As the second Mother’s Day without my mother approached, Rasil Basu reappeared via an unexpected Google alert.
U.S. historian and writer Noam Chomsky and Indian counterpart Vijay Prashad had resurrected my late mother's prophetic warnings from the late 1980s about the plight of Afghan women and girls under our proxy war with the Soviets.
Chomsky and Prashad examine the legacy of America's two decades of war in Afghanistan, now set to end by Sept. 11 under President Joe Biden's order. (In a rare instance of agreement, Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, had planned on a pullout.) But the authors, who have long argued against a U.S. military presence in favor of our brokering political talks between factions, are concerned about the impact of still leaving several thousand U.S. troops and contractors there. As Politico reported, top military leaders advocate keeping them "to keep the Taliban in check and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorists."