This article, by Samira Ahmed, is about how the war in Afghanistan has been framed as a “feminist experiment” and the plight of Afghan women has been referred to by various female politicians (and politicians’ wives) so as to justify the invasion and continuing occupation of Afghanistan. I recall the real reason troops were sent in being to do with the terrorists the Taliban had been foolishly harbouring, who had organised a major terrorist attack on New York and Washington. The situation for women in Afghanistan had been the case since 1996, when the Taliban took power, and had not been the reason for an invasion until then.

Western troops, principally American and British it seems, have been in Afghanistan for ten years. In that time, we have been propping up a corrupt and weak government in Kabul, while the Taliban seem to have a huge influence almost everywhere else. We know that much of rural Afghan society is sympathetic to the Taliban, whose version of Islamic rule is based on the custom of those regions (although Kabul and parts of the north are more liberal, or may seem so to western eyes, anyway). The west has not provided any significant reasons for people (and particularly the men who hold the power) in those areas to transfer their allegiance away from the Taliban, and have caused civilian deaths of its own, there and in Pakistan by using drones to bomb what turn out to be wedding parties and other non-military targets.

The central goal, of eliminating a threat to western security, was achieved years ago. It seems that nothing else can be achieved as there is no sign of a strong and stable government despite ten years of western support for Karzai. This demonstrates that either Afghanistan is ungovernable, or that western leaders lack the will or the skill to do it properly. At a time when budgets are having to be cut, and essential services at home with them (along with enormous cuts in military spending, something nobody would expected from a Tory-led government), we cannot justify sending troops to a far-off country other than in response to a dire threat to our own security, or something like an ongoing genocide or other humanitarian emergency. Neither of these situations exist any longer in Afghanistan; the troops should be withdrawn.

The Guardian today reported that an investigation by the paper had uncovered a fake vaccine programme in Abbotabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was reported found and assassinated earlier this year, which was conducted by local doctors in an attempt to get his family’s DNA. A local doctor, one Shakil Afridi, was one of a number of people arrested by the ISI (the Pakistani security police) and the only one still being held. The programme started by offering a free dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is normally given in three stages although in this case only one dose was given, in a poor district of Abbotabad before moving onto the wealthier district where Bin Laden lived. It is not clear whether they succeeded in gaining any of the Bin Ladens’ DNA. (More: Maggie Koerth-Baker @ Boing Boing, Maryn McKenna @ Wired.)

If true, this scheme is grossly irresponsible; it endangers the credibility of vaccine programmes throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim world where conspiracy theories about vaccines have circulated for decades, usually based on claims that they are laced with chemicals to reduce men’s fertility. It also bolsters the position of anti-vaccine activists in the west who can now claim that vaccines can be used for information gathering purposes. Surely they know that chances to eradicate polio have been missed because of such theories, much as the incidence of measles in the west rose after take-up of the MMR fell because of fears about autism.

The scam should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, yet I have not found any leader or opinion columns that even mention it in today’s British papers, and Google’s news search does not turn up any. Curbing the spread of disease should take precedence over all but the most essential security concerns, and getting rid of Osama bin Laden certainly does not fall into that category (at least, not in 2011). It is reported that Dr Afridi has been arrested for collaborating with the CIA, but any case against him should emphasise the damage he might have done to people’s health, and there must be an investigation into this in the USA also.

This is about a tendency among the political left in this country (and the USA) that really irritates me — those who whitewash any dictator or tyrant who could be seen as “standing up to western hegemony”, even if they are actually genocidal maniacs. There are, of course, plenty of good reasons to oppose intervention every time there is a human rights emergency in another part of the world, particularly in a very inaccessible part like Rwanda, but then claiming that they didn’t really commit any atrocities (or reducing them to supposedly slightly more acceptable levels) is both ridiculous and immoral.

I was anti-war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and pro in Bosnia and Kosovo. Bosnia, in particular, really was an ongoing genocide right on our doorstep, while Iraq (in 2003) was not, and those of the London soft left who supported the invasion seemed to be deluded that they could use the Bush war machine to their advantage, when in fact it was they that were being used and the US right that was in charge. However, I also found it bizarre that some anti-war activists (including Muslims) enthusiastically lapped up Chomsky and various right-wing libertarian anti-war types, who had opposed intervention in places like Bosnia even when a genocide was going on (and if that was not obvious, there were more obvious individual atrocities such as the setting up of concentration camps, rape, individual massacres and so on).

Stephen Schwartz wrote this article for Comment is Free (run by the Guardian) on the subject of the “burial” given to Osama bin Laden’s body after his killing last week; it was reported that it was thrown into the sea after some kind of burial ritual was performed. It has been widely commented that burial at sea is not appropriate for a Muslim (presumably this only applies to one who has died on land, as it is not very healthy or practical for ships to be transporting dead bodies for long voyages, and certainly wasn’t before very recently and in hot climates). Schwartz claims that bin Laden was not entitled to an Islamic burial because his beliefs put him outside Islam.

Schwartz is right that the argument that his grave would have become a shrine is mistaken, as Muslims of his stripe are opposed to shrines and are more likely to destroy them than build them. Indeed, there have been a number of incidents in Pakistan where the local “Taliban” — vigilantes or militants of an extreme Deobandi or “salafi” tendency — have destroyed shrines of popular Sufi shaikhs. However, he then says he believes Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam:

I believe Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam by his denial of the sinful nature of terrorism. He planned and took responsibility for atrocious acts, which were those of an enemy of Islam, by the tongue, the pen, money, and the sword. These deeds were public and he boasted of them. Rejecting the judgment of the sin of killing innocent people is a repudiation of Islam.

Schwartz also suggests that “journalists should ask moderate Muslim scholars whether they consider Bin Laden to have died in a state of Islamic belief”, which raises the question of whom he considers to be moderate. Certainly, the mainstream of Islamic scholarship has always shied away from pronouncing people to be unbelievers unless they deny something necessarily known of Islam or show obvious contempt for the religion. For example, it is necessarily known (this is generally defined as “even a nine-year-old madrassah student would know that”) that drinking alcohol for its own sake is forbidden, but some scholars allow its use for such purposes as clearing one’s throat if it is the only thing to hand; they do not, though, allow it for alleviating extreme thirst, as it is a diuretic. However, if someone erred on the wrong side here, without saying that drinking alcohol in general was allowed, they would not be regarded as a disbeliever.

It is also necessarily known that killing is impermissible other than in self-defence, or in war, or in punishing a crime, or certain other limited circumstances. Deliberately killing innocent people, even in war, is forbidden as well, but the Kharijites of old made numerous excuses for killing those they regarded as enemies simply because of sometimes very minor disagreements that were not over matters of doctrine. The only Kharijites that were declared not to be Muslims, however, was one group that regarded Sura Yusuf, a chapter in the Qur’an, not to be part of the Qur’an. As this passage was universally regarded as being part of the Qur’an, they were excluded from being Muslims. Terrorists justify their actions by making excuses for why certain people are not “innocent” (such as that they pay taxes to the enemy state, voted for its leaders or are in their army, even if not on active service — a common justification for terrorist acts in Israel) which are rejected by many or all scholars, but without declaring them to be out of the fold of Islam because they do not make the killing of innocents in general lawful.

The upshot is that we do not pronounce takfeer, that is, that someone is not Muslim, unless they declare themselves not to be Muslims, or show obvious contempt for the religion (such as by desecrating a copy of the Qur’an) or adopt a belief which is against a well-known unanimous consensus. This means that, as in most religions, the majority of criminals are entitled to a proper burial in Islam (although it is not always up to to the local imam or the whole community) as long as they did not regard the crimes they committed as being in line with Islam. Schwartz does not list any “moderate scholar” who has actually declared Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qa’ida to be outside of Islam; the majority, I believe, regard him as being a criminal who justifies his acts with spurious arguments, much as was the case with the Kharijites of old, but still a Muslim. This, of course, means that Muslims should know that they do not have to be loyal to anyone who purports to act in the name of Islam or in defence of Islam, and that we may still condemn a person’s or group’s actions and disassociate from them even if we cannot say they are outside Islam altogether.

Two things in particular make this story look extremely suspect. The first is the apparent prompt disposal of the body. It is understandable that they do not release them for public viewing, but surely there are trusted intermediaries (not just politicians) who could confirm that they had seen the pictures and that they were of Osama bin Laden’s body. It sounds like a child who tells his teacher that he has done his homework, honest, but that the dog ate it. There is no hard evidence that the person killed was Osama bin Laden, unless we accept the Americans’ version of events at face value.

Then there is the excuse given for disposing of the body: that it would have become the focus of a shrine, a place of pilgrimage. Any expert on Islam could have told them that his main followers are Wahhabis and they do not believe in shrines. They do not build them and have destroyed them on a number of occasions; they bury their dead in unmarked graves, including major figures like the last king of Saudi Arabia and their chief scholars such as Abdul-Aziz bin Baz. (They are strongly opposed to Bin Laden’s methodology, but have the same theology.)

Finally, it seems most bizarre that the whole thing was done with a live video feed to the White House. Surely, any such feed would have been a security risk, regardless of whatever security measures were taken (and encryption would have drastically reduced the quality of any live feed). I cannot believe they jeopardised the security of a military operation simply for the president’s personal entertainment. If they did, of course, then they would surely have a recording of what they transmitted. They don’t have to show Bin Laden actually taking a bullet, of course, but there is surely much else they could release, at least once the operation has been cleared up.

