Report from Kabul: America is being Bush-whacked in Afghanistan — and at home too

About five of us visiting Americans were sitting around our guesthouse dining room table in Kabul last night, talking about what we had seen and done that day.

“I went to a school started by residents in the poorest part of Kabul,” someone said. “It was very inspiring.”

“I went to the headquarters of a NGO that is having a major effect on opium eradication by helping the farmers grow and market other crops,” said someone else.

“I visited an imam who taught a co-ed school under the Taliban,” I said. “The Taliban hated him for educating girls but they couldn’t exactly claim that the imam was anti-Muslim because he was one of the top Islamic scholars in the Middle East.” This was an incredibly brave stand to take back then. “He said that all people and all religions need to learn how to live in peace.”

“I went to an American ex-pat bar and had two beers,” said someone else. That bar was the only place in Kabul where I had ever felt scared. It was a lovely place – with a garden straight out of the Arabian Nights. Plus it had satellite TV, a swimming pool and CLEAN TOILETS. It was the ideal place to be on a hot Kabul summer night – except that the whole street in front of the bar was patrolled by armed guards with sub-machineguns just in case some Afghans might want to focus their anger on American targets.

Someone else in our group, an American health worker, was debating whether or not to visit a clinic in a province about one hour outside of Kabul. “The people there really want me to come,” she said, “but getting there would be very dangerous. There’s a one-in-ten chance I’d be killed.”

We spent the next hour debating whether or not the health worker should go. “Do you have any children who would be effected if you die?” She did.

“Will the project suffer if you don’t go?” It would.

“Can you buy a burka and hide in the back seat until you get there?” She could. But it would be very undignified.

“Do you want to go?” She did.

“Would you MIND being killed?” She would.

Why would “they” want to kill her? Because she is an American. Why do “they” hate Americans so much? Because George Bush is a sadistic bastard who has killed over 700 Afghans in the last month and has a foreign policy GUARENTEED to un-do all the good work of Afghanistan’s reconstruction efforts and turn Afghanistan into a mini-Iraq within a year if we in America don’t arrest Bush for high crimes – forget the misdemeanors! – against our country NOW! Like the Good Germans should have done with Adolph Hitler. But didn’t.

Seeing what Bush has done to this poor country is horrifying me.

“If that man had sat down and DELIBERATELY concocted a plan to throw the entire world into chaos,” said one of our dining-room-table scholars, “Bush couldn’t have been more successful.” This man is a danger to the helpful, hard-working Afghans on our side. He is a danger to all Americans working in Afghanistan to stem the influence of the foreign-trained terrorists who prey on this country. And he is a danger to American troops.

But somehow Afghanistan will survive all this. It always has. However, the country most threatened to be destroyed by the madness of George Bush is AMERICA.

George Washington said, “Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation.” George Bush is not a good man. Let’s stop associating America with his name. The alternative? Kabul – and Washington – won’t be safe for Americans any time soon.