As the US Empire tries to leave its 9/11 warpath on Afghanistan & Iraq in the past, Abby Martin reviews the core lessons.
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International policymakers pledged about $1 billion in aid for Afghanistan Monday following a plea from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for immediate funding to protect Afghan children and other vulnerable people from starvation — but just 6% was pledged by the country which led Afghanistan into two decades of war before withdrawing all troops at the end of August.
The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the country would direct $64 million to Afghanistan to “provide lifesaving support directly to Afghans facing the compounding effects of insecurity, conflict, recurring natural disasters, and the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Guterres had appealed to the international community for at least $606 million, warning that Afghans now “face perhaps their most perilous hour” after the 20-year U.S. occupation.
Since the Taliban took control of the country last month, the Afghan population of 38 million people has been cut off from aid projects run by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund payments, and U.S.-controlled assets in Afghanistan’s central bank.
“Even before the dramatic events of the last weeks, Afghans were experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world,” said Guterres. “Today, one in three Afghans do not know where their next meal will come from. The poverty rate is spiraling — and basic public services are close to collapse. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.”
The loss of humanitarian funding — which nearly 10 million Afghan children depend on “just to survive,” according to Henrietta Fore of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), who also spoke at the conference — comes as the country faces its second drought in three years. The World Food Program (WFP) estimated this month that 40% of crops this year have been lost, pushing the price of wheat up by 25%.
The WFP’s stock of food aid for the country is expected to run out by the end of September, the New York Times reported recently.
“At least one million children will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year and could die without treatment,” Fore said Monday.
As Common Dreams reported last week, aid groups have warned that the slashing of Western aid to Afghanistan has resulted in the health system approaching a collapse, as healthcare workers continue to face the Covid-19 pandemic.
The U.S. pledge amounted to about 10% of the U.N.’s original request on Monday. Prior to Guterres’ appeal on Monday, Pakistan had sent food and medicine to its neighboring country while China had provided $31 million in aid. Iran also said it had sent humanitarian aid, according to Reuters.
As USAID announced its intention to respond to the U.N.’s plea for help, grassroots anti-war network Win Without War called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to answer several key questions about how the people of Afghanistan will be supported following the end of the U.S.-led war, particularly how the U.S. will “ensure that Afghans will receive sufficient humanitarian aid.”
1⃣ It was right (and long overdue) to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan; but the United States still has a profound responsibility to the Afghan people. How will you ensure that Afghans will receive sufficient humanitarian aid?
— Win Without War (@WinWithoutWar) September 13, 2021
Win Without War also called on Blinken to “commit to significantly raising the U.S. refugee cap so that the people fleeing violence and persecution can find safe haven in the United States,” noting that the U.S.-led war “helped fuel a refugee crisis” in Afghanistan.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
AFP 2021 / Seth McAllister
The United States’ 245-year history as a political entity has been one long trail of wars and more wars. It is estimated that nearly 95 percent of that historical span has seen the nation involved in either all-out wars, proxy conflicts, or other military subterfuges.
But since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the US has gone into hyper-war mode. Twenty years ago, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan ushered in multiple other American wars and covert operations from Asia to Africa, from the Middle East to the Americas.
At one point, the former Obama administration was bombing seven countries simultaneously all in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Hundreds of US bombs rain down somewhere on the planet every day.
What is rather sickening is how the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 event this weekend is marked with solemn speeches by US president Joe Biden and his British counterpart Boris Johnson – the two countries that spearheaded the “War on Terror” era.
Biden claims that 9/11 demonstrates the “unity and resilience” of the American people, while Johnson blusters with platitudes about 9/11 showing that “terrorists did not defeat Western democracy and freedoms”. This self-indulgent piffle is contemptible and nauseating.
Two decades after the US and Britain launched their criminal blitzkrieg on Afghanistan and the rest of the world, those two nations are more financially broke than ever. Internally, they are more bitterly divided than ever. More evidently, their so-called democracies are in reality oligarchies where a tiny rich elite rule over a mass of impoverished people who are spied on and treated like serfs by unaccountable secret agencies and a mass media in hock with oligarchic masters.
If there was a genuine commemoration of 9/11 it would entail a mass uprising by the people to overthrow the war-mongering class system that Biden and Johnson serve as frontmen.
Just this week – of all weeks – the American and British states are in effect admitting that their societies are collapsing from vast economic inequality and crumbling infrastructure. The Biden administration is trying to release a budget of up to $4.5 trillion to alleviate poverty and repair decrepit roads, bridges, buildings and other public utilities.
The Johnson regime in Britain is forced to admit that the National Health Service is overwhelmed by a chronic lack of funding. Taxes are being hiked that will hit low-income workers in order to pay for the £12 billion ($16bn) needed to prop up the enfeebled health service.
All of the cost for trying to repair the US and Britain to make these countries a modicum of decency for its citizens to live in could have been covered by the expenditure on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere that the US and Britain have directly or indirectly been involved in.
A new estimate of the cost for the “war on terror” by the United States alone is put at $8 trillion. This is roughly double the infrastructure bill that Biden is trying to get passed by Congress. American politicians are objecting to the extravagance of that “rescue budget”, yet they had no qualms about spending $8 trillion on wars. It is also estimated that for Britain its military adventurism in Afghanistan alone cost a total of $30 billion. Again, just imagine how British society might be better off if that money had been spent instead on attending to the health needs of its citizens.
But 9/11 also ushered in wanton warmongering regimes in Washington and London that have bled the American and British public of finances and democratic rights. In 2001, the US national debt was about $6 trillion. This year that debt burden on future American generations has escalated to $28 trillion – a crushing, unsustainable burden largely driven by criminal wars.
The healthcare costs for American military veterans wounded and maimed from the wars on terror are projected at $2 trillion. Over 30,000 US service members and veterans are reckoned to have committed suicide over the past 20 years. That’s 10 times the number of American people who died on the day of 9/11.
Untold millions of innocent civilians were killed by the wars that the US and British launched after 9/11. Such suffering and destruction all for nothing except for the enrichment of war-profiteering corporations and the oligarchic elite.
fThe United States and Britain have been so deformed by criminal wars they have become dysfunctional and dystopian. They have inflicted failed states around the world, but none more so than on their own people. The towers that fell on 9/11 were a premonition of much bigger collapse.
The post 9/11 Collapsed Towers… And Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“Even if you want to believe Bush and Blair’s excuses to try and justify this war; saying that they were going after Al Qaeda, well this has nothing to do with that. They didn’t say they were invading Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights – no matter how just or noble that may sound now. So, to try and use women’s rights now to deflect from the horrors they inflicted on Afghanistan, the millions of people they turned into refugees, the scores they killed – many of whom are women– is an attempt to whitewash their crimes and an insult to people’s intelligence.”
