This story had been circulating for a few days. So I thought it would be nice that we had both sides of the story for a change. So no conjecture no opinionated commentary. Just the letter plain and simple. As to what it means you just have to read it and judge that for yourself.
Open Letter of Qari Mohammad Yousaf Ahmadi, Spokesman of the Islamic Emirate aof Afghanistan, to Members of the American Congress
To Members of the American Congress:
Availing myself of this opportunity, I am pleased to share with you my views about certain issues that have become a cause of concern and resentments for many peace-loving people, not only in America, Afghanistan but for all people at the region and the world. They now openly say that the status quo is unbearable and that drastic measures must be taken to change it.
Messrs American Congressmen!
You certainly know that on June 7, the current year, the war of Afghanistan, surpassed that of Vietnam in terms of longevity--thus becoming the longest war in the history of America. Ironically, this war began on the basis of an event which in itself is a mystery to many people. But your government is bent on continuing the war further more on the same basis. However, we have made it clear from the day one that we have no role in this event, nor participation in operations on foreign soil is part of our policy.
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It is also worth mentioning that , no neutral entity which is acceptable to all sides, has ever carried out investigation into the September Event. In short, the war started as you resorted to the usage of most sophisticated, lethal and latest weapons available at your arsenal. To confront this, our people had to put up resistance to your offensive out of sheer feeling of patriotism to defend the country and the religious sanctity. From the beginning of the war, your army, your coalition allies, the regional sycophants and proxies turned a blind eye to all universal norms and principles of the war, seeing that the Afghans were miserable and friendless. Hence, a new trend set in where murdering , capturing , harassing and insulting the Afghans became not only legal but a commendable work. Entire villages of Afghanistan were razed to ground as a result of your heavy bombardment, ostensibly under the name of mopping-up havens of so-called terrorists. Not only that. Orchards were burnt down to ashes; mass murders were committed in northern and central Afghanistan, not once but recurrently. Houses of local people were destroyed, women raped and green field scorched by using daisy-cutter bombs. People were put under detention in the notorious Jouzajan, Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar prisons for many years on mere suspicions. All these were done under the name of war on terror!
Throughout the past nine years, the Afghans have been festering in the vortex of an imposed war. They have remained deprived of the delight and solace of a normal life. The apparition of mass murder , imprisonment, night house raids and plundering which has become the order of the day, constantly haunts them. Every morning, as the Afghan wake up from the bed, they do not know whether he or she will see the next sunset, thinking that they might fall prey to your blind bombardment or straying bullets. Some times, media reports highlight these events. But the real and gruesome picture of these horrendous events remains stored in the chests of our people. In face of all these adversities, our people remained firm as they were in the right. Ultimately, casualties of your troops and your material losses began to spiral up as the war hauled along with the passage of time. This naturally sparked off hot discussions among common Americans about the worthiness of this unjustified war. The worry and concern of people presumably found way to the echelons of the representatives of the people in your country and now it has become one of the most critical issues pending before you.
As we monitor the developments, we see that, after every few days, a military official submits you distorted information about Afghanistan. They want to keep you snarled up in an environ of a misleading optimism and are trying to give vent to their own grudges. By doing so, they want to show themselves victorious, to obtain financial gains and add fuel to the fire of the war.
Your defense Secretary, Robert Gates, whenever he takes the floor at the podium, he speaks of military advancement in Afghanistan. General Petreous says, the initiative of the war is in our hands. But in fact, in the last two years, your military high-ups implemented different strategies including troop’s surge, construction of new military bases, forming militias, boosting the Kabul mercenary army etc. However, all these steps have been taken without considering the ground realities. It is why they all failed. The resistance of our people easily thwarted all efforts of your military brasses. Last year, on the basis of Obama’s new strategy, the south of our country saw rise in troop’s deployment, but, on the contrary, we opened new fronts in the north and east of the country and beefed up our operations there. You launched operations for the capture of rural areas, we infiltrated into different cities including the cities of Kandahar and Kabul, expanding our operations there. You intended to reverse the resistance but we extended the jihad to become a country-wide resistance. Now your troops are not able to take a breath of relief in any part of Afghanistan. Last, you launched military operations dubbed as Dagger’s Strike in Helmand province, considering it as your experimental initiative to test your fortune. But it only brought in casualties and failures. Resistance has increased comparatively in areas wherever you have carried out operations. Your troops have the highest life losses in these areas. In the east of the country, the successful operations of Mujahideen forced General Crystal to waive the rural areas protection strategy by announcing a new strategy of concentration of forces at most populated urban areas. Then you launched the Marja operations with great fanfare but only turned out to entangle you in a deadly and crippling battles. Every day, brings new fatality to your ranks and files. Similarly, in this current year, your generals wanted to launch Kandahar operations but Mujahideen took initiative in their hands as they always do so. They launched tip-and run attacks there instead and have been forging ahead with the tactic successfully. The formation of militias as a part of civilian support program and the boosting of the Kabul administration’s army was your most prominent plan, propagated with most fanfare, prior to launching it. But this plan also went awry. Soldiers in the army and in military uniform targeted you with their own weapons. Still, instead of pondering over their mistakes, your military officers are bent on continuing the war. They irresponsibly give you distorted information about a losing war, trying to conceal from you, their failures.
Your generals and intelligence high-ups claim that the current resistance in Afghanistan is the result of interference by neighboring countries. However, by doing so, they want to justify the prolongation of the war. Sometimes, they ascribe the resistance to foreign elements and are trying to show the current armed Jihad by the Afghans as being a war waged only by Taliban or they intentionally portray it as an insurgence being put up by a given tribe and ethnicity of Afghanistan-- whereas, in fact, the current armed Jihad is a country-wide resistance against you . Men and women, old and young from every tribe, ethnicity, caste and area have arisen to oppose you. Thus by your intending to wipe out the resistance, you have chosen the way of committing genocide of the whole nation.
