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“Afghanistan’s tragedy is that to the world’s powers, it has never really
maered – or has not maered for long. It has never been valued for itself. In
the chronology of its history, Afghanistan has repeatedly played the role of
pawn in a larger power game […]”
-Kathy Gannon (2005, p. 165)
The recent events in Afghanistan, mainly the death of
Farkhunda, women’s protests and the current incursion
of ISIL into the country, show that the book I Is for In-
del: From Holy War to Holy Terror; 18 Years inside Afgha-
nistan is sll a “must-read” in these mes of turmoil. It is
always good to remember why men and women are now
ghng for rule of law, democracy and women’s rights:
more than three decades of atrocies have steered Af-
ghanistan towards a normalizaon of violence. The
Farkhunda case has demonstrated clearly two facts: the
NATO invasion of Afghanistan has completely ravaged
the country, provoking a general diculty to disnguish
between right and wrong and favoring a long-standing
culture of impunity. But secondly, it has also proven that
Afghan people are becoming empowered, especially wo-
men that have demonstrated all their strength with the
latest demonstraons, showing that the stereotype of
the “burka-vicm” was completely wrong (Malikyar,
2015). So, did we listen to the wrong people during this
whole unjused war?
I chose this moment to publish a book review on Afgha-
nistan because I think that we, as a whole society, tend
to forget the conicts when they are not
‘hypervisualized’ in the media. The Afghan tragedy is not
over: it is not because now ISIL is monopolizing all the
aenon of the media that leads us to forget again what
is happening ‘out there’. Gannon’s book reminds us that
everything is not ‘black/white’ and/or ‘good/bad’ in the
Afghan war story: actually, we have adopted the tenden-
cy to dichotomize the conict between the ‘evil’ Taliban
(forgeng that other sources of terror were comming
war crimes in the country) and the ‘savior’ represented
by the Western ‘democracies’ (forgeng that NATO
troops also ravaged the country and perpetrated heinous
violaons of human rights).
In this book, Gannon oers a crical point of view of the
various foreign invasions that have been devastang Af-
ghanistan since the Soviet intervenon during the 80s:
she dynamically quesons the ‘double standards’ that
Rethinking Afghanistan: Have We Listened to
the Wrong People?
Book Review: Kathy Gannon – I Is for Indel: From Holy War to Holy Terror; 18 Years
inside Afghanistan
Author: Priscyll Ancl Avoine1
1Priscyll Ancl Avoine is a researcher for Corporación Descontamina, and researcher and profesor at Universidad Santo Tomás and Universi-
dad Industrial de Santander, Bucaramanga, Colombia. She has a MA in Peace, Conict and Development Studies (Jaume I University, Spain).
Email: priscyll.ancl@descontamina.org
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have characterized the decisions made by the interna-
onal community, including the UN, in this strategic
region of the globe. She arms that the internaonal
community always adopted the “quick exit” (2005, p.
9), beneng more their own interests to the detri-
ment of the whole populaon. She also strongly crici-
zes the ‘mujahedeen’, those ghters that led the coun-
try to a civil war during the 1990s, aer the retreat of
the Soviet troops: she argues that these mujahedeen
are the newly ‘elected’ people that nowadays, Ameri-
can and other Western countries are supporng in
order to supposedly restore democracy in Afghanis-
tan. She states that today, she looks around Kabul,
and unfortunately, she sees many of the same faces
that have been pushing Afghanistan into the horrible
tragedy and mass murders (2005, p. 18).
We listened to the war propaganda of George Bush,
believing that the Taliban were the most horrifying
people on earth, and by this, we thought we should
“eliminate them”. Gannon tries to expose, in this
book, the series of mistakes that have been made by
the US and UN in this regard. Without legimizing the
Taliban, she argues that we should have listened to
the moderate Taliban when there was sll me: while
not denying the brutality of the Taliban, she ackno-
wledges that their inial purpose was to put an end to
the human rights violaons and murders caused by
the civil war and mulplicaon of war lords in the
country, insisng on the fact that the foreign ghters
have been highly inuencing the original goal of the
Taliban (2005, p. 25):
Sixty men founded the Taliban, according to
Khaksar. In the nal years of the Taliban, more
than half of the founding fathers, had either
died or returned to their mosques, disillusio-
ned with the Taliban they had helped to crea-
te. (2005, p. 27)
By 1994, the Taliban were nothing more than a bunch
of resenul men with distorted ideals and increasing
death ideology. The anger and frustraon that accom-
panied them nally won over their moral dues. We
did not listen to the good people: most of the extreme
inuences received by the Taliban (Wahhabi Islam,
harsh prohibion on music and photography, discrimi-
naons and violence against women, etc.) came from
foreign combatants (although there is a huge problem
with regards to some damaging customs and tradi-
ons) and clearly, the internaonal community did not
react in me and never gave a holisc answer to the
problems of human rights violaons and the overall
disregard for the rule of law (Gannon, 2005, p. 47).
The mujahedeen, and above all Sayyaf (a well-known
Afghan criminal that is enjoying the support of NATO
and the US), were the rst people to welcome Bin La-
den on the Afghan soil: if the internaonal community
would have reacted and reached out to support the
moderate Taliban, the links between the Saudi man
and the extremist groups of the Taliban might have
just aborted (Brown, 2005). It was only in 2001, when
it was convenient for the US-led coalion that the in-
ternaonal community started to be interested again
in the tragic desny of the Afghan people, with all the
discourses on women’s right to legimize the armed
intervenon.
Gannon relies on various stories and tesmonies of
key leaders in Afghanistan to construct a narraon
that strongly criques the ocial version spread out
by the mass media. She also represents an uncommon
type of journalism nowadays; a truly in-depth analysis
of the situaon, being highly crical of the Afghan lea-
ders, warlords and ill-intenoned mullahs (the former
and the present ones), the involvement of Pakistani
intelligence (2005, p. 38), the Western war propagan-
da (despite the inherent contradicon; the mujahe-
deen were concretely nanced by the West during the
Soviet invasion) and the abominable number of vic-
ms caused by the NATO invasion. She therefore de-
nounces the high implicaons of these war forces on
determining the course of events. This is why she
named her book “I Is for Indel”:
The United States also pumped out inspirao-
nal literature of its own for the Afghan refugee
camps, where U.S.-printed school books
taught the alphabet by using such example as:
J is for Jihad, and K is for Kalashnikov, and I is
for indel. (Gannon, 2005, p. 141)
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Gannon unveiled the fact that the normali-
zed pracces today are not coming only/
strictly from the “Afghan culture”, but
surely, from the mulple foreign interven-
ons and years of war: “Afghans had never
before outlawed women from working or
girls from aending school” (2005, p. 48).
The internaonal community clearly has
missed the point or, worse, carefully orga-
nized a strategy with regards to opium trade
and securizing/militarizing the region.
However, for her, there are no heroes or
war saviors; she assumes that from every
point of view, the vicms are always civi-
lians:
Aer so many years covering Afgha-
nistan, I now understand what Af-
ghan leaders really mean when they
talk about shedding the last drop of
blood. They certainly don’t mean
their own. It is usually the blood of
innocent civilians caught in the cross
re. When leaders’ lives are threate-
ned, their rst inclinaon is to beat
a hasty retreat. (Gannon, 2005, p.
2)
The fact is that we listened to the wrong
people: as Butler says, the frames of war are
powerfully having the control of what we
understand as grievable lives (2009). Afghan
lives do not count in the balance of humani-
ty, or they count ‘less’. We failed in respon-
ding to terror in Afghanistan; we did not
listen to our humanity.
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