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Joe Biden, who staked so much on multilateralism and a clean reputational break with his predecessor, has infuriated his “coalition partners” by honoring Trump’s unilateral commitment to end 20 years of brutal military occupation. Extraordinarily, the United States has arm-twisted its Western allies into accepting the unmitigated defeat of a common imperial project, which it initiated, gravely harming its relations with its allies in the process.
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This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The International Service for Human Rights (HRC) published again it – as usual – very useful Guide to the next (48th) Session of the UN Human Rights Council, from 13 September to 8 October 2021. Here is an overview of some of the key issues on the agenda directly affecting human rights defenders. Stay up-to-date: Follow @ISHRglobal and #HRC48 on Twitter, and look out for their Human Rights Council Monitor and during the session. [for last year’s, see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/06/22/key-issues-affecting-hrds-in-47th-session-of-un-human-rights-council-june-2021/]
On 29 September, the Assistant Secretary General Ilze Brands Kehris for Human Rights will present the Secretary General’s annual report on Cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights (also known as ‘the Reprisals Report’) to the Council in her capacity as UN senior official on reprisals. The presentation of the report will be followed by a dedicated interactive dialogue, as mandated by the September 2017 resolution on reprisals. ISHR remains deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who engage or seek to engage with UN bodies mechanisms. We continue to call for all States and the Council to do more to address the situation. The dedicated dialogue provides a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals, and demand that Governments provide an update on any investigation or action taken toward accountability. An increasing number of States have raised concerns in recent sessions about individual cases of reprisals, including in Egypt, Nicaragua, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Yemen, Burundi, China and Venezuela, Egypt, Burundi, Lao and China,
During the 48th session, Ghana, Fiji, Hungary, Ireland and Uruguay will present a draft resolution on cooperation with the UN. The draft resolution aims to strengthen the responses by the UN and States to put an end to acts of intimidation and reprisals. ISHR urges all delegations to support the adoption of the draft resolution and resist any efforts to undermine and weaken it.
ISHR recently launched a study analysing 709 reprisals cases and situations documented by the UN Secretary-General between 2010 and 2020. The study examines trends and patterns in the kinds of cases documented by the UNSG, how these cases have been followed up on over time, and whether reprisal victims consider the UN’s response effective. Among other things, the study found that nearly half the countries serving on the Council have been cited for perpetrating reprisals. The study found that public advocacy and statements by high level actors condemning reprisals can be one of the most effective tools to prevent and promote accountability for reprisals, particularly when public pressure is sustained over time. The study also found that, overall, the HRC Presidency appears to have been conspicuously inactive on intimidation and reprisals, despite the overall growing numbers of cases that are reported by the UNSG – including in relation to retaliation against individuals or groups in connection with their engagement with the HRC – and despite the Presidency’s legal obligation to address such violations. The study found that the HRC Presidency took publicly reported action in only 6 percent of cases or situations where individuals or organisations had engaged with the HRC. Not only is this a particularly poor record in its own right, it also compares badly with other UN actors. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/05/06/un-action-on-reprisals-towards-greater-impact/]
In line with previous calls, ISHR expects the President of the Human Rights Council to publicly identify and denounce specific instances of reprisals by issuing formal statements, conducting press-briefings, corresponding directly with the State concerned, publicly releasing such correspondence with States involved, and insisting on undertakings from the State concerned to investigate, hold the perpetrators accountable and report back to the Council on action taken.
It’s high time the Council responds at this session to the repeated calls by diverse States and civil society to recognize the right of all to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment and establish a new mandate for a Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change. ISHR joins a broad civil society coalition in calling on all States to seize this historic opportunity to support the core-group of the resolution on human rights and environment (Costa Rica, Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, Switzerland) as they work towards UN recognition of the right to environment so that everyone in the world, wherever they live, and without discrimination, can live in a safe, clean and sustainable environment. Furthermore, ISHR also joins a broad civil society coalition in calling on States to establish a new Special Rapporteur on climate change at this session. This new mandate is essential to strengthen a human rights-based approach to climate change, engage in country visits, undertake normative work and capacity-building, and further address the human rights impacts of climate responses, in order to support the most vulnerable. [see also the recent Global witness report: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/09/13/global-witness-2020-the-worst-year-on-record-for-environmental-human-rights-defenders/]
At this 48th session, the Council will discuss a range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights and issues through dedicated debates, including interactive dialogues with the:
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including with the:
ISHR has joined 50 civil society organisations to urge UN Member States to ensure the adoption of a robust resolution to establish a Fact-Finding Mission or similar independent investigative mechanism on Afghanistan as a matter of priority at the upcoming 48th regular session of the HRC. We expressed profound regret at the failure of the recent HRC special session on Afghanistan to deliver a credible response to the escalating human rights crisis gripping the country, falling short of the consistent calls of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Procedures and civil society organisations, and does not live up to the mandate of the HRC to effectively address situations of violations of human rights, including gross and systematic violations. The Council must establish a Fact-Finding Mission, or similar independent investigative mechanism, with a gender-responsive and multi-year mandate and resources to monitor and regularly report on, and to collect evidence of, human rights violations and abuses committed across the country by all parties.
It has now been three years since High Commissioner Bachelet announced concerns about the treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims – including mass arbitrary detention, surveillance and discrimination – in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. During the intervening three years, further substantial and incontrovertible evidence has been presented indicating crimes against humanity in the region. ISHR joins a 300+ strong coalition of global civil society that continues to call for accountability for these and other violations, including in Tibet and Hong Kong, by the Chinese authorities. At this session, ISHR highlights that arbitrary detention is – as has been noted by the Special Procedures – a systemic issue in China. Chinese authorities are long overdue in taking any meaningful action in response to the experts’ concerns, such as ceasing the abuse of ‘residential surveillance in a designated location’, or RSDL. ISHR reiterates its calls from the 46th and 47th sessions for a clearly articulated plan from OHCHR to ensure public monitoring and reporting of the situation, in line with their mandate and with full engagement of civil society, regardless of the outcome of long-stalled negotiations for High Commissioner access to the country. This would be a critical first step for future, more concrete actions that would respond to demands of victims, their families and communities, and others defending human rights in the People’s Republic of China.
We request the Council to continue its scrutiny and pursue its work towards justice and accountability in Burundi. The Council should adopt a resolution that acknowledges that despite some improvements over the past year, the human rights situation in Burundi has not changed in a substantial or sustainable way, as all the structural issues identified by the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi (CoI) and other human rights actors have identified since 2015 remain in place. The Council should adopt an approach that focuses on continued independent documentation on the situation of human rights in Burundi which should be carried out by the CoI, or a similarly independent mechanism or team of experts, who are solely focused on Burundi. The Council’s approach should also ensure that there is follow up to the work and recommendations of the CoI, in particular, on justice and accountability. See joint letter released ahead of the UN Human Rights Council’s 48th session.
