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Category: Afghanistan

  • Missing Voices in Broadcast Coverage of Afghan Withdrawal

     

    As the US after 20 years finally began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the story dominated TV news. Just as they did when the war began (Extra!, 11–12/01), corporate journalists overwhelmingly leaned on government and military sources, while offering no clear antiwar voices and vanishingly few perspectives from civil society leaders in either Afghanistan or the United States.

    FAIR studied a week of Afghanistan coverage (8/15–21/21), starting with the day the Taliban took back Kabul. We looked at the three primetime broadcast news shows, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, identifying 74 sources across the three shows.

    Who got to speak?

    ABC: Crisis in Afghanistan

    Afghan women made up just 5% of sources in nightly news stories on the Afghanistan withdrawal (ABC, 8/16/21).

    Of these sources, 23 sources were Afghans (20) or identified as Afghan Americans (3)—31% of all sources. Only 11 of these 23—fewer than half—were identified by at least a first name, and only four were women. (Afghans often have only one name.) While three Afghan sources were identified as professionals who might have offered informed commentary on the broader political or historical situation—a journalist, a member of parliament and a nonprofit director—the vast majority of questions to all Afghan and Afghan American sources were about their personal risk and situation, essentially providing “color” rather than expert opinion to the story.

    Americans who were not Afghans comprised the remaining 51 sources, with no other nationalities represented. Of these US sources, 31 were non-Pentagon government officials, and 16 were current or former military, from the secretary of Defense to enlisted soldiers. The remainder were three parents of Americans killed in the war, and a non-Afghan US citizen evacuating from Afghanistan.

    The partisan breakdown of US officials was 29 Democrats to eight Republicans, with President Joe Biden accounting for 14 of the Democratic sources, and other members of his administration accounting for 12.

    No scholars or antiwar activists from either the US or Afghanistan were featured. Only two civil society leaders made appearances: the director of a nonprofit women’s organization in Afghanistan (8/16/21) and the president of a New York City veterans’ organization (8/16/21).

    Despite the media’s emphasis on the plight of women in Afghanistan as a result of US withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21), women were rarely considered experts, or even voices worth hearing on this story: Only eight sources were female (11% of the total), two of whom were unnamed.

    No independent defense of withdrawal 

    Mitch McConnell on NBC News

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (NBC, 8/16/21): The Afghan situation is “a stain on the reputation of the United States of America.”

    Biden, who played a key role in leading the country into the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 1/9/20), was essentially the strongest “antiwar” voice in the conversation. While he and his administration frequently defended their decision to uphold the withdrawal agreement, there were no other sources who did so.

    Of the three non-administration Democratic sources, two encouraged an extension of the withdrawal deadline. All of the Republican sources criticized either the commitment to or the process of withdrawal. Most of the remaining sources were also critical of the process.

    The final days of the occupation were without question chaotic. But by only featuring sources who emphasized the “stain” on the US’s “reputation” (Sen. Mitch McConnell, NBC, 8/16/21), or the idea that “the Americans left us behind, and left us to those people who are not human and cut our heads off in front of our families” (Abdul, ABC, 8/20/21), a discussion of the tragedy of the 20-year occupation itself was completely foreclosed.

    Journalists’ continued jingoism

    And corporate journalists themselves, who have often been the loudest cheerleaders for the Afghanistan War (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/17/01, 8/25/09, 1/31/19), continued their jingoism in the face of the withdrawal.

    NBC‘s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel (8/16/21), for instance, offered an echo of—rather than a counterpoint to—McConnell and Abdul: “A 20-year war, the longest in US history, today ended a disgrace. The US leaving behind a country its citizens are too terrified to live in.”

    Similarly, CBS‘s Norah O’Donnell (8/16/21) declared: “When America leaves, for many, so does the hope—the hope of freedom, the hope for human rights. And in its place comes the sheer terror of what’s next.” O’Donnell went on to detail the number of Americans killed and wounded, plus the unspecified “cost to America’s national security.”

    New Yorker: The Other Afghan Women

    Anand Gopal (New Yorker, 9/13/21): “To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.”

