destroyed who knows how many homes, who knows how many families.

What happens if we leave Afghanistan? Time must not want us to think critically about that possibility because they didn't pose it as a question on their cover. What happens if our corporations leave Afghanistan? What happens if our economic policies leave Afghanistan? What happens if the people of Afghanistan benefit from the resources under their soil instead of U.S. and European companies? What happens if the people of Afghanistan self-determine their present and their future with true democracy, not the propped-up version that offers only corrupt options?

Time can't ask those questions. Time would be out of business if it did.