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Category: Afghanistan

  • With 750 military bases in 80 countries, the US still remains a threat to global peace

    The Afghan war may be over, but the vast global network of US military bases still threatens peace, an American think tank has warned. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI) has published a report on the 750 remaining US military bases in 80 countries.

    Its report comes as the US is undertaking a Global Posture Review. The review will examine the US military footprint around the world. And QI said this is a chance to close down bases. Given the cost and the fact many bases are in authoritarian and undemocratic states, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

    Expensive and destabilising

    The report contains some astonishing statistics on US military installations, including that:

    • “The United States has at least three times as many overseas bases as all other countries combined”.
    • “U.S. bases abroad cost taxpayers an estimated $55 billion annually”.
    • “The United States has nearly three times as many military bases abroad… as U.S. embassies, consulates, and missions”.
    • “Bases abroad have helped the United States launch wars and other combat operations in at least 25 countries since 2001”.
    • “U.S. installations are found in at least 38 non-democratic countries and colonies”.

    But it also noted that a full list hasn’t been published by the Pentagon since fiscal year 2018.

    When is a base a base?

    The authors acknowledge that some bases might not even be counted as bases. They say the Pentagon is wary of how a military presence is defined:

    Frequently the Pentagon and U.S. government, as well as host nations, seek to portray a U.S. base presence as “not a U.S. base” to avoid the perception that the United States is infringing on host nation sovereignty (which, in fact, it is).

    Closer to home

    QI’s breakdown showed that many US bases are in Global South countries. And many of these have authoritarian governments. But European countries are also colonised by the American military, including the UK. This week saw the family of a teenager killed by a US citizen working on a military base reach a resolution a civil claim.

    19-year-old Harry Dunn was killed after being struck by a car in 2019. Anne Sacoolas, allegedly an intelligence officer for the US government, claimed diplomatic immunity and fled to the US. Sacoolas may have been working at RAF Croughton, Northamptonshire. Despite the name, RAF Croughton is a US spy base.

    Closures

    QI says closing bases is politically possible. They say that recent presidents from Bill Clinton though to Donald Trump all closed bases around the world regularly. There’s nothing to stop Biden, who has pledged to reset US foreign policy, doing the same.

    It said the review meant there was a “historic opportunity” to reduce the US military footprint, saving taxpayer cash and improving “national and international security in the process”.

    And QI has a point. Closing bases is a good idea in economic, political, and moral terms. The question is, will the new administration muster the political will to do so?

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/ Sgt Chris Stone

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Trumpism with a Biden Face: US Haitian Policy

    With that orange haired brute of a president supposedly ushered out of the White House with moralising delight, the Biden administration was all keen to turn over a new leaf.  There would be more diplomacy, and still more diplomacy.  There would be a more humanitarian approach to refugees and asylum seekers – forget, he claimed, the Border Wall.  Kindness would come over border officials and guards of the imperium.

    Instead, we have had secret diplomacy culminating in the trilateral security pact of AUKUS, one reached unbeknownst to allies in Europe, Asia and the Indo-Pacific.  And we have had a particularly ugly spectacle concerning Haitian refugees, with many being bundled into planes to be sent back to their country, having been taken from the burgeoning border camp around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

    Having been blooded in the mass evacuation exercise from Afghanistan, the Biden administration was now doing the reverse in an exercise of expulsion, promising the deportation of 14,000 Haitians over a period of three weeks.  The jarring contrast was not lost on Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans.  “When you contrast the welcome mat that was rolled out for many Afghan refugees who are deserving – of course – of our support and resettlement, with the deplorable treatment of Black migrants on our home soil, it is just an unfathomable contrast.”

    At the Rio Grande River, US border agents, crowned by cowboy hats and sporting a thuggish élan, left a remarkable impression of ugliness by their free use of reins in pushing migrants back across the river.  Many members of their quarry had made the journey to obtain food.  “I can’t imagine what context would make that appropriate,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki expressed with the sort of wonder that is becoming her hallmark style.  “But I don’t have additional details and certainly I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.”

    Political atmosphere and atmospherics is everything, and while Psaki might be puzzled, her colleagues in the Biden administration are happy to maintain a firm line against mischievous incursions.  The US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas has been firm.  “If you come to the United States illegally,” he declared on September 20, “you will be returned.  Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.”

    Such conduct did not sit well with the May announcement by Secretary Mayorkas that Haiti had been designated for Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for 18 months.  “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Mayorkas stated at the time.

    Despite that official characterisation, the administration has taken comfort in using Title 42 of the United States code Section 265, a public health statute freely employed by the Trump administration, to prohibit “the introduction of persons or property, in whole or in part, from Mexico and Canada” into the US for fears of pandemic spread.  The liberal use of the statue has received judicial excoriation, with US District Judge Emmet Sullivan claiming it “collectively deprived” asylum seekers and refugees facing “real threats of violence and persecution” of “certain statutory procedures”.

    Public health officials have also been disconcerted.  As Dr Ronald Waldman of the human rights group Doctors of the World remarks, “The prohibition for crossing the border has been applied selectively to asylum seekers”.  It certainly has not been applied to students and those doing business.

    In a sober assessment of Biden’s report card so far, Natasha Lennard of The Intercept points out that the Trump administration’s use of the law saw half a million people removed. During the short tenure of the Biden administration, the current number stands at 700,000.  Over the course of January, 62,530 migrants were expelled according to the figures of Customs and Border Protection. For the month of April, it was 110,846.

    In a resounding judgment of Biden’s policy towards Haitians and Haiti in general, Washington’s envoy to the country, Daniel Foote, has resigned.  His September 22 letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was an effort of extrication from “the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.”

    Foote also took a stab at a long standing practice of US foreign policy: that habitual meddling in the affairs of a country that had “consistently produced catastrophic results”.  The de facto, unelected prime minister Ariel Henry had received yet “another public statement of support as interim leader of Haiti” from the US embassy, among others. They had continued touting “his ‘political agreement’ over another broader, earlier accord shepherded by civil society.”  The now resigned envoy, sniping at this policy of backing “winners”, stated the essential heresy of the imperium: What Haitians needed was “the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favoured candidates, but with genuine support for the cause.”

    In response to the resignation, US State Department spokesman Ned Price was a picture of regret and hollow advice. “It is unfortunate that, instead of participating in a solutions-oriented policy process, Special Envoy Foote has both resigned and mischaracterised the circumstances.”

    Psaki was icily dismissive.  “Special Envoy Foote had ample opportunity to raise concerns about immigration during his tenure.  He never once did so.” Such bitchiness is a nice summation of the Biden administration so far: policies that continue to furnish us the acceptable face of Trumpism.

    The post Trumpism with a Biden Face: US Haitian Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘We buried our sportswear’: Afghan women fear fight is over for martial arts

    Female taekwondo and karate trainers are forced to practise in secret since the Taliban takeover and fear they may never compete again

    On the morning of 15 August, when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, Soraya, a martial arts trainer in the Afghan capital, woke up with a sense of dread. “It was as though the sun had lost its colour,” she says. That day she taught what would be her last karate class at the gym she had started to teach women self-defence skills. “By 11am we had to say our goodbyes to our students. We didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she says.

    Soraya is passionate about martial arts and its potential to transform women’s minds and bodies. “Sport has no gender; it is about good health. I haven’t read anywhere in Qur’an that prevents women from participating in sports to stay healthy,” she says.

    Continue reading…

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

  • 20 years after his war began George Bush gets a timely reminder of his crimes

    George W. Bush probably thought he was in for an easy night when he was invited to speak at a live event in Beverly Hills. But the former US president – best known for invading and destroying Iraq – wasn’t reckoning on an audience member named Mike Prysner.

    Bush sounded relaxed until Prysner, who served with the US Army in Iraq, interrupted to demand an apology for the million Iraqis killed in the war.

     

    Prysner also accused Bush of lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and made false claims about Iraqi involvement in 9/11 in order to support his calls for war.

    As Prysner confronted Bush, two audience members tried vainly to wrestle the former corporal out of the room. However, they were quickly joined by security guards, who dragged Prysner the rest of the way out of the auditorium.

    List of the dead

    Speaking outside, Prysner said he had tried to read out a list of friends of his who died because of the war and Iraqis who had been killed during the occupation.

    I tried to read the names but event runners immediately grabbed the list and tore it up. But I was able to shut it down for a little while. Right when Bush was getting into his first little cheesy story about his life and all that, trying to be funny…

    Round Two?

    A day later at a different event, Bush faced another barrage of criticism. Mint Press News, reported that researcher Jeb Sprague had also challenged the ex-president on Iraq. A Twitter video shows Bush smiling and laughing in response:

    Sprague later tweeted the full text of his intervention:

    Sprague’s thread continued:

    Your war destroyed my cousin’s life. Your war created a nightmare for my family. He’s a shell of his former self. Tens of thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis have died. You used white phosphorus a chemical weapon in Fallujah. Arrest this man. Arrest this war criminal.

    No rest for the wicked

    Sprague and Prysner’s efforts were commended on Twitter. And one user pointed out that Britain’s own war criminals should be called out as well:

    A view which other Twitter users seemed to share:

    None of the architects of the Iraq war have ever been brought to justice for their involvement in the disaster. And people like Mike Prysner are doing a public service by making sure the wicked don’t rest easy.

    Featured images via YouTube – The Empire Files & Wikimedia Commons/Chris Greenberg

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Taliban ‘journalism rules’ open way to censorship, persecution, warns RSF

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it is very disturbed by the “11 journalism rules” that the Taliban announced at a meeting with news media on September 19.

    The rules that Afghan journalists will now have to implement are vaguely worded, dangerous and liable to be used to persecute them, the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog said.

    Working as a journalist will now mean complying strictly with the 11 rules unveiled by Qari Mohammad Yousuf Ahmadi, the interim director of the Government Media and Information Centre (GMIC).

    At first blush, some of them might seem reasonable, as they include an obligation to respect “the truth” and not “distort the content of the information”, said RSF.

    But in reality they were “extremely dangerous” because they opened the way to censorship and persecution.

    “Decreed without any consultation with journalists, these new rules are spine-chilling because of the coercive use that can be made of them, and they bode ill for the future of journalistic independence and pluralism in Afghanistan,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

    “They establish a regulatory framework based on principles and methods that contradict the practice of journalism and leave room for oppressive interpretation, instead of providing a protective framework allowing journalists — including women — to go back to work in acceptable conditions.