    Given that the withdrawal was an acknowledgement that after 20 years of occupation, the US had little control over what kind of country it would be “leaving behind,” it’s hard to imagine a withdrawal that Engel would not have considered a disgrace. But while he and O’Donnell highlighted the plight of “many” Afghans, neither made any mention of the number of Afghans killed and wounded in the 20-year war, which was at least 27 times higher than US casualties, according to the Costs of War project (9/1/21) at Brown University. That project estimated at least 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed, including more than 500 humanitarian workers and journalists, along with over 69,000 national military and police and more than 52,000 opposition fighters.

    But these tallies—which do not even include the wounded, or excess (indirect) deaths—are almost certainly undercounts. New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal, who has spent years covering the war, including time in rural Afghanistan, believes that the available death tolls have “grossly undercounted” civilian casualties, as much of the ongoing conflict has taken place in outlying areas where deaths frequently go unrecorded (Democracy Now!, 9/16/21).

    Gopal’s recent article (New Yorker, 9/13/21) on rural Afghan women recounted his investigation in the largely rural Helmand province, where he interviewed a random selection of 12 households, finding that each had lost, on average, 10 to 12 civilians to the war. While Taliban rule was not popular among those he interviewed, it was clearly preferred to US occupation, which had empowered even more ruthless warlords and ensured unending conflict, airstrikes and terror in the region.

    This perspective was not to be found on US TV news coverage of the withdrawal, with its correspondents reporting from the airbase in Kabul, an Afghanistan a world apart from that known by the majority of the country’s population.

    Rosy picture of occupation

    Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News

    Lester Holt (NBC, 8/16/21): “Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war, it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness.”

    NBC‘s Lester Holt (8/16/21), who visited Afghanistan in 2010 and 2012, offered a typical assessment, painting the occupation as a sensitive operation bringing Afghanistan out of darkness into a brighter future:

    Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war [2012], it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness…. Through the war, epic American-led battles reclaim cities and villages from the Taliban. US commanders nurture trust among village elders believing in Afghanistan’s future. And now, in the chaos, we’re left to wonder how that future has been so rapidly rewritten with chapters from Afghanistan’s past.

    Two weeks later, on the eve of the official withdrawal, CBS‘s O’Donnell (8/30/21) asked longtime Pentagon correspondent David Martin, “What does this moment mean?” Martin responded:

    To me, it’s on all of us. All of us as American citizens. We as a country could not summon the will to outlast the Taliban. We sent more than 800,000 troops to fight in the war. The vast majority of them did everything we asked of them. They would have gone back for another 20 years if we had asked them. But the country grew tired of the war, and they elected political leaders, both Democratic and Republican, who wanted to end it. History will decide whether that was right or wrong. But either way, Norah, it’s on us.

    CBS's Norah O'Donnell

    Norah O’Donnell (CBS, 8/26/21): “The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity.”

    O’Donnell herself (CBS, 8/26/21) painted a rosy picture of the occupation a few days prior :

    This is what American troops were doing before terrorists struck today: feeding children, playing with kids, lending an arm to the elderly. The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity—soldiers providing a helping hand, pulling Afghan infants to safety. This child kept warm by the uniform of a US soldier during her evacuation. This mother delivered her baby in the cargo bay of a C-17, naming the newborn Reach, after the call sign of the aircraft that rescued her.

    For the last two decades, our mission has been about keeping us safe at home and improving the lives of Afghans. The 13 US service members who made the ultimate sacrifice today did not die in vain. One hundred thousand people have been evacuated because of their heroic actions. They answered the call and did what they were trained to do. A reminder of the high price of freedom. And God bless our US troops.

    Obviously, the families of the thousands of Afghan civilians killed in US airstrikes—many of them children—or those victimized by rogue soldiers, might have a different perspective on the US military. Those voices, too, might have helped explain to journalists like Holt, and his viewers, why Afghanistan’s future looks the way it does, rather than the rosy, peaceful outcome those journalists seem to have expected the US to have supplied.

    Veteran voices

    The perspectives of US troops were occasionally presented, but segments featuring veterans’ voices seemed largely intended to reassure viewers that the 20-year war was worth it. “Some veterans are thinking, was it worth it? Were our sacrifices worth it?”  O’Donnell (CBS, 8/18/21) said, followed immediately by a soundbite from a veteran: “It was worth it…. We gave Afghanistan two decades of freedom. It made the world a better place.”

