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Category: Afghanistan

  • West condemns Taliban over ‘summary killings’ of ex-soldiers and police

    Human Rights Watch says 47 former members of Afghan national security forces have been killed or forcibly disappeared

    The US has led a group of western nations and allies in condemnation of the Taliban over the “summary killings” of former members of the Afghan security forces reported by rights groups, demanding quick investigations.

    “We are deeply concerned by reports of summary killings and enforced disappearances of former members of the Afghan security forces as documented by Human Rights Watch and others,” read a statement by the US, EU, Australia, Britain, Japan and others, which was released by the state department on Saturday.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Afghan Emirate’s Challenge to the World

    What happened to news about Afghanistan? After their spectacular sweep of the entire country and overnight victory, there is no news now. And Taliban websites remain closed. Just human interest stuff about traitors/ cowards/ whatevers fleeing to the US or wherever. A convening of Afghan women parliamentarians, holding a mock Afghan parliament in exile (a Greek refugee camp). The hysteria about girls schooling ignores the well-documented but little known fact that almost all the schools (80%) that were supposedly educating girls throughout the country were non-functioning or even non-existent. And those teachers who were actually being paid were just pocketing the money (much of it first taken by local officials, who in turn funneled a portion to warlords).

    In fact, all schooling was mostly nonexistent, even for boys, so Afghanistan is actually less literate now, thanks to the US invasion, than it was 20 years ago, and even less literate than in 1978, the last year of peace, when women were going to university and those in Kabul were hijab-less, let alone birqa-less.

    Of course, the fault lies entirely with the nasty Taliban, though they didn’t even exist before 1978. War is nasty business and it’s always the other guy’s fault. And when you lose, you just move on, try to forget. So what if you left the scene-of-the-crime a basket case? Where is Afghanistan anyway?

    The US has a standard operating procedure: bomb the enemy to smithereens. If that doesn’t work, bomb some more. Then find some civilians who have been riddled with your bullets, fly them to Bagram air base for (the best) emergency treatment, try and fit the body pieces together, and presto! a human interest story highlighting how noble you are, how scientific. If that still doesn’t work and you’re getting flak at home, then cut your losses, pull out, and move on to the next enemy (all the time, boycotting the old enemy so it can’t threaten you). Eventually, as you are the world’s sole superpower now, the enemy will come begging and you can relent a bit.

    That was how Vietnam panned out, though it took 20 years to get around to recognizing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It’s a bizarre kind of win-win: even if you lose, the target is reduced to a failed state which is a model for no one, rather a warning for anyone contemplating trying to get out of US clutches. If you win, you can decide just how prosperous the new client state will be. Japan, Korea, and of course Germany got the VIP treatment. (WWI lesson learned: don’t ‘fail’ a big, powerful state). Vietnam managed to recover, and since it is happy to join the US-controlled world economy, it has been allowed to prosper. Reparations are never an option.

    That these horrendous wars never seem to bring any peace, let along goodwill, doesn’t faze US ‘planners’. Bombing is easy, and cheap (given that you have a military-industrial complex that is the very engine of your prosperity). It’s the new US norm. ‘It’s what we do.’

    The complementary policy to these senseless, horrible wars is the fanatical anti-ideology, which since the days of McCarthyism, seems to run in American veins. There is only one way to live, the American way, and any other option is by definition wrong, mistaken, evil. In the 1950s anti-communism poisoned US culture, and led the US down the proverbial rabbit-hole, destroying any socialist revolution on the globe before it could catch hold, cutting off the one path that can save our civilization from its current road to oblivion. Afghanistan provided the perfect battlefront for the latest US obsession (far away, mostly desert and mountains, good for target practice).

    Oh, almost forgot. Lie to enemy, even when they want to surrender. Most Taliban wanted to give up after the US invaded. They weren’t idiots. After a blanket offer by top Taliban leaders to resign was rejected, individuals tried to broker a deal for themselves. After a dozen agreed and were promptly arrested and sent to Bagram, Guantanamo or just tortured and killed, others realized their only future lay in resistance, so they regrouped, some in Pakistan, most just locally where they lived. Sleeper cells were activated and by 2003, as the corruption and murder/ torture by Afghan yes-men blossomed, the rural population started to support the Taliban. Soon half of Afghanistan was being administered by them, providing justice, collecting taxes.

    So why no interest in what’s happening now that the US is gone? And was the US project doomed from the start? Were all those trillions of dollars, 100,000s of lives for naught? Is there a Rosebud?

    Taliban ‘won’ in 2002

    The best way to answer that and what’s happening now is to see what happened under US occupation, but from the Afghan point of view. The Taliban have been governing most of Afghanistan for 15 years now. Anand Gopal’s No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes (2014) does this. He follows the lives of a few local heroes from 2001 to 2010, and presents events through their eyes.

    The answer starts in the dying days of the communist government, which had started out much like the US occupation, brokering peace with local warlords, having scaled back its development projects as things deteriorated. It held on, annoying the US, but then the peace was signed in 1988, ending arming of both sides–which US promptly ignored. For 3 years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the CIA kept weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. When President Najibullah ran out of arms, the mujahideen took over. That was Bush I’s thank you to Gorbachev for dismantling the Soviet Union. (Lying is ok if you’re lying to the enemy.)

    When 9/11 came, Akbar Gul was already a star Taliban fighter, battling the Northern Alliance to the end. When the US invaded, he quit and tried exile, but after being robbed several times in Karachi, he returned to his native Wardak, learned how to fix mobile phones by trial and error, becoming well known as ‘mobile-phone Akbar’. But the US offered no amnesty for those who wanted to leave the movement, and the thieving and violence of the police and Karzai’s stooges, who now were in power and seeking revenge or just riches, became intolerable. A phone call from an old comrade to ‘get to work again’ was heeded.

    Between 2003 and 2010, he was the commander in Wardak, just southwest of Kabul, responsible for assassinating government officials, kidnapping policemen, deploying suicide bombs, killing US soldiers. He even hijacked two tanker trailers full of gas, paid off the drivers, bought arms on the black market, and divided the booty among his team. When interviewed the last time in 2010, he was disillusioned with the stressful life and the increasing intra-Taliban squabbles and one-up-manship. But it was also clear that the US had lost almost from the start with its mania to wipe out the enemy, just as it failed in Iraq to wipe out the Baathists, merely turning them into insurgents.

    Gopal describes the background to this. The lure of the Taliban in the 1990s held much the same allure by 2003, as ‘a home for unsettled youths,’ repulsed by the chaos their country was descending into. It provided ‘a sense of purpose, a communion with something greater.’ Akbar recalled receiving some instruction once on bomb-making from an Arab, presumably al-Qaeda, but otherwise had no interest in international politics, was barely able to read and write. He resented Mullah Omar’s support for bin Laden and his call to martyrdom following 9/11. Instead, he disbanded his men: ‘Go home. Don’t contact each other.’

    How close the US was to victory! If only they had left with their al-Qaeda spoils in 2002, amnestied the Taliban, with a solemn promise not to promote terrorism.

    Heela Achakzai graduated from university in the 1990, married her suitor Musqinyar, an idealist but a secular one, a communist. Though not interested in politics, Heela liked the communists for providing services and freedom for women, but as the Soviet troops retreated, the writing was on the wall, and they fled Kabul to Musqinyar’s family home in Khas Uruzgan. Although she was now effectively under house-arrest, complete with burqa and meshr (male guardian), she liked the Taliban for putting an end to tribal practices, including using females to settle feuds. And they didn’t kill her communist husband either. They lived in safety.

    When 9/11 brought US soldiers and a return of anti-Taliban warlords, her village descended into violence. Her husband was assassinated by a Karzai crony, local warlord Jan Muhammad Khan. She would have had to marry her brother-in-law as second wife, give him her home and possessions. No way. Her story is rivetting. She fled to the US base in Tirin kot, eventually worked promoting elections and and as a midwife. One villager elder told her that while this type of work wasn’t good for ‘our women, the the villages’ it was fitting for ‘educated women like you.’

    Heela also provided medicines to Taliban when they asked, thinking ‘Given Jan Muhammad and Commander Zahir and the others on the government’s side, why wouldn’t they fight?’ Then she was nominated and became a senator, having quietly worked with the Americans. (I presume she was evacuated in August, though she could well return. She is no traitor-coward.)

    Jan Muhammad Khan, Khas Uruzban warlord, plotted with Karzai after the Taliban came to power in 1996, and was about to be executed when 9/11 happened. He was appointed governor of Khas Uruzgan and moved quickly to amass wealth, feeding the US intelligence about Taliban, all of it fabricated (there were no Taliban), used to target his rivals. The US was blind to this but the people of Khas Uruzgan weren’t, and the US attempt to rebuild Afghanistan ended up only enriching the new US-backed elite, and turning most people against the Americans.

    As the Taliban were the only other choice, they gained support. US backers like Jan created nonexistent Taliban to keep the dollars and arms coming. For a country that prides itself as a model to be emulated around the world, it is hard to understand how the US could be so easily hoodwinked for 20 years at a cost of trillions, almost all of it wasted, enriching a handful of corrupt cronies, creating Potemkin villages and spiriting ill-gotten gains abroad. And, in a final irony, warlords like Jan spirited out at the last minute (Jan was assassinated in 2011) along with girls football teams and other Afghans who trusted the US.

    Gopal concludes: the Americans were not fighting a war on terror at all, they were simply targeting those who were not part of the Sherzi clan [another warlord, also later killed by a bomb] and Karzi networks.

    US troops fueled insurgency, ISIS

    Interestingly, Karzai did not flee in August, as did his successor, Ghani, who fled to Dubai with several suitcases full of cash. Karzai was never an easy ally for the US. During an interview with Voice of America in 2017, he claimed that ISIS in Afghanistan is a tool for the US, that he does not differentiate at all between ISIS and the US. In May 2021, he told Der Spiegel he sympathized with the Taliban, and saw them as “victims of foreign forces” and said that Afghans were being used to be ‘each against the other.’ Clearly hedging his bets.

    There were more than a few mass killings by crazed US soldiers, recalling My Lai. Gopal documents the case of Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, awarded a Silver Star for his cold blooded murder of innocents in Khas Uruzgan. A Google search only turns up glowing reports of Pryor’s heroism, but the truth is he murdered 21 pro-American leaders and workers (which the US admitted), with 26 taken prisoner. Which is not much better than a bullet in the head.

    That US troops meant more terrorism, killing, was explained by Eckart Schiewek, political advisor with the UN mission. The same jockeying for power by warlords Dostum and Atta in the north never boiled over. ‘There were no American troops. You couldn’t call on soldiers to settle your feuds.’ By allying with various warlords outside the puppet government, the US undermined the puppet, syphoning funds to pay endless bribes to warlords, and created the petri dish for feuds over who’s closest to the US. A truly vile scenario, especially for a people as fiercely proud and independent as Afghans. By 2005 US fatalities doubled from previous year, and kidnappings and assassinations came in record numbers. Already it was too late. As for poppy elimination, that too became a program to wipe out other tribes’ competition and keep prices high.