    ‘Tyranny and persecution’
    “These rules open the way to tyranny and persecution.”

    The first three rules, which forbid journalists to broadcast or publish stories that are “contrary to Islam,” “insult national figures” or violate “privacy,” are loosely based on Afghanistan’s existing national media law, which also incorporated a requirement to comply with international norms, including Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    The absence of this requirement in the new rules opens the door to censorship and repression, because there is no indication as to who determines, or on what basis it is determined, that a comment or a report is contrary to Islam or disrespectful to a national figure.

    Three of the rules tell journalists to conform to what are understood to be ethical principles:

    • They must “not try to distort news content”;
    • They must “respect journalistic principles”; and
    • They “must ensure that their reporting is balanced”.

    But the absence of reference to recognised international norms means that these rules can also be misused or interpreted arbitrarily.

    Rules 7 and 8 facilitate a return to news control or even prior censorship, which has not existed in Afghanistan for the past 20 years.

    ‘Handled carefully’
    They state that, “matters that have not been confirmed by officials at the time of broadcasting or publication should be treated with care” and that “matters that could have a negative impact on the public’s attitude or affect morale should be handled carefully when being broadcast or published”.

    The danger of a return to news control or prior censorship is enhanced by the last two rules (10 and 11), which reveal that the GMIC has “designed a specific form to make it easier for media outlets and journalists to prepare their reports in accordance with the regulations,” and that from now on, media outlets must “prepare detailed reports in coordination with the GMIC”.

    The nature of these “detailed reports” has yet to be revealed.

    The ninth rule, requiring media outlets to “adhere to the principle of neutrality in what they disseminate” and “only publish the truth,” could be open to a wide range of interpretations and further exposes journalists to arbitrary reprisals.

    Afghanistan was ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index that RSF published in April.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs “Native Informants” 

    Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?

    In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.

    Actually, the answer is far more complex than that offered by Western officials and media, which ultimately – although inaccurately – conveyed the impression that NATO armies were in Afghanistan to safeguard human rights, to educate women and to bring civilization to a seemingly barbaric culture.

    Though political dissent is a basic human right, there is a clear and definitive line between the legitimate right to challenge one’s government/regime and willingly collaborating with another – especially when that collaboration can have dire consequences on one’s own people.

    In the United States and Europe, there are thousands of political dissidents from many parts of the world – from South America, the Middle East, East Asia, and others – who are, sadly, used as cheerleaders for political and military interventions, either directly by certain governments, or indirectly, through lobby and pressure groups, academic circles and mainstream media.

    These individuals, often promoted as ‘experts’, appear and disappear whenever they are useful and when their usefulness expires. Some might even be sincere and well-intentioned when they speak out against, for example, human rights violations committed by certain regimes in their own home countries, but the outcome of their testimonies is almost always translated to self-serving policies.

    Thousands of Afghans – political dissidents, NATO collaborators, students, athletes and workers seeking opportunities – have already arrived in various western capitals. Expectedly, many are being used by the media and various pressure groups to retrospectively justify the war on Afghanistan, as if it was a moral war. Desperate to live up to the expectations, Afghan ‘activists’ are already popping up on western political platforms, speaking about the Taliban’s dismal record of human rights and, especially, women’s rights.

    But what is the point of appealing to the western moral consciousness after 20 years of a NATO-led deadly invasion that has cost Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

    In Afghanistan, an alternative narrative is evolving.

    On September 11, hundreds of Afghan women protested in Kabul University, not against the Taliban, but against other Afghan women who purport to speak from western capitals about all Afghan women.

    “We are against those women who are protesting on the streets, claiming they are representative of women,” one of the speakers said, Agency France Press reported.

    While AFP made a point of repeating that the women protesters have “pledged” their commitment to “all Taliban’s hardline policies on gender segregation”, emphasizing how they were all covered “head to toe,” the event was significant. Among many issues, it raises the question: who represents Afghan women, those who left or those who stayed?

    A large banner held by the protesters in Kabul read: “Women who left Afghanistan cannot represent us.”

    The truth is no one represents Afghan women except those who are democratically-elected by Afghan society to represent all sectors of that society, women included. Until real democracy is practiced in Afghanistan, the struggle will continue for real freedom, human rights, equality and, obviously, representation.

    This fight can only take place within an organic, grassroots Afghan context – whether in Afghanistan or outside of the country – but certainly not through Fox News, the BBC or US Senate hearings.

    The late Palestinian-American scholar, Professor Edward Said, had repeatedly warned of the pseudo reality painted by the ‘native informants’ – supposed political dissidents recruited by western governments to provide a convenient depiction of the reality in the Middle East and elsewhere, as a moral justification for war. The consequences, as the 2003 Iraq war and invasion have demonstrated, can be horrific.

    Said challenged a particular ‘native informant’, the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese academic, whose ideas about the Iraqi enthusiasm for the US war, though proved disastrously wrong, were used by George W. Bush and others as proof that the impending war was destined to be a ‘cakewalk’.

    Ajami’s ideas were long discredited, but the political machinations that still prefer ‘native informants’ to genuine human rights defenders and good scholarship remain in place. Many of the Afghan escapees are sure to be strategically placed through the same channels, which continue to promote interventions and sanctions as sound policies.

    The war in Afghanistan has ended, hopefully for good, but the conflict on who represents the people of that war-torn country remains unresolved. It behooves the Taliban to deliver on its promises regarding equal representation and political plurality, otherwise there are many others abroad who will be ready to claim the role of legitimate representation.

    In the Middle East, in particular, we have already witnessed this phenomenon of the west-based ‘legitimate’ democratic representations. Ultimately, these ‘governments-in-exile’ wrought nothing but further political deception, division, corruption, and continued war.

    War-torn Afghanistan – exhausted, wounded and badly needing a respite – deserves better.

    The post Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs “Native Informants”  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US “Era of War Over”?

    It’s nice to hear President Joe Biden saying that the US “era of relentless war is over”. But “nice” doesn’t mean “credible”. Indeed, the probable chances are that Biden’s words are sugary, hollow and disingenuous. Sentimental candy-floss.  © REUTERS / Eduardo Munoz

    So hold on to the ticker-tape celebrations and champagne toasting a new era of world peace.

    When Biden addressed the annual United Nations General Assembly this week he was giving the usual spiel that we have come to expect from US presidents at the podium. Rosy, florid platitudes, full of self-congratulation and presumed American virtue. But, ultimately, as usual, it is a feat of US duplicity and hypocrisy meant to hoodwink the rest of the world from the reality of Washington’s systematic warmongering.

    I stand here today, the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war. We’ve turned the page… We close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.

    That feel-good soundbite is shot through with lies and deception. Biden is referring to the forced retreat of US military after its defeat in Afghanistan – America’s longest war. Biden makes it sound as if it was some kind of honorable end of hostilities. When the reality is the US was beaten and mired in war debt.

    The United States invaded Afghanistan in criminal aggression under the false pretext of “fighting terrorism”. Its forces should never have been in the Central Asian country in the first place. Now it is ruled by Taliban militants whom the US ousted two decades ago. Talk about a futile waste of millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. Biden has the gall to make the retreat from Afghanistan sound as if it is noble.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan. © AFP 2021 / Wakil Kohsar

    The first time in 20 years the United States is not at war, declares Biden. That’s a barefaced lie. US troops are illegally occupying parts of Syria denying that nation access to its oil fields. The US is carrying out airstrikes in Syria, Iraq and Somalia.

    The Biden administration, like his predecessors, is plying an anti-Russian regime in Kiev with billions of weapons to wage a civil war against the ethnic Russian people of Eastern Ukraine. That war has been festering for more than seven years and runs the risk of escalating into a confrontation between the US-led NATO alliance and Russia.

    President Biden referred to the foundation of the United Nations in 1945 following the Second World War – the greatest conflagration in human history with an estimated death toll of nearly 75 million, most of the victims being Soviet and Chinese citizens.

    What’s he talking about? In every decade since the Second World War, the United States has been involved in one or more major armed conflicts, from Korea to Vietnam, from Latin America to Africa and the Middle East.

    The ostensible end of the war in Afghanistan is but a punctuation mark in an ongoing history of American wars of aggression against the rest of the planet. This is about turning the page all right… to the next US war.

    That’s because the US is an imperial power that relies on coercion, force, and ultimately violence in order to assert its writ over other nations. Imperialism was at the root of the First and Second World Wars. Why would we expect that kind of power to stop waging wars?

    Biden’s rhetoric at the UN is the euphemism of a crime boss. He talks about “working together” and how we should “redouble our diplomacy” to “end conflicts”. He says the United States is not “seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs”.

    This pious bluster came only days after Biden announced a new military alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom – AUKUS – which will supply nuclear-powered submarines to Australia for the purpose of ramping up Washington’s hostility towards China and Russia.

    US policy is essentially about polarizing and dividing the world into hostile camps in order to bestow hegemonic control. American capitalist power and its addiction to militarism is all about driving conflicts and war.

    Biden’s soundbite about the world being at “an inflection point”, facing a “decisive decade” is half-right. But not in the sense he means of US leadership. We are facing another build-up to more US war, this time against China and Russia. The only way out of this dead-end is for people around the world, including the American people, to realize the lies and duplicity they are being sold by US and Western misleaders.

    • First published in Sputnik News

    The post US “Era of War Over”? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Kabul Diaries Part 13: Not without my sister

    After the Taliban announced that only boys and male teachers should resume their studies and work, a trend went viral on social media, reports Yasmeen Afghan. Children are posting their pictures, holding placards with slogans against the unofficial ban on girls’ education.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Laws of Forever War

    In Humane, historian Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to make U.S. wartime conduct less brutal have helped pave the way for a policy of permanent armed counterterrorism.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Afghanistan: Women’s ministry secretariat converted to Moral Police headquarters

    The Taliban converted the secretariat of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice on September 17, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Afghanistan: Women’s ministry secretariat converted to Moral Police headquarters

    The Taliban converted the secretariat of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice on September 17, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Sorry Cover-Up for US Mass Murder

    AP Photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth, File

    So a top US commander has come clean on primetime TV about the killing of 10 civilians in Afghanistan with a drone missile. Seven of the victims were children packed into a car.

    CentCom General Kenneth McKenzie said the deadly strike was a “tragic mistake” and he offered his “deep condolences”. In an unprecedented televised press conference, the general said he took personal responsibility for the atrocity and that there would be financial compensation paid out to the victims’ families.

    He didn’t offer his resignation though, which might seem appropriate for someone taking responsibility for such a heinous event. Neither did the Pentagon commander explain how compensation would be arranged given that the US evacuated from Afghanistan on 30 August with no officials now present in the country.

    General McKenzie went to great lengths in his press conference to claim that the vehicle was surveilled carefully for several hours before the drone missile was launched, killing all the occupants. He presented a graphic to illustrate the detailed movements of the targeted car near Kabul international airport on 29 August. This was the day after a suicide bomber killed 13 US troops at the airport along with over 100 Afghan civilians trying to join the frenzied American airlift.

    This handout photo courtesy of the US Air Force obtained on November 7, 2020 shows an armed MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) as it flies over the Nevada Test and Training Range on July 15, 2019. © AFP 2021 / Haley Stevens/US Air Force

    The general emphasised how his staff were under immense time pressure when they were assessing the target whom they believed was an ISIS terror team on its way to bomb the airport again.

    What is objectionable about McKenzie’s apology live on TV is the impression of an exceptional error by US forces.

    The reality is that civilians are routinely murdered by US drones in Afghanistan and several other countries where the Pentagon is operating, oftentimes illegally in violation of international law. Killing innocent people is not an “exceptional error” for US forces, it is the norm.

    Daniel Hale, a former US Air Force analyst who turned whistleblower, was imprisoned in July for revealing the horror of civilian casualties from drone strikes in Afghanistan. He told a judge that 90 percent of victims were innocent civilians. Hale said he was sickened by the indiscriminate slaughter. For his truth-telling, he is now behind bars.

    The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was expanded under the Obama administration and they were deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Obama personally selected targets every week in briefings from the CIA in what became known as “Terror Tuesdays”.

    U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley discusses the end of the military mission in Afghanistan during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, U.S., September 1, 2021 © REUTERS / Evelyn Hockstein

    It was claimed that during the Obama drone assassination programme that the total number of civilians mistakenly killed was just 117. That figure was derided as a gross underestimate. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism puts a more accurate death toll at six times higher. Even the latter may be an underestimate.

    Hale, the whistleblower, was prosecuted and jailed by the Trump administration. Public calls for a pardon have been so far ignored by the Biden administration.

    The fate of truth-tellers who reveal the murderous nature of US military occupations in foreign countries is to be buried behind bars. Julian Assange’s biggest “crime” was showing to the world the systematic killing of civilians by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in England awaiting the outcome of an extradition order by the US where he faces 175 years in jail for “espionage”.

    People like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale are heroes who should be venerated publicly and given lifetime awards.

    Meanwhile, the real criminals are given primetime TV to parade their insipid apologies while taking no responsibility for the murder. Saying “sorry” means nothing when the killings will go on and on. It’s just a sorry cover-up for US imperialism and its routine war crimes.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan © AFP 2021 / Wakil Kohsar

    Unlike many other US drone murders of civilians that are brushed away into oblivion, the killing of 10 civilians in Kabul only came to light because one of the victims worked for a US charity. Otherwise, the Pentagon would have ensured that the atrocity was buried in a bureaucratic cover-up. The innocent victims like the truth-tellers are always buried.

    General McKenzie’s “honourable” mea culpa is sick performance art. It is aimed at reassuring the American public that we really are the good guys who rarely commit atrocities. And when we do, then it is an exceptional “tragic mistake” for which we are truly “sorry”. That gives US imperialism a license to continue criminal wars, aggression, occupations and Mass Murder Inc.

    •  First published in Sputnik

    The post Sorry Cover-Up for US Mass Murder first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Drone strikes prove that Muslim lives hold no value for Western imperial powers

    The US recently admitted that its drone attack in Kabul, perpetrated on 29 August, killed 10 civilians. Seven of them were children. The youngest victim, a toddler named Sumaya, was only two years old.

    With this development has come a fresh wave of outrage against US military aggression. But the outrage means little without an outright rejection of the neoliberal system of which these strikes are a feature. It also means little if it comes from people who won’t acknowledge the Islamophobia inherent in the war on terror – and the dehumanisation of Muslim lives that it’s enabled and legitimised.

    The US only helps itself

    At the start of the 1987 Hollywood film Predator, American soldiers charge into an unidentified forest in Central America and indiscriminately gun down an entire encampment. Their aim was to save hostages, but their policy was to shoot first and ask questions later. More recently, The Suicide Squad similarly depicted US agents accidently gunning down a camp that later turned out to be ‘the good guys’.

    The drone attack in question is a real-life example of this approach. The attack has turned on its head the notion that the US is, or ever has been, a benevolent protector of Afghan people. But moreover, this incident is symbolic of US foreign policy for at least half a century. Acts of military aggression instigated on claims of freedom, democracy, and justice are anything but. Whether the bogeyman is communism or terrorism, the objective remains the same: protecting US interests.

    And in service of this aim, human life is reduced to collateral damage. Of secondary importance. Its loss is regrettable but necessary. The US attack on 29 August killed 10 people, none of whom were IS agents. Sorry about that, but oh well.

    The non-value of Muslim lives

    Moreover, a defining feature of drone strikes carried out over nearly two decades is that the targets have been Muslim countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya – all attacked in service of US interests. Although the justifications have been varied, they fall broadly under the ‘war on terror’ umbrella. And nothing exemplifies the concept of structural Islamophobia quite like the war on terror.

    These strikes have killed as many as 16,901 people so far. And as many as 2,200 are recorded as being “civilians”. These are high estimates – but even if we were to take the lower estimates of these figures, what would that prove? The lives of 910 civilians are as valuable as the lives of 2,200 civilians. 8,858 extra-judicial killings is no better than 16,901.

    And even if we consider confirmed non-civilian killings to be ‘justified’ targets, the killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of those targets is never justifiable. These people were not collateral. They were not mere statistics. They were human beings with names, and families, and aspirations. Hundreds of them were children. And regardless of the extent to which the media and Western superpowers may have dehumanised them, their lives mattered.

    We need more than outrage

    It won’t be long before the news cycle moves on to discuss something else. Drone strikes in Muslim countries, meanwhile, will continue. Nation states will keep chasing their tails, trying to fight ‘Islamist’ groups and radicalisation while refusing to look to their own disastrous policies. Yet the 7/7 bombers had said in no uncertain terms that military aggression against Muslim nations played a role in motivating them. For decades, the wars that benefit our governments have only put the rest of us at risk.

    The war on terror killed those 10 civilians in Kabul on 29 August, seven of whom were children. Outrage is no longer enough. Anyone who continues to give credence to the war on terror – and moreover the counter-terror ideology that spawned in its wake – is complicit. Anyone that continues to support politicians who have presided over these drone strikes is complicit. And anyone who supports a neoliberal status quo that tut-tuts at civilian deaths in one breath while celebrating war heroes in the next is complicit.

    Reject the system that created the war on terror, and all the senseless wars that may yet be fought in its name. The system that continues to dehumanise Muslims and render their lives worthless. Otherwise, your sympathies are meaningless.

    Featured image via YouTube – Sky News

    By Afroze Fatima Zaidi

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.

    In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:

    “The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”

    Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.

    This after all comes out following a new Byline Times report which found that “at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

    It also comes out two months after whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for leaking secret government information about America’s psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program.

    It also comes a few months after a Code Pink report found that the US and its allies have been dropping an average of 46 bombs per day in its so-called War on Terror for the last twenty years.

    Do you remember seeing an average of 46 news reports a day on bombings conducted by the US and its allies? Do you remember even reading about one single US bombing per day in the mainstream news? I don’t. The US power alliance has for decades been continuously raining explosives from the sky on impoverished people in the Global South and the mainstream news reports on almost none of those instances, much less launches an in-depth investigation into whether each one killed who the military claims they killed.

    The difference between the August 29 airstrike and the thousands which preceded it in America’s post-9/11 wars was that this one was politicized. The Biden administration ordered it to look tough on terrorism after the Kabul airport attack (most of the fatalities from which were probably due to panicked gunfire from US and/or allied troops), amidst a withdrawal for which Biden was being aggressively slammed by plutocratic media outlets eager to paint ending US wars as a bad thing that everyone should oppose.

    The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

    “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

    Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had. Instead it’s been left to obscure bloggers and indie journalists to question these actions using scant resources and shoestring budgets.

    They’ve shown that they can do these investigations into the validity of US airstrikes, and they’ve shown that they’ve spent two decades choosing not to. The mass media manipulators who provide cover for mass military murder by journalistic malpractice and negligence are just complicit in these depraved acts of human butchery as the people firing the weapons and the officials giving the orders.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • 9/11 and Afghanistan Post-Mortems: Lessons in Safe Logic

    In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and alternative media have been replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.

    These critiques have ranged from mild to harsh, and have covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields.  Many of these articles have emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the U.S. has lost its footing and brought on the demise of the American empire and its standing in the world.  Some writers celebrate this and others bemoan it.  Most seem to consider it inevitable.

    This flood of articles has been authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right.  All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless.

    These articles have included cries about phony tears for the wrong victims (those who died in the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and on the planes), how good intelligence could have prevented 9/11, how so many died in vain, how it all led to torture, how whistle blowers were not heeded, how the military was right, how the collapse of the towers led to the collapse of the American empire, how bin Laden won, how evil U.S. war making came home in the form of 9/11 evil, how the longest war was in vain, how the Pentagon received vast sums of money over decades, how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal of the 9/11 victims, etc.

    Many of the points made were valid; others were not.  This flood of opinionated outrage was very emotional and no doubt stirred deep feelings in readers.  It fed on the widespread feeling in the country that something dreadful has occurred, but what it is isn’t exactly clear. The sense of mass confusion and continual disaster permeating the air and infecting people’s daily lives.  The sense of unreality existing everywhere.

    These articles have almost run their course and a new series of post mortems can be anticipated as fear and trembling attaches to new matters, particularly the ongoing Covid-19 fear porn minus the dire consequences of government policies.  Fear is the name of the game and untruth snakes through the media hidden in the grass of truth.  Many of the articles I referred to above – and you can check for yourself as I have purposely left out names and links – contain truths, but truths that disguise deeper untruths upon which the truths are allegedly based.  I will leave the logic lesson to you.