This isn’t the only insult to the poppy appeal to be made publically this week — a bunch of idiotic Muslims held a demo in London on Armistice Day (last Thursday) in which a giant poppy was burned and banners reading “British soldiers, burn in Hell” and “Afghanistan, graveyard of empires” were held up, and the two-minute silence was deliberately broken. Of course, this was the one that got media coverage even though it was the usual handful of idiots (no doubt known to those who shouted slogans as Roshonara Choudhary was sentenced last week, if they’re not the same people).

Personally, I rarely get a poppy; I remember doing so when at school and perhaps I have once or twice as an adult, but certainly not every year. However, it’s the “done thing” for TV presenters, news readers and the like to wear them when they appear on TV in the week or so leading up to Remembrance Sunday, which is why Jon Snow has raised a few eyebrows by appearing on TV without one. Snow explained, in response to a comment on his blog that he was “dishonouring” the war dead by appearing without one, he responded that they died so that we could choose when to wear a poppy or not, and to insist that everyone wears one is “poppy fascism” or intolerance. Enforced greetings and symbols, badges and so on are hallmarks of totalitarian states, whether imposed on certain groups or on everyone (e.g. yellow stars in Nazi Germany, the badges everyone wears in North Korea).

A few years ago, someone called Carol Gould wrote an article in which she complained that she had been accosted near Edgware Road by an Arab who saw her poppy and demanded to know if she was of “the Jewish” (I responded here). She then claimed that a cab driver had told her she was asking for it by going to “little Beirut” and displayed “white working-class anger” at the “Islamic takeover” of Britain. She claimed that nobody among the staff at any of the establishments on the Edgware Road wore one, and exaggerated the atmosphere of devotion of British people generally for the event. As someone who, unlike Carol Gould, has grown up in this country, I can say that, while there is some degree of respect for the occasion (such as the two-minute silences in shops, for example), the events are broadcast on TV and radio and kids are taught about it in schools, there is no general atmosphere of reverence and, while attendance at the Cenotaph (where the national commemoration takes place) is large, many of those attending are sent by various organisations. The idea that everyone wears a poppy is simply wrong, even for the white population.

As for why Muslims don’t often wear poppies, there are a number of reasons — many of those on the Edgware Road are not British citizens anyway, and many of the younger generation don’t feel any connection to the forces, particularly since the 1990s when they have mostly been involved in American-led wars against Muslim enemies (though not always; British forces were deployed as peacekeepers in Bosnia and Sierra Leone during the 1990s). Many younger people of any ethnic minority background would not even consider joining the army, regarded it as a white-dominated institution, and there have been many tales of non-white recruits being victimised. On the other hand, there are those in the older generation of British Muslims who did serve in the British Army during World War II, particularly against the Japanese, so they and their descendents are perhaps more likely to be seen wearing them.

Personally, as someone whose grandfathers both served in that war, I think it’s good that this country looks after its old soldiers and that this is done through a mass appeal, not through taxation. However, we also all do contribute towards soldiers’ welfare through taxation, particularly the rehabilitation of injured soldiers as happens at Headley Court and Selly Oak (there was a feature on Headley Court in the Guardian yesterday), so nobody should feel guilty for not contributing. This is, after all, one charity appeal among many, and as was the case with the earlier piece on charity pressure, we may all have causes we find more pressing and more deserving of our money than this one, particularly at a time when the elderly and disabled are going to be badly hit by reductions in public spending, particularly in poorer parts of the country. While I acknowledge that I’ve never been “charity mugged” to buy a poppy, it’s important that the symbol does not become a matter of conformity and that wearing one is not a test of loyalty, particularly given that displays of loyalty and patriotism aren’t part of the national culture for most people anyway.

These claims are nothing new — there was a documentary on the subject (on Channel 4) in this country a few months ago, and I have seen claims about such practices in tourist guidebooks (on Pakistan, I believe) — but what sticks out about this article is the ridiculous justification for the practice, which I don’t believe could possibly come from any Muslim:

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It’s not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren’t in love with their boys.

Afghanistan is far from the only place where women cover their faces, and you get paedophilia everywhere but on nothing like this scale. Furthermore, people in Afghanistan marry young and they will have seen girls when growing up, so they will have some idea of how they will look as women. There is simply no possible Islamic justification for this: there are hadeeths about how devils follow “beardless youths”, i.e. boys of precisely the age of those involved in this custom, more than they follow women, and books by Deobandi scholars (and the Taliban were strongly influenced by the Deobandis in Pakistan) warning men against looking lustfully at boys.

