(2009) Only an hour in length, but this documentary from director Robert Greenwald is an intense seminar on the need to re-evaluate the war in Afghanistan (according to Sen John Kerry, America is "on the wrong track"), featuring dozens of contributors in rapid-fire interview clips, accompanied by images from across an impoverished country further devastated by conflict.

According to former CIA field operative Robert Baer and others, the Americans and their NATO coalition forces are caught in the middle of a civil war between the Taliban, a regional and national resistance to foreign occupation with a local agenda, and the despised Afghan government under President Karzai with his corrupt administration of war lords.

Afghans are the world's champions at resisting foreign occupiers: "Do not invade" our country, communities, homes, or else. With that in mind, not nearly enough troops are available to meet the ratio of one soldier for every 40 people, or 250,000 personnel, according to counterinsurgent strategy.

By bombing villages where the Taliban take refuge, the US military has killed and injured civilians as well, turning thousands of otherwise peaceful Afghans into anti-American fighters. Further, with 40% unemployment, Afghan men join the insurgents as a means of providing for their families. (One suggestion proposes that by spending $4 billion, a tenth of the current budget for Afghanistan, enough jobs could be created to deplete the ranks of the Taliban.) In addition to jobs (work, not war), what the Afghan people need and want are schools for their children, sanitation, and healthcare.

By waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda is no longer a presence (thus, going after the hotelier after the unwelcome guests have departed), the US has in the process destabilized neighboring Pakistan with its "cruel, corrupt, callous" ruling elites. The Taliban are instrumental to the paranoid Pakistani military command and intelligence in its existential fear that without them India (with whom it has a long simmering feud over Kashmir) would otherwise launch from western Afghanistan an attack simultaneous with an invasion from eastern India; however, the Taliban do not recognize the political borders separating these countries.

Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of Harvard, Rory Stewart argues that the US could monitor and disrupt al-Qaeda across the border in Pakistan with much fewer numbers, leaving the Taliban alone.

The costs of the war for Americans in treasure ($1 trillion by the end of the decade, explains author Linda J. Bilmes, when care for wounded vets and the social disruptions are taken into account) and blood must be compared, several commentators insist, to what the money and lives could have accomplished at home, such as paying for universal healthcare for every American.

This war is more expensive than the fighting in Iraq, partly because of the arduous effort necessary in supplying troops in Afghanistan's mountainous terrain without adequate infrastructure. Funds have been squandered for lack of oversight and accountability; war profiteers, such as KBR and Halliburton acting as middlemen, have used local subcontractors to their advantage.

For those who claim that since the US invasion of 2001 women in Afghanistan have been liberated from the Taliban's strict religious codes, contrarians such as Sonali Kolhatkar (founder, radio host, and producer of Uprising) refute this as mythology: under the current regime women have been the victims of rape, plunder, domestic violence, and collateral damage of war while they've been granted only two rights - to obey their husbands and to pray.

Among those participating in the discussion (entirely one-sided) are co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives Carl Conetta, professor of international relations at Boston University Andrew Bacevich, CEO and president of the New American Foundation Steve Coll, political-science professor Robert Pape, social and political activist Tom Hayden, Afghan journalist for the Wall Street Journal Anand Gopal, Founder and Executive Director of FIDA Faiysal Alikhan, and Lawrence Kolb.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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