Despite Egypt’s assurances during the UPR Working Group in 2019 that reprisals are unacceptable, since 2017, Egypt has been consistently cited in the UN Secretary General’s annual reprisals reports. The Assistant Secretary-General raised the patterns of intimidation and reprisal in the country in the 2020 reprisals report, as well as UN Special Procedures documenting violations including detention, torture and ill-treatment of defenders. In her latest communication to the Government, the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders highlighted the arbitrary detention of 12 defenders, including three targeted for their engagement with the UN: Mohamed Al-Baqer, human rights lawyer and Director of the Adalah Centre for Rights and Freedoms, arbitrarily detained since 29 September 2019; Ibrahim Metwally, coordinator for the Association of the Families of the Disappeared in Egypt, arbitrarily detained since 10 September 2017; and Ramy Kamel, Copitic rights activist, arbitrarily detained since 23 November 2019. Both States and the HRC Presidency should publicly follow up on these cases. Furthermore, in light of Egypt’s failure to address concerns expressed by States, the High Commissioner and Special Procedures, ISHR reiterates our joint call with over 100 NGOs on the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on Egypt and will continue to do so until there is meaningful and sustained improvement in the country’s human rights situation.
The human rights crisis in Nicaragua has steadily deteriorated since May 2021. Given the reported lack of implementation of resolution 46/2 and the absence of meaningful engagement with the UN and regional mechanisms by the Government, stepping up collective pressure has become vital. We warmly welcome the joint statement delivered by Costa Rica on behalf of a cross-regional group of 59 States on 21 June 2021. This is a positive first step in escalating multilateral pressure. Further collective action should build on this initiative and seek to demonstrate global, cross-regional concern for the human rights situation in the country. In her oral update, the High Commissioner stressed ‘as set out in [the Council’s] latest resolution, I call on this Council to urgently consider all measures within its power to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights in Nicaragua. This includes accountability for the serious violations committed since April 2018.’ We call on all States to support a joint statement at the 48th session of the Human Rights Council, urging the Government to implement priority recommendations with a view to revert course on the ongoing human rights crisis, and indicating clear intention to escalate action should the Nicaraguan Government not take meaningful action.
While many of the WHRDs mentioned in previous joint statements at the Council have been released from detention, severe restrictions have been imposed including travel bans, or making public statements of any kind. Most of the defenders have no social media presence. Furthermore, COVID-19 restrictions and the G20 Summit in November 2020 coincided with a slow down in prosecutions of those expressing peaceful opinions and a decline in the use of the death penalty. However, throughout 2021 the pace of violations has resumed. This has included fresh new waves of arrests of bloggers and ordinary citizens, often followed by periods of enforced disappearance, lengthy prison terms issued against human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience, and abuse in prison, including deliberate medical neglect. In addition, despite announcing the halt of the death penalty against minors, the Saudi government recently executed someone who may have been 17 at the time of the alleged offense, and the number of executions in 2021 is already more than double the total figure for 2020. Saudi Arabia has refused to address the repeated calls by UN Special Procedures and over 40 States at the Council in March 2019, September 2019 and September 2020, further demonstrating its lack of political will to genuinely improve the human rights situation and to engage constructively with the Council. ISHR reiterates its call on the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.
With the environment becoming all the more hostile for civil society organisations in Venezuela, the Council will once again focus attention on the human rights situation in the country at the upcoming session. On 24 September, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission will provide its second report to the Council building on its findings of likely crimes against humanity committed in the country. ISHR looks forward to making an oral statement during the dialogue with the Mission. In addition, the High Commissioner will provide an oral update on the situation in the country and the work of her office in-country, on 13 September. The Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures will present her report following her in-person visit to the country in February 2021. Finally, it’s expected that the report of the Secretary General on reprisals will include cases related to Venezuela. During all these opportunities to engage, States should remind Venezuela of the need to implement UN recommendations; engage with UN human rights mechanisms, including the Mission; and organise visits for Special Rapporteurs already identified for prioritisation by OHCHR.
ISHR joined over 60 civil society organisations to use the upcoming session of the HRC to establish an international criminally-focused investigation body for Yemen, and simultaneously ensure the continuity of the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (GEE) through an ongoing or multi-year mandate. In their last report, “A Pandemic of Impunity in a Tortured Land”, the UN Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen (GEE) underscored Yemen’s “acute accountability gap”, concluding that the international community “can and should” do more to “help bridge” this gap in Yemen. They recommended that the international community take measures to support criminal accountability for those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law and egregious human rights abuses. In particular, they supported the “establishment of a criminally focused investigation body” (similar to the mechanisms established for Syria and Myanmar) and “stressed the need to realize victims’ rights to an effective remedy (including reparations)”. Such a mechanism would facilitate and expedite fair and independent criminal proceedings, in accordance with international law standards, and lay the groundwork for effective redress, including reparations for victims.
The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 13 September 2021. The Council will consider updates, reports and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:
During the organisational meeting for the 48th session held on 30 August the President of the Human Rights Council presented the programme of work. It includes six panel discussions. States also announced at least 20 proposed resolutions. Read here the 87 reports presented this session.
At the organisational meeting on 30 August the following resolutions inter alia were announced (States or groups leading the resolution in brackets):
During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Myanmar, Namibia, the Niger, Mozambique, Estonia, Belgium, Paraguay, Denmark, Somalia, Palau, Solomon Islands, Seychelles, Latvia, Singapore and Sierra Leone.
During each Council session, panel discussions are held to provide member States and NGOs with opportunities to hear from subject-matter experts and raise questions. Six panel discussions are scheduled for this upcoming session:
Read here ISHR’s recommendations on the the key issues that are or should be on the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council in 2021.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Written assurances also say aid agencies will be able to operate independently of government and will be free to employ women
The Taliban have given the UN written assurances on the safe passage and freedom of movement for humanitarian workers operating in Afghanistan, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, has told a UN fundraising conference in Geneva.
Reading extracts from the Taliban undertakings, Griffiths said he had also received the assurances that aid agencies would be able to operate independently of the government, and would be free to employ women.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The last known missile launched by the U.S. during its 20-year war in Afghanistan — the August 29 drone attack in a Kabul neighborhood that killed 10 civilians — was described by Gen. Mark Milley as a “righteous strike” that targeted a parked vehicle suspected of holding explosives, along with the driver and another man suspected of having militant ties.
A pair of investigations published Friday, however, revealed that — contrary to the Pentagon’s claims — there were no bombs in the car, the men accused of “suspicious” behavior were engaged in peaceful activities related to the driver’s job, and there were eight additional defenseless victims in the vicinity of the sedan destroyed by a missile fired after several hours of surveillance.
The New York Times obtained exclusive security camera footage and interviewed more than a dozen of the driver’s co-workers and family members. The newspaper reported:
Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired, but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an ISIS safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car.
Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.
Ahmadi, who started working for California-based Nutrition and Education International (NEI) in 2006, was one of thousands of Afghans who had applied for U.S. resettlement. On the day he and nine members of his family were killed by the U.S. military, the 43-year-old used his 1996 Toyota Corrola to run work errands, witnesses said.