    Notably, post–9/11 veterans had soured on the war over the past decade. While a 2011 Pew poll found that 50% believed the Afghanistan War had been worth fighting, the outfit’s 2019 poll found that number had dropped to 38%—roughly on par with the general public. Afghanistan veterans were more likely than the general public to support the withdrawal—58% vs. 52%—even after it was well underway and the subject of widespread one-sidedly hostile media coverage (Morning Consult, 9/9/21).

    Research assistance: James Baratta, Elias Khoury, Dorothy Poucher, Jasmine Watson

    Featured image: NBC Nightly News (8/16/21)

    The post Missing Voices in Broadcast Coverage of Afghan Withdrawal appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media

    During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists:

    ‘I simply pass on’

    His tweet was in reference to a ministerial source saying that Priti Patel was ‘not looking happy’. She remained in her job as Home Secretary.

    Peston’s phrase was a tragicomic echo of a remark by Nick Robinson, ITV political editor during the Iraq war, who infamously declared that:

    ‘It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do.’

    (‘“Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, 16 July, 2004)

    In 2012, Robinson, by now the BBC’s political editor, mourned:

    ‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions’.1

    However, Robinson’s career certainly did not appear to have been harmed having abdicated this basic responsibility of journalism; namely, holding those in power to account. After a ten-year stint as the BBC political editor, he became a presenter on the high-profile BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

    Peston’s counterpart at the BBC, political editor Laura Kuenssberg, also performs the required function of ‘I simply pass on’, broadcasting and amplifying the words of those in power with minimal ‘analysis’, far less critical appraisal. Relaying Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s words on the current crisis in gas supply in the UK, as he flew to New York to attend climate talks, she tweeted:

    ‘Speaking on the plane Johnson said..

    1. gas supply probs shd be “temporary”, the squeeze is a result of world waking up from pandemic shutdowns like everyone “going to put the kettle on at the end of the TV programme” and he said he was confident in UK supply chains’

    Gary Neville, the football pundit and former Manchester United defender, replied to Kuenssberg’s tweet:

    ‘Hi Laura do you believe this guys crap ?’

    A tad blunt perhaps. But, judging by the number of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, it was a welcome challenge from someone with a public profile to the endless channelling by highly-paid political journalists of Johnson’s twaddle – and worse (as we will see below).

    Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and Times columnist, defended Kuenssberg and responded that reporting the Prime Minister’s words ‘is a part of her job’ so that the public can judge them for themselves. Three obvious glaring holes in his argument are that the BBC political editor:

    (a) rarely challenges Johnson (or other government ministers) to any significant extent;

    (b) provides very few perspectives or opinions from outside the narrow range of ‘mainstream’ Parliamentary debate (Labour hardly counts as an effective ‘Opposition’ under the Blair-lite Sir Keir Starmer;

    (c) ignores Johnson’s many lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations which have been well-documented by several independent political observers, including Peter Oborne and Peter Stefanovic. Kuenssberg and her corporate media peers have given the Prime Minister a free pass on his serial deceptions.

    There are countless examples of establishment bias by Kuenssberg (and her predecessors as BBC political editor). Recall, for example, that for years she channelled a one-sided account of Labour’s supposed antisemitism crisis, including an infamous BBC Panorama programme that was demolished as a ‘catalogue of reporting failures’ by the Media Reform Coalition. Recall, too, her evident disapproval when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, refused to give her a commitment in a BBC News television interview that he was willing to press the nuclear button to launch weapons that would cause untold death and suffering.

    On 20 September, 2021, The National newspaper in Scotland reported that the flagship BBC News at Six ‘did not run a single negative news story about the UK Government’ during the previous week, 13-17 September. This was probably not an unusual week in that regard. Genuinely hard-hitting critical reporting of the Tory government is notable by its absence on BBC News and other establishment news media.

    The truth is, that on one issue after another, leading journalists like Kuenssberg, Peston, and all the high-profile correspondents ‘reporting’ on politicians, the military and intelligence services spend too much time performing as mere stenographers to power. Rational and critical opposing voices are routinely ignored, marginalised or ridiculed.

