Terry Glavin: Telling lies about Aisha

Among the many defining features that unite the left and the right wings of reactionary isolationism in the rich countries of the world, abject moral squalor is perhaps the most noticeable and repulsive. It thrives by a cunning parasitism that requires of its ruling-class host only an acquiescence to its self-flattery as “the anti-war movement.” All it requires of the rest of us is to be complicit in the lie.
In this way, moral leprosy has metastasized, and like so many undead zombies, “anti-war activists” require nothing but their own pathological solipsism to survive, and only a steady feed-supply of lies and deceptions to corrupt every debate about Afghanistan they choose to infect. Nowhere is this degeneracy more painfully evident than in the way the gangrene has spread throughout the public debates about the young Afghan woman Bibi Aisha, whose beautiful, disfigured face ended up on the cover of Time magazine a few days ago.
Remember that it is in the context of the prevailing “troops-out” sentiment now so deeply embedded in the Western establishment, along with the delusion of an “exit strategy” based on negotiations with the Taliban, that the Time controversy erupted. That is why the zombies do not want you to see Aisha’s face. But Aisha knew what she was doing, and why: “They are the people that did this to me,” she says, touching her damaged face. “How can we reconcile with them?”
For her trouble, Aisha has now suffered the further indignity of having the most vicious calumny heaped upon her dignity and her bravery. The”anti-war” line is that she is a dirty liar. Aisha now stands accused of deliberately prostituting herself for war propaganda in exchange for reconstructive surgery, even though her accusers know full well that Aisha’s surgery treatments in America were secured long before her face appeared on Time‘s cover.
The zombies have also slandered Aryn Baker, the respected Time correspondent who wrote the story. They have called Baker a secret propaganda stooge for the U.S. military, they say she wrote the story about Aisha for the purpose of “bolstering the case for war,” and they have even stooped to lying about Baker’s Afghan husband, calling him a war profiteer. And they have sneered at Time magazine’s unequivocal response: “Aryn Baker’s husband has no connection to the U.S. military, has never solicited business from them and has no financial stake in the U.S. presence in Afghanistan whatsoever.”
They have “problematized” the debate with a barrage of postmodernist psychobabble about “the other” and “objectifying” Aisha to “reify” imperialist fanatasies. They have said the whole thing is a CIA plot. They have claimed occult and personal prior knowledge of what Aisha’s story is “really” about, when in fact Aisha’s story appeared on American national television, twice, months before her face even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, here and here.
One lie after another. One filthy slander after another. One deception after another. Why?
This is why the zombies don’t want you to see Aisha’s face: “That is exactly what will happen,” said Manizha Naderi, referring to Aisha and cases like hers. An Afghan-American whose group Women for Afghan Women runs the shelter where Aisha stayed, Ms. Naderi said, “People need to see this and know what the cost will be to abandon this country.”
This why the “anti-war movement” tells such hysterical lies: Their troops-out politics, which have now so deeply poisoned establishment politics in Europe, Canada and the United States, run in precisely the opposite direction to what Afghan women want. Says WAW board member Esther Hyneman, a strong and tireless feminist I recently had the honour of meeting in Kabul: “Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over.”
There is no plot. There is no secret agenda. And there is no moral difference between the “anti-war” lies you hear circulating about Aisha among Western elites and the lies the Kabuli elites tell when they say Afghan women’s shelters are merely whorehouses.
Reactionary scum are reactionary scum, the world round.

Journalist, author and blogger Terry Glavin is an adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia and editor of Transmontanus Books. He was awarded the 2009 B.C. Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

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