“The people who rode with Mr. Ahmadi that day said that what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves was simply a normal day at work,” the Times noted. The newspaper continued:
After stopping to pick up breakfast, Mr. Ahmadi and his two passengers arrived at NEI’s office, where security camera footage obtained by the Times recorded their arrival at 9:35 a.m. Later that morning Mr. Ahmadi drove some co-workers to a Taliban-occupied police station downtown, where they said they requested permission to distribute food to refugees in a nearby park. Mr. Ahmadi and his three passengers returned to the office around 2 p.m.
As seen on camera footage, Mr. Ahmadi came out a half-hour later with a hose that was streaming water. With the help of a guard, he filled several empty plastic containers. According to his co-workers, water deliveries had stopped in his neighborhood after the collapse of the government and Mr. Ahmadi had been bringing home water from the office.
A couple of hours later, when “Ahmadi pulled into the courtyard of his home — which officials said was different than the alleged ISIS safe house — the tactical commander made the decision to strike his vehicle, launching a Hellfire missile at around 4:50 p.m.,” the Times reported. “Although the target was now inside a densely populated residential area, the drone operator quickly scanned and saw only a single adult male greeting the vehicle, and therefore assessed with ‘reasonable certainty’ that no women, children or noncombatants would be killed.”
The Washington Post, which also examined the U.S. military’s deadly attack, reported that the missile took about 30 seconds to reach Ahmadi’s vehicle. The newspaper added:
In that time, three children approached the car just before it was destroyed, according to a senior U.S. military official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing military investigation. The children were killed, the official said, and families of the victims said another seven people also died in the strike, including the driver and the second man.
According to U.S. Central Command, the strike produced “significant secondary explosions from the vehicle,” which “indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.” “We are confident we successfully hit the target,” said a military spokesperson, who claimed the attack had eliminated “an imminent ISIS-K threat to Hamad Karzai International Airport.”
The Post “provided imagery of the damage caused by the strike and U.S. military assessments of the operation to experts, including a physicist and former bomb technicians, and spoke to the nonprofit that employed the driver targeted in the operation.”
“Taken together,” the newspaper wrote, “their assessments suggest there is no evidence the car contained explosives; two experts said evidence pointed to an ignition of fuel tank vapors as the potential cause of the second blast.”
The Times‘ analysis also “found no evidence of a second, more powerful explosion.”
In response to the new reports, Jason Paladino, an investigative reporter at the Project on Government Oversight, tweeted that “the Pentagon has some serious explaining to do.”
Between this report and the @nytimes report, the Pentagon has some serious explaining to do. Now consider how many strikes go unexamined by Western media. https://t.co/CdPE2Z0TrS
— Jason Paladino (@jason_paladino) September 11, 2021
“Consider,” Paladino added, “how many strikes go unexamined by Western media.”
Last week, Airwars, a military watchdog that monitors and seeks to reduce civilian harm in violent conflict zones, released a report showing that airstrikes conducted by the U.S. have killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians during the so-called “War on Terror” pursued in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Launched in the wake of a deadly ISIS-K attack on Kabul’s international airport, the August 29 drone strike came just one day before U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan following two decades of devastating war. The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and ensuing 20 years of military occupation caused more than 240,000 deaths, displaced nearly six million Afghans, and cost U.S. taxpayers over $2.3 trillion and counting, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.
Despite officials’ claims that the drone assassination program is highly precise and targeted at militants, U.S. strikes have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in recent years. According to documents leaked by former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale — who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison in July — nearly 90% of the people killed during one five-month period of a U.S. drone operation in Afghanistan were not the intended targets.
Following the August 29 attack that killed 10 more innocent people, the Council on American-Isamic Relations demanded that the Biden administration immediately impose a “moratorium on drone warfare.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.
Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.
I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.
The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.
I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.
My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.
In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”
For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.
When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation, military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.
Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?
One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.
The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.
In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.
It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.
Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.
In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?
On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.
We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.
Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.
My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.
Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”
Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.
Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.
• This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence
The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A man imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay peers out through the “bean hole” which is used to allow food and other items into cells at Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, in Cuba, on Dec. 4, 2006.
Photo: Brennan Linsley/AP
As the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan draws to a close, it is my hope that fair-minded people will begin to reexamine the history of this long and bloody conflict. There are two especially prominent episodes from the opening stage of the war that deserve renewed attention due to their historical significance as well as their direct relationship to the unresolved issue of the Guantánamo Bay internment camp.
During the final week of November 2001, a total of around 5,000 unarmed Taliban prisoners of war were massacred in two closely related incidents near Mazar-e-Sharif. Several dozen survivors were among the earliest detainees sent to Guantánamo Bay. These massacres received widespread media coverage at the time but elicited minimal sympathy from an American public still deeply shaken by September 11. Reporter Robert Young Pelton spoke for many Americans when he said, “We could have wiped out every Talib on earth and no one would have cared.”
Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has finally ended, the time has come for these events to be reevaluated dispassionately and for the issue of prisoners of war to be resolved once and for all.
During the summer and fall of 2001, I served as a Taliban infantryman in northern Afghanistan. In mid-November of that year, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was on the verge of collapse. Kabul and several other major cities had been overrun by the Northern Alliance, a warlord cartel described by journalist Robert Fisk as “a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage” that would form the nucleus of America’s collaborationist regime for the next two decades. Our commanders told us that the Taliban had begun to evacuate their forces from urban centers to protect civilians from dangers posed by 15,000-pound Daisy Cutters, Tomahawk cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium munitions. I saw the toll that some of these weapons took on Afghan civilians with my own eyes.
Northern Alliance soldiers watch as U.S. air strikes pound Taliban positions in Kunduz province near the town of Khanabad, Afghanistan, on Nov. 19, 2001.
Photo: Ivan Sekretarev/AP
By mid-November, our division of about 8,000 mujahideen had been surrounded by the Northern Alliance in Kunduz. An agreement was made between our commanders and Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had recently subordinated his militia to the CIA. The agreement guaranteed us safe passage through Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat, near the Afghan border with Iran. From there, my understanding was that the Afghan mujahideen would return home, while foreign volunteers would evacuate to neighboring countries. In return, Dostum would be left to take control of the northeastern city of Kunduz without a fight.
The agreement stipulated that we would travel to Herat in a convoy of trucks with only our light weapons, and it was decided that the foreign volunteer brigade would go first. We were about one-third Arab, one-third Uzbek, and one-third Pakistani, with smaller numbers of other nationalities totaling a few hundred. The remaining mujahideen were primarily Afghans and were to follow the same route from Kunduz through Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat.