    Gopal concludes that there were almost no Taliban or ISIS among Guantanamo prisoners, that most prisoners there and in Afghanistan were casualties of warlord-governors’ phony intelligence whose sole purpose was power and money.

    Real news

    Considering the general news blackout or deliberately anti-Taliban stories, we must look to events during the occupation through the eyes of such as Gopal, Jere Van Dyk, and memoirs of Taliban leaders, and the role of Islam itself in shaping Afghanistan’s future, as this is the bedrock of Taliban thinking and action. To not only respect Islam, but welcome it. “The Taliban was now a part of our family,” said Bowe Bergdahl’s mother Jani, as she waited stoically for news of her hostage son (eventually released). She was just stating a fact and dealing with it, not rejecting or despising it.

    First, ‘jurisprudence is part of the Taliban’s DNA, even to a fault,’ as that is their training (12 years for judges). Governing means providing justice. In a village under Taliban control for two years, the malek (mayor) told Gopal that ‘in that time crime had vanished.’ Taliban ‘police’ had captured a known child molester and turned him over to Islamic justice, with ‘judges tarring his face, parading him around Chak, and forcing him to apologize publicly. If caught again, he would be executed.’ People preferred Taliban austerity to government and foreign impunity.

    Real world political and economic troubles are pushed aside, or dealt with cavalierly, especially anything smacking of western decadence, as the road to hell is paved with seductive music, images, foods, drugs, etc. So that is what’s happening now. Cleaning the slate, exorcizing society of the demons who latched on to the rich heathen invaders. The Taliban are busy dismantling the US puppet infrastructure, finding warlords and bringing some justice to villages and cities.

    Times have changed. Whereas in 1999, it was still possible to smash TVs and radios, keep women off the air, it no longer is. And whereas Afghanistan’s fabulous musical traditions and non-Islamic culture were repressed, destroyed, they are not pushing this any longer. Gopal listened to the Taliban insurgents’ music, watched tapes of Taliban fights with the invader.

    All Taliban websites were banned in August, but Deputy Minister for information and broadcasting of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-IEA Zabihullah Mujahid now has a twitter account. The most recent messages (with lots of insulting comments):

    1. West should not impose its civilization on us, we have an Islamic civilization, and the system of Islamic society that already exists.
    2. Islamic Emirate announces complete ban on the use of foreign currency in the country.
    3. ISIS attack on 400-bed hospital fails, 4 ISIS killed.

    There is another twitter account the Emirate, even charging westerners with a Trumpian ‘fake news’ for suggesting ISIS will grow again if sanctions continue. Voice of Jihad was the Taliban’s main English language site till it was closed. Googling Voice of Jihad Islamic Emiirate of Afghanistan, I found
    https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan which includes more unfiltered news of Taliban. Otherwise Al-Jazeera is the best source.

    So what about girls’ education? With no jobs waiting for high school graduates, villagers could only see potential ruin in allowing their daughters outside. Which is the cart and which the horse?

    It is wrong to think the Taliban are anti-education. They are ‘students,’ and the highest calling is teaching and administering justice. But they don’t want the US determining what is taught and to whom. They follow sharia, not tribal law, which is much better for women.

    The moral of this story?

    Justice is the main thing a government can provide, but for Muslims, it means a strict, god-fearing government. Iran, though Shia, had an Islamic revolution too, and as such is in US crosshairs, much like Afghanistan. It has survived 40 years of US-Israel bullying and worse, so its experience will be important for the Taliban. It is big on the death penalty, and the Emirate of Afghanistan most likely will be too. Women must wear scarves but study freely. Music and the arts are low key. This is most likely how Afghanistan will develop.

    The US can’t accept that Islamic justice is a worthwhile alternative to our very flawed systems of justice. Just as it couldn’t accept the truth that it’s better to be poor in a socialist society than in a capitalist one. Just ask 70% of Russians and the other orphaned ex-Soviets. The 1% needs to be brought under control, tamed to meet society’s pressing needs. And to take away the unease, resentment that eats away at society where the super rich flaunt their wealth and despise the common folk. This is not an easy task. The Taliban have stated recently there should be limits on wealth. They understand the truth behind the Lorenz curve.

    Gopal recounts meeting a one-eyed malek of a village, Garloch, that no longer existed. ‘Nothing you see here in this country belongs to us. You see that road out there? That’s not ours. Everything is borrowed and everything can be taken back.’ Gopal was intrigued by this Sufi wisdom. Garloch’s malek explained the vagaries of existence: First came the Taliban, then US soldiers, then planes killing the wrong suspect, then Taliban, then … until the villagers gave up and left, leaving the old mayor living under a plastic sheet in a gully. His message to Obama: ‘I don’t give a shit about your roads and schools! I want safety for my family.’

    Now comes the hard part. While Talib mullahs are busy righting wrongs and bringing a harsh but just communal peace, factions within the Taliban are also marshalling their forces, vying for power, not to mention the many collaborators, dreaming of another invasion. The revolutionary honeymoon is soon over, and the US continues to sit on Afghanistan’s meagre reserves, thinking about giving them away to 9/11 and other victims.

    Which of course would leave the Taliban nothing to feed Afghans, who will turn again to poppies to survive, which will lead to more US-led boycotting, etc.

    What’s happening now in Afghanistan demands our attention. And not the CNN version of events. It is heartening that such hardy, devoted souls like Gopal really care what happens to Afghans, and truly want the best for them. I want to know what has happened to the villains and heroes of his tale of life behind the lines. Sadly, our age of internet is letting us down on. I can only wish the Taliban well.

    *****

    Warlord Zaman: This whole land is filled with thieves and liars. This is what you Americans have made. I know this game. I went to the Americans and said, ‘I can find bin Laden. Give me $5m and I’ll bring you his head. Then I went to al-Qaeda and told them, ‘Give me $1m or I’ll turn you over the the Americans.’ So they gave me $1m, and I convinced the Americans to stop the bombing for a little while. I told them we could use the time to find Osama, but really it was so those Arab dogs could escape to Pakistan. Then I went to the ISI and said, ‘Give me $500,000 and I’ll give you al-Qaeda.’ They pulled a gun and told me to get out of their face. You see, they don’t play this game. You can’t buy them. Gopal, p148.

    The post Afghan Emirate’s Challenge to the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US is destroying the people of Afghanistan

    When the United States left Afghanistan in August it also froze almost all foreign aid to the country. Now, Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, writes Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

    The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come in an end.

    For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and – “there is no alternative.”

    But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new era.

    The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.

    Why?

    The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.

    That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”

    However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamize had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”

    And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.

    In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.

    The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.

    Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.

    With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.

    That is why, like a crazed wounded animal during the decline of the white West, all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.

    But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition. And that opposition is clear. In order for the world to live, the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy must die.

    The post The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Three months of Taliban occupation: Barbarism unlimited

    November 16 marked exactly three months of Taliban occupation of Kabul, reports Yasmeen Afghan. The world cannot turn its back.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Migrant caravan and Qatar’s tarnished World Cup: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians

    An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.

    And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.

    At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.

    A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.

    In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.

    Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.

    Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?

    Colonial narrative

    The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.

    The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.

    This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.

    It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.

    Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?

    The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.

    The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”

    The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.

    That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.

    Pattern of behaviour

    But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.

    And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.

    But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.

    Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.

    It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.

    When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.

    As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”

    Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.

    The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.

    Killing innocents

    The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.

    Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.

    Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.

    Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.

    In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.

    That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.

    The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.

    No scrutiny

    Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.

    US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce.  But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.

    The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.

    The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.

    But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.

    That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.

    In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.

    Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as US and the West Freeze Government Funds

    Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as U.S. and the West Freeze Government Funds

    Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas. “Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently visited Afghanistan and with refugees in Iran, where as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing everyday. “They told me very clearly, ‘We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through.’”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hi, Juan.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today in Afghanistan where humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a video call with members of the AfghanEvac Coalition who said they need more help evacuating tens of thousands of people who could be targeted under the Taliban government and noted, “Winter is coming. There is a famine already.” The United Nations estimates 60% — that’s more than half of Afghanistan’s population — now suffer from acute hunger and the country faces a financial crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves held in banks overseas. The World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told the BBC Afghanistan is now the worst humanitarian crisis on earth.

    DAVID BEASLEY: It is as bad as you can possibly imagine. In fact, we are now looking at the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth. Ninety-five percent of the people don’t have enough food and now we are looking at 23 million people marching toward starvation. Out of that, almost nine million are knocking on famine’s door. The winter months are coming. We’re coming out of a drought. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.

    AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. estimates half a million people could flee Afghanistan by the end of the year. Thousands of Afghan refugees are now crossing the border into neighboring Iran. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing into Iran every day. This could set up another crisis in Europe, where the European Union agreed Monday to new sanctions against Belarus for bringing some 4,000 migrants to the border with Poland and leaving them stranded in freezing forests.

    For more, we are joined by the NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland, who is in Oslo, Norway. He has just returned from a trip to Iran where he met with Afghan refugees in a refugee camp. He recently tweeted “Iran alone hosts more displaced Afghans than 30 European countries combined. Despite this, nations in the ‘European Championship In Erecting Barbed Wire against Refugees’ give negligible funds for displaced Afghans elsewhere.” His recent New York Times op-ed is headlined Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.

    Jan Egeland, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe the scope of the catastrophe in Afghanistan right now and what you think needs to happen.

    JAN EGELAND: I was myself recently also in Afghanistan and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps around Kabul. I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” They told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the NATO countries not only went for the door, they took all of Afghanistan’s financial reserves with them as they left. They froze the assets of the Afghan government. Could you talk about the role of this issue of all of the money in Afghanistan essentially being held hostage by the Western nations that left?

    JAN EGELAND: Yes. There is a lot of issues over these last 20 years, and one of them is that there was an enormous aid dependency. Seventy percent of teachers, nurses, doctors, water engineers, garbage collectors, public workers were on the payroll of Western development donors. That was cut overnight. I met teachers who were eager to restart girls’ education and boys’ education. They hadn’t been paid since May. The banks are paralyzed because of the freezing of assets, so we, NRC, Norwegian Refugee Council, cannot transfer money to our colleagues in Kabul through the local bank system, not even extract money there to pay salaries for our 2,000 aid workers that did not go for the door, who are there to stay and deliver, because of this freezing of the economy. The Taliban has an enormous responsibility for good governance in the place that they took over, but I sincerely believe that NATO countries mustn’t forget they left behind 40 million people.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the role of Iran and Pakistan, which have basically shouldered an enormous refugee population, estimates of three million Afghans in Iran alone, and the failure of again the West to assist these countries in their efforts to assist the refugees?

    JAN EGELAND: Yes, indeed. Ninety percent of Afghan refugees — and there are many millions of them — accumulated over 40 years of fighting since the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan 40 years ago. The 90% of these refugees are in two countries, Iran and in Pakistan. They are not in Europe. They are not in North America. They are not in the rich countries. They are in these two neighboring countries. In Iran where I was, refugees are getting education and healthcare and so on, but the Iranian host communities are not getting much international assistance at all. Now that 4,000 or 5,000 come over the border every single day, 320,000 since the Taliban took over, it means that the Afghan refugees in Iran are very afraid of the future because they think that the little they have has to be divided in even smaller portions for all of those coming over the border. There has to be an investment in hope inside Afghanistan but also in the two neighboring countries.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about the conditions in the health centers in Afghanistan. This is an excerpt from a France 24 program which features Hasseebullah Barakzai, an administrator at a hospital in Kabul, where patients have to buy their own medicine, gloves and syringes. The clip begins with Masood, a nurse in the hospital.

    MASOOD: [translated] You see, we don’t have any medicine here. We used to have antibiotics, painkillers and vitamins here but it is empty now. In this cupboard we had medicine for heart patients. Now we don’t even have a tablet left. This water cooler doesn’t work anymore. Look, we don’t even have water to wash our hands.

    HASSEEBULLAH BARAKZAI: [translated] We don’t have enough food for the patients. Winter is here and we don’t have enough fuel for the heating system.

    AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan was already suffering from decades of war, drought and economic collapse prior to the Taliban takeover, but now U.N. officials have been warning of a much worse humanitarian crisis in the country with 23 million people facing hunger and nine million on the brink of starvation. Children are bearing the brunt of the crisis. The U.N. warned that if urgent humanitarian assistance is not provided, more than a million children will die from malnutrition. The BBC spoke to a mother whose two severely malnourished children were hospitalized.

    MOTHER: [translated] The pain that he is suffering, I also feel it. Only God knows what I go through when I look at him. Two of my children are facing death because we don’t have any money. I want the world to help Afghan people. I don’t want any other mother to see their children suffering like this.

    AMY GOODMAN: Just some of the voices of Afghanistan. Jan Egeland, as Juan just pointed out, when the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s government, the country suddenly lost access to $9 billion in Central Bank reserves, frozen by the Biden administration. For those countries that are saying, “We will not support the Taliban so we will not give money,” what do you say to them?

    JAN EGELAND: I say “Correct.” Money should not go to the military political group called the Taliban that took power by force. The money should go to the people, and it is possible. Number one, there has to be trust funds, as we call it, that is held by UN agencies, that funnel money directly to the hospitals that you just showed where people are dying at the moment. It can go straight to the teachers that were on the payroll of the World Bank previously. It can go straight to them. The money can go through us, international organizations, straight to the people. Secondly, unfreeze those funds that will enable banks to function again. At the moment, we cannot even buy relief items in Afghanistan. We have to ship them over, take them over from Pakistan and Iran which means that employment is dying in Afghanistan. Thirdly, donors, come down from the fence. See that we are there. We are reliable channels for funding. The money will go to the people. Transmit funding, not just come with pledges. This will not become Switzerland in a long time. You have to share the risk with us to save lives this winter.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, isn’t it in the interest of NATO and the Western nations that were in Afghanistan to assure some kind of an orderly government in Afghanistan? Because if the Taliban are not able to deliver basic services to their people, doesn’t that give the possibility for the rise of even more extremist groups within the country, like ISIS?

    JAN EGELAND: That could well be. But anyhow, I would argue that nobody wants an implosion in Afghanistan where 40 million people see “I have no hope here. I need to leave.” People would then use the neighboring countries as a segue, a channel to go elsewhere, including to Europe where we have worked ourselves up in a hysteria for a very few thousand migrants on the Polish-EU border. Hundreds of thousands have now assembled at the Iranian-Afghan border on the Afghan side with the intent to get over. Iranian refugees I spoke to said, “All our relatives have started to wander.” They want to come to Iran and they want to wander towards Europe. So it is in everybody’s interest to stabilize things in Afghanistan, and I just listed the three things that can be done. It is not rocket science. It has to happen tomorrow. We have no time really before the massive death starts.

    AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to turn to Hassan Esfandiar of the Iranian Red Crescent, who spoke to Al Jazeera about the difficulties of providing assistance to the thousands of Afghans you just described arriving at the border every day.

    HASSAN ESFANDIAR: Due to the current situation of sanctions to the country, unfortunately we are not able or we were not able to receive the international donations assistance because the banking channels are blocked and then we are not able to receive the humanitarian donations. So far, the Iran Red Crescent has tried to provide its own resources for the Afghan displaced populations who are approaching the border. As it is mentioned by your colleagues in the report, the average number of the populations who are approaching the Iranian borders are between 2,000 to 7,000 per day, so it’s a huge number.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, of course the U.S. has sanctions against Iran, so how can Iran be helped in dealing with this number of refugees that are crossing the border, 4,000 or 5000 every day? What is getting the West’s attention is what is happening in Eastern Europe. Earlier today, Polish border guards firing tear gas, water cannons at hundreds of asylum-seekers trying to push their way through a razor-wire barrier erected along the Poland-Belarus border. That’s 4,000 to 5,000 refugees there altogether. What’s happening in Iran is every day. If you could address both, from Iran to Poland-Belarus border?

    JAN EGELAND: As a European, I’m ashamed at what is happening in our part of the world. What Belarus is doing by using vulnerable migrants like chess pawns in some kind of a power play, and then Europe basically saying, “We’re not going to hear any asylum applications at all” in violation of international law. “We’re going to throw everybody out.” Then migrants in some kind of a stalemate with the Army on either side, wanting them to go in opposing directions. That is Europe with a few thousand. In Iran, we are having between three and a half and four million Afghans at the moment. Three and a half to four million. I think that has to be sunk in — 4,000 or 5,000 more per day, and a very small international aid program.

    Again, the United Nations is there with UNHCR. They’re a refugee agency. NRC is there. We can do more. We need more funding. We also ask for more freedom of operation from the Iranian authorities so we can win this race against the winter on both sides of the border, inside Afghanistan but also in Iran and in Pakistan. It has to be understood that a lot is at stake. It is not a small catastrophe. It is 23 million people who have no more food. They will wander. I would go if I was in that situation. I would also wander to where I could get food for my children.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the particular role of the United States in all of this as being the primary power that led the war in Afghanistan for so many years and then the Biden administration suddenly pulling out — what would you urge the Biden administration to do now?

    JAN EGELAND: The U.S. should lead, really, as it has in the military political project of the last 20 years, should lead in the humanitarian relief operation. Unfreeze the assets that is necessary to get the public sector going. The World Bank sits on funds. When I wrote to the World Bank president, the answer back was, “Well, we’re willing to do things if the member states on our board, the U.S. and others, tell us to release money. We can’t release money.” It is sitting there for teachers and nurses and hospitals and whatnot in Afghanistan.

    Also, enable us as organizations to really work effectively and efficiently on both sides of the border. Iran sanction is making it difficult for us to work to some extent. The Norwegian Refugee Council couldn’t even transfer money for a full year after the Trump administration started these sanctions because there was no bank with a backbone strong enough to transfer aid money to our people because they were so afraid of one day coming in court in New York because of the potential break of these sanctions. It is paralyzing for us who are on the front lines of humanity.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, the U.N. Climate Summit just wrapped up in Glasgow with a significantly weakened pact that activists, scientists, many governments say falls far short of what is needed to avert a climate catastrophe. You tweeted, “This deal is better than no deal, but far from achieving climate justice and avert disaster displacements. There are too many carbon spewing spoilers among the negotiators. The fight must now be taken to each and every big polluter.” Name names. Talk specifically about what has to be done and how the climate catastrophe generates climate refugees.

    JAN EGELAND: I would start actually by going to those who intend to burn a lot of coal now that will lead to — and Afghanistan and Iran, that we are talking about, have both massive droughts at the moment. It is climate change-fueled. Really it is the major industrialized nations that has to do most, including China and now India, that are carbon-spewing and plan to spew out much more carbon in the coming years. We have to call a spade a spade. Look at where the emissions come from and it all has to come dramatically down. Afghans, they emit nothing really, and they are the first to starve because of this. The economic chaos and the droughts have created chaos in Afghanistan. Same in the Sahel belt. I was in places like Burkina Faso and Negev [sp] and so on, and you see how vulnerable they are. They have not emitted anything, really, in recent decades and they are first and hardest hit.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council. We will link to your piece in The New York Times, “Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.” Speaking to us from Oslo, Norway.

    Coming up, we look at the U.S.-China summit that took place last night and look more broadly at U.S.-China relations. We will speak to Alfred McCoy, his new book out today, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Military Defends Strikes on “Armed” Women and Children

    A US military spokesperson has defended a series of strikes on civilians in Syria, which killed 80 people including women and children, claiming they were in self-defense and that no disciplinary measures were necessary.

    The US military found itself at the center of controversy after the New York Times reported that it had covered up a 2019 strike on Syrian civilians which left at least 80 dead. After the report went viral, US officials finally acknowledged the casualties in a statement and claimed that 16 of those killed were allegedly Islamic State fighters and 4 were civilians.

    Upon being asked about the other 60 casualties, which apparently included women and children, US Central Command told the New York Times that it “was not clear” whether they were civilians “in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”

    On Sunday, a US Central Command spokesperson defended the strikes in a statement to the BBC, claiming they were in self-defense. Captain Bill Urban said the military could not “conclusively characterize the status of more than 60 other casualties,” because “multiple armed women and at least one armed child were observed in the video.”

    “The exact mixture of armed and unarmed personnel could not be conclusively determined,” Urban argued, hypothesizing however that it was “likely” a majority of the casualties “were also combatants at the time of the strike.”

    It is also highly likely that there were additional civilians killed by these two strikes

    Despite acknowledging that the strikes killed civilians, including women and children, Urban claimed their investigation concluded the strikes “were legitimate self-defence strikes” and that “no disciplinary actions were warranted.”

    According to the New York Times’ report, even US military officers were shocked and disturbed by the strikes, which they observed live from a drone camera feed, and some questioned whether the incident could be considered a war crime. The entire incident, however, was reportedly soon covered up and reports of the casualties were classified.

    The post US Military Defends Strikes on “Armed” Women and Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Duke and Duchess visit Afghan refugee at US, NJ military base.

    New Jersey

    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan met the Afghan refugees during a trip to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for their foundation Archewell, Mail-Online reported.

    More than 10,000 Afghans migrated after Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Refugees accommodated temporarily at a compound in the base as part of Task Force Liberty.

    Harry and Meghan also visited a English learning classroom full of children, and spoke to several pupils who practiced phrases such as ‘nice to meet you’.

    According to Mail Online, The couple were pictured pointing at their heads as they led the class in singing Head, Shoulders, Knees And Toes.

    Meghan was pictured holding up a red pen, as the children shouted out the English words for colors they were learning that day.

    At last, couple thanked the teachers in particular for their efforts, and reminded them to take care of their own mental health as well.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Court hears evidence UK Special Forces hid war crime evidence

    Elite UK soldiers may have covered up evidence of their war crimes, the High Court has heard. An Afghan who lost several family members during UK military operations has brought the case. MOD documents seem to show investigators kept the cases secret.