The claim about a “biblical passage” obviously reflects the ignorance of the author. The Bible as it exists today has no relevance to Muslims, and its laws are not taken into account at all. What the Bible says about menstruation doesn’t apply to Muslims who get their law from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, which principally consists of the sayings of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and how they were acted on and interpreted by the early generations of Muslims. Muslims actually don’t regard menstruating women as unclean and, while they are barred from ritual activity, they are not prohibited from touching people or food, or from being touched, as they are in other religions such as Orthodox Judaism and some branches of Hinduism. It’s forbidden to have sex with a woman who currently has her period on, but it is not forbidden for her husband to touch or sleep with her during that time.

This could well be a custom that pre-dates Islam in that region — after all, similar customs existed in ancient Greece and are referred to in such texts as Plato’s Republic. I studied that at A-level and was puzzled by the lead character, named Socrates, talking about his companions being “bitten with a passion for boys in the bloom of youth” as if that was somehow normal. There is simply no way you can twist any Islamic text to show that it’s OK for a man to have sex with a young boy. It just isn’t.

Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, an Afghan official said Tuesday.

… The spokesman, Dr. Kargar Norughli, said his ministry and the World Health Organization had been testing the blood of victims in 10 mass sickenings and had confirmed the presence of toxic but not fatal levels of organophosphates. Those compounds are widely used in insecticides and herbicides, and are also the active ingredients of compounds developed as chemical weapons, including sarin and VX gas.

Dr. Norughli did not explain why the confirmations had not been announced earlier.

But he emphasized that how the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery. There have been no fatalities, and no one has claimed responsibility for the episodes.

Many local officials had dismissed the cases as episodes of mass hysteria provoked by acid and arson attacks on schoolgirls by Taliban fighters and others who objected to their education. But the cases have been reported only in girls’ schools, or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.

Organophosphates are also a common ingredients in sheep dips, and contact with sheep dips has been linked to poisonings of farmers and farm workers in western countries, with long-term debilitating neurological effects including depression and pain. The practice of putting such incidents down to “hysteria” will be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of chronic neurological illness in the West: Gulf War Syndrome and M.E. have both been the subject of such claims and even when outbreaks of M.E. have occurred, there have been those who have tried to put them down to “mass hysteria” as with these poisonings. Even multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, before scientists worked out what was actually wrong with the patients, were put down to hysteria and some victims spent years in psychiatric hospitals because doctors were convinced that their symptoms were signs of mental illness — until the MRI scanners which were invented in the mid-1980s proved that wrong.

Having been shouted down by opponents in what passes as debate for years, it was a profound relief to read Nick Cohen articulating the moral high ground on which the Iraq war was based (“Blair will never be branded a war criminal”, Comment).

It is so simple. The cases for going into Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq are identical: people were being murdered in their thousands. End of story. You can’t support intervention in the first three but not in Iraq. Saddam killed for 30 years and his sons were carrying on murdering.

Opposition to the war is fuelled largely by anti-Americanism in general and a hatred of Bush in particular and, yes, I think he’s a twerp too.

But how can you possibly support such a monster by opposing his removal? How could you and then claim any moral high ground? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

There were, in fact, substantial differences between the situations in Iraq and those in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. In fact, the UN did not intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda; it stopped when the rebels took control of the country. The UN was in the country, but did not act. UN troops had been doing much the same in Bosnia for two years by the time the Rwandan genocide happened.

However, there always was a very voluble public clamour for military action in Bosnia, because it was very clear that atrocities were taking place and that this was taking place in Europe, in a country that had been considered civilised and where people had taken holidays just a few years earlier. Although the atrocious record of Saddam Hussain’s regime was well-known, the impetus for that invasion came from above, not from below. It was Bush’s and Cheney’s own idea, whether in revenge for Saddam’s attempted assassination of Bush’s father or for whatever other reason, and Iraqi human rights could not have been high on their agenda given what they were doing in Bagram and Guantanamo Bay.

Many people who had supported military intervention in the past, even in Afghanistan, opposed it in 2003. We knew that Bush’s intentions were not good, that it would not lead to a meaningful democracy (it remains to be seen whether what exists now will last), that it would be extremely corrupt and brutal. Nick Cohen and his gang were the useful idiots, cheering on the American hard right thinking they were on the same side. In fact, they proved even more incompetent than might have been expected, as parts of the country became awash with terrorists and the country ended up in virtual civil war. Cohen seems oblivious to the fact that elements that he might despise, and that Saddam Hussain kept a lid on, were unleashed after the invasion.

Some of us wanted to see Saddam Hussain gone, including the Muslim Brothers who were instrumental in running the Stop the War Coalition in the UK. We were against this invasion because it was the wrong time and for the wrong reason. Speaking personally, I have friends and relatives in the USA (not just Muslims) and I am not “anti-American”, just against that particular government, and given that its own legitimacy was questionable at the time, it was ironic that it should pretend to spread democracy in other places.