A few days earlier, thousands of miles away and unbeknownst to us, the following exchange had taken place at a Pentagon press briefing:
REPORTER: Mr. Secretary, you had mentioned earlier that the U.S. is not inclined to negotiate nor to accept prisoners. Could you just elaborate what you meant by “nor to accept prisoners”?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: We have only handfuls of people there. We don’t have jails, we don’t have guards, we don’t have people who — we’re not in the position to have people surrender to us. If people try to, we are declining. That is not what we’re there to do, is to begin accepting prisoners and impounding them in some way or making judgments. That’s for the Northern Alliance, and that’s for the tribes in the south to make their own judgments on that.
REPORTER: So they would be taken — you’re not suggesting they would be shot, in other words?
RUMSFELD: Oh, my goodness, no. You sound like Charlie. (laughter)
Once we were on the road, instead of permitting our convoy to pass as had been agreed, the CIA-led force insisted that we lay down our weapons before proceeding through Mazar-e-Sharif. After tense negotiations and a great deal of hesitation on our part, we complied. But instead of fulfilling their side of the agreement and letting us proceed, Dostum’s militiamen diverted our trucks to the Qala-e-Jangi fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif and began to bind us with our own turbans. The CIA interrogators made it clear that if we did not talk to them, we would be killed:
CIA OFFICER MIKE SPANN: You believe in what you’re doing here that much, you’re willing to be killed here? How were you recruited to come here? Who brought you here? Hey! What’s your name? Hey! Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here? What? Are you Muslim? Put your head up. Don’t make me have to get them to hold your head up. …
CIA OFFICER DAVID TYSON: Mike!
SPANN: Yeah, he won’t talk to me.
TYSON: OK, all right. We explained what the deal is to him.
SPANN: I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is.
TYSON: Well, he’s a Muslim. You know, the problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here. If he don’t want to die here, he’s gonna die here. … It’s his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. …
SPANN: Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists and killed other Muslims? There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Quran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?
TYSON: That’s all right, man. Gotta give him a chance. He got his chance.
Our Uzbek brothers were acutely aware of the likelihood they would be sent back to a country that Secretary of State Colin Powell described as “an important member of this coalition.” Political prisoners in Uzbekistan faced torture with cattle prods, asphyxiation with gas masks and plastic bags, dousing with freezing cold water, beatings with steel pipes and nail-studded wooden clubs, involuntary psychiatric treatment, electric shocks applied to the genitals, the removal of fingernails and toenails with pliers, the burning of body parts, rape, repeated kicks to the head, flogging the soles of the feet, forced labor in subzero temperatures, and being boiled alive.
When it became clear that we had been betrayed, some of the Uzbek mujahideen detained in the fortress spontaneously launched a desperate revolt that could have only resulted in a massacre, but as the poet al-Mutanabbi said: “I am drowning, so what do I have to fear from getting wet?”
As this began to unfold, the remainder of the convoy proceeded along the same route. They were stopped in the desert about five miles west of Kunduz and surrounded by U.S. Special Forces, along with their proxy militia. The convoy was then commandeered to a different fortress, known as Qala-e-Zeini, on the road between Mazar-e-Sharif and Sheberghan. Detainees were taken down from the trucks and tied up with their turbans. Survivor Abdul Rahman recalled seeing about 50 people buried alive; survivor Mohammad Yousuf Afghan recalled seeing more prisoners beaten to death and others drowned in pools of standing water. However, the vast majority were locked in metal shipping containers and left to die.
Each of the containers held 200 to 300 detainees. By the time they arrived at Sheberghan and the containers were opened, most of the detainees had suffocated. In some containers there were no survivors. One of the truck drivers recalled: “They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish. All their clothes were ripped and wet.” The thousands of bodies were then buried in mass graves in the Dasht-e-Leili desert outside the city. Another witness said that some survivors were summarily executed at the burial site under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces.
U.S. Special Operations forces walk nearby as the Northern Alliance troops fight pro-Taliban forces near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan on Nov. 26, 2001.
Photo: Darko Bandic/AP
A confidential U.N. memorandum shared with Newsweek concluded that evidence gathered at the site was “sufficient to justify a fully-fledged criminal investigation,” as the mass graves contained “bodies of Taliban POWs who died of suffocation during transfer from Kunduz to Sheberghan.” However, due to “the political sensitivity of this case and related protection concerns, it is strongly recommended that all activities relevant to this case be brought to a halt until a decision is made concerning the final goal of the exercise: criminal trial, truth commission, other, etc.”
As Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a 2009 report: “Gravesites have been tampered with, evidence has been destroyed, and witnesses have been tortured and killed.” PHR researcher Nathaniel Raymond added, “Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction.”
Human bones and clothing lie in the sand at a mass grave site near the northern Afghan city of Sheberghan on Aug. 31, 2002.
Photo: Mindaugas Kulbis/Ap
Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban government’s ambassador to Pakistan, who was detained for three and a half years in Guantánamo Bay, later wrote that of some 8,000 Taliban fighters who surrendered, “only 3,000 were to survive captivity. I had been in Islamabad trying to secure their release, and talked to Dostum several times, and he had assured me that the prisoners would be well treated. I even went to the United Nations to inform them about the prisoners, as well as the Human Rights Commission and the Red Cross.”
Survivors of the twin massacres at Qala-e-Jangi and Dasht-e-Leili were initially detained together in a massively overcrowded prison in Sheberghan. Some would be killed by guards or die of medical neglect, starvation, or disease, but most would later be released. Several dozen others would be among the first planeloads of prisoners transported to Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay.
Qala-e-Jangi survivors Yasser al-Zahrani, left, and Mohammad al-Hanashi, right, both died at Guantánamo under dubious circumstances.
Photos: U.S. Guantánamo Bay military prison
In June 2006, Qala-e-Jangi survivor Yasser al-Zahrani, along with Ali al-Salami and Mani al-Utaybi, would be found hanging in their cells at Camp Delta, according to their autopsies. It later emerged that rags had been shoved down their throats. Their battered bodies were subsequently mutilated and returned to their families with their throats removed. In early 2009, Guantánamo detainees selected Qala-e-Jangi survivor Mohammad al-Hanashi as their representative and negotiator. Shortly thereafter, he was involuntarily committed to the Behavioral Health Unit, the camp mental hospital, and subsequently died on June 1, 2009, under dubious circumstances. Internal documents from the BHU dated June 1 and 2 were later described in a memo as “missing and unrecoverable for inclusion in the case file.” According to former detainee Mansoor Adayfi, what these four had in common was that they all played prominent roles in various forms of protest at Guantánamo, including mass hunger strikes. The same was true of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who was sent to the BHU shortly before being transferred to Camp V, where he died in solitary confinement under similarly questionable circumstances in 2012, two years after he had been cleared for release.
The history of the Guantánamo Bay internment camp did not begin in January 2002 with the opening of Camp X-Ray. It began in November 2001 with the mass slaughter of Taliban detainees on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif. The CIA has yet to release its video footage of the massacre at Qala-e-Jangi and what led up to it, some of which I watched them film, nor has an exhaustive inquiry ever been conducted into the suspicious deaths at Guantánamo of Yasser al-Zahrani, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi, Mohammad al-Hanashi, or Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. There has also never been any satisfactory explanation for the death in custody of Guantánamo detainee Abdul Rahman al-Umari in 2007, nor of Awal Gul and Haji Naseem in 2011.