    The man known as Safiullah says four family members died at the hands of UK troops. The alleged murders happened in 2011 and the accused killers were members of the UK Special Forces. The new documents show remarkable details, including comments by concerned senior officers about the legality of killings.

    Safiullah claims the incidents weren’t investigated properly and his lawyers want the judge to order the MOD to release more documents.

    War crimes

    The alleged crimes saw 17 people killed by UK Special Forces in February 2011 over two days. The soldiers claimed they had taken captured men back into their houses to search. But the soldiers insist some captives then reached for hidden weapons and were killed in response.

    But senior officers mentioned in the documents do not appear to believe this. One colonel said the claims were “quite incredible”. Another officer said:

     I find it depressing it has come to this. Ultimately a massive failure of leadership.

    Controlled-access

    The court also heard the documents relating to the cases were kept locked away in a “controlled-access security compartment”.

    The court learned that one top officer said soldier’s stories contained “layers of implausibilities”, and that this made their claims “especially surprising and logic defying”.

    Even more shockingly, one officer spoke of execution-style killings of restrained captives:

    It was also indicated that fighting-age males were being executed on target inside compounds, using a variety of methods after they had been restrained. In one case it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual being killed with a pistol.

    Overseas Operations Act

    The allegations brought by Safiullah have made it to the courts. But thanks to the Tory’s Overseas Operations Act, other cases, especially those more than five years old (six years for civil cases), may never come to court. This means that older allegations from Iraq and Afghanistan are harder to pursue.

    Top Tories like ex-veterans minister Johnny Mercer have maintained the act was about stopping “vexatious” (illegitimate) allegations against the military. Opponents, like Amnesty International, disagree. Because, as it states:

    War crimes are still war crimes if they took place five years ago.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Army

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Afghan mosque blast leaves at least three killed and several wounded.

    Jalalabad,

    A blast at a mosque in Afghanistan rocks Nangarhar province, at least three people were killed and wounded more than 15 on Friday, a hospital official told news agency.

    The blast took place in Spin Ghar district of the eastern province, a active belt of Daesh group activity since August Taliban seized power.

    According to a Taliban official told to news agency that, “I can confirm a blast during Friday prayers inside a mosque in Spin Ghar district. There are casualties and fatalities.”

    The Afghan based Daesh group first emerged in Nangarhar in 2015 and has claimed responsibility for a series of bloody attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power.

    One of the latest attack in early November, Daesh fighters conducted the Kabul National Military Hospital, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 50.

    Earlier this year Deash attacks on two popular mosques with the ethnic minority Hazara community killed more than 120 people.

    .

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • The Foreign Policy Response to the Situation for Women in Afghanistan: From Optics to Effective Change?

    By Sarah Hellyer

    Women’s Rights as Rhetoric

    Concerns for the rights of Afghan women and girls were used to leverage support for the war in Afghanistan from start to finish. In her famous radio address at the beginning of the war, Laura Bush urged Western governments and the international community to amplify and protect the voice of Afghan women. Throughout the duration of the war, this sentiment was captured in the development of foreign policies which were notionally designed to facilitate women’s empowerment and prevent further curtailment of their rights.

    Yet much of the political support and resourcing behind these nominal policies began to dwindle as the war continued, resulting in a failure to secure meaningful change for Afghan women following the withdrawal of US and allied forces. Now, Afghan women and girls wait to see whether the international community is serious about promoting and securing their rights, or if concerns for their wellbeing were simply optics all along. 

    The frustration that Afghan women feel towards the ineffective, optics-driven policy response of the international community is summarised in the following quote from an Afghan human rights defender who spoke recently at a seminar on women and peace negotiations organised by the Castan Centre and Monash Centre for Gender Peace and Security:

    “…the other side of the story is the unfair position of the international community. While in statements and press releases and their tweets they talk about women’s rights, they think that women’s rights is a priority for them, that women are half of the society in Afghanistan; in reality they have not done much in terms of protection of especially women human rights defenders in Afghanistan.”  

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Feminist Foreign Policy – A New Framework for Securing Women’s Rights?

    In contrast to foreign policies which address the rights of women and gender equality as an isolated policy concern, such as those relied on by the US and other western countries throughout the war in Afghanistan, Feminist Foreign Policy takes a structural approach to securing the rights of women. Feminist foreign policy draws on critical feminist and race scholarship to create a policy framework that addresses and interrogates the global systems of patriarchal power which facilitate the military-industrial complex and perpetuate harms against women. It is also a framework which steps away from traditional forms of foreign policy which focus on military force and coercion, opting instead for policies which holistically address the human needs of the most vulnerable. Under a feminist foreign policy, the needs of women are central to all policy considerations and their engagement is required in all aspects of political and policy decision making.

    Feminist Foreign Policy is achieving groundswell amongst certain governments, as indicated by the establishment of a Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy which was formalised at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris in June this year.  While gender equality and the rights of women are playing an increasingly significant role within international foreign policy, only 8 countries, including Sweden and Canada have formally adopted a feminist foreign policy. Notably, Australia, the UK and the US are yet to implement a formal Feminist Foreign Policy. 

    Importantly, research has shown that when women are placed at the centre of foreign policy concerns, meaningful outcomes can be achieved which go beyond optics or gestures. In particular, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that peace agreements which engage civil society and women’s organisations are 64% less likely to fail.[1] Further, studies indicate that when women participate in peace processes, the agreement reached is likely to be better implemented and more durable.[2] Moreover, it has also been found that societies with higher levels of gender equality are less prone to conflict both between and within states.[3] Addressing the need for women engagement in peace talks in the Afghan context, a joint brief from UN Women and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission notes that: 

    “….in a context where conflict recidivism remains high around the world, the inclusion of women in peace processes, and ceasefires negotiations in particular, may result in the long-term sustainability of the agreement—and of peace itself.”

    Yet despite the evidence that women’s engagement in peace talks leads to better foreign policy outcomes, there were only four women in the Afghan government’s 21-person negotiation team at the Doha negotiations, and no women delegates representing the Taliban.

    The following quote from an Afghan human rights defender at the Women and Peace seminar highlights the need for women to be meaningfully engaged in foreign policy as opposed to symbolic inclusion:

    “I think what the major problem is, is giving a symbolic role to Afghan women. Even if it’s a ministerial position, whether it’s an ambassador position, whether you are holding a senior position, whether you are in the negotiation team … women are mostly given symbolic roles. It’s more about numbers, not about meaningful participation of women, it’s not about women making decisions, it’s not about women influencing the decisions.”

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Similarly, this Afghan commentator at the same seminar addresses a key concern of feminist foreign policy, namely that peace-negotiation frameworks should holistically incorporate women instead of being limited to the realm of military and combat, which is primarily the ambit of men:

    “The belief in Afghanistan is that men fought, so they have to also bring peace. Because men have been leading the war in Afghanistan, they believe that they … have the responsibility to discuss peace in Afghanistan. I have witnessed different forums where, you know, men have said ‘why should we bring in women? What woman has to do [here]? We know the war, so we will know the peace also.”  

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Feminist Foreign Policy in the Wake of the Withdrawal

    Canada and Sweden are two countries that fought in Afghanistan whilst having a feminist foreign policy framework in place. Sweden was the first country to introduce a feminist foreign policy back in 2014. Ann Bernes, Director and Special Advisor on Women, Peace and Security at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, has said that Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is about moving gender equality from being an issue that competes amongst other priorities to being “the absolute core and DNA of… everything we do.”  The rights and resources of women in Afghanistan has been a key focus of Swedish feminist foreign policy, with Afghanistan being the largest recipient country of Swedish development assistance since 2013.

    Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, which was introduced in 2017, takes a holistic approach to the aims of feminist foreign policy, addressing not just issues of equality and rights recognition but also women’s engagement with and disruption of existing power structures. An example of a project instituted under Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy in Afghanistan was the Amplify Change: Supporting Women’s Rights project aimed at promoting women’s and girls’ rights by increasing awareness of existing rights under the law and by enhancing women’s and girls’ access to services and support.”                                              

    Yet while both Canada and Sweden have established feminist foreign policy programming efforts during the occupation of Afghanistan, there has been little indication from either country about how these efforts will continue following the withdrawal of allied forces that has occurred this year. In a statement following their withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Swedish government has said:

    “Under the development assistance strategy, Sweden was due to contribute almost SEK 3.3 billion between 2021 and 2024. Following the Taliban takeover, Sweden will have to redirect parts of this assistance.”

    This raises the question of how countries such as Sweden and Canada will continue to proceed with their feminist foreign policy approach following withdrawal. It also raises questions as to whether the current iterations of these country’s feminist policies can effectively address the needs of Afghan women. Importantly, a growing number of feminist foreign policy advocates argue that any form of military intervention is incommensurate with the goal of furthering women’s rights, given the violent patriarchal structures which are imbedded within the military.

    Where to from here?

    For many advocates, the withdrawal of troops provides an opportunity for the US and allied countries to instigate a total paradigm shift within their foreign policies that facilitates a non-military solution to the situation in Afghanistan through a commitment to peace building. For Lara Kiswani, the executive director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Centre (a member of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance), this involves adopting the principles of ‘feminist democracy’ whereby intersectionality and self-determination are pioneered, and economic and political power is redistributed.

    In any case, the international community waits to see whether the withdrawal of the US and its NATO allies truly signifies the end of (albeit perfunctory) efforts to empower women in Afghanistan, or whether this juncture presents an opportunity to revise current foreign policies and adopt a substantive feminist framework.

    References

    [1] Desirée Nilsson (2012) Anchoring the Peace: Civil Society Actors in Peace Accords and Durable  Peace, International Interactions, 38:2, 243-266, DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2012.659139.

    [2] Jana Krause, Werner Krause & Piia Bränfors (2018) Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace, International Interactions, 44:6, 985-1016, DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2018.1492386.

    [3] Hudson, Valerie M., Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott, and Chad F. Emmett. “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States.” Quarterly Journal: International Security, vol. 33. no. 3. (Winter 2008/09): 7-45.

    Sarah Hellyer is completing a double degree in a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University.  She is currently undertaking the Monash Afghanistan Support Clinic set up by the Monash Faculty of Law’s Clinical Education Program to support the Ham diley Campaign. The Campaign is an initiative started byPhD students Azadah Raz Mohammad (Melbourne University) and Karin Frodé (Monash University, Castan Centre Affiliate) and CEO of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, Simone Abel, that seeks to support Afghans at risk by providing research and advocacy support, as well as by leveraging trusted contacts to make referrals for evacuation.

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    This post was originally published on Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.

  • Amir K Muttaqi Afghan FM arrived Pakistan.

    Islamabad,

    Amir Khan Muttaqi Acting Foreign Minister of Afghanistan’s has arrived Pakistan on a three-day visit, News channel reported.

    According to the report, a high-level delegation of the Taliban-led Afghan government also accompanied Muttaqi.