    Media Lens has documented and explained over the past two decades how ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are alien concepts to state-corporate journalism. As the US commentator Michael Parenti once noted:

    ‘Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.’

    Similarly, Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, a vital resource for independent journalism, put it well:

    ‘If you’re sympathetic to the weak, it’s activist journalism. If you’re sympathetic to the powerful, it’s objective journalism.’

    The public are, in effect, constantly being subjected to gaslighting by corporate journalists purporting to inform the public what is happening around us. We are being told, explicitly and implicitly, that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the system of economics and power politics that prevail in the world. We are being misled that any serious problems that arise – even climate instability – can be ‘fixed’ by ‘incentivising’ changes to consumer behaviour, rejigging the economy by redirecting public subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, but all still within a corporate-driven ‘market’ framework to maximise private profit, and by implementing technical ‘solutions’, such as capturing and storing carbon emissions (which have failed to live up to the grandiose PR promises made, while fossil fuel companies have received large injections of public cash from governments).

    In fact, ‘mainstream’ news is characterised by serial deceptions and omissions that hide essential truths about the world. We are being drip-fed propaganda that preserves the current inequitable system of power, privilege and class – even as we hurtle towards the abyss of climate chaos.

    Any one of the topics addressed here could merit a media alert in its own right. Indeed, in each case, we have done so several times before. The objective here is to provide something of an overview of the propaganda system that is leading us towards ever greater levels of inequality and misery, even human extinction; a timely reminder of what is at stake.

    Endless War

    Consider the recent pull-out of US troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation. In an excellent article for the Morning Star, Ian Sinclair observed that BBC News and other outlets continued to promote ‘misleading narratives about the Afghan invasion and its motives’. As just one example, Sinclair highlighted Johnson’s ‘astonishingly deceitful claim’ that:

    ‘It was no accident that there has been no terrorist attack launched against Britain or any other Western country from Afghanistan in the last 20 years.’

    Sinclair countered:

    ‘First, terrorist attacks have taken place in Britain and the US that have been inspired by the US-British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.’

    He continued:

    ‘Second, it is widely understood by intelligence agencies and experts that the West’s military intervention in Afghanistan led to a heightened terrorist threat to the West.’

    Sinclair added:

    ‘The final problem with the government’s claim that the war stopped terrorism on the West from Afghanistan is that it’s based on a simplistic understanding of the September 11 2001 terror attacks — that it was necessary for terrorists to “have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations,” as president George W Bush explained in 2006.’

    However, the 9-11 attacks were planned initially in Germany, training was implemented in the US and most of the hijackers were Saudi. A recent article in CovertAction Magazine noted that:

    ‘The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.’

    The 7 July 2005 bomb attacks in London, and the Manchester Arena bombing and London Bridge attacks in 2017, required no ‘safe haven’ for terrorists to commit atrocities in Britain.

    Sinclair summed up:

    ‘The omissions and distortions that have been made by politicians about Afghanistan over the last few weeks, echoed by much of the media, have been so big and unremitting it’s easy to start questioning one’s own grip on reality.’

    But following corporate news media daily can have precisely that effect. In gaslighting media audiences, ‘mainstream’ news routinely skews the agenda in favour of what Washington and its allies wish to project. Thus, as Julie Hollar noted in a piece for US-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the corporate media only rediscovered Afghan women and their human rights when US troops left:

    ‘[corporate media] coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.’

    Hollar continued:

    ‘The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.’

    She concluded:

    ‘For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.’

    FAIR has summarised a 20-year-long pattern of corporate media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography since 9-11. The US ‘war on terror’ has likely killed more than one million people at a cost of $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The report states:

    ‘Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars – because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and water-related disease.’

    Cost of War co-director Stephanie Savell said:

    ‘Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after US forces are gone.’

    The corporate media played a major role in bringing about this catastrophe, then covering it up afterwards.

    Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing its immoral mission to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder and publisher, for telling the truth about US crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Assange rightly said in 2011 that the US goal was ‘an endless war, not a successful war’. The aim is to line the pockets of the narrow sector of society that profits from the military-industrial complex, at the expense of the general population.

