[Nettime-bold] Plantar wart removal

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

Recently, India joined a list of nations that will allow the US use 
their air space and land facilities to launch attacks against Taliban. 
This came on heels of Russia deciding not to block US efforts to 
secure use of Uzbekistan for surveillance and air base. Russians 
appear to be more worried of Islamic fundamentalism on their 
southern borders than of American presence, and they mostly 
resort to warning Americans that the war in Afghanistan might be 
very difficult. After all - they lost it. And their economy was so 
ruined that they fell apart as a Soviet Union afterwards.

Afghanistan has perhaps the worst geography (unless you are into 
mountain biking, rock climbing or snowboarding), the worst history, 
the worst economy and the worst political regime available on the 
planet. The tourist guide to Central Asia (Lonely Planet) gives 'the 
best time to go' for each country. For Afghanistan the best 
suggested time to go is "don't go." The entire country is a big 
mountain - there are practically no elevations below 700 feet, and 
the parts that are not a mountain, are dessert - two of three big 
rivers that start in Afghanistan, disappear in the dessert sand. The 
mountain range itself is poetically called Hindu Kush - "the killer of 
Hindu's", and it averages at around 7,000ft with 20,000ft peaks. 
With long, cold winters, this seems to be perfect for radical back-
country snowboarding. However, I doubt that Taliban ever thought of 
developing tourism in their country.

Such a pleasant geography is only matched by the history: 
Russians lost tens of thousands of men there and finally lost an 
empire in that war; British Empire before them suffered one of its 
highest losses in Afghanistan, when 16,000 of their men were first 
allowed to leave and then massacred on their way out. The last 
outside conqueror who came close success in Afghanistan was 
Jenghiz Khan in 13th century.

The economy up until this spring was mostly opium and hashish. 
85% of the world's heroin supply originated there until Taliban 
declared growing opium being against the God's will earlier this 
year, for which they received $43 million in US help - I wonder what 
did they do with that money. Paying all that flight-school tuitions? 
The little fertile land in the North is virtually cut off from the rest of 
the country, and the little gas that is underneath there is largelly 
unexploited due to the stone age conditions in which the country 
was left after ten years war with the Soviet Union and the four+ 
years civil war afterwards. 

Of the man-made objects of interest in Afghanistan the most 
notable are ten millions landmines, that Soviets forgot to pick up 
when they ran, scattered around the countriside - the largest 
concentration of the landmines in the world. And a quarter of the 
population lives in refugee camps across the border in Pakistan - 
breaking yet another infamous record as the largest refugee 
population in the world.

Taliban ('the seekers of knowledge') fit perfectly in that environment. 
They consider Saudi regime (that bans alcohol in the entire country 
and cuts hands of caught thieves) too secular. They are called too 
fundamentalist even by Iran's fundamentalist clerics (8 of whom 
were slaughtered by Taliban, while on diplomatic mission in 
Afghanistan). Taliban regime bans music, film and television. There 
is only one radio program that, of course, spreads the 'truth' of 
Islamic Law amongst the population. Their Islamic Law requires 
men to wear beards and women to cover themselves completely 
head to toe. Men who break that law are kept in prison until their 
beard grows back. Women are stoned to death in public. 

The sport stadiums (since sports are also against the law) are 
turned into the weekly public execution spectacles. Because, 
obviously, if you are kept in prison for shaving, you can only 
imagine what kind of punishment is reserved for more heinous 
crimes. Basically, it seems that the country did not move very far 
in history since the time of Jenghiz Khan. After careful 
consideration of his alternative options for pursuing a succesful 
career of a global terrorist, after being expelled from Saudi Arabia, 
Osama Bin Laden must have concluded that Afghanistan was an 
ideal location for the Al Qaeda headquarters...

Still, as in any society, about half of population in Afghanistan are 
women - and they all are dispossesed. Here are some resources 
on their revolt against the Taliban:

The Taliban's War on Women:
http://www.nettime.org/nettime-nl.w3archive/199901/msg00075.html
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan:
http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/index.html

ivo

ps - since the success of Al Qaeda largely depends on the number 
of dissafected young men in the Arab Muslim world - the same as 
the success of Nazi ideology depended largely on the number of 
dissafected young men in the pre-WWII Europe - the best way to 
fight it is to erase the possible reasons for such dissafection (it is 
not the Allied victory in WWII that won against Nazism - it is the 
Marshall Plan that carried that victory): Israel's often too aggressive 
politics in the region, ancient regional Arab feudal regimes lack of 
political freedoms, economic deprivation of masses through 
unfavorable global trade policies and internal tariffs, years of war 
and militarism that pre-empted any thinking of alternatives to 
violence (as an example: a united Arab trade sanctions against 
Israel would be far more effective that suicide bombings, yet while 
Arab states cannot agree on such a 'civilised' collective action, 
they rather condone the extremist "religious" individual acts of 
violence), etc.



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