    Since many of these articles have been penned by liberal writers, some of whom one might naively expect to grasp essentials, and since those further to the right are considered defenders of Pax Americana, I will quote the outspoken anti-war singer/songwriter Phil Ochs, who prefaced his trenchant 1965 song, Love Me I’m a Liberal, with these words about logic:

    In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion.    One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the  right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.

    So here’s the rub about the logic.  Almost without exception (there are a handful of truthful writers aside from those I am here referring to, such as Kit Knightly, Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, et al.), from the left to the right and everywhere in between, the authors of all these articles about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and Afghanistan have based their points on a false premise.

    A false premise.  This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism.  Assume (or make believe) something is true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there. Slip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. This is what has happened throughout the media in the last two weeks.  It is not new but worth pointing out.

    The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for American wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the U.S. led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

    The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false.  In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag attack, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe.  I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look.  Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten and conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.

    One is not supposed to say that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post-mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the U.S. had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world.  It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic.  American innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema.

    It is another example of the unspeakable, as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said long ago and James W. Douglass referenced in his monumental book, JFK and the Unspeakable, to explain why John Kennedy died at the hands of the CIA and why that fact had to be suppressed.  The mass murders of September 11, 2001 recapitulate that systemic evil that defies speech.

    It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes    them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.  It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…

    From true writers and journalists we should expect something better – that they don’t repeat official declarations, utter hollow platitudes, and build analyses on false premises – but these are not the best of times, to rephrase Ochs, and safe logic keeps one’s legitimacy intact and protects one’s brand.

    It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable.

    The post 9/11 and Afghanistan Post-Mortems: Lessons in Safe Logic first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghan women, war and the media

    On September 17, Green Left’s Peter Boyle spoke to Dr Ayesha Jehangir who is a writer and academic currently based in Australia. Dr Jehangir specialises in peace journalism, digital war, online extremism, and justice. She has also worked as a journalist in Afghanistan and Pakistan and is currently writing a book about Afghan refugees and media discourses of war and conflict, which was also the topic of her PhD thesis.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Decades of Reporting on Afghanistan War Failed to Look at Life Outside Kabul

    Violence in Afghanistan’s countryside has reportedly dropped after the Taliban takeover and the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but the country continues to face an ongoing humanitarian and economic crisis, with millions of children at risk of starvation. Joining us from Kabul, New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal says he was shocked by the “sheer level of violence” Afghan women outside the cities have experienced in the last two decades of war. “The level of human loss was really extraordinary,” Gopal says. “I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.”

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Afghanistan a month after the Taliban seized power. The New York Times is reporting there’s been a dramatic drop in violence in the Afghan countryside following the Taliban takeover and the U.S. withdrawal of troops. One doctor in Wardak province reports his hospital has no patients with conflict-related injuries for the first time in over two decades. But the hospital is in a crisis as it is unable to pay salaries or buy new medical equipment.

    On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Afghanistan is facing a “dramatic humanitarian crisis,” and urged foreign governments and institutions to keep supporting the people of Afghanistan. UNICEF has warned a million Afghan children are at risk of starvation.

    We go now to the capital, to Kabul, where we’re joined by Anand Gopal. His latest article, “The Other Afghan Women,” appears in The New Yorker. It’s based on his deep reporting in the rural villages of Afghanistan that have been devastated by decades of war. Anand Gopal is also the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.

    Anand, thanks so much for joining us. Can you talk about who the “other Afghan women” are?

    ANAND GOPAL: Thanks, Amy.

    You know, when we were watching the images streaming from Kabul of people desperately trying to get to the airport, including many of my friends, you know, it was easy to come to the conclusion that perhaps what was happening right now was the worst thing that had happened in the last two decades. And, of course, there were many Afghans who wanted to get out because they desperately want a better life, and I don’t blame them for that.

    There was another reality, actually, at the same time that wasn’t really covered as much, and that was happening outside of Kabul in rural areas, where, for the bulk of the last 20 years, the war was actually being fought. So, we think of the War in Afghanistan as just happening in Afghanistan, but, actually, it wasn’t fought in most of the country. There was only particular provinces where the fighting was happening.

    So, I visited Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, which is really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades. And I wanted to see how women there, who had been facing roadside bombs and night raids and airstrikes — what they thought about the U.S. withdrawal. So, that’s the “other Afghan women” in the title. And so, the piece is actually about trying to get their views of how they looked at the American withdrawal after two decades.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand Gopal, just to make clear, 70% — over 70% of Afghanistan’s population is rural, so we have, in a sense, a highly distorted view, because we hear about urban areas — and, in fact, not just urban areas, only Kabul, or principally Kabul. Now, among the people that you spoke to in one village, Pan Killay, a woman told you that a large number of her family, all civilians, had been killed in the last years. And you went and spoke to many other families in the village and found that, on average, every family had lost 10 to 12 family members during the war, the war that they refer to as the American War. Could you elaborate on what they told you?

    ANAND GOPAL: Sure. So, the woman in question, her name is Shakira, and she’s a housewife who lives in a very small village in the valley of Sangin, which was one of the areas of the most intense violence over the years. And so, I had the opportunity to meet her and interview her a number of times. And, you know, I’m somebody who’s been covering this conflict for many years, and even I was taken aback by the sheer level of violence that people like her had gone through and had witnessed.

    So, she lost, as you said, 16 members of her family. But what was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident. This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years. So, there was one cousin who was carrying a hot plate for cooking, and that hot plate was mistaken for an IED, a roadside bomb, and he was killed. There was another cousin who was a farmer, who was in the field and had encountered a coalition patrol, and he was shot dead. Shakira told me his body was just left there like an animal. So, there were so many different instances.

    So people were living — reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary.

    And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not — there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, one of the other women that you spoke to, Pazaro, said to you, “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here. Is this justice?” she said. I mean, in a sense, as you show in this piece, “The Other Afghan Women,” there are two different realities in Afghanistan — there are probably more, but with respect to the attitude towards the Taliban taking over the country. Could you talk about that? You’ve covered, of course, as you said, the war extensively over many, many years, from Kabul as well as elsewhere across the country.

    ANAND GOPAL: Yeah, I mean, when we think about women’s rights in Afghanistan, we tend to think about the ability to go to school, to work, to have representation in Parliament. And these are real gains that were made in the last 20 years. But there are other women’s rights that aren’t talked about.

    So, when I asked Pazaro or other women, you know, “What do you think about the claim that the U.S. was bringing women’s rights to Afghanistan?” they told me, you know, “We can’t walk outside without worrying if we’re going to get blown up. So, what right do — you know, how is that protecting our rights?” It’s also a part of women’s rights to be able to walk without fear, to be able to live. To live is a woman’s right, right? So, they had a very different conception of women’s rights, which was not that they rejected the aspiration for wanting to get educated or to wanting to have a public role, but they also didn’t want to be shot at or have their loved ones killed. And so, they had a very different conception.

    And so, when I asked them about the claim that the U.S. was bringing women’s rights, they were very skeptical, and many of them were cursing the United States, saying, “They brought us nothing.” So, for example, like, one person said, “They were bringing rights to Kabul, and they were just bombing us here,” essentially. So, it’s a country that has different realities, and I think we need to be able to hold both of those realities in our head at the same time.

    AMY GOODMAN: Anand Gopal, if you can talk about the empowering of warlords by the U.S. occupation? If you can tell us the story of Amir Dado and take that right through to a person who ended up at Guantánamo?

    ANAND GOPAL: So, Amir Dado was a member of the mujahideen, which was the holy warriors or the rebels, the rural rebels, that were fighting against the Soviet occupation. The Soviet occupation was a brutal occupation that killed millions of people in Afghanistan, and so, naturally, people were rising up against it. But at the same time, some of these rebels were being supported by Pakistan, by Saudi Arabia, and especially by the CIA. And so, there was the creation of warlords or strongmen. There was never warlords in Afghan history until the start of the wars in 1979.

    So, Amir Dado is one of these warlords. And he came to prominence in the Sangin Valley in the mid-’80s. He was a major drug trafficker. He was also somebody who held a religious court, and he basically acted the way we think the Taliban would act now. You know, he would make sure women stayed in the home. When people tried to marry for love, he would have them arrested. He kidnapped people. I mean, he was really considered a real brutal strongman.

    When the Taliban emerged in the mid-’90s, the main reason they emerged was to fight against people like Amir Dado. So they came to the Sangin Valley and Helmand in early 1995, and they demobilized him, and he fled the country. And then, for the next few years, the Sangin Valley and places in southern Afghanistan were at peace. And so, that was the kind of perspective that a lot of the women there had, which is that they don’t like the Taliban, but they hated the warlords. And so, at least the warlords were gone, and they would accept that.

    Then, when the U.S. invaded in 2001, they did something astonishing, which is that they brought those very same warlords back into the country. You know, they had a choice there. They could have tried to support local Afghans. They could have tried to help build a democracy, with the incredible yearning there is in Afghanistan for a better world. I mean, people like Shakira, the woman I profile in the piece, she wanted the U.S. to invade. She hated the Taliban, and she wanted the support. Instead, what the U.S. did is they brought people like Amir Dado back into the country. The reason they did that is because the U.S. never really cared about building a democracy in Afghanistan. The mission was always about counterterrorism. It was always about trying to find the, quote-unquote, “bad guys.” And so they brought these warlords back in who could be their partners.

    And so, for the next two or three years, from 2001 until 2004, Amir Dado basically terrorized the Helmand countryside. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, innocent people, were arrested. People were killed. There’s the multiple cases of people who were wrongfully accused of being Taliban members and sent to Guantánamo. There was essentially a one-sided war that was waged by the U.S. and its allied warlords, like Amir Dado, against the Afghan population in Helmand. And that, ultimately, is what led to the reconstitution of the Taliban by 2004.

    AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you talk about Amir Dado suspected of being responsible for the killing of U.S. Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales in March of 2003, but he managed to point the finger at a Taliban member who ended up being sent to Guantánamo.