    During visit, acting foreign minister will hold meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan, his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and other Pakistani government officials, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

    The Afghan delegation will also take part in the Troika Plus meet on Afghanistan which is set to start on Thursday, November 11. Special representatives from China, the Russian Federation, the United States and Pakistan will also participate to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

    Pakistan has still not recognized the caretaker setup in Afghanistan. Earlier, FM Qureshi, visit to Kabul, had told the media that he invited Mutaqqi to attend the Troika Plus meet.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Kabul Dairies Part 19: Afghan cricketers subtly defy Taliban

    Afghanistan, a country gripped by misery, tyranny and an uncertain future, is having moments of joy and pride, thanks to the men’s national cricket team, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • A New Memoir Reveals How Brzezinski’s Chessboard Led to US Being Checkmated in Afghanistan

    Nearly as suspenseful as the Taliban’s meteoric return to power after the final withdrawal of American armed forces from Afghanistan is the uncertainty over what will come next amid the fallout. Many have predicted that Russia and China will step in to fill the power vacuum and convince the facelift Taliban to negotiate a power-sharing agreement in exchange for political and economic support, while others fear a descent into civil war is inevitable. Although Moscow and Beijing potentially stand to gain from the humiliating U.S. retreat by pushing for an inclusive government in Kabul, the rebranded Pashtun-based group must first be removed as a designated terrorist organization. Neither wants to see Afghanistan worsen as a hotbed of jihad, as Islamist separatism already previously plagued Russia in the Caucasus and China is still in the midst of an ongoing ethnic conflict in Xinjiang with Uyghur Muslim secessionists and the Al Qaeda-linked Turkestan Islamic Party. At this point everyone recognizes the more serious extremist threat lies not with the Taliban but the emergence of ISIS Khorasan or ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate blamed for several recent terror attacks including the August 26th bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport in the Afghan capital which killed 13 American servicemembers and more than a 100 Afghans during the U.S. drawdown.

    Three days later, American commanders ordered a retaliatory drone strike targeting a vehicle which they claimed was en route to detonate a suicide bomb at the same Kabul airport. For several days, the Pentagon falsely maintained that the aerial assault successfully took out two ISIS-K militants and a servile corporate media parroted these assertions unquestioningly, including concocting a totally fictitious report that the blast consisted of “secondary explosions” from devices already inside the car intended for use in an act of terror. Two weeks later, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was forced to apologize and admit the strike was indeed a “tragic mistake” which errantly killed ten innocent civilians — all of whom were members of a single family including seven children — while no Daesh members were among the dead. This distortion circulated in collusion between the endless war machine and the media is perhaps only eclipsed by the alleged Russian-Taliban bounty program story in its deceitfulness.

    If any Americans were aware of ISIS-K prior to the botched Kabul airstrike, they likely recall when former U.S. President Donald Trump authorized the unprecedented use of a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, informally referred to as the “Mother Of All Bombs”, on Islamic State militants in Nangarhar Province back in 2017. Reportedly, Biden’s predecessor had to be shown photos from the 1970s of Afghan girls wearing miniskirts by his National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, to renege on his campaign pledge of ending the longest war in U.S. history. As it happens, the ISIS Khorasan fighters extinguished by the MOAB were sheltered at an underground tunnel complex near the Pakistani border that was built by the C.I.A. back in the 1980s during the Afghan-Soviet war. Alas, the irony of this detail was completely lost on mainstream media whose proclivity to treat Pentagon newspeak as gospel has been characteristic of not only the last twenty years of U.S. occupation but four decades of American involvement in Afghanistan since Operation Cyclone, the covert Central Intelligence Agency plan to arm and fund the mujahideen, was launched in 1979.

    Frank Wisner, the C.I.A. official who established Operation Mockingbird, the agency’s extensive clandestine program to infiltrate the news media for propaganda purposes during the Cold War, referred to the press as it’s “Mighty Wurlitzer”, or a musical instrument played to manipulate public opinion. Langley’s recruitment of assets within the fourth estate was one of many illicit activities by the national security apparatus divulged in the limited hangout of the Church Committee during the 1970s, along with C.I.A. complicity in coups, assassinations, illegal surveillance, and drug-induced brainwashing of unwitting citizens. At bottom, it wasn’t just the minds of human guinea pigs that ‘The Company’ sought to control but the news coverage consumed by Americans as well. In his testimony before a congressional select committee, Director of Central Intelligence William Colby openly acknowledged the use of spooks in journalism, as seen in the award-winning documentary Inside the C.I.A.: On Company Business (1980). Unfortunately, the breadth of the secret project and its vetting of journalists wasn’t fully revealed until an article by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, whereas the series of official investigations only ended up salvaging the deep state by presenting such wrongdoings as rogue “abuses” rather than an intrinsic part of espionage in carrying out U.S. foreign policy.

    The corrupt institution of Western media also punishes anyone within its ranks who dares to swim against the current. The husband and wife duo of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of a new memoir which illuminates the real story of Afghanistan, were two such journalists who learned just how the sausage is made in the nation’s capital with the connivance of the yellow press. Both veterans of the peace movement, Paul and Liz were initially among those who naively believed that America’s humiliation in Vietnam and the well-publicized hearings which discredited the intelligence community might lead to a sea change in Washington with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. In hindsight, there was actually good reason for optimism regarding the prospect for world peace in light of the arms reduction treaties and talks between the U.S. and Moscow during the Nixon and Ford administrations, a silver lining to Henry Kissinger’s ‘realist’ doctrine of statecraft. However, any glimmer of hope in easing strained relations between the West and the Soviet Union was short-lived, as the few voices of reason inside the Beltway presuming good faith on the part of Moscow toward détente and nuclear proliferation were soon challenged by a new bellicose faction of D.C. think tank ghouls who argued that diplomacy jeopardized America’s strategic position and that the USSR sought global dominion.

    Since intelligence assessments inconveniently contradicted the claims of Soviet aspirations for strategic superiority, C.I.A. Director George H.W. Bush consulted the purported expertise of a competitive group of intellectual warmongers known as ‘Team B’ which featured many of the same names later synonymous with the neoconservative movement, including Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Bush, Sr. had replaced the aforementioned Bill Colby following the notorious “Halloween Massacre” firings in the Gerald Ford White House, a political shakeup which also included Kissinger’s ouster as National Security Advisor and the promotion of a young Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense with his pupil, one Richard B. Cheney, named Chief of Staff. This proto-neocon soft coup allowed Team B and its manipulated estimates of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to undermine the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between Washington and the Kremlin until Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev finally signed a second comprehensive non-proliferation treaty in June 1979.

    The behind-the-scenes split within the foreign policy establishment over which dogma would set external policymaking continued wrestling for power before the unipolarity of Team B prevailed thanks to the machinations of Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. If intel appraisals of Moscow’s intentions and military capabilities didn’t match the Team B thesis, the Polish-American strategist devised a scheme to lure the USSR into a trap in Afghanistan to give the appearance of Soviet expansionism in order to convince Carter to withdraw from SALT II the following year and sabotage rapprochement. By the time it surfaced that the C.I.A. was supplying weapons to Islamist insurgents in the Central Asian country, the official narrative dispensed by Washington was that it was aiding the Afghan people fight back against an “invasion” by the Red Army. Ironically, this was the justification for a proxy conflict which resulted in the deaths of at least 2 million civilians and eventually collapsed the socialist government in Kabul, setting off a bloody civil war and the emergence of the Taliban.

    Even so, it was the media which helped manage the perception that the C.I.A.’s covert war began only after the Soviets had intervened. Meanwhile, the few honest reporters who tried to unveil the truth about what was happening were silenced and relegated to the periphery. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould were the first two American journalists permitted entry into the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1981 by the Moscow-friendly government since Western correspondents had been barred from the country. What they witnessed firsthand on the ground could not have contrasted more sharply from the accepted tale of freedom fighters resisting a communist “occupation” disseminated by propaganda rags. Instead, what they discovered was an army of feudal tribesman and fanatical jihadists who blew up schools and doused women with acid as they waged a holy war against an autonomous, albeit flawed, progressive government in Kabul enacting land reforms and providing education for girls. In addition, they learned the Soviet military presence was being deliberately exaggerated by major outlets who either outright censored or selectively edited their exclusive accounts, beginning with CBS Evening News and later ABC’s Nightline.

    Not long after the Taliban established an Islamic emirate for the first time in the late 1990s, Brzezinski himself would shamelessly boast that Operation Cyclone had actually started in mid-1979 nearly six months prior to the deployment of Soviet troops later that year. Fresh off the publication of his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, the Russophobic Warsaw-native told the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998:

    Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the National Security Advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

    Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

    Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?

    B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

    Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?

    B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

    Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

    B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

    If this stunning admission straight from the horse’s mouth is too candid to believe, Fitzgerald and Gould obtain confirmation of Brzezinski’s Machiavellian confession from one of their own skeptics. Never mind that Moscow’s help had been requested by the legitimate Afghan government to defend itself against the U.S. dirty war, a harbinger of the Syrian conflict more than three decades later when Damascus appealed to Russia in 2015 for military aid to combat Western-backed “rebel” groups. Paul and Liz also uncover C.I.A. fingerprints all over the suspicious February 1979 assassination of Adolph Dubs, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan, whose negotiation attempts may have inadvertently thrown a wrench into Brzezinski’s ploy to draw the USSR into a quagmire. Spurring Carter to give his foreign policy tutor the green light to finance the Islamist proxies, the timely kidnapping and murder of the U.S. diplomat at a Kabul hotel would be pinned on the KGB and the rest was history. The journo couple even go as far as to imply the branch of Western intelligence likely responsible for his murder was an agent from the Safari Club, an unofficial network between the security services of a select group of European and Middle Eastern countries which carried out covert operations during the Cold War across several continents with ties to the worldwide drug trade and Brzezinski.

    Although he was considered to be of the ‘realist’ school of international relations like Kissinger, Brzezinski’s plot to engineer a Russian equivalent of Vietnam in Afghanistan increased the clout of neoconservatism in Washington, a persuasion that would later reach its peak of influence in the George W. Bush administration. In retrospect, the need for a massive military buildup to achieve Pax Americana promoted by the war hawks in Team B was a precursor to the influential “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” manifesto by the Project for the New American Century cabal preceding 9/11 and the ensuing U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Fitzgerald and Gould also historically trace the ideological roots of neoconservatism to its intellectual foundations in the American Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. If a deviated branch of Marxism seems like an unlikely origin source for the right-wing interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration, its basis is not as unexpected as it may appear. In fact, one of the main reasons behind the division between the Fourth International and the Comintern was over the national question, since Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” called for expansion to impose global revolution unlike Stalin’s “socialism in one country” position which respected the sovereignty and self-determination of nation states while still giving support to national liberation movements.