    In a piece for Newsweek, Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky wrote that:

    ‘When Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the public was given an unprecedented window into the lack of justification and the futility of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth was hidden by a generation of governmental lies. Assange’s efforts helped show the American public what their government was doing in their name.’

    As we have noted in previous media alerts, Assange’s continued incarceration and long-term confinement, described as torture by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, is a damning indictment of Western ‘democracy’.

    Political commentator Philip Roddis observes astutely that ‘Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus’ because:

    ‘(a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations” [quoting Noam Chomsky].’

    A recurring feature of ‘democracy’ and its ‘free press’ is judicious silence or quiet mumbling when a ‘mistake’ is made. Consider the BBC’s limited apology, and dearth of follow-up by almost all media, when the BBC conceded its coverage of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April, 2018 was ‘seriously flawed’.

    As we have described in numerous media alerts, the corporate media declared with instant unanimity and certainty that Syria’s President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attack. One week later, the US, UK and France launched missiles on Syria in response to the unproven allegations. Since then, there has been a mounting deluge of evidence, in particular from whistleblowers, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UN poison gas watchdog, has perpetrated a cover-up to preserve the Western narrative that Assad gassed civilians in Douma.

    Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens had complained to the BBC following last November’s Radio 4 broadcast of ‘Mayday: The Canister On The Bed’, which propagated the official Western narrative of the attack. In particular, Hitchens had objected to the slurs against an anonymous OPCW whistleblower named ‘Alex’. The BBC had claimed that ‘Alex’ only cast doubt on the official narrative because he had been promised $100,000 by WikiLeaks. The claim was false, as the BBC later admitted. There was no evidence to suggest that ‘Alex’, described as ‘a highly qualified and apolitical scientist’, was motivated by anything other than a desire for truth in sharing his doubts about the attack.

    Aaron Maté, an independent journalist with The Grayzone, has vigorously and repeatedly pursued the story, shaming both ‘mainstream’ media and most progressive media outlets who, like the corporate media, have blanked the scandal. He recently wrote a devastating account of the deceptions and evasions by OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias when appearing before the UN. Now, in a must-watch interview with Jimmy Dore about the BBC’s apology, Maté said that the BBC only retracted part of its attack on the OPCW whistleblowers and that ‘the retraction only scratches the surface of its deceit.’

    Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, noted in response to the BBC’s apology on its Douma coverage that:

    ‘None of the major British newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph, or the liberal mouthpiece for war with a human face, The Guardian, gave it column space despite the serious nature of the matter.’

    The Stark Reality Of Newspeak

    But, of course, ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’. And when evidence emerges to the contrary, it is shunted to the margins or buried. Other countries might be ‘belligerent’, but not us. Hence the deeply skewed reporting of the recent ‘Aukus pact’ between the US, UK and Australia which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. This was largely presented by state-corporate news, including the BBC and the Guardian, as a ‘defence’ deal to ‘counter’ China in its ‘belligerent behaviour’ in the Indo-Pacific.

    BBC News at Ten declared on 16 September:

    ‘The deal will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy to promote stability in the Indo-Pacific region which has come under increasing pressure from China.’

    The BBC might as well admit that they are reading out press releases on behalf of Western power.

    An online BBC News article included the deceptive wording:

    ‘Aukus is being widely viewed as an effort to counter Beijing’s influence in the contested South China Sea.’

    The weasel phrase ‘widely viewed’ is newspeak for ‘the view from Washington and London’.

    Likewise, the Guardian dutifully carried the official US-UK view and framed its reporting accordingly:

    ‘In Washington, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, made clear that the administration had chosen to close ranks with Australia in the face of belligerent Chinese behaviour.

    ‘Austin said he had discussed with Australian ministers “China’s destabilising activities and Beijing’s efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms”, adding: “While we seek a constructive results-oriented relationship with [China], we will remain clear-eyed in our view of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the established international order.”’

    Imagine if western journalists regularly wrote news reports about the plentiful examples of belligerent US behaviour. And about America’s destabilising activities and efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms. But that would be real journalism. Instead, a Guardian editorial oozed its approval:

    ‘A firm and unified response to China’s actions by democratic nations is both sensible and desirable.’