    ANAND GOPAL: Yeah. I mean, this is just an example of the extraordinary chaos that was happening there and the ways in which these strongmen were using their access to the Americans to eliminate their enemies. So, what happened in this case was that the U.S. Special Forces went to meet some members of the Afghan government in Sangin, and Amir Dado, who was a U.S. ally, engineered an attack, an ambush, on U.S. troops. It killed two U.S. soldiers, Special Forces personnel. They were the first two U.S. soldiers who died in Helmand as a result of violent activity. And the U.S. themselves, internally, among the Special Forces, began to suspect that their own ally, Amir Dado, was the one who was behind the attack.

    Nonetheless, Amir Dado took some — basically, some random guy who had nothing to do with the attack, who was an ex-Taliban who had surrendered and was sitting at home, took him, tortured him and then delivered him to the U.S. and said, “This guy here is the person who was the real culprit.” The U.S. sent him to Guantánamo. He spent three or four years in Guantánamo. And when I looked at the classified documents from Guantánamo, which were eventually released by WikiLeaks, you know, what was extraordinary in those documents was that the investigating judges and others knew that this person was innocent. They wrote in the documents that Amir Dado, the U.S. ally, was the one who actually sent — who was the one who actually conducted this ambush. But, nonetheless, this person languished in Guantánamo for three or four years. His case is not unique. This has happened hundreds of times across the country in those years.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, as you’ve pointed out in a recent interview with Reveal News, one of the effects of the way in which the U.S. supported these warlords and made them extremely wealthy is that they had an incentive to continue the war and an incentive to continue producing terrorists. Now, you mentioned earlier that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — Pakistan, in particular — played a critical role in supporting the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. Could you say more about the role of Pakistan in supporting the Taliban all of these years and what role you think the country will play, Pakistan will play, in the interim government, its relations to the people who have been appointed in the interim government by the Taliban?

    ANAND GOPAL: Well, Pakistan supports the Taliban very closely. A number of the senior leaders of the Taliban were living in Pakistan, so the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, was basically sheltering the senior Taliban leadership. There’s a very close working relationship there.

    But it’s very important to understand the history here, which is that in 2001, when the U.S. invaded, the Taliban was defeated. You know, to a man, they basically either surrendered or, you know, escaped and ran away. So, there was, in 2002, no Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no resistance whatsoever. Al-Qaeda, as well, fled the country. They went mostly to Pakistan, and some of them to Iran. So you had thousands of U.S. troops on the ground in 2002 with a mandate to fight a war against terror, but with no enemy actually to fight.

    And so, this was the context in which they began to incentivize the allied warlords to basically produce bad guys and enemies for them. They started to arrest these people and kill them. This created the insurgency. Once the insurgency was created — and this is now 2004 — then Pakistan got involved and tried to influence the insurgency for its own interests. Its own interest is, it basically views Afghanistan as its own backyard and doesn’t want Indian influence. And so, Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan has been a very malign role. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the ultimate cause of the War in Afghanistan was by the U.S., its actions in the early years.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a part of the article that hasn’t gotten very much attention. Anand, you tweeted, “CIA-created Afghan death squads were evacuated before many American citizens.” Can you explain?

    ANAND GOPAL: So, from the very beginning, the U.S. created these militias. As I mentioned earlier, warlordism and militias, that’s not something that’s natural to Afghanistan. It really emerged in the late 1970s, early ’80s, as a result of the war. In 2001, the U.S. really invented some of these, created some of these groups. So, there is a group called the Khost Protection Force, which was a CIA-created militia in the southeast of the country. There’s many groups like this around the country. And they were seen as the CIA’s closest allies in trying to fight the Taliban. And many, many innocent people, many, many civilians suffered as a result of this. And so, their methods were seen as extraordinarily brutal.

    What happened with the evacuation last month was that these CIA death squads were essentially the ones that were one of the guards of the airport itself. And the reason they were there is, ultimately, they were going to be evacuated, as well. And it was a horrific scene. As I was talking to colleagues and friends who were on the ground, sometimes these death squads are shooting at crowds. Also, the Taliban wasn’t always letting people through. It was chaotic. But, ultimately, all of these death squads got evacuated. There are still American citizens here in Afghanistan today trying to get out, but the CIA militias are all out. They’re now living in the United States. And it’s not the first time this has happened. There have been other CIA-backed strongmen who have been living comfortably in the U.S. for the last decade or two decades. And so, this is kind of, I think, an indictment on what the CIA’s priorities are in terms of Afghan lives.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anand, before we conclude, if you could comment on the people the Taliban has appointed to serve in the interim government? You’ve said that what’s striking in the list is that the most powerful members of the Taliban, those who were running the insurgency in the last 20 years, have been excluded. What are the implications of this? You’ve said that this might create a shadow government.

    ANAND GOPAL: Yeah, I think that, you know, when we see the Taliban Cabinet that was announced a few days ago, I mean, all of those figures in the Cabinet held similar positions in the ’90s. But, really, the powerful people in the movement, some of them were military commanders, others do have Cabinet positions, but they all kind of exist in what’s called a shura, a leadership shura, which is in Kandahar. That’s really who’s controlling the country. There’s a prime minister. He’s a longtime member of the Taliban. But I’m not sure how much power he actually has. The real power is behind behind the scenes.

    And I think that’s tragic for Afghans, because that means even less accountability. The previous regime, that was here for 20 years, had very little accountability. There was elections, but those elections were mostly rigged. And a lot of the real decision-making was done behind the scenes. And I think there were some Afghans who were hoping that this would be a change. I think this is not going to be a change. It’s going to be further down the line of zero accountability and power being wielded behind the scenes.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I wanted to ask you — a main issue that you write about is the countryside versus Kabul. We know a lot more about what’s happening in Kabul. You write, “The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness.” Can you end with that?

    ANAND GOPAL: Well, you know, there was a lot of — there’s activists, women’s rights activists, you know, people who are part of civil society, etc., all of which only appeared in the last two decades, and only appeared because of the American occupation. And for people like that, this obviously is a lot of — they’re facing despair, and it’s very understandable. Many of them have been able to leave the country. Many are still stuck here in Kabul. And Kabul is a relatively liberal area compared to the countryside. And there are more freedoms for women here than there are in places like Helmand, where I visited. And the idea that the Taliban are going to impose the mores of Helmand onto Kabul, I think, is a tragedy, because it means that people who have enjoyed some freedoms for the last two decades are going to see them rolled back.

    All of this, I think, didn’t have to be this way. The U.S. had the opportunity in the early years to negotiate with the Taliban, when they were much weaker. They had the opportunity to try to create an inclusive government. But instead they chose the path of war, and here’s where we are now. Nobody has really won from this. The people in the countryside are breathing a sigh of relief because there’s no war, but the people in the cities are terrified. Nobody is actually happy with the outcome. And that’s a tragedy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Anand Gopal, I want to thank you so much for being with us, journalist and professor at Arizona State University. His article, “The Other Afghan Women,” is in The New Yorker magazine. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. He is also author of the book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.

    Coming up, as the debate over a booster vaccine shot, a third shot, heats up in the U.S., calls are growing for global vaccine equity. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 20 Years of Post-9/11 Amnesia

    The constant demand that we “Never forget!,” the events of September 11, 2001 is rather laughable. Forgetting is difficult after enduring 20 years of war propaganda. News stories about that day are plentiful albeit useless, that is to say they add nothing to our understanding of why the U.S. was attacked and depend upon sentiment, jingoism, and tried and true claims of exceptionalism to maintain fear, hatred, and support for war.

    The post 20 Years of Post-9/11 Amnesia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Winner In Afghanistan: China

    On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.

    The post The Winner In Afghanistan: China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Know Your Enemy: Twenty Years of Terror, with Spencer Ackerman

    National security reporter Spencer Ackerman explains how the War on Terror laid the groundwork for Trump.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • One month of Taliban occupation: A hundred years of Afghan solitude

    Today, it’s been exactly one month since the fall of Kabul on 15th August 2021, writes Yasmeen Afghan. People live in constant fear, government employees have not been paid, and most people are out of jobs, especially Afghan women.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Despite its exit, the US will continue to wage war on Afghanistan

    The United States has always been a bad loser. Whether it has viewed itself as an imperial power, a military superpower or, in today’s preferred terminology, the “world’s policeman”, the assumption is that everyone else must submit to its will.

    All of which is the context for judging the outcry in western capitals over the US army’s hurried exit last month from Kabul, its final hold-out in Afghanistan.

    There are lots of voices on both sides of the Atlantic lamenting that messy evacuation. And it is hard not to hear in them – even after a catastrophic and entirely futile two-decade military occupation of Afghanistan – a longing for some kind of re-engagement.

    Politicians are describing the pull-out as a “defeat” and bewailing it as evidence that the US is a declining power. Others are warning that Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for Islamic extremism, leading to a rise in global terrorism.

    Liberals, meanwhile, are anxious about a renewed assault on women’s rights under the Taliban, or they are demanding that more Afghans be helped to flee.

    The subtext is that western powers need to meddle a little – or maybe a lot – more and longer in Afghanistan. The situation, it is implied, can still be fixed, or at the very least the Taliban can be punished as a warning to others not to follow in its footsteps.

    All of this ignores the fact that the so-called “war for Afghanistan” was lost long ago. “Defeat” did not occur at Kabul airport. The evacuation was a very belated recognition that the US military had no reason, not even the purported one, to be in Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden evaded capture.

    In fact, as experts on the region have pointed out, the US defeated itself. Once al-Qaeda had fled Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s chastened fighters had slunk back to their villages with no appetite to take on the US Robocop, each local warlord or tribal leader seized the moment. They settled scores with enemies by informing on them, identifying to the US their rivals as  “terrorists” or Taliban.

    US commanders blew ever bigger holes through the new Pax Americana as their indiscriminate drone strikes killed friend and foe alike. Soon most Afghans outside the corrupt Kabul elite had good reason to hate the US and want it gone. It was the Pentagon that brought the Taliban back from the dead.

    Deceitful spin

    But it was not just the Afghan elite that was corrupt. The country became a bottomless pit, with Kabul at its centre, into which US and British taxpayers poured endless money that enriched the war industries, from defence officials and arms manufacturers to mercenaries and private contractors.

    Those 20 years produced a vigorous, powerful Afghanistan lobby in the heart of Washington that had every incentive to perpetuate the bogus narrative of a “winnable war”.