    The authors conclude by highlighting how the military overhaul successfully championed by the neoconservatives marked the beginning of the end for U.S. infrastructure maintenance as well. With public attention currently focused on the pending Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to repair decaying industry at home just as the disastrous Afghan pullout has put President Joe Biden’s favorability at an all-time low, Fitzgerald and Gould truly connect all the dots between the decline of America as a superpower with Brzezinski and Team B. Even recent statements by Jimmy Carter himself were tantamount when he spoke with Trump about China’s economic success which he attributed to Beijing’s lack of wasteful spending on military adventures, an incredible irony given the groundwork for the defense budget escalation begun under Ronald Reagan was laid by Carter’s own foreign policy. Looking back, the spousal team note that the ex-Georgia governor did not need much coaxing after all to betray his promises as a candidate, considering his rise to the presidency was facilitated by his membership alongside Brzezinski in the Trilateral Commission, an elite Rockefeller-funded think tank. What is certain is that Paul and Liz have written an indispensable book that gives a level of insight into the Afghan story only attainable from their four decades of scholarly work on the subject. The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond is now available from Trine Day Press and the timing of its release could not offer better context to recent world events.

    The post A New Memoir Reveals How Brzezinski’s Chessboard Led to US Being Checkmated in Afghanistan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charlotte Bellis on Afghanistan: ‘It’s just life and death on so many levels’

    RNZ News

    In just a few weeks the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply as millions cope without desperately needed international aid, New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis says.

    Bellis is Al Jazeera’s senior producer in Afghanistan and reported on the turmoil in August as the Taliban took over the government and thousands of people tried to flee.

    She has dealt with Taliban leaders for a long time, and has sensed a change in their attitudes since they first ruled the country before being toppled 20 years ago.

    She had to leave the country in mid-September because the network feared for her safety and Bellis noted on Twitter that the Taliban were detaining and beating journalists trying to cover protests.

    Now she has returned and told RNZ Sunday Morning that she was not worried about her safety.

    “The situation here is pretty dire and there are a lot of stories still to be told and I feel invested in what’s happening here and I also just love the country. It’s a beautiful place to be with amazing people and I genuinely like being here.”

    However, the country is facing an uncertain future with its population suffering more than ever now that international aid has been cut off.

    UN warns of humanitarian crisis
    This week the United Nations warned that Afghanistan is becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and Bellis agrees.

    “The Taliban took over about two months ago and I just can’t believe how quickly everything has deteriorated.

    “People cannot find food, there’s no money, they can’t pay for things, employers can’t pay their workers because there’s no cash, they can’t get money out even from the ATMs.”

    Millions of jobs have disappeared, half of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from and already children are dying from malnutrition, Bellis said.

    All the aid agencies are appealing to the world to listen.

    23 million need urgent help
    She is about to go out with the UN Refugee Agency whose teams are organising some aid distribution as the temperatures drop to 2 degC overnight as winter approaches. They are handing out blankets, food and some cash to thousands of the needy in camps in Kabul.

    “But it’s such a Band-Aid. There is no way they can reach the number of people they need to reach — it’s  like 23 million people who need that kind of assistance,” she said.

    Neighbouring countries such as Pakistan and Iran were very concerned, in part because they fear a huge influx of refugees. They have closed the borders to try and keep them away.

    The process of getting money and food into people’s hands had broken down, she said, with a lot of it due to United States sanctions.

    Three quarters of the country ran on foreign donations before the Taliban took over and that has dried up because no countries are recognising the Taliban’s legitimacy to govern.

    Bellis has spoken to one senior Taliban official who said that at recent meetings between the Taliban and the US in Doha the Americans would not tell the Taliban what policies they needed to enact to unfreeze billions of dollars in funding.

    “They [the Americans] are playing with millions of people’s lives.”

    School problem for girls
    She believes some Taliban leaders are pragmatic and would be willing to agree to high school girls being educated but are worried they will alienate their conservative base.

    In the main, primary school age girls are able to attend their lessons but the problem is at secondary school level.

    “If you’re a high school girl in Kabul it’s awful – sitting around thinking how did this happen. It’s really frustrating and really frustrating for everyone to watch and say this doesn’t make sense.”

    Taliban Badri 313 fighter
    An elite Taliban Badri 313 fighter guarding Kabul airport … facing threats from ISIS-K. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR

    Bellis said while she feels safe at the moment, the main problem is the terrorist group, ISIS-K, who have made threats against the hotel where she is staying.

    The Taliban have said they will protect guests and have placed dozens of extra guards outside.

    ISIS-K is believed to only number between 1200 and 1500 yet they are a potent force with their random attacks, such as beheading members of the Taliban, whom they hate.

    She believes the Taliban’s biggest worry is that ISIS will appeal to its most fundamentalist members.

    ISIS attracting recruits
    ISIS is also believed to be trying to attract recruits who would be trained as fighters and be paid $400 a month which is a substantial amount of money in Afghanistan.

    Bellis said she feels guilty staying at a hotel with the scale of poverty and deprivation she is witnessing.

    “Right outside the door people are desperate,” she said.

    She visited a major maternity hospital in Kabul yesterday and the only medication available for women giving birth was paracetamol.

    “Imagine going into labour and thinking, OK if anything goes wrong I’ve got paracetamol. It’s just life and death on so many levels.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Shaheen’s sweeps Afghan bowlers, won by 5 wkts.

    Web desk,

    Pakistan cricket team will move closer to a semi-final of ICC T20 World Cup 2021, it takes on Afghanistan in a Group 2 Super 12 game at Dubai International Stadium on Friday and match will start at 7:00 pm. Afghans won the toss and choose to bat first.

    Shaheens were in full form and has an impressive fast-bowling cast that can blow away the less experienced Afghanistan batters. Afghans give a target of 148 on the loss of 6 wickets.

    Afghanistan have their mystery spinners, against Pakistan’s batting line but line is in-form with opening pair of captain Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan. Experienced Shoaib Malik came to the pitch to chase but did not contained the wicket, and finally Asif Ali, becomes a reliable finisher.

    At one point after the loss of 3rd wicket Pakistan cricket lovers becomes nervous but skipper Asif Ali played well and hits 3 sixers one after another in the 19th over and become a finisher.

    Pakistan has so far played 3 matches in super 12 T20 Worldcup 2021, winning all of them and on the top of Group with scoring 6 points.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Justice remains elusive in the vast majority of journalist murders

    Sustained impunity in Afghanistan a concern as attacks against journalists rise

    New York, October 28, 2021 – Over the past decade, 226 of the 278 journalists killed in a nexus of corruption, organized crime, extremist groups, and government retaliation, have been murdered with impunity, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2021 Impunity Index, published today. The annual Index spotlights countries where journalists are murdered and their killers go free.

    “When justice is subject to corruption and political power feuds, these forces silence journalists and the critical stories they tell,” said Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, CPJ’s advocacy and communications director. “It is imperative that authorities fully investigate these crimes and stop censorship by murder. This task cannot be left to the families, colleagues, and civil society groups tirelessly seeking justice.”

    The Index shows little change from 2020, with Somalia remaining the worst country for impunity in journalist killings for the seventh year. It is followed by Syria, Iraq, and South Sudan. Illustrating the sustained lack of accountability, seven of the countries on the list have appeared every year. In 81% of all cases in the Index, CPJ recorded complete impunity.

    In countries like Mexico, which has consistently remained the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, there have been some key convictions in the cases of journalists Javier Valdez Cárdenas and Miroslava Breach Velducea. However, attacks have continued unabated, with at least three killed thus far in 2021, a chilling sign of how murder can stifle the press freedom environment.

    While the Index reflects some of the most dangerous countries for journalists, it doesn’t include the full scope of threats to press freedom, from imprisonment to surveillance, to physical attacks. For example, Afghanistan’s spot on the Index did not change, yet its vibrant media landscape has been decimated since the Taliban took control of the country during the U.S. withdrawal. As Afghanistan’s judicial system collapses, the prospect of justice for the 17 journalists killed in the last 10 years moves further out of reach.

    CPJ remains steadfast in its commitment to securing justice for journalists and ensuring family and colleagues get the answers they deserve. In an important step, CPJ and partners, as part of A Safer World For The Truth, will host a Permanent People’s Tribunal to hold governments accountable for the murder of journalists, delivering indictments to Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Syria. The opening hearing is November 2, coinciding with the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. Learn more and RSVP here.

    CPJ’s Global Impunity Index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of population. The 2021 Index examines journalist murders that occurred between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2021. Only those nations with five or more unsolved cases are included on the index. Read about our methodology.

    Note for Editors:

    Find the report “Killers of journalists still get away with murder: CPJ’s 2021 Global Impunity Index,” and information on CPJ’s Global Campaign against Impunity on our website. Translations are available in Arabic, Dari, English, French, Hindi, Pashto,  Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. To arrange an interview with a CPJ expert, email press@cpj.org.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kabul Diaries Part 18: Parents of suicide bombers gather to celebrate

    In an Orwellian twist, Kabul’s famous Intercontinental Hotel was the venue for an awards ceremony on October 18 for the families of suicide bombers who managed to successfully explode their vests, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

  • Racist Western Monopoly Media Ignore Colin Powell’s Horrendous War Crimes

    File photo taken on 5 February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the UN Security Council in New York. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary / AFP)

    The pro-Apartheid Israel former African-American military commander, mass murderer and genocidal liar, Colin Powell, has just died. Mendacious, racist and pro-war Western Monopoly media and politicians have been fulsome in their praise for the first Black US Secretary of State, white-washing his deadly lies over non-existent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and ignoring the millions dying in the Powell-complicit Vietnamese, Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian Genocides.

    By way of a posthumous International Criminal Court (ICC) war crimes prosecution brief, summarized below are the horrendous human consequences of Colin Powell’s evil role over 40 years in deadly US state terrorism atrocities from the Vietnam War to the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel (dates and Indigenous deaths from violence and war-imposed deprivation are given in brackets):

    (1). Powell lying and white-washing of the Vietnamese Genocide (1955-1975; 11.9 million deaths).

    (2). Powell lying and the illegal invasion of Panama (1989; 3,000 deaths).

    (3). Powell lying, the Gulf War and mass murder of Iraqi children by Sanctions (1990-2003; 1.9 million deaths).

    (4). Powell lying, America’s 9/11 false flag atrocity and the War on Terror (2001 onwards; 34 million deaths).

    (5). Powell lying and the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (2001-2021; 6.7 million deaths).

    (6). Powell lying and the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003-2011; 2.7 million deaths).

    (7). Powell lying, the Apartheid Israel-linked Iran-Contra scandal, Opiate Holocaust and the ongoing deadly Sanctions against Iran (post-1979, 4 million Iranian deaths; post-2001, 5.8 million global opiate deaths).

    (8). Powell lying and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by Apartheid Israel (1914 onwards; 2.2 million deaths).

    (9). Powell lying, General Smedley Butler’s truths, and the Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust (post-1950; 1,500 million avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation).

    (10). Critics of mendacious mass murderer Powell (post-1950 US Asian wars; 40 million deaths).

    (11). Egregiously dishonest Mainstream praise for serial war criminal, mass murderer, liar and child-killer Powell that soils and endangers America and the World (lying, inaction and Climate Genocide may cause 10 billion deaths this century).