    There was no mention in any of the current reporting, as far as we could see, that the UK is set to increase its number of nuclear warheads by over 40 per cent, breaking international law. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is encouraging the public to report the UK government to the UN.

    This behaviour by the UK is no exception. ‘We’ routinely flout the law on arms, nuclear or conventional. Andrew Feinstein and Alexandra Smidman recently reported for Declassified UK, that Britain’s ‘robust’ arms export controls are a fiction:

    ‘In practice, UK controls on arms exports are all but voluntary, and Britain routinely arms states abusing human rights and those at war.

    ‘Britain exported more than £11-billion worth of arms around the world in 2019 but UK ministers claim this trade is properly administered in a mantra that goes like this:

    ‘“HM Government takes its export control responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most robust arms export control regimes in the world. We consider all export applications thoroughly against a strict risk assessment framework and keep all licences under careful and continual review as standard.”’

    However, Feinstein and Smidman pointed out that:

    ‘These contentions are not true and the stark, unavoidable reality is that the British government and its weapons manufacturers, between whom there is a symbiotic relationship, repeatedly violate domestic law and international agreements on arms controls with no repercussions.’

    In short:

    ‘The British arms industry, politicians, the military and intelligence services can all essentially do what they want, with limited scrutiny and virtually no accountability.’

    As just one damning example: in supplying arms and other support, including military training and maintenance services to Saudi Arabia, Britain is an active contributor to the brutal Saudi subjugation of the Yemeni people.

    The UK also defies its own arms exports criteria in relation to Israel, to whom the UK has sold military equipment worth more than £400 million since 2015. Even this year’s deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza caused no let-up in UK sales to Israel.

    These are all yet more examples of the gaslighting that state-corporate news media are guilty of: the constant framing of the UK as a ‘defender’ and ‘promoter’ of ‘security’ and ‘stability’, while the state and military companies pursue arms sales and a wider foreign policy that kills and endangers people abroad and at home.

    ‘Nothing Is Moving’ On Climate

    Almost inevitably, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg makes a return in this alert for another dishonourable mention. ‘Boris Johnson aims to push for more climate action during trip’, she gushed after travelling as part of a press pack with him and his entourage on a plane headed to New York for climate talks. She wrote that Johnson was ‘delighted’ to be:

    ‘acting as the host of the government plane he has had repainted with the Union Jack on the tail, urging journalists to approve of the new paint job.’

    But the most significant ‘paint job’ here was the BBC’s depiction of Johnson as some kind of climate hero. ‘Brokering climate deals a political priority’, was one headline in Kuenssberg’s report. She added:

    ‘the prime minister’s main task on this trip to New York is to push other countries to make more meaningful promises on cash and climate.’

    The notion that Johnson, who has frequently cast doubt on global warming and made derogatory remarks about ‘bunny-hugging’, is a true champion of climate and environmental protection is bogus and dangerous. As recently as December 2015, when it was unseasonably warm, he published a Telegraph piece titled, ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing to do with global warming’.

    He wrote:

    ‘We may all be sweating in the winter air, but remember, we humans have always put ourselves at the centre of cosmic events.’

    Referring to the leaders of state who had been at the 2015 Paris climate talks, Johnson added:

    ‘I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.

    ‘There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong [in December] – but they don’t include global warming.’

    The reference to ‘ping-pong’, and his flippant remarks on the climate talks, suggest the whole thing was all just a game to Johnson; a ‘jolly wheeze’ to provide ammo to churn out another newspaper column.

    In this month’s Cabinet reshuffle, Johnson appointed Anne-Marie Trevelyan as his new International Trade Secretary. She had previously rejected climate science in a series of tweets between 2010 and 2012, stating in one:

    ‘Clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those doom-mongers and global warming fanatics.’

    People can, of course, change their minds when confronted by cast-iron evidence and solid arguments. Johnson himself said this month that ‘the facts change and people change their minds’. But the facts had not changed. Certainly not since 1988 when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up and renowned climate scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress about the already-known dangers of climate instability.

    Moreover, how sincere can someone like Johnson be with his appalling track record? Has his understanding around the serious reality and implications of catastrophic climate change really changed? Or does he just say whatever he believes is politically expedient to retain his grip on power?

    In April 2021, Johnson waffled about ‘building back greener’ after the pandemic.

