Laura Bush Visits and Lies in Afghanistan. News&Opinion

The International Institute of Nonviolence.

by Rev.Jermano

First Lady Laura Bush went to Afghanistan outside of Kabul to spin her tales of success and rebirth of Afghanistan since its war weary historical past. She reminds everyone of the 2 largest Buddha Statues that were destroyed by the Taliban. These statues are said to be over 2,000 years old. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080608/ap_on_re_as/laura_bush_afghanistan

It's interesting to note this because AP writer  Deb Riechmann from the Associated Press did not give the full story of the feud and long history of troubles between the Taliban and the Hazara People. http://www.hazara.net/hazara/geography/Buddha/buddha.html

The Taliban also have an old feud with the Hazara Shi'ites dating to the murder of Mazari in March 1995, when the Taliban, already approaching Kabul, entrapped him after inviting him for peace talks. He was tortured and murdered before his body was thrown out of a helicopter somewhere near Ghazni. Observers of the Afghan scene may have forgotten the incident, but what comes readily to mind is that the suspicion still lingers that Mazari's murder was the handiwork of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Taliban have no helicopters.

Yes Mrs. Bush; the ISI are the very people who are controlled by Dictator President Mushareff of Pakistan that your husband GW Bush has given billions of dollars to fight the war on terror. It's the very money that has literally collapsed the US economy. The trouble with Mrs Bush's seemingly righteous display is meant to stir sentiment away from the huge and numerous mistakes committed by her very own family. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK08Df02.html

Mazari was the leader of the Hazara, a religious and ethnic minority in Afghanistan. In death, he has become a martyr and hero. The word Hazara means “battalion” or “one thousand” in Persian. Probably a Persian king garrisoned Mongol-Turkish horse archers in Afghanistan and they stayed. Mazari’s beard was pretty substantial for a Hazara; most look Asiatic, with sparse facial hair and cowboy eyes. In Afghanistan, looking different can be dangerous. Bushy beards are a masculine and pious display amongst Pashtuns, so lacking them is a social handicap, even illegal under the Taliban. Also, Hazara are Shi’a, a sect of Islam that split off after the martyrdom of Imam Ali. Mazari’s murder made him a martyr to a people who identify with persecution and celebrate martyrdom.

Most Hazara live in Bamian, a crossroads province in the center of the country, mountainous, inaccessible, and easy to defend. Oppressed by Pashtuns and nomads for centuries, Bamian Hazara actually benefited from the breakdown in established order. They built a militia with strong centralized leadership and drove their enemies out. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kquigg/itec745/final/mazari.htm

Over the years, thousands of poor Hazara migrated to the cities where they took low-paying jobs. Urban Hazara had a much worse experience than their Bamian cousins. Mujadeen and Taliban alike persecuted them. In Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, the Hazara organized militias to defend themselves. When Mullah Omar captured Kabul in 1996, he encountered a Hazara militia under the command of Abdul Ali Mazari. Mazari met with the Taliban to negotiate, but they took him prisoner. Later, they claimed he reached for a gun, but more likely, they just murdered him as one more heretic.

Now, hatred between the Taliban and the Hazara has become a death struggle. Mullah Omar launched an ethnic cleansing style campaign in Bamian, but it went slowly because of the terrain. When he took the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997, the Hazara rose up and massacred the Taliban garrison, shooting down thousands in the streets. It was the single greatest disaster suffered by the Taliban so far. When they recaptured the city the next year, the Taliban avenged themselves, murdering thousands. The US invasion saved the Hazara from what would have been bad years, suffering at the hands of the Taliban. Today, they are promised representation in Karzai’s government

Such acts of destruction to Religious artifacts are nothing new in history, when the British and France are given credit for destroying China's Summer Palace. To say the US was not involved in this turn of events is not true because the US was very instrumental and allied with France and Britian during the Opium Trade that literally collapsed China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Summer_Palace

There have been numerous times in history when holy places have been attacked and rampaged. http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=6227

On October 7, 2000, after constant attacks by Palestinian mobs, the Jewish holy site of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus (Shechem) was sacked and burned, and later converted into a mosque. Five days later, the ancient Shalom Al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho was sacked and burned by Palestinians.4

Rachel's Tomb at the Jerusalem-Bethlehem border has come under repeated Palestinian sniper attack.

And so Mrs. Bush you should consider that blaming Taliban for religious destruction is nothing in comparison to what the US and your family has done to people throughout the world. Your money to Mushareff has helped destroy many historical sites and articles.

PAKISTAN'S CULTURAL HERITAGE IN PERIL
Dam Threatens Ancient Buddhist Stone Carvings

By Joachim Hoelzgen

Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.

At first sight, it's difficult to tell whether the work going on near Nanga Parbat mountain (8,126 meters, 26,660 feet) has more to do with preserving the world or heralding its demise.

Down by the Indus River, near a farmers' settlement called Basha, workers have built landing sites for helicopters. They have set up a cargo cablecar above the stream and technicians on the northern banks are drilling holes into the rock in order to search out hollow spaces in the depths. This being an earthquake zone, seismic analyses are also being conducted.http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,479215,00.html

Here, in an oppressively narrow and steep canyon, construction of a gigantic dam is planned -- as high as a skyscraper and kept in place by its sheer weight. The future power plant's turbines are to yield 4,400 megawatts of electricity -- the capacity of four nuclear power plants. Behind the retaining wall, a reservoir will flood 32 villages and force as many as 40,000 people to undergo evacuation in the name of progress. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/016225.php

But the reservoir will also bury beneath itself the witnesses of entire civilizations and ancient cultures along the Indus -- mainly stony messages and images from Buddhist times, whose loss is fully comparable to that of the famous Buddhas of Bamyan, which were demolished with explosives by the Taliban in March 2001.

Just maybe you should consider Geothermal Development instead of Dam building, and Nuclear Development.

The United States, Great Britain and Iraq are signatories of The Hague Convention of 1954 for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. This stipulates that mankind should prevent, make impossible, and sanction any state or group of states from destroying, damaging, and desecrating the monuments of culture in the territory of another state. They should also ensure that national agencies should, as far as possible, exercise continued protection and maintenance of such property.

Despite this, and the promise of the US military to be "as gentle as possible" concerning the some 4,000 specific sites of historical interest in Iraq, during the first week of the Third Gulf War American and British forces bombarded Iraq and news came of the complete destruction by missiles of the National Museum of Takrit on the outskirt of Baghdad.

The national museum in Baghdad was the first repository of archaeological treasures to be subjected to looting within days of the US and UK invasion in April 2003. Despite attempts by Donny George, the museum's director, to recover stolen artifacts and keep the museum open in the weeks and months that followed, the chaos unleashed by the invasion made this impossible. George fled Iraq in August 2006 after death threats. The national museum remains shut, and there is no immediate prospect of it reopening (Jenkins).http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1195032389454&pagename=Zone-English-ArtCulture%2FACELayout

Does it not seem apparant that the US is never involved in regions in the world that do not offer something to them, for invading? Certainly Laura you know that Afghanistan is a regional Oil pipeline that will bring much oil to the United States. Also Iraq is another Oil rich country, that America has ransacked for its Oil.

Mrs Bush your claims are quite disingenuous.