Think, can a few militants stand up to armed forces of 40 countries including the strongest countries of the world—still more in circumstances that the initiatives of the war is in the hands of the invaders, as your generals claim? Can a clandestine and weak intervention (by foreigners) be able to confront these troops? Can only Taliban i.e. students, confront these large number of forces? Can a certain race in a multi-ethnicity nation of Afghanistan, be able to resist such a strong and well-equipped military coalition? If the intervention had been a decisive factor for the maintenance of stability, then the Karzai would have been able to achieve that goal by now?
If you claim that the current resistance is being put up by non-Afghan elements, then your government and the coalition should produce concrete evidence for all to see. Following your occupation of Afghanistan and the inception of armed Jihad against you, you have undoubtedly detained not only tens of people, or hundreds of them, or thousands of them, but tens of thousands of them, would your military generals produce only one hundred non-Afghans from among those thousands of detainees to prove their case? If they did so, we would accept your claim that non-Afghan Mujahideen had been fighting against you all these years? Otherwise, the claim is a mere assumption. If you are not willing to act on our suggestion, then how about another experiment? Send a team to Afghanistan on fact-finding mission. But members of the team should have freedom of movement, and should be allowed to remain far from the clutches of your intelligence agencies. Then they should see for themselves whether the military generals give them permission to go out of military barracks and hotels or they try to keep them in barracks and hotels as distinguished detainees? Presume, if they permit you to go out to find the ground realities, would you be able to travel to other areas beyond the vicinity of the few limited streets of Kabul? Even if you venture out of Kabul, do you believe, you will come back safe? The fact of the matter is that you will hardly find any area in all Afghanistan beyond proximity of two kilometers of the military bases where you can walk freely and openly. On the other hand, when Mujahideen captured your soldier Bergh dal, they traveled with him 500 km on foot. Berg dal himself says that no government soldier ever stopped him on the way during that long journey. But still if you are not willing to put to experiment our proposal, then you should listen to my words , however, they may be bitter but are the ground realities. By feeling the burden of the issue, as responsible persons, you should not plunge your nation into perdition furthermore.
Moreover, the fear that Afghanistan may turn out to be a threat to the world peace must be put out of your minds as it is a mere baseless propaganda and a lie fabricated by your rulers to justify and continue their illegal, unjustified and irrational war, the so-called war on terror.
You had better know the ground reality that the war of Afghanistan is a losing war, being fought by the indigenous people, not just by a given faction , a tribe but by an entire nation which has over 5,000 years old history; a nation that considers both victory and martyrdom in the war against your forces as a cherished wish of success not only in this world but in the world to come as well.
Your modern and advanced military warfare and arms with state-of the-art technology have failed against Mujahideen. Your tanks, the military hardware and your soldiers that you have been spending billion of dollars on them to keep, are simply and inexpensively wiped out by ordinary Afghans. For example, 69 year-old Saleh Jan Aka along with his 18 year-old son, destroyed 32 tanks of the coalitions and 9 ranger vehicles in Helmand, by spending just $ 2500 —the only amount paid to him for the purpose.
Sale Jan Aka who has never been trained in any military academy, neither he left his farming work nor his village to do this. Besides, he has never asked for any reward as quid pro que. Meantime,. All the items which he used to blow up the US and its allies tanks and vehicles has been bought from Lashkar Gah, while the seller not knowing what he bought them for?
According to him, his house has been searched four times so far by the US and its allies but nothing was found to prove that he was involved in such activities. He says, once after destroying the coalition forces tanks by using IEDs, he gave some cold water to the wounded soldiers to brush away their suspicions and to cause their injuries to get worse.
It is worth to consider whether your forces in Afghanistan with all the advanced hardware and modern military equipments that they have and your various operations such as Expectation, Mountain, Dagger, Dragon which cost you billion of dollars and the media war by you, will ever be able to prevent people like Saleh Jan Aka and many thousands others from carrying out their mission or even slow down the tempo of their mission? Not at all.
Is it that, that your force have come all the way to Afghanistan, expecting the Afghan people stand for them in ovation and keep watching while your forces will do what they wish to do? Or just the Afghans be sitting hand on hand while your forces will be busy building military bases, barracks, airbases and so forth? Or are you under the illusion that the Afghan nation would ever tolerate the presence of your forces and military interference in their country? You will only come around to know it when the Afghans rise to show their response.
Come and think, a moment for the sake of pondering. Suppose, a foreign force invades your country and tries to build military bases there, would you and your nation tolerate all these ? or would you be convinced that the invasion was a fair and just act and the forces in your country were there for security purposes?
Anyway, on the basis of the principle of your universal slogan( democracy) , the decision by parliament is considered final because it is the parliament that approves fund for each and every mission. So all relevant affairs and events are referred to the parliament for decision.
I would like to bring one last point to your notice, what was your goal to come to Afghanistan? what have you achieved so far ( through the war) and what will possibly you achieve in future? Will you be able to obtain your long-term goals in the region only through the war in Afghanistan?
You are representatives of people and are an authorized entity to take decision about the Afghan issue, therefore, I presented you with a true picture of the ground realities of Afghanistan-- say, another side of the coin, more different from the one which is submitted to you by your generals, time and again.
Qari Mohmmad Yousaf Ahmadi
Spokesman of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
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