    ‘It’s vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging.

    ‘What I’m driving at is this is about growth and jobs.’

    Experienced observers of political rhetoric will recognise that ‘jobs’ is often newspeak for ‘corporate profits’.

    Johnson’s insincerity and disregard for those he considers beneath him surfaced once more in the grossly insensitive remarks he made in ‘joking’ about Margaret Thatcher’s ‘green legacy’. During a visit to a windfarm off the Aberdeenshire coast in July, he was asked if he would set a deadline for ending fossil fuel extraction. He replied with what he clearly thought was a witty remark:

    ‘Look at what we’ve done already. We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime.

    ‘Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.’

    Continuing his track record of serial deceptions, Johnson boasted this month that:

    ‘The fact is the UK is leading the world [in tackling the climate crisis] and you should be proud of it.’

    The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was scathing of this ‘lie’ that has been channelled repeatedly by Johnson and other cabinet ministers ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November:

    ‘There’s a lie that the UK is a climate leader and that they have reduced their emissions by 45 per cent since 1990.’

    She pointed out that the statistics do not include the UK’s share of emissions from international aviation, shipping and imported goods:

    ‘Of course, if you don’t include all emissions of course the statistics are going to look much nicer. I’m really hoping that we stop referring to the UK as a climate leader, because if you look at the reality that is simply not true. They are very good at creative carbon accounting, I must give them that, but it doesn’t mean much in practice.’

    Rational analysis also shows that none of the world’s major economies – in particular, the entire G20 (which includes the UK) – is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate.

    The watchdog Climate Action Tracker (CAT) analysed the policies of 36 countries, as well as the 27-nation European Union, and found that all major economies were off track to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The countries together make up 80 per cent of the world’s emissions.

    Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute, a CAT partner, warned that:

    ‘there has been little to no improvement: nothing is moving. Anyone would think they have all the time in the world, when in fact the opposite is the case.’

    The lack of seriousness given by UK broadcasters to the crisis is evident in the results of a recent study that showed that the word ‘cake’ appeared 10 times more on British television than ‘climate change’ in 2020 while ‘dog’ was mentioned 22 times more. Mentions of climate change and global warming fell by 10 per cent and 19 per cent respectively compared with 2019, the report from BAFTA-backed sustainability initiative Albert found.

    Joanna Donnelly of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service, told viewers of the ‘Claire Byrne Live’ programme on Irish television that:

    ‘when it comes to climate change, we are in an emergency situation’

    Irish journalist John Gibbons highlighted the TV clip on Twitter, praising Donnelly’s forthright words, adding:

    ‘We’re in a Code Red national/global emergency, might be a good time to start acting like it (yes, media friends, that means YOU)’

    A soberly-worded, but terrifying, assessment of climate change risk published last week by Chatham House warned that, unless countries dramatically increase their commitments in carbon cuts:

    ‘many of the climate change impacts described in this research paper are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to.’

    The report added that:

    ‘Any relapse or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a plausible worst case of 7°C of warming by the end of the century’

    That prospect is terrifying. John Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, warned a decade ago that:

    ‘the difference between two degrees and four degrees [of global warming] is human civilisation.’

    In other words, we are potentially talking about the end of human life as we know it; perhaps even human extinction.

    James Hansen, the previously mentioned climate expert, remains sceptical about a truly successful outcome of COP26 in Glasgow. He wrote earlier this month:

    ‘The bad news: we approach the gas bag season – the next Conference of the Parties (COP26) is scheduled for November 1-12.  Gas bag politicians won’t show you the data that matter because that would reveal their miserable performances.  Instead, they set climate goals for their children while adopting no polices that would give such goals a chance.  Some of them may have been honestly duped about the science and engineering, but many must be blatant hypocrites.’ 2

    Other than the ever-present risk of nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humanity than the climate crisis. And there is no more damning example of gaslighting by state-corporate media when they tell us we can trust governments and corporations to do what is required to avert catastrophe.

    1. Nick Robinson, ‘Live From Downing Street’, Bantam Books, London, 2012, p. 332
    2. James Hansen, ‘August Temperature Update & Gas Bag Season Approaches’, email, 14 September 2021.
    The post Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

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