    (12). Powell, post-WW2 German CAAAA (C4A; Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends, and Assertion of “never again”), and the need for de-Nazification of America and its Western allies.

    For details see Gideon Polya, “Vietnamese, Afghan & Iraqi Genocides: Mainstream media ignore war crimes of Colin Powell,” Countercurrents.

    The post Racist Western Monopoly Media Ignore Colin Powell’s Horrendous War Crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cool “Afghanistan Withdrawal”, Bro

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US government is reportedly close to securing a deal with Pakistan that will ensure its ability to continue military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, the nation where the Biden administration proudly “ended” a decades-long war.

    “The Biden administration has told lawmakers that the US is nearing a formalized agreement with Pakistan for use of its airspace to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, according to three sources familiar with the details of a classified briefing with members of Congress that took place on Friday morning,” reads a new report from CNN.

    “The briefing comes as the White House is still trying to ensure that it can carry out counterterrorism operations against ISIS-K and other adversaries in Afghanistan now that there is no longer a US presence on the ground for the first time in two decades after the NATO withdrawal from the country,” the report reads.

    So as has been obvious for months the US empire will still be retaining military control over a key geostrategic region adjacent to Iran and China, will still be enriching the military-industrial complex by raining explosives upon human beings on Afghan soil, and will still be continuing George W Bush’s “war on terror” scam. It just won’t come with the bad cosmetics of maintaining a ground troop presence.

    After all the Biden administration’s proud self-fellating fanfare for “ending” this war, it turns out it was nothing more than a slight formatting adjustment.

    Cool withdrawal, bro.

    As we discussed after Biden took office, this is the modern model of US warfare; a de-emphasis on Bush-era Hulk Smash ground invasions in favor of drone warfare, missile strikes, starvation sanctions, proxy wars, staged coups, special ops, and cold war maneuverings. Constant footage of flag-draped coffins coming home during Bush’s wars caused a PR nightmare for the empire from which it still hasn’t fully recovered, but technological and strategic advancements has made such bad publicity largely a thing of the past. Troops deployed overseas are now far more likely to die by their own hand than by combat.

    The goal of the empire is to be able to topple governments and dominate the globe without incurring a negative perception among the inhabitants of the US and its client states. It has been doing this with a combination of (A) shifting to more “light touch” interventionism which doesn’t garner as much negative attention as full-scale ground invasions and (B) a global perception management campaign of historically unprecedented scale and sophistication.

    Ideally the imperialists want to be able to dominate the planet with economic sanctions and the occasional strategic drone strike combined with mass-scale psychological manipulation. It is not a coincidence that nations where they are unable to do these things at will are the nations we are most aggressively propagandized against.

    The empire isn’t getting less tyrannical, it’s just getting better at public relations. The need for critical thinking and alternative perspectives has never been higher.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Taliban ‘forcibly evicting’ Hazaras and opponents in Afghanistan

    Human Rights Watch has logged illegal seizures of land and homes then given to Taliban supporters

    Thousands of people have been forced from their homes and land by Taliban officials in the north and south of Afghanistan, in what amounted to collective punishment, illegal under international law, Human Rights Watch has warned.

    Many of the evictions targeted members of the Shia Hazara community, while others were of people connected to the former Afghan government. Land and homes seized this way have often been redistributed to Taliban supporters, HRW said.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Afghanistan Withdrawal: Sundays With the Military Industrial Complex

     

    As US troops finally made their exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation, the Sunday shows—which have always aimed to set Washington agendas—were filled with guests who had direct ties to the military/industrial complex.

    FAIR analyzed three weeks of ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press during the Afghanistan withdrawal (8/15/21, 8/22/21, 8/29/21). We recorded 36 featured guest appearances and 33 roundtable participant appearances. Those who appeared on more than one show were counted every time they appeared; there were 24 unique featured guests and 32 unique panelists.

    Of the 24 unique featured guests, only two were not from the US: Roya Rahmani, the former ambassador to the US from Afghanistan, and Yasmeen Hassan, the Pakistani director of the NGO Equality Now. The two were interviewed jointly in one CNN segment (8/29/21)—the only segment in the study to center on the situation of Afghan women.

    MIC ties

    HR McMaster, Meet the Press

    Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Meet the Press, 8/29/21): “We surrendered to a jihadist organization and assumed that there would be no consequences for that.”

    Twenty of the 22 unique featured guests from the United States had ties to the military/industrial complex. These MIC associates accounted for 28 of US guests’ 34 appearances. They included 13 appearances by elected officials who are recipients of military industry PAC money, 12 appearances by current or former government officials who serve or have served as consultants or advisors to the military industry, and eight appearances by former members of the military. (Some guests had multiple ties.)

    The two exceptions were National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who appeared five times, and career diplomat and former ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker (CBS, 8/22/21). Even these exceptions didn’t stray far from the MIC orbit: Crocker was cozy enough to the military to be named an honorary Marine in 2012, and Sullivan was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a somewhat misleadingly named think tank that regularly takes five- and six-figure donations from various tentacles of the military/industrial complex.

    No elected officials without military/industrial complex ties were invited on to discuss the situation in Afghanistan in the three weeks studied. Nor were any scholars, activists or civil society leaders aside from Hassan.

    Though roundtable panelists are predominantly journalists, one—Council on Foreign Relations fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon—also had MIC ties.

    Skewed against withdrawal

    Liz Cheney on This Week

    Rep. Liz Cheney (This Week, 8/15/21): “Everybody who has been saying, ‘America needs to withdraw, America needs to retreat,’ we are getting a devastating, catastrophic, real-time lesson in what that means.” Cheney took $104,500 from military industry PACs in the 2020 election cycle.

    The arguments expressed in these Afghanistan segments skewed against withdrawal, despite the fact that a majority of the public has consistently supported withdrawal. In a Quinnipiac poll (9/10–13/21), respondents supported Biden’s decision to withdraw, 54% to 41%; Monmouth (9/9–13/21) found 63% in support of withdrawal “regardless of how it was handled” versus only 27% opposed. When offered the option of approving of withdrawal while disapproving of Biden’s handling of it, an ABC/Washington Post poll (8/29/21–9/1/21) found a total of 78% in favor of withdrawal.

    The format of the Sunday shows for the three weeks studied typically featured a Biden administration guest questioned about Afghanistan as the headliner, followed by a Republican guest offering a counterpoint. Featured guests on other topics (often the Covid pandemic) sometimes followed, wrapped up with a roundtable of three or four panelists analyzing the week’s news. (CBS and CNN did not have roundtables.)

    Hosts tended to ask questions of the administration guests that predominantly—sometimes exclusively—concerned the process of withdrawal, rather than the wisdom of it. For instance, in four of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s seven appearances, and three of National Security Adviser Sullivan’s five appearances, they were only asked process questions, and made no statements in support of the decision to withdraw.

    Lindsey Graham, Face the Nation

    Sen. Lindsey Graham: (Face the Nation, 8/29/21): “You cannot break ISIS’s will through drone attacks. You’ve got to have people on the ground hitting these people day in and day out.” Graham took $256,700 from military industry PACs in the 2020 election cycle.

    But the Republicans brought on to offer “balance”—such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Ben Sasse and Rep. Liz Cheney—were frequently introduced as opponents of withdrawal, not just critics of the process, and given ample opportunity to discuss that opposition.

    As a result, the shows tilted toward anti-withdrawal voices. Of the 16 appearances by featured guests with Democratic affiliations, only eight voiced support for withdrawal; of the 17 appearances by Republicans, 11 expressed opposition to withdrawal itself, not just how it was handled. (One opposition voice, Crocker, served under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and was therefore counted in both groups.)

    Three other pro-Trump Republicans—Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Rep. Steve Scalise—expressed support for the general idea of withdrawal, but opposition to Biden’s withdrawal. Haley argued: “President Trump very much wanted to see soldiers come out of Afghanistan. So it’s not about soldiers coming out.” But she also argued that Biden should have kept troops in under the circumstances: “This was a complete and total surrender and an embarrassing failure…. The Biden administration needs to go back and extend that August 31 deadline.”

    Of the roundtable panelists, 11 presented arguments opposed to withdrawal, while  seven presented arguments in favor; 15 did not voice an argument on either side.

    Pro-occupation journalists

    Peter Baker on Meet the Press

    New York Times‘ Peter Baker (Meet the Press, 8/15/21; with Washington Post‘s Anne Gearan): “It’s a dark day for America…. And it’s a dark day, especially, for the Afghan people.”

    Many of those panelists offering pro-war arguments were—perhaps unsurprisingly to regular FAIR readers (1/31/19, 8/24/21)—journalists. New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker (NBC, 8/15/21) parroted talking points popular among Republican guests:

    There’s a relatively minor investment of national resources in the last few years, right?….

    In one day, we’ll have six times as many people die of Covid in America as we’ve had combat casualties in five years. So we were not actually sustaining a big war effort. Very few troops there in the scheme of things. Much less than we have in South Korea, much less than we have in Germany, for an outsized impact, right? We’ve had a stable, if not very satisfying, situation in Afghanistan. I think Anne [Gearan, Washington Post White House correspondent] is right. The conclusion is we can’t make it better. But we now see in the last few days, we can make it worse….

    And it’s a dark day. It’s a dark day for America. It’s going to be the end of a 20-year experiment, 20 years of epic failure. And it’s a dark day, especially, for the Afghan people, 38 million people who are now going to be returned to the tender mercies of the Taliban.

    This Week Jonathan Karl

    ABC‘s Jonathan Karl (This Week, 8/29/21): “Now the big question is, does Afghanistan once again become a safe haven for terrorist attacks on US interests around the world or at home?”

    ABC reporter Jonathan Karl offered this analysis as a panelist on ABC‘s This Week (8/29/21):

    Now the big question is, does Afghanistan once again become a safe haven for terrorist attacks on US interests around the world or at home?… You know, maybe part of the reason why Afghanistan had not been such, is that it was a military presence in Afghanistan. But now we will have this over-the-horizon capability, but the bottom line is the terror threat has increased, and our ability to combat it has decreased….

    President Biden has portrayed this as, he has two choices. Basically, go back in, be in the middle of a revived civil war. Send in more troops, or leave as quickly as possible. Those were, I think, not the two choices, and the bottom line is that the intelligence that he was receiving, and the advice from his military, was not on the dangers of staying a little while longer. It was on the dangers of leaving too quickly.

    Helene Cooper, Meet the Press

    New York Times correspondent Helene Cooper (Meet the Press, 8/22/21): “For 20 years, Joe Biden has believed that he knew more about Afghanistan, and he was the only realistic skeptic in a roomful of people who had pipe dreams.”

    Similarly, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper argued on NBC‘s Meet the Press (8/22/21):

    The one thing that I feel like this whole conversation on Afghanistan constantly doesn’t reckon with is what some people in the military would call the original sin. And that is the decision that President Biden made that withdrawing 3,500 troops from Afghanistan, rejecting the advice of his Defense secretary and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to leave 3,000 to 4,500 people there, was not going to lead to the insane chaos that we are seeing now….