    The lobby understood that their enrichment was best sold under the pretence – once again – of humanitarianism: that the caring West was obligated to bring democracy to Afghanistan.

    That deceitful spin, currently being given full throat by politicians, is not just there to rationalise the past. It will shape the future, too, in yet more disastrous ways for Afghanistan.

    With American boots no longer officially on the ground, pressure is already building for war by other means.

    It should not be a difficult sell. After all, that was the faulty lesson learned by the Washington foreign policy elite after US troops found themselves greeted in Iraq, not by rice and rose petals, but by roadside bombs.

    In subsequent Middle East wars, in Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US has preferred to fight more covertly, from a greater distance or through proxies. The advantage is no American body bags and no democratic oversight. Everything happens in the shadows.

    There is already a clamour in the Pentagon, in think tanks, among arms manufacturers and defence contractors, and in the US media, too, to do exactly the same now in Afghanistan.

    Nothing could be more foolhardy.

    Brink of collapse

    Indeed, the US has already begun waging war on the Taliban and – because the group is now Afghanistan’s effective government – on an entire country under Taliban rule. The war is being conducted through global financial institutions, and may soon be given a formal makeover as a “sanctions regime”.

    The US did exactly the same to Vietnam for 20 years following its defeat there in 1975. And more recently Washington has used that same blueprint on states that refuse to live under its thumb, from Iran to Venezuela.

    Washington has frozen at least $9.5bn of Afghanistan’s assets in what amounts to an act of international piracy. Donors from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to the European Union, Britain and the US are withholding development funds and assistance. Most Afghan banks are shuttered. Money is in very short supply.

    Afghanistan is already in the grip of drought, and existing food shortages are likely to intensify during the winter into famine. Last week a UN report warned that, without urgent financial help, 97 percent of Afghans could soon be plunged into poverty.

    All of this compounds Afghanistan’s troubles under the US occupation, when the number of Afghans in poverty doubled and child malnutrition became rampant. According to Ashok Swain, Unesco’s chair on international water cooperation, “more than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-thirds no electricity”.

    That is an indictment of US misrule over the past two decades when, it might have been assumed, at least some of the $2tn spent on Afghanistan had gone towards Washington’s much-vaunted “nation-building” project rather than guns and gunships.

    Now Afghans’ dire plight can be used as a launchpad for the US to cripple the Taliban as it struggles to rebuild a hollowed-out country.

    The real aspiration of sanctions will be to engineer Afghanistan’s economic collapse – as an exemplar to others of US power and reach, and vindictiveness, and in the hope that the Afghan people can be starved to the point at which they rise up against their leaders.

    Deepen existing splits

    All of this can easily be framed in humanitarian terms, as it has been elsewhere. Late last month, the US drove through the United Nations Security Council a resolution calling for free travel through Kabul airport, guarantees on human rights, and assurances that the country will not become a shelter for terrorism.

    Any of those demands can be turned into a pretext to extend sanctions to the Afghan government itself. Governments, including Britain’s, are already reported to be struggling to find ways to approve charities directing aid to Afghanistan.

    But it is the sanctions themselves that will cause humanitarian suffering. Unpaid teachers mean no school for children, especially girls. No funds for rural clinics will result in more women dying in childbirth and higher infant mortality rates. Closed banks end in those with guns – men – terrorising everyone else over limited resources.

    Isolating the Taliban with sanctions will have two entirely predictable outcomes.

    First, it will push the country into the arms of China, which will be well-positioned to assist Afghanistan in return for access to its mineral wealth. Beijing has already announced plans to do business with the Taliban that include reopening the Mes Aynak copper mine.

    As US President Joe Biden’s administration is already well-advanced in crafting China as the new global menace, trying to curtail its influence on neighbours, any alliance between the Taliban and China could easily provide further grounds for the US intensifying sanctions.

    Secondly, sanctions are also certain to deepen existing splits within the Taliban, between the hardliners in the north and east opposed to engagement with the West, and those in the south keen to win over the international community in a bid to legitimise Taliban rule.

    At the moment, the Taliban doves are probably in the ascendant, ready to help the US root out internal enemies such as the ISKP, Islamic State group’s offshoot in Afghanistan. But that could quickly change if Washington reverts to type.

    A combination of sanctions, clumsy covert operations and Washington overplaying its hand could quickly drive the hardliners into power, or into an alliance with the local IS faction.

    That scenario may have already been given a boost by a US drone strike on Kabul in late August, in retaliation for an ISKP attack on the airport that killed 13 US soldiers. New witness testimonies suggest the strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, not Islamic militants.

    Familiar game plan

    If that weren’t bad enough, Washington hawks are calling for the Taliban to be officially designated a “foreign terrorist organisation“, and the new Afghan government a state sponsor of terrorism, which would make it all but impossible for the Biden administration to engage with it. Others such as Lindsey Graham, an influential US politician, are trying to pile on the pressure by calling for troops to return.

    How readily this mindset could become the Washington consensus is highlighted by US media reports of plans by the CIA to operate covertly within Afghanistan. As if nothing has been learned, the agency appears to be hoping to cultivate opponents of the Taliban, including once again the warlords whose lawlessness brought the Taliban to power more than two decades ago.

    This is a game plan the US and Britain know well from their training and arming of the mujahideen to oust the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s and overthrow a few years later Afghanistan’s secular communist government.

    Biden will have an added incentive to keep meddling in Afghanistan to prevent any attacks originating from there that could be exploited by his political opponents and blamed on his pulling out troops.

    According to the New York Times, the CIA believes it must be ready to “counter threats” likely to emerge from a “chaos” the Taliban will supposedly unleash.

    But Afghanistan will be far less chaotic if the Taliban are strong, not if – as is being proposed – the US undermines Taliban cohesion by operating spies in its midst, subverts the Taliban’s authority by launching drone strikes from neighbouring countries, and recruits warlords or sponsors rival Islamic groups to keep the Taliban under pressure.

    William J Burns, the CIA’s director, has said the agency is ready to run operations “over the horizon“, – at arm’s length. The New York Times has reported that US officials predict “Afghan opponents of the Taliban will most likely emerge who will want to help and provide information to the United States”.

    This strategy will lead to a failed state, one immiserated by US sanctions and divided between warlords feuding over the few resources left. That is precisely the soil in which the worst kind of Islamic extremism will flourish.

    Destabilising Afghanistan is what got the US into this mess in the first place. Washington seems only too ready to begin that process all over again.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Despite its exit, the US will continue to wage war on Afghanistan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan media: ‘You can’t put that genie back in the bottle’

    By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

    Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks prompted the US to invade Afghanistan, the Taliban announced they have taken the whole country again last week.

    Journalists who remain there are at risk in spite of assurances media freedom will be respected.

    Will proper journalism be possible under the Taliban? We ask a former foreign correspondent there who was once jailed by another repressive regime.

    Anyone filling their lockdown downtime binge-watching the final series of US spy show Homeland might have found its fictionalised account of the US trying to get out of Afghanistan in a hurry pretty prescient.

    “It’ll be Saigon all over again,” the gravelly-voiced Afghan president says as he warns the US that making peace with the Taliban will end in tears.

    When the US troops left this month, it was indeed a case of “choppers at the embassy compound” once more.

    And after that, getting other people out who feared the Taliban became a story all of its own.

    RNZAF and NZDF forces dispatched to get out New Zealand citizens and visa holders provided the media with dramatic stories of improvised rescues.

    One  exclusive in the New Zealand Herald described a grandmother in a wheelchair hauled out from the crowd via a sewage filled ditch, illustrated with NZDF images and footage.

    But while the government said it got about 390 people out of the country, Scoop’s Gordon Campbell pointed out authorities here have not said how many were already New Zealand citizens — or Afghan citizens or contractors whose service put them and their family members in danger.

    Afghan translator Bashir Ahmad — who worked for the NZDF in Bamiyan province and came to New Zealand subsequently — told RNZ’s Morning Report he knew of 36 more people still stuck there.

    Sticking around

    Afghan channel Tolo news broadcast's the Talliban's first press conference since after over in Kabul.

    Afghan channel Tolo news broadcasts the Taliban’s first press conference since they took over in Kabul. Image: RNZ screenshot

    The end of 20 years of US occupation was witnessed by BBC’s veteran correspondent Lyse Doucet. She was also there in 1989 reporting for Canada’s CBC when the Soviet Union’s forces pulled out after its occupation that lasted almost a decade.

    Back then she pondered how she would work when power changed hands to the Mujaheddin. Thirty-two years on, herself and others in Afghanistan — including New Zealander Charlotte Bellis who reports from Kabul for global channel Al Jazeera — are also wondering what the Taliban has in store for them.

    The last time the Taliban were in charge — 1996 to 2001 — the media were heavily controlled and independent journalism was almost impossible.

    Local and international media have flourished in Afghanistan after the US ousted the Taliban 20 years ago – but now their future is far from clear.

    The Taliban have offered reassurances it will respect press freedoms. On August 21 they announced a committee including journalists would be created to “address the problems of the media in Kabul.”

    But some have already reported harassment and confiscation of equipment. Five journalists from Etilaatroz, a daily newspaper in Kabul, were arrested and beaten by Taliban, the editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.

    Other local journalists got out while they could.

    The day before the suicide attack outside Kabul airport the BBC’s Lyse Doucet found pioneering journalist Wahida Faizi — head of the women’s section of the Afghanistan Journalists Safety Committee — on the tarmac trying to get out. (Faizi has reportedly reached Denmark safely since then through the assistance of Copenhagen-based group  International Media Support.)

    In the meantime, the Taliban have been getting to know reporters who are still there.

    Charlotte Bellis told RNZ’s Sunday Morning she was sticking around to cover what happens next in Afghanistan and build relationships  with the Taliban — and even give them advice.

    “I told them … if you’re going to run the country you need to build trust and you need to be transparent and authentic – and do as much media as you can to try and reassure people that they don’t need to be scared of you,” she said.

    It helps that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar where the Taliban have a political office.

    Earlier this month, the Taliban’s slick spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told Charlotte Bellis they were grateful for New Zealand offering financial aid to Afghanistan.

    But that money is for the UN agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent operations — and not an endorsement of the Taliban takeover.

    That prompted the former chief of the UN Development Programme – Helen Clark – to call in to Newstalk ZB to say the media had been spun.

