Julie Levesque: From Afghanistan to Syria, Women's Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA!

Women's rights are increasingly heralded as a useful propaganda device, to further imperial designs. Western heads of state, UN officials and military spokespersons will invariably praise the humanitarian dimension of the October 2001 US NATO led invasion of Afghanistan, which allegedly was to fight religious fundamentalists, help little girls go to school, liberate women subjected to the yoke of the Taliban. The logic of such humanitarian dimension of the Afghan war is questionable. Lest we forget, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were supported from the outset of the Soviet Afghan war by the US, as part of a CIA led covert operation. As described by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the US and her allies tried to legitimize their military occupation of Afghanistan under the banner of bringing freedom and democracy for Afghan people, but as we have experienced in the past few decades, in regard to the fate of our people, the US government first of all considers her own political and economic interests, and has empowered and equipped the most traitorous, anti democratic, misogynist and corrupt fundamentalist gangs in Afghanistan. It was the US, which installed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1996, a foreign policy strategy, which resulted in the demise of Afghan women's rights: Under NSDD 166, US assistance to the Islamic brigades, channelled through Pakistan,, was not limited to bona-fide military aid. Washington also supported and financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the process of religious indoctrination, largely to secure the demise of secular institutions. Religious schools were generously funded by the United States of America: Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet Afghan war, was largely secular. The US covert education destroyed secular education. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools increased from 2,500 in 1980, to over 39,000 in 2001. Unknown to the American public, the US spread the teachings of the Islamic jihad in text-books filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers,which were filled with talk of jihad, and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then, as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American produced books.