    What I find so interesting about all this is for 20 years, Joe Biden has believed that he knew more about Afghanistan, and he was the only realistic skeptic in a roomful of people who had pipe dreams about this…. That’s exactly the problem, because he came in and he was not going to listen. He believed the Pentagon had rolled a successive number of administrations for 20 years. And he was going to stand up to them.

    Such trust in the military for policy decisions, not just tactical ones, extended to questions from Sunday hosts, as when NBC‘s Chuck Todd (8/22/21) pressed the National Security Council’s Sullivan:

    So you followed the military advice on closing Bagram. But the same military advisers were telling you to keep a force on the ground. They told you not to pursue this withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, correct?

    Parity: partisan, not gender

    The Sunday shows clearly made an effort to prioritize partisan parity: 17 guests were Republican elected officials or were affiliated with Republican administrations, while 16 guests had similar Democratic affiliations. (Four guests had no partisan affiliations.) The panels had a similar breakdown, with five having Republican affiliations and four tied to Democrats.

    The programs showed no similar concern for gender parity among their interview guests. Of the 36 featured guest appearances, only six were women. Fox featured no women as guests in the three-week study period, and no outlet had more than two. The roundtable guests were essentially balanced by gender, with 17 women and 16 men.

    Chris Wallace and Anthony Blinken, Fox News Sunday

    Chris Wallace (Fox News Sunday, 8/22/21) to Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “Joe Biden…has made a pretty cold calculation that, for instance, the plight of Afghan women…is not a matter of national security.”

    While they made no efforts for gender parity among interview guests, women did appear frequently as talking points against the withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21). Fox News‘ Chris Wallace (8/22/21)—one of the network’s few remaining journalists to not wear their partisanship on their sleeve—offered his frank assessment of Biden’s choice:

    It seems to me that we learned a lot about Joe Biden this week. That for all of the talk about his empathy, that, in fact, he has made a pretty cold calculation that, for instance, the plight of Afghan women—and there’s every reason to believe their lives are going to get a lot worse now with the Taliban in charge—is not a matter of national security.

    ABC‘s Karl (8/15/21), in a question to Blinken, likewise emphasized Afghan girls:

    So what does all this mean for America’s image in the world, and for what President Biden has spoken so forcefully about, the need to fight on behalf of democracy and democratic values? To see us leaving, and an extremist group coming in and taking power that wants to close down the right of girls to go to school, that is executing surrendering soldiers, that is anything but representative of those democratic values that President Biden has said that the United States must stand for.

    CNN (8/29/21), however, was the only outlet to actually feature an Afghan woman as an interview guest.

    Featured Sunday Show Guests on Afghanistan (8/15–29/21)

    Name Title Party Appearances Military/Industrial Complex Ties
    Antony Blinken Secretary of State D 7 Founded WestExec, consulting firm with military industry clients. Former partner in Pine Island, military industry–centered investment group.
    Jake Sullivan National Security Advisor D 5 Senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which receives funding from multiple MIC members*
    Ben Sasse Senator, Nebraska R 2 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Liz Cheney Representative, Wyoming R 2 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Adam Kinzinger Representative, IIllinois R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs; former military
    Chris Murphy Senator, Connecticut D 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    H.R. McMaster Former National Security Advisor R 1 Former board, Atlantic Council, funded by multiple MIC members; former military
    Jariko Denman Former Army Ranger 1 Former military
    Joni Ernst Senator, Iowa R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs; former military
    Larry Hogan Governor, Maryland R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Lindsey Graham Senator, South Carolina R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Lloyd Austin Secretary of Defense D 1 Former board member, Raytheon; former partner in Pine Island, military industry–centered investment group; former military
    Michael McCaul Representative, Texas R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Mike Mullen Former Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff D 1 Partner at Pine Island, military industry–centered investment group; former board member at General Motors; former military.
    Mike Pompeo Former Secretary of State R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Mitch McConnell Senator, Kentucky R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Mitt Romney Senator, Utah R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Nikki Haley Former UN Ambassador R 1 Former board member, Boeing
    Peter Meijer Representative, Michigan R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs; former military
    Ryan Crocker Former Ambassador to Afghanistan D/R 1 Honorary Marine*
    Steve Scalise Representative, Louisiana R 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs
    Roya Rahmani Former Afghan Ambassador to US 1 —
    Seth Moulton Representative, Massachusetts D 1 Campaign funding from MIC PACs; former military
    Yasmeen Hassan Executive Director, Equality Now 1 —

    * Not counted in statistics as a military/industrial complex tie.

    Research assistance: Dorothy Poucher, Jasmine Watson, Adam Weintraub

    The post Afghanistan Withdrawal: Sundays With the Military Industrial Complex appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • After 20 years, occupation has failed Afghanistan – but our struggle for freedom continues

    The only way to save Afghanistan is solidarity of the progressive, democratic and secular forces, writes Malalai Joya.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Afghanistan Tackles The Islamic State

    On October 8, a terrible blast struck the worshippers attending Friday noon prayers at the Gozar-e-Sayed Abad Mosque in the Khan Abad district of Bandar, the capital of Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities in its northern belt. This is a mosque frequented by Shia Muslims, who were referred to as “our compatriots” by Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid. Forty-six people died immediately in the blast, and local officials said that many more people were injured in the incident.

    The post Afghanistan Tackles The Islamic State appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Washington Demands Acquiescence In Afghanistan

    War and conflict rarely benefit the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, the very nature of war is destructive. In the case of Afghanistan, once the US war and occupation ended, any delusive stability or vitality in the nation’s economy collapsed too.

    The post Washington Demands Acquiescence In Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Tribunal to combat disinformation on the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing another extradition hearing on 27-28 October. The US authorities are appealing an earlier ruling that Assange should not be extradited to the US on health and safety grounds.

    Now the US and its allies are to be put on ‘trial’ by a tribunal. They are accused of committing atrocities, for example in Iraq, and of torture at Guantánamo Bay. While the tribunal possesses no legal powers, it’s intention is to set the record straight and demonstrate that Assange is not the criminal here.

    The tribunal – referred to as the Belmarsh Tribunal, after the prison where Assange continues to be held – will commence proceedings on 22 October.  There are 20 members of the tribunal, including:

    • Historian Tariq Ali
    • Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
    • Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa
    • Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
    • Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon
    • Award-winning film maker Ken Loach
    • Hellenic parliament member Yanis Varoufakis.
    What it’s all about

    Via a press release, Tariq Ali explains the tribunal’s origins:

    The Tribunal takes inspiration from the Sartre-Russell Tribunal, of which I was also a member. In 1966, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre issued a call for a War Crimes Tribunal to try the United States for crimes against humanity in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. A number of us were sent to North Vietnam to observe and record the attacks on civilians. I spent six weeks under the bombs, an experience that shaped the rest of my life.

    “The tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1967. The jury members included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Dedijer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, and David Dellinger, among others. The aim was not legal but moral: to bring the crimes to the notice of the public.

    “In London on 22 October 2021, we will do the same. Assange must be freed and the many crimes of the War on Terror placed centre stage.”

    Jeremy Corbyn says it’s all about accountability:

    Wikileaks exposed crimes of US empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. At the Belmarsh Tribunal, we will turn the world the right way up, placing crimes of war, torture, kidnapping and a litany of other gross human rights abuses on trial.

    The perpetrators of these crimes walk free, often still prominent public figures in the US, U.K. and elsewhere. They should be held accountable for the lives they destroyed and the futures they stole.

    To understand why the imprisonment of Assange is a travesty of justice, it’s important to appreciate some of the many crimes, including war crimes, exposed by WikiLeaks.

    War crimes

    As reported on by The Canary, during one of Assange’s extradition hearings Reprieve human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith provided details of some of the war crimes committed by the US.

    In a March 2019 article, the Canary’s John McEvoy reported that “according to a highly sensitive 2006 UK military report into Iraq, UK and US war planning “ran counter to potential Geneva Convention obligations””. He added how a “US cable from April 2009 [published by WikiLeaks] shows UK business secretary Peter Mandelson “pushing British oil and other corporate interests in Iraq””. A “2009 cable also reveals that the government of former PM Gordon Brown “put measures in place to protect [US] interests” during the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq”. Another “US cable also shows how the US and UK governments “rigged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to stop it being able to hold [Tony] Blair and [George W.] Bush accountable for the crime of aggression over Iraq””.

    In 2018, journalist Mark Curtis reported that a WikiLeaks published cable revealed that former foreign secretary David Miliband helped “the US to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at US bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year”.

    More allegations

    In 2016, The Canary reported on several allegations of US war crimes based on testimony given by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

    Another article in The Canary referred to a cable published by WikiLeaks that “suggested that the US had intended to convince Spanish officials to interfere with the National Court’s judicial independence”. This was in connection with an allegation “that the [six US officials] accused conspired with criminal intent to construct a legal framework to permit interrogation techniques and detentions in violation of international law”. The cable shows that the US secretly pressurised the Spanish government to ensure no prosecutions took place.

    The Canary also reported on allegations of a cover-up relating to hundreds of UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. These included UK involvement in the use of torture centres in both countries. One such centre was Camp Nama where it’s alleged:

    British soldiers and airmen helped operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion. Many of the detainees were brought there by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.

    Britain was also implicated in the extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and imprisonment) of detainees.

    Underestimating deaths

    As for the number of Iraqis killed during the war, The Canary reported on figures far higher than the official estimates.

    According to journalist Nafeez Ahmed:

    the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.

    Ahmed added that the overall figures of fatalities from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s – from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation – constituted:

    around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the ‘war on terror’), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.

    Back to front

    The prosecution of Assange is arguably political. Indeed, journalist John McEvoy points out how mass media has responded to recent news of a plot to kill Assange with “ghoulish indifference”.

    UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has commented how Assange has been “systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed”. In other words, the Belmarsh Tribunal will at the very least help remind us that it’s the perpetrators of war crimes who should be prosecuted – not the person who helped reveal those crimes.

    As such, Assange should be released forthwith.

    Featured image via Veterans for Peace / Wikimedia Commons

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • How Feminists Can Support Afghan Women Living Under The Taliban

    Since the Taliban took control of Kabul and Afghanistan’s central government on August 15, efforts to support Afghan women have become extremely challenging. According to some prominent US feminists with strong ties to Afghan women, the Taliban “has no legitimacy beyond the brutal force it commands,” and governments, the United Nations, and regional actors should not recognize or work with it.

    The post How Feminists Can Support Afghan Women Living Under The Taliban appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Australian Islamic body cancels forum with Taliban officials after heavy criticism from Afghan community

    Australian Federation of Islamic Councils says event due to feature two senior Taliban representatives was not intended to ‘legitimise any group’

    The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (Afic) has cancelled its planned online forum that was due to include two senior Taliban representatives, after it faced heavy criticism from within the Muslim and Afghan communities.

    “I genuinely thought it was a joke,” said Mariam Veiszadeh, a lawyer and community rights advocate from the Afghan-Australian community.

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    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.