Jon Pilger on Afghanistan

Here's an article by Jon Pilger with a great line in it

Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".

The article talks about how the fight for women's rights before 9/11 was undermined by the Clinton administration's desire to do business with the Mullahs and get an oil pipeline for Unocal

It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)

Of course once they became the enemy, women's rights became one of the reasons for the invasion. I suppose we should be grateful that women's rights were well established in the west before the advent of high-altitude saturation bombing or we might have had to blow the shit out of ourselves too.