The conflict in Afghanistan will not be fully resolved until the issue of prisoners of war has been justly settled. All remaining detainees must be set free, and comprehensive independent investigations must be conducted into these massacres and suspicious deaths. As the 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan comes to an end, so too must the obscene mockery of justice at Guantánamo Bay.
The post The Guantánamo Bay Internment Camp Is an Unresolved Vestige of the American Occupation of Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
No individual is more emblematic of the corruption, criminality, and moral rot at the heart of the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan than President Ashraf Ghani. As the Taliban took over his country this August, advancing with the momentum of a bowling ball rolling down a steep hill, seizing many major cities without firing a single bullet, Ghani fled in disgrace. The US-backed puppet leader allegedly made his escape with $169 million that he stole from the public coffers. Ghani reportedly crammed the cash into four cars and a helicopter, before flying to the United Arab Emirates, which granted him asylum on supposed “humanitarian” grounds. The president’s corruption had been exposed before.
The post How Elite US Institutions Created Afghanistan’s Neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Snapshot of the moment: On the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, days after the president announced vaccination mandates intended to stop the 9/11-every-two-days death toll caused by the COVID pandemic, a Washington, D.C., rally planned for next Saturday celebrating people who invaded the Capitol Building and tried to overturn a free and fair election may become the flashpoint for further political violence because an astounding number of Republicans have been brought to believe Democrats are running a cannibal pedophile ring with Hollywood “elites” as part of a larger plot to take over the world.
Twenty years ago this morning, as I stood before a bank of televisions and watched the Twin Towers swaying in their death throes, I had a vision of what was to come. It was ridiculously incomplete, to be sure — Nostradamus himself couldn’t have pulled “President Trump” out of his hat — but those events in combination with the people in power at that moment assured me we were headed for some very dark places.
Twenty years later, and all I can say is, “I had no idea it would be like this.” By “this,” I mean members of the very same Republican Party that pounced on 9/11 to wrap itself in the flag while attacking the Taliban and then Iraq has transmogrified into a pack of neo-Confederate would-be warriors, some of whom see the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan as a model for future endeavors. The GOP was bad enough back then — remember John Ashcroft shrouding the stone breasts of a statue so as not to be tempted, or something? — but this new breed is thoroughly around the bend.
You can’t blame it all on an economy that left them behind. A whole lot of these Republicans drive cars that cost more than your average three-bedroom house — see: the gun-toting McMansion couple who got famous on the right-wing circuit for menacing peaceful protesters with an AR-15. What most of these people share in common is a frenzied terror that being white in America might be becoming less of a power ticket than it used to be, and hating Muslims 20 years ago has metastasized into hating everyone and everything that might threaten their centuries-old supremacy. Even you. Especially you.
If that includes disrupting and destroying elections, so be it. David Frum, the George W. Bush speechwriter who helped that Republican president sell fear to a traumatized nation, made an observation once. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically,” he predicted, “they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
It turns out Frum was only half right. They are rejecting democracy wholesale (see: Trump’s “Big Lie”), but in their tumbledown rush to please a failed real estate mogul, they are also abandoning the flaccid “strictures” of basic conservatism. Look no further than Texas and Florida, where right-wing governors are dropping the hammer on local governments and small business over COVID mask mandates.
I’m so old, I remember when local government and small business were the reasons conservatives claimed they existed in the first place. Now, they exist to please Trump, and have gone so far out into the ether that people like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, John Boehner and God-help-us even George W. Bush are considered to be too squishy-lefty to be tolerated in proper Republican circles.
All that, and they have foot-soldiers now, shock troops dressed in their finest tac gear and armed to the last tooth. These brigands are insinuating themselves into the ranks of anti-mask and anti-vax fanaticism, to the point that any school board meeting on these topics is likely to descend into a parking lot brawl, with fathers screaming at school board members, “We will find you.”
* * * * *
Flipping through the TV channels on Thursday night, I came across the first game of the NFL season. Someone was performing the national anthem, and I caught “…gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” The thought came of itself, immediate and unbidden — “Not in Afghanistan, not anymore” — and I fell down the stairwell of 20 years, again.
That’s been happening quite a bit lately, as this grim anniversary has lurked on the far side of news reports — try to contain your shock — about how our disastrous, useless, calamity war in that country came to a disastrous end. I mashed the buttons on the remote until some show about growing carrots came on, and I watched for a while in search of elusive calm; the very last thing I wanted to see was the God damned war machine flyover that has become a stinking staple of sporting events ever since the whole country went sideways into war, fear and failure.
Please clap, right? Twenty years, 20 miles of bad road, millions dead, damaged or displaced, trillions of dollars deftly handed to the fortunate few who sell the bullets and the bombs, criminal profiteers and their political enablers walking unencumbered in the daylight, hauling down small fortunes in speakers fees, and more again in fees for commentator gigs with the murderously complicit corporate “news” media….
All of it aftermath, the consequences of getting everything wrong since that day, and it has all only just begun, because a segment of the population spent 20 years bathing in far-right Republican Kool-aid — the best stuff for fundraising, don’tcha know — and came out of the tub orange with rage, oblivious to the absurdities and the brazen picking of their pockets. Every time I see a vehicle with a Trump sticker next to an American flag sticker next to a Confederate flag sticker, a tiny part of my prefrontal lobe turns into pus and leaks out of my ear.
When did it start? Trump? The Tea Party? Newt Gingrich? Ronald Reagan? Richard Nixon? Barry Goldwater? Ayn Rand? Henry Ford? Appomattox? Wounded Knee? Jamestown? Cristóbal Colón? From what bleak corner came the original sin that set us pinwheeling into this vortex of racism, greed, ignorance and violence?
Answer: “Yes.”
Upon this anniversary, I offer a dollop of purest truth to that cohort: Osama bin Laden and his friends got more than everything they came for 20 years ago, and you are the proof.
To the rest, I humbly proffer a bit of wisdom from Helen Keller: “Rights are things which we get when we are strong enough to make our claim to them good.”
To properly consecrate this day, endeavor to be stronger than those who seek to shred your rights out of a misguided fear that they are losing theirs. Quite an enormous amount depends on it.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Suddenly, the idea put forth by French President, Emmanuel Macron, late last year does not seem so far-fetched or untenable after all. Following the US-NATO hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan, European countries are now forced to consider the once unthinkable: a gradual dismantling from US dominance.
When, on September 29, 2020, Macron uttered these words: “We, some countries more than others, gave up on our strategic independence by depending too much on American weapons systems”, the context of this statement had little to do with Afghanistan. Instead, Europe was angry at the bullying tactics used by former US President Donald Trump and sought alternatives to US leadership. The latter has treated NATO – actually, all of Europe – with such disdain, that it has forced America’s closest allies to rethink their foreign policy outlook and global military strategy altogether.
