The Trouble with Warlords
16 December 2008 12:01 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
Following up on this post from last week, a formal request has been made to Gen. McKiernan about securing a grave site in Afghanistan, which McClatchy has reported on being disturbed. It involves Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime, someone who is believed to have committed horrible atrocities against prisoners buried at the site.
Physicians for Human Rights, whose investigators discovered the site in 2002, urged U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, to provide the troops and logistical support required by the U.N. to secure the area against further disruption. “Full protection of the grave will be dependent upon NATO forces being given the mandate to preserve any remaining evidence and safeguard any surviving witnesses,” Frank Donaghue, the chief executive of the Cambridge, Mass., organization, said in a statement. [...]
Dostum is one of many warlords the U.S. utilized in removing the Taliban, which simply pushed them into Pakistan to wait and plot the comeback happening now, proving how ineffective U.S. policy under Bush has been in Afghanistan. This obviously isn’t Abu Ghraib, but it certainly is in the category for Afghanistan since the U.S. arrived, only the man believed guilty is a warlord with over 2,000 believed dead from his practices. He’s just one of the men responsible for carrying out U.S. policy that gave warlords the power in place of a real plan to put Afghanistan back together using the government and Afghans, not relying on warlordism. It’s all coming back to haunt us. It’s the mess Obama will inherit next month.
