29 September 2023 — Some of my friends whose opinions I very much respect admiringly shared an analytical piece by Cheryl Benard on Afghan women after the failure of the American Neo-imperial project and their ignominious withdrawal this month. Here is the piece: https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-truth-about-afghan-women/…

I found the main points of attractions in the piece either misplaced or wanting in depth and practical value:

• A reference to Sharia law as better than Pashtunwali for women is just superficial when it comes to real practice since those who are empowered to interpret, package and apply Sharia in Afghanistan from amongst the Taliban are largely adherents of the very patriarchal Pashtun code of conduct when it comes to women issue. So I am not sure how the Taliban would be better for the dazed and degraded women lot with their miserable conditions as aptly and thoughtfully described by Cheryl. It is so dated to say that Islam allows this or bans that with the many varying forms of interpretation and implementation of sharia from Indonesia to California. Focus on the context and the historical evolution please!

• It is tiring to blame urban and somewhat elitist civil society organizations in capitals of the developing world as if they have wasted all this money and betrayed the ambitions of their people. Firstly, money spent on failing health and education projects far exceeds the fraction used up by such organizations which at the end of the day represented their own intersectional identities and not the collective needs of this ambiguous category of Afghan Women. Secondly, while humanitarian projects and structural intervention have long focused on services (with success and failures), such advocacy organizations are focused on what they claim (sometimes rightly) is more important which are policies and values undergirding them.

• The proposition that money could have been better spent on health care for women as Afghanistan still has some of the worst health indicators for women worldwide is worth a serious discussion, but I am not sure how it can be clearly linked to women struggle for equality and better status within their own society especially in the country side in the east and south. Better health will indeed raise the life expectancy to over 45 years of age but I am not sure why is that seen as progress if the additional years are to be lived under the same conditions Cheryl described. It really reminded me of what a doctor who worked at a concentration camp said in one book that he worked to keep the inmates standing so they can be punished well by the wardens!

• Cheryl suggests staying away from Afghanistan, implicitly meaning staying away from supporting women rights groups. This could have a been a great advise in the 18th and early 19th century but after all these decades of intervention that cannot be rolled back and in light of the fact that several countries are meddling into Afghanistan at any given time including the US which will continue to do so without soldiers on the ground, I am not sure how useful her suggestions are, though they are clearly in line with the isolationist American streak that used to dream up that America can stay away from the world while American tax dollars were busy at work all around the world supporting dictators or securing market access.

Urban and rights-based upper middle class and upper-class activists really need a lot of introspection and self-criticism and to think seriously of what Cheryl and other say, but they are not the cause not even a catalyst in the miserable conditions various groups and communities have in the developing world.

This line of reasoning which dismisses CSOs as apolitical and depoliticizing is tortured, antiquated and really gives these struggling NGOs more weight than they ever had.

Thinking that the Taliban’s sharia (their interpretation and implementation of Islamic sharia) is better than the Pashtunwali and hoping that it could alleviate the suffering of Afghan women is so misplaced I do not know where to start in dismantling it!

27 September 2023 — For many days now, every day Laila Soueif, a professor of mathematics at Cairo university, has gone to sit in the street patiently for hours in front of a Cairo prison complex awaiting for a letter from her son who has spent most of the past ten years behind bars for his political activism (the last two years in preventive detention on ambiguous charges). #Alaa, according to his family, has been in detention for many months without access to reading material, exercise outside his cell, books, even a watch, to the extent that he threatened — last he was able to very briefly communicate with a lawyer — that he considered killing himself.

Laila Soueif has the right to receive a letter from her son, who also has the right to send a letter, let alone regain all his other rights, that are supposedly enshrined in the Egyptian constitution. #FreeAlaa

20 September 2023 — The anti-imperial camp that rejoiced in the fall of the US-backed regime in Kabul and saw the Taliban as an expression of national liberation should celebrate the establishment of a whole ministry in Afghanistan to fight for “real” Afghan values. The ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has taken over the offices of the Ministry of Women Affairs that was cancelled altogether and its women workers sent home to …. to … so whatever they are meant to do away from the free national post imperial government. This type of new left and neo-imperialists are about the same indeed in how blind they are to the real people in Afghanistan or in Syria for that matter.

8 July 2023 — Like us he surely suffered nightmares but he also had dreams he preferred to speak about

18 July 2023 – Eat ice cream as long as you can

16 August 2023 — To all #UN friends who worked like me in #Afghanistan twenty years ago and who are now blaming various countries or Afghan factions for the return of the #Taliban:

As aid workers or peacekeepers or human rights functionaries, we in the UN tried to be part of a solution in Afghanistan but more often than not we ended up being part of the problem and not a small part. So please this is time for more self-criticism and introspection and less pity, if only for the fact that some of our mistakes seem to have a habit of repeating themselves as we have seen in Iraq, Syria, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Myanmar, etc., since then. WFP People UNAMA News

19 August 2023 — On this day, 18 years ago, a truck with explosives crashed into the #UN head office in #Baghdad, where I was working, killing 22 of my colleagues. In the following years, humanitarian aid organizations have changed a lot, their shortcomings becoming more visible, but there is still no alternative in a world where bloody conflicts, poverty and injustice persist. As long as we are unable to come up with radical solutions to these dilemmas, relief and band aid work will remain necessary at least in order to maintain our claims and dreams about a common humanity.

These organizations spend more than thirty billion dollars annually (not much at all compared to the 50 billions spent annually by the USA only in Afghanistan during the same period and for less lofty objectives). However, Washington only defends its interests as defined by its ruling elite, while humanitarian organizations lean on claims about international norms and laws. Against these principles we must hold them accountable and continue to do so.

The piece I wrote last year for Mada Masr last year is still valid, here is the intro:

“Seventeen years ago, this week, I survived a terrorist attack that killed 22 people and injured many, including several friends in the United Nations. The attack on the UN offices at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad came a few months after the US invasion of Iraq deposed the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. The building housed the offices of the UN political team and a large group of humanitarian aid workers, whose task was to work with the US-led coalition and the remnants of the Iraqi civil service to help the country stand on its feet after many years of war and draconian sanctions.

Staff and investigators alike faulted security lapses including, but not limited to, the bending or breaking of rules to enable the deployment of this mission, called for by major donors and political powers, led by the United States. Such explanations are narrow and superficial. They explain how the attack might have been possible, and how it might have come to kill and injure so many. But they don’t tell us anything about why these armed groups launch such attacks in the first place and the deeper roots of increasing apathy within vulnerable communities towards the very aid organizations claiming to assist them.

To me, a survivor still haunted by the blood and body parts I touched as I groped my way along darkened corridors shrouded in dust, part of the answer lies in the erosion of the humanitarian principles of independence, impartiality, and humanity, and in the politicization of the global humanitarian enterprise.” Read on https://khaledmansour.org/…/when-aid-workers-serve-the…/