Even the advent of US President Joe Biden and his assurances to Europe that “America is back” did little to reassure European countries, which fear, justifiably, that US political instability may exist long after Biden’s term in office expires.
The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan – without NATO members even being consulted or considered as the US signed and enacted a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban starting in July 2020 – has convinced Europe that, despite the defeat of Trump, Washington has essentially remained the same: a self-centered ‘ally’.
Now that the US and NATO have officially left Afghanistan, a political debate in Europe is raging on many political platforms. The strongest indicators that Europe is ready to proceed with an independent foreign policy agenda and European-centered military strategy became evident in the EU Defense Ministers’ meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
In a position that is increasingly representing a wider EU stance, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, articulated the Bloc’s prevailing sentiment: “The experience from Afghanistan has shown that our inability to respond comes at a price. The EU must therefore strengthen its strategic autonomy by creating the first entry force capable of ensuring stability in the EU’s neighborhood.”
Despite assurances that this ‘first entry force’ will not represent an alternative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but rather ‘complement’ its role, chances are this new army will serve as a stepping stone for Europe’s coveted independence from the US foreign policy agenda.
Just marvel at these statements by top European, including British, officials and analysts to appreciate the crisis underway in NATO. Remember that 51 NATO members and partner countries had rushed to aid the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, following the invocation of the common-defense clause, Article 5.
“Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea to leave that country in such … a way,” Johann Wadephul, a deputy caucus leader for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said, with reference to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the absence of any coordination with Washington’s NATO allies.
Former British Prime Minister, Theresa May, questioned everything, including Europe’s blind allegiance to the US: “Was our intelligence really so poor? Was our understanding of the Afghan government so weak? Was our knowledge on the ground so inadequate? Or did we just think we had to follow the United States and on a wing and a prayer it would be all right on the night?”
Katharina Emschermann, the deputy director of the reputable Berlin-based Center for International Security at the Hertie School, seemed to speak for many European analysts when she said: “Part of the discord that we’re seeing now is probably also rooted in the sense of unease about how things are going to go on in the future.”
This ‘unease’ refers to Europe’s traditional foreign policy, which has been hostage to post-WWII Trans-Atlantic European American partnership. However, Europe itself is changing, together with the world around it. Moreover, the Chinese economy has grown tremendously in recent years. As of last year, it was Beijing, not Washington, that served the critical role of being the EU’s largest trade partner.
Not only has Chinese economic – thus, political and military – clout grown exponentially, Europe’s share of the global economy has shrunk significantly, and not only because of the Brexit ordeal. According to NBC news, citing the British accounting firm PwC, “in 1960, the countries that would form the E.U. made up a third of the global economy. By 2050, the bloc is projected to account for just 9 percent”.
The growing realization among European countries that they must engineer an eventual break-up from the US is rooted in legitimate fears that the EU’s interest is hardly a top American priority. Hence, many European countries continue to resist Washington’s ultimatums regarding China.
It was also Macron, while elaborating on the concept of the European army, who rejected the US China agenda. “We cannot accept to live in a bipolar world made up of the US and China,” he said.
Macron’s once ‘controversial’ view is now mainstream thinking in Europe, especially as many EU policy-makers feel disowned, if not betrayed, by the US in Afghanistan. If this trajectory of mistrust continues, the first step towards the establishment of a European army could, in the near future, become an actuality.
The post Following Afghanistan Defeat: Can EU Win Own ‘Independence’ from the US? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The first time I heard about 9/11 was on the radio at a restaurant in Afghanistan, where I was working as a research assistant. I wasn’t following any news, and at that time in Afghanistan there was no TV or internet. People used radios to listen to the outside world.
I’m from Yemen, and I couldn’t imagine a skyscraper 110 floors tall. In fact, it was the first time I heard that such buildings even existed. The tallest building in Sana’a was 25 floors — that was a skyscraper by Yemeni standards.
At that time, Afghanistan was a mix of a lot of the past and a little of the present, mostly represented by cars. The land, damaged buildings, scraps of war machines that harvested countless lives, and general destruction and casualties already told a brutal and sad tale of Afghanistan’s past and what would shape its future.
When I heard on the radio that airplanes had flown into buildings in the United States, I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the attack, what it meant, or how many victims there would be. The United States was all the way around the world and didn’t have anything to do with me.
Most Afghan people, along with the foreigners who lived in Afghanistan, had no idea what had happened either. Life continued as usual, until suddenly word got out that a Saudi charity organisation that worked in Afghanistan had received instructions to immediately liquidate and distribute everything it had then leave.
My friend was working for the organisation so I agreed to help him and take some aid, logistics, and medicine to a nearby hospital. We then planned to leave Afghanistan in the organisation’s car.
It never once crossed my mind that 9/11 would impact me. I was 18 years old and traveling outside of Yemen for the first time. I knew very little about the West. I didn’t really know the difference between the United States and the United Nations.
My dream was simply to finish my mission, get back to Yemen, and leave to one of the Gulf countries to finish my education and work there.
Instead, I was kidnapped in Afghanistan and sold to the Americans. They said I was an “Al Qaeda general”, and the United States government classified me as an “Al Qaeda commander” and a “9/11 insider”.
I don’t consider myself any different from the many Muslims around the world who must live under the war on terror. But I do consider myself fortunate compared to those who have lost their lives, lost their families, or lost their limbs as collateral damage in ground wars, air strikes, and drone strikes.
I was tortured and imprisoned for almost half of my life at Guantanamo and my life changed forever. I still live with the stigma of Guantanamo. And this past hinders my daily life in Serbia, where I have been placed in the detainee “resettlement” programme, and where I am still treated as a terrorist even though I have been cleared of any crime.
But I appreciate that I’m alive.
9/11 was a turning point in history. It accelerated the war on Islam and Muslims and on those who understand or sympathise with us. For the last two decades, we have faced state-sponsored crimes against us in the name of the war on terror.
9/11 was also presented as the beginning of history. But people forget that the United States was deeply involved in what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There it paid Muslims to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union which helped lead to its downfall.
The current US policy towards Muslims and Islam leaves an especially bitter taste if you realise that, thanks to Muslims, the US won against the Soviets in Afghanistan without a single American life being lost.
9/11 was a product of United States foreign policy and a long-standing conflict between the US and al-Qaeda. But it has been employed and misused against Muslims more broadly all over the world.
It served as a framework which has enabled countless senseless deaths, and US and NATO invasion and aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East and Asia, as well as across Africa.
It has also been waged against Muslims who live in the United States, UK, and Europe. This has been done through counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies that profile people based on their religion and undermine justice.
But despite what I see, and what I’ve been through as a result of 9/11, I still believe in justice.