    “They’ve cottoned on to the fact they can use social media for propaganda,” she told Newstalk ZB.

    “When journalists run these stories it implies that governments are supporting the Taliban when nothing could be further from the truth,” Clark said.

    How should the media deal with an outfit which turfed the recognised government out of power — and whose real intentions are not yet known?

    The Taliban’s governing cabinet named last week has several hardliners — and no women.

    Will reporters really be able to report under the Taliban from now on?

    No caption
    ‘Please, my life is in danger.’ Image: RNZ Mediawatch

    Peter Greste was the BBC’s correspondent in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was poised to take over the first time — and he is now the UNESCO chair in journalism at the University of Queensland.

    “We need to make it abundantly clear to the Taliban that they need to stick to their promises to protect journalists and media workers — and let them continue to work. The Taliban‘s words and actions don’t always align but at the very least we need to start with that,” Greste said.

    “And we need to give refuge and visas to media workers who want to get out,” he said.

    “Watching the way they treat journalists is going to be an important barometer of the way they plan to operate,” said Greste, who is working with the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom to monitor abuses and to create an online “Afghan media freedom tracker”.

    “There’s been an obvious gap between the spokespeople who say they are prepared to let journalists operate and women continue to work — and the troubling reports of attacks by Taliban fighters on the ground, going door-to-door looking for journalists and their families,” he said.

    “We need to maintain communications with them. We need to use all the tools we can to make sure we are across where all the people are. Afghanistan’s borders are like Swiss cheese. It’s not always easy to get across — but it is possible,” he said.

    Peter Greste said the translators and fixers the international journalists rely on are absolutely critical to international media.

    “Good translators don’t just translate the words– but help you understand the context. To simply give refuge just to the people who have their faces in their stories and names on bylines is not fair,” Greste said.

    Peter Greste, UNESCO chair of journalism at the University of Queensland, Australia
    Peter Greste, UNESCO chair of journalism at the University of Queensland, Australia … Image: RNZ Mediawatch

    Greste was jailed for months in Egypt on trumped-up charges in 2014 along with local colleagues when the regime there decided it didn’t like their reporting for Al Jazeera.

    It triggered a remarkable campaign in which rival media outlets banded together to demand their release under the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”.

    Does he fear for journalists if the Taliban resort to old ways of handling the media?

    Will we even know if they make life impossible for media and journalists outside the capital in the future?

    “The country has mobile phone networks now it has social media networks. It is possible to find out what’s going on in those regions and it’s going to be difficult for the Taliban to uphold that mirage – if that’s what it is,” he said.

    “I’m not prepared at this point to write them off as an workable and we need to acknowledge the realities of what just happened in Afghanistan,” he said.

    When Greste first arrived in Afghanistan for the BBC in 1994 there was no reliable electricity supply even in the capital city — let alone local television like TOLO news.

    Al-Jazeera news channel's Australian journalist Peter Greste listens to the original court verdict in June.
    Al-Jazeera news channel’s Australian journalist Peter Greste listens to the original court verdict in June. Image: RNZ Mediawatch

    “One of the great successes of the last decade or two has been the flowering of local media. Western organisations and donors and Afghans have understood that having a free media is one of the most important aspects of having a functioning society,” he said.

    Afghans have really taken to that with real enthusiasm. The number of outlets and journalists has been phenomenal. You can’t put that genie back in his bottle without some serious consequences,” Greste told Mediawatch.

    The regime in Egypt wasn’t afraid to imprison him and his colleagues back in 2014. Does he fear for international reporters like Charlotte Bellis and her colleagues?

    “Al Jazeera will have a lot of security in place to make sure the operation is protected,” Greste said.

    “But of course I worry for Charlotte — and also the staff at work with her. As a foreign correspondent though, I think you enjoy more protection than most other journos locally,” Greste said.

    “If my name had been Mohammed and not Peter and if I’d been Egyptian and not Australian or a foreigner there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the kind of outrage and consequences for the government,” Greste said.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • US Drone Killed 10 Afghans After Mistaking Water Jugs for Bombs

    We speak with reporter Matthieu Aikins about how his investigation for The New York Times found an August 29 U.S. drone strike, which the Pentagon claimed targeted a facilitator with the militant group ISIS-K, actually killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children and Zemari Ahmadi, an Afghan engineer who had worked since 2006 for an American aid group. A review of video evidence by the Times shows Zemari loading canisters of water at the charity’s office, after the Pentagon claimed surveillance video showed Zemari loading what they thought were explosives into a car at an unknown compound earlier in the day. “We put together evidence that showed that what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves from the sky was, according to his co-workers and colleagues and video evidence, just an ordinary day for this aid worker,” says Aikins.

    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, with Juan González.

    We turn now to Afghanistan. It’s been one month since the Taliban seized control of Kabul after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken defended the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan during a second day of questioning on Capitol Hill. Blinken was grilled about a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on August 29th. It’s the last drone strike before the withdrawal. The Pentagon claimed the strike targeted a facilitator with the militant group ISIS-K who was preparing to attack the Kabul airport. But local residents said the strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children and Zemari Ahmadi — not an ISIS-K operative, but an Afghan engineer who had worked since 2006 for the California-based charity group Nutrition and Education International. The Pentagon claims surveillance video showed Zemari loading what they thought were explosives into a car at an unknown compound earlier in the day. But video evidence obtained by The New York Times found Zemari was actually loading canisters of water at the charity’s office to deliver to those in need. The Pentagon has described the drone attack as a “righteous” strike. But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Blinken acknowledged the U.S. is not certain who was targeted, when questioned by Republican Senator Rand Paul.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?

    SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: The administration is, of course, reviewing that — that strike, and I’m sure that a, you know, full assessment will be — will be forthcoming.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: So you don’t know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?

    SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: I can’t speak to that. And I can’t speak to that in this setting, in any event.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: So, you don’t know or won’t tell us?

    SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: I don’t — I don’t know, because we’re reviewing it.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, see, you’d think that you’d kind of know, before you off somebody with a Predator drone, whether he’s an aid worker or he’s an ISIS-K. See, the thing is, is this isn’t just you. It’s been going on for administration after administration.

    AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Kabul, Afghanistan, where we’re joined by Matthieu Aikins of The New York Times. He wrote the recent piece headlined “In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb.”

    Matthieu, talk about going to the site, to the family’s home, where the car was, and describe what you learned happened that day, August 29th.

    MATTHIEU AIKINS: Well, August 29th, there was the strike in the evening. And we went the next morning, myself and a photographer for the Times, Jim Huylebroek, and we arrived at the scene. It was inside a courtyard of a house, where a car had been hit. And there was a small crater, still flesh and blood spattered around the interior of the courtyard. And we spoke to the family who lived there, and they were extremely distraught, because they had just lost 10 members of the family, including seven children. So, it was immediately apparent that there had been civilian casualties in the strike. And then, you know, when we followed up with our investigation over the past two weeks, we put together evidence that showed that this — what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves from the sky was, according to his co-workers and colleagues and video evidence, just an ordinary day for this aid worker.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Matthieu, the continued stonewalling, effectively, of the government in terms of what they have found out since is really remarkable. I’m just wondering — basic stuff like how many people died. And there’s a big difference between 10 and the official count that the U.S. is still saying of three civilians. They haven’t quite explained why they claimed Mr. Ahmadi was driving into an unknown compound at one point, which actually was the aid agency’s headquarters in Kabul. And also, they’re not even making clear whether they’ve checked if he was an employee of this U.S.-based aid group. What do you make of this continued almost refusal to explain the results of what they’ve investigated so far?

    MATTHIEU AIKINS: Well, certainly, they have a lot to answer for, a lot to explain. But they are conducting an investigation, and typically when the military does this sort of investigation, you do have to wait for the results. They’re going to be classified, but they’ll probably brief them to lawmakers and then eventually release a redacted version of the investigation. So, at this point, I don’t think we’re going to hear anything, at least not officially, until that’s completed.

    AMY GOODMAN: On September 1st, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, described the drone attack as a “righteous” strike.

    GEN. MARK MILLEY: We know that there were secondary explosions. Because there were secondary explosions, there is a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle. The third thing is, we know from a variety of other means that at least one of those people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator. So, were there others killed? Yes, there are others killed. Who they are, we don’t know. We’ll try to sort through all that. But we believe that the procedures, at this point — I don’t want to influence the outcome of an investigation — but, at this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s General Mark Milley. Evidence examined by The New York Times at the scene of the drone strike suggests there was not a second explosion.

    NARRATOR: We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared the evidence with three weapons experts, who said the damage was consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car, and the damage from the metal fragments of a warhead. This plastic melted as a result of a car fire triggered by the missile strike.

    All three experts also pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large secondary explosions described by the Pentagon — no collapsed or blown-out walls, including next to the trunk with the alleged explosives; no sign that a second car parked in the courtyard was overturned by a large blast; no destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded and triggered a large fire.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s The New York Times video report based on Matthieu Aikins’ investigation of the U.S. drone strike. So, if you could elaborate on that, Matthieu, and also talk about why the children, why there were seven children in Zemari’s car?

    MATTHIEU AIKINS: Sure. Well, the investigation was definitely a team effort. And we had experts look at the photos and videos that we were able to collect from the scene. And that was really the military’s justification, from what we’ve learned at least thus far, for taking the strike, you know, that this was an imminent threat to the airport, because they took the shot inside a crowded residential neighborhood, where there was a very high likelihood of civilian casualties. You know, that’s a kind of assumption that I think would have been fair in that circumstance. So, really, the way they would have justified this was that this was a car bomb or some kind of imminent threat. And I think it’s pretty conclusive that there was not a larger explosive in this car.

    Now, what happened was, is that Zemari’s family, you know, the kids — he lived with his three brothers, so there was a lot of kids in this house. And when he came home every day from work, as I was told by his brother, you know, he’d pull up, and the kids would run out, and they’d be excited to see him. And they’d get in the car, and, you know, usually one of them would sit behind the wheel, maybe on his lap, and they would back the car in the courtyard. So, that’s what they said happened that day, so those kids were in the car when it was struck by a Hellfire missile. And that is the reason why seven of them were killed.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Matthieu, what does this — from your reporting in Afghanistan, what does this tell us about the limitations of these drone strikes, the inherent problems that exist when you rely, essentially, on aerial surveillance to determine who you strike, or not, versus on-the-ground, real human intelligence?