The innocent people whose lives were lost on 9/11, and their families, deserve justice. I don’t think that the 9/11 victims or their families would approve of the killing, kidnapping, and torture of people around the world that has followed from an already terrible event.
In fact, I don’t think any member of the 9/11 families would want other innocent people to suffer and to experience the pain they felt from having a loved one taken from them in such an unjust way. I imagine the first responders, the firefighters, the police officers, the medics, and all the others who were lost on 9/11 would not support the distortion of justice, the sacrificing of values, and the taking of innocent lives to be done in their names.
Let us remember that those who lost their lives on 9/11 and their families are not the only victims of 9/11. Over a period of twenty years, there are now victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Guantanamo, and many countries around the world. Countless people have suffered silently at the loss of innocent lives. They experience untold 9/11s every single day, with no country to defend them or media to cover their stories. They deserve justice too.
To that end, I’ve recently joined CAGE in its global campaign to do exactly that. The International Witness Campaign, which I’m proud to support, will aim to ask the questions that we must answer: how do we truly arrive at justice?
Every single life is sacred. I pray every day for justice and peace for all humanity.
Featured image via Mansoor Adayfi
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Protests continue on the streets of Kabul and other cities in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, over hundreds of activist organisations and individuals around the world have pledged support for the Afghan women facing oppression by the Taliban.
Courageous
On 4 September, women protesters attempted to march to the presidential palace in Kabul. But the Taliban attacked them with tear gas:
The women demanded there be no recognition of Taliban government without the full participation of women in politics and without recognition of their right to work. Tear gas was reportedly used to disperse the demonstrators and one woman allegedly beaten. Women also reportedly demonstrated in Herat and other regional cities.
More protests followed:
Kabul right now. Brave women protesting and chanting “freedom.” pic.twitter.com/wxstxHcRHl
— Farnaz Fassihi (@farnazfassihi) September 7, 2021
The Taliban fired in the air to disperse these protesters (parts of this footage may be distressing for some readers):
Despite a ban by the Taliban on demonstrations, protests continued in Kabul and other cities such as Takhar, Parwan, Badakshan, and Ghazni.
Meanwhile over 370 activist organisations and hundreds of individuals have pledged to take to the streets on 25 September in support of Afghan women.
Their demands are as follows:
- Refuse to recognize a Taliban government, which has no legitimacy beyond the brutal force it commands, and which terrorizes the people of Afghanistan, girls and women in particular.
- Stop all forms of support to the Taliban, including funding, providing of arms, and technical know-how.
- End imperialism, militarism, fascism and religious fundamentalism. Cut the Pentagon Budget.
- Stop and prevent manipulating women’s rights for commercial and other interests.
- Support the women’s resistance to the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Respect and support Afghan women and people’s exercise of their democratic and human rights, including their right to self-determination.
- Evacuate women and men, human rights defenders, journalists, police officers, public employees, athletes, and LGBTI+ who wish to leave the country and ensure their safe passage.
- Create an independent body of observers, made up with a majority of women, who have a track record of promoting women’s human rights to monitor the situation in Afghanistan.
- Welcome refugees, with the US and their allies assuming the responsibility of financing the cost of resettling displaced people from Afghanistan.
- Immediately open humanitarian corridors to support the people of Afghanistan.
- Stop arms trade policies and the military industrial complex, which profits from the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere the world.
Previously, The Canary published messages of defiance by the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA). There were also messages of support from a number of Kurdish women’s organisations, including the armed YPJ (women’s protection units).
Now Kurdish women’s organisation Kongra Star is calling on all governments and the UN to refuse recognition of a Taliban government:
We urgently call upon governments, @UN Security Council & regional entities to:
Refuse to recognize a Taliban government, which has no legitimacy, & terrorizes the people of Afghanistan, women & girls in particular
#StandWithWomenofAfghanistan#No2TalibanYes2WomensRights pic.twitter.com/ouM7g2x4JT
— Kongra Star Women's Movement Rojava (@starrcongress) September 1, 2021
The Kurds of northern Syria have been at the forefront of the war against Daesh (ISIS). NATO member Turkey is at war with the Kurds and Yazidis – a war which will likely benefit IS-Khorasan (ISIS-K). IS-Khorasan is the organisation that claimed responsibility for the Kabul airport bombing. As one commentator observed:
Thus, the more Ankara erodes the ability of Kurdish and Yazidi militant groups to combat ISIS, the greater the chance Turkish forces could face ISIS-K attacks in Afghanistan, like the one that killed some 180 people at Kabul airport last month.
It now appears that Turkey, led by authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is working up a deal to provide intelligence and military support to the Taliban. Indeed, on 18 August, Erdoğan explained:
The main point is to reach an understanding with the Afghan authorities. For example, we can achieve this with a bilateral agreement like we did in Libya.
And in July, Erdoğan admitted Turkey:
has nothing against the Taliban’s ideology, and since we aren’t in conflict with the Taliban’s beliefs, I believe we can better discuss and agree with them on issues.
In a statement issued on 3 August, RAWA declared:
we call for the establishment of a democratic front against the Taliban, we call upon all democratic, secular, anti-fundamentalist and anti-occupation forces, all our tormented women, girls and men, to say that nothing will come out of mourning. Let us rise and resist against the Taliban and their partners, in any way and at any level, and give them a taste of defeat and sorrow.
The Afghan people – particularly women and their supporters globally – are now the only true opposition to the fundamentalists.
Featured image via YouTube – Hindustan Times
By Tom Coburg
This post was originally published on The Canary.
COMMENTARY: By David Robie
When I arrived at my office at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji on the morning of 12 September 2001 (9/11, NY Time), I was oblivious to reality.
I had dragged myself home to bed a few hours earlier at 2am as usual, after another long day working on our students’ Wansolwara Online website providing coverage of the Fiji general election.
One day after being sworn in as the country’s fifth real (elected) prime minister, it seemed that Laisenia Qarase was playing another dirty trick on Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour Party, which had earned the constitutional right to be included in the multi-party government supposed to lead the country back to democracy.
Stepping into my office, I encountered a colleague. He looked wild-eyed and said: “It’s the end of the world.”
Naively, I replied, thinking of the 1987 military coups, “Yes, how can legality and constitutionality be cast aside so blatantly yet again?”
“No, not Fiji politics,” he said. “That’s nothing. I mean New York. Terrorists have destroyed the financial heart of the Western world.”
It was a chilling moment, comparable to how I had felt as a 17-year-old forestry science trainee in a logging camp at Kaingaroa Forest the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — 22 November 1963.
Wansolwara newsroom
Over the next few hours, it seemed that half the Laucala campus descended on our Wansolwara newsroom to watch the latest BBC, TVNZ one and Fiji TV One coverage of the shocking and devastating tragedy.
While a handful of student journalists struggled to provide coverage of local angles — such as the tightening of security around the US Embassy in Suva and shock among the Laucala intelligentsia — most students