    MATTHIEU AIKINS: Yeah. So, this is not an isolated incident. You know, we’ve had civilian casualties from drone strikes many times over the years. But the fact of the matter was, this happened in Kabul. You know, I was able to go to the scene, and we were able to do the story in two weeks. Normally these happen in remote, dangerous areas, difficult to access. So, often all we have is the military’s official version of the events — in this case, that this guy was an ISIS facilitator and that there was explosives in the car.

    So, the danger with these strikes, which — again, this may have been the last drone strike of the 20-year American war, but the war on terror continues, and there’s going to be more drone strikes, you know, as promised by the administration, in an over-the-horizon role in places like Afghanistan. The danger is that we’re going to have more of these incidents, there’s going to be more children killed, but that we’re not going to really even know about it, because, again, we’re not going to have access to what’s happening on the ground.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, these drone strikes lessen the chance of U.S. soldiers being killed, as they fly over from another country, as you said, the over-the-horizon capability they’re talking about. But I wanted to go to one last video that you obtained, security camera footage from the office of the U.S.-based aid group Nutrition and Education International, where Zemari Ahmadi had worked earlier in the day.

    NARRATOR: At 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi pulls out a hose. And then he and a co-worker fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning, we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic containers to the office. There was a water shortage in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought water home from the office.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re looking at this closed-circuit footage of him gathering this water to bring home. The U.S. apparently was monitoring him for hours that day, Matthieu.

    MATTHIEU AIKINS: Yeah, they said that they were surveilling him with an MQ-9 Reaper drone. But, again, you know, what they see from the sky and what’s happening on the ground are not necessarily the same thing. And in this case, you know, this was a man who had loaded water in the car to bring home to his family.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Matthieu, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Matthieu Aikins, Kabul-based contributing writer to The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, his investigation into the drone strike headlined “In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb.”

    Next up, we go to a clinical social worker helping undocumented 9/11 responders and cleanup workers 20 years later, even to this day. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Only Way To Effectively Counter Terror Is To End War

    We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create. Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

    The post The Only Way To Effectively Counter Terror Is To End War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Taliban will welcome Australia’s cricket boycott

    In post-9/11 Afghanistan, music and cricket became an escape from twin-violence of United States-occupation and Taliban-terrorism. Farooq Sulehria reports that with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, these cultural activities are now under attack.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Kabul Diaries Part 12: Afghan women are defying Taliban by posting colourful dresses

    An international online campaign of Afghan women’s traditional dress started after the Taliban introduced a strict dress code for female university students, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Kabul Diaries Part 11: Afghans say no to trade in Pakistani currency

    There are growing concerns over the Pakistan establishment’s influence in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • George W. Bush Spent This 9/11 Moralizing. What About His Own Big Lie?

    George W. Bush

    The 20th anniversary of September 11 is behind us now, but the George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour continues unchecked, and the cognitive dissonance surrounding it remains thicker than the frosting on my daughter’s last birthday cake. “He seems decent compared to the other guy,” I overheard someone say. It was almost too much to bear.

    I suppose it would have been impossible to pass the day without Bush making an appearance, but it would have been nice if he had kept it simple: “That was awful, I’m sorry for “fixing the facts around the policy” and lying the country into two failed calamity wars that started a bunch of other wars and torturing people and spying on everyone and looting the Treasury and dropping a giant turd on your future, so I’m going to go paint in Kennebunkport for the remainder of my years and never be seen again until they put me in the ground. Bye, y’all.”

    Would that it were so. Instead, the foulest failson of fearsome privilege went and made himself a bit of news on Saturday by alluding that Donald Trump’s domestic terrorism brigades are not such a good thing for the country. He named no names, but even that infamously obtuse man can pop a cap in a fish when it’s in a very small barrel.

    Speaking from the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial for the passengers of Flight 93, Bush alluded to “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.” That got everyone’s attention in a hurry.

    “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush continued. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

    Quick note: When the U.S. withdrew from Bush’s war in Afghanistan, some of Donald Trump’s favorite Proud Boys were vocally thrilled, considering the Taliban’s actions a worthy roadmap for their own plans. “Little cultural overlap, George?” More than you and your Republican pals may want to think.

    To be fair, this wasn’t the first time Bush gave Trump and his minions a soft serving of the back of his hand. After the 1/6 insurrection, Bush said, “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” adding that he was “appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election.” Again, no names, but the inference was unmistakable … though I winced hard at the time to hear Bush, of all people, use the (notably racist) term “banana republic” after gaining the presidency by way of the bag job they call the 2000 election.

    Had Bush stopped there, this column probably would not exist … but, of course, he didn’t stop there. “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said in Shanksville. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”

    Full stop, what?

    You know what year was worse than 2001? 2002. That was the year the swelling started to go down after 9/11 and Bush’s people, along with their allies in Congress and the news media (most of the news media, not just Fox), went full-tilt into fearmongering and brazen racism. Bush said many nice things about Muslims and peace and getting along, while his administration arrested Muslims by the score and slapped together anti-Muslim no-fly lists that included 4-year-old children.

    2002 was the year of “Watch what you say” from the press secretary, well-timed terror “alerts” that seemed to come along a few minutes after any negative story about the administration hit the wires, and WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA whenever anyone dared question the lethal course we were taking. 2002 was the first full year of the war in Afghanistan, and unbeknownst to most of us, was also the year when the groundwork for the Iraq War WMD lies was being prepared. The torture of Muslims around the world began in full not long after.

    “At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith,” said Bush in Shanksville. “That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.”

    According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims had increased 1,617 percent by the end of 2001. Mosques were vandalized and burned, and those seeking to worship at them were brutalized. George W. Bush was not personally directing violence against these communities, but in his quest to maximize his power after 9/11, he wound the country up so tight with a cocktail of fear and patriotic balderdash that racist violence was an obvious outcome, and it was. There is little chance Trump’s rampant anti-Muslim bigotry would have bloomed as well as it did without the Bush era preparing the ground first.

    That is the nation I know, Mr. Bush, and you had a heavy hand in creating it … which brings me back around to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. The country, and in particular the news media, spent the weekend gazing deeply into its navel wondering, “What does it all mean? How did we come to this dismal place after 20 years?”

    A primary answer, of course, should have been “the Bush administration,” which presided over 9/11 and got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. That triple play served to put us down in this deep hole, but few people in positions of responsibility seem willing to say it. The TV news people want no part of it, though their role is almost equally bleak.

    Many are rightly worried about the ongoing effects of Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being stolen. What about Bush’s “Big Lie” regarding WMD in Iraq? Cognitive dissonance is what. That deliberate decision to mislead the country into a two-decade war has cost us countless lives and trillions of dollars. It touches every aspect of our existence now, and not for the good, but the corporate media and politicians largely refused to acknowledge it even on September 11, 2020, a day when a reckoning with what we’ve done and what we’ve become seemed just and proper.

    That didn’t happen, and George W. Bush was allowed out in public again without even the most minor public displays of accountability. Instead, we spent the weekend lamenting our sorry national estate while one of the principal authors of that collapse was treated like a returning hero.

    That is cognitive dissonance to the bone. It is our lasting collective inheritance from a former president who knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it for all those years ago. All you really need to remember is the smirk. The rest is aftermath, and the ashes in our hair.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Up to Half of Pentagon Spending Since 9/11 Has Gone to War Profiteers

    A jet shoots off missiles during an unnecessary airshow

    Up to half of the estimated $14 trillion that the Pentagon has spent in the two decades since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors, with corporate behemoths such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics hoovering up much of the money.

    That’s according to a new paper (pdf) authored by William Hartung — director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy — and released Monday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

    Published just days after the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and two weeks after the last U.S. military plane departed Afghanistan, the paper documents the extent to which the massive post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending benefited weapon makers, logistics firms, private security contractors, and other corporate interests.

    “The magnitude of Pentagon spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was remarkable,” Hartung observes. “The increase in U.S. military spending between Fiscal Year 2002 and Fiscal Year 2003 was more than the entire military budget of any other country, including major powers like China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.”

    According to Hartung’s analysis, from “one-third to one-half” of the Pentagon’s $14 trillion in spending since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan on October 2001 went to defense contractors, which spend heavily on government lobbying.

    “A large portion of these contracts — one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years — have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman,” Hartung writes. “The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion.”

    But those five corporate giants are far from the only companies that profited from the increase in U.S. Defense Department outlays following the Afghanistan invasion, which ultimately killed more than 46,000 Afghan civilians. Hartung notes that numerous other firms — including Erik Prince’s since-rebranded Blackwater, the Dick Cheney-tied company Halliburton, and DynCorp — benefited handsomely from the Pentagon spending boom.

    “Halliburton’s Pentagon contracts grew more than tenfold from FY2002 to FY2006 on the strength of its contracts to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and provide logistical support for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the new paper reads. “By 2009, over half of DynCorp’s revenues were coming from the Iraq and Afghan wars.”

    Hartung argues that the Pentagon’s growing reliance on private contractors to carry out U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks “raises multiple questions of accountability, transparency, and effectiveness.”

    “This is problematic because privatizing key functions can reduce the U.S. military’s control of activities that occur in war zones while increasing risks of waste, fraud, and abuse,” he writes. “Additionally, that the waging of war is a source of profits can contradict the goal of having the U.S. lead with diplomacy in seeking to resolve conflicts.”

    In order to rein in war profiteering and increase government “accountability over private firms involved in conducting or preparing for war,” Hartung recommends several broad policy changes, including:

    • Slashing overall spending on war and military operations overseas;
    • Increasing “the role of diplomacy” in U.S. foreign policy;
    • Implementing more strict regulations and “strengthening the role of inspectors general, auditors, and contracting officers in rooting out corruption”; and
    • Enacting “revolving door reforms” such as “longer cooling off periods between government service and employment in the arms industry, closing loopholes in current laws, and increasing detailed reporting on revolving door employment.”

    “Reducing the profits of war ultimately depends on reducing the resort to war in the first place,” Hartung writes. “Likewise, making war less profitable decreases the incentive to go to war. Given the immense financial and human costs of America’s post-9/11 wars — and the negative security consequences generated by many of these conflicts — adopting a new, less militarized foreign policy should be a central goal of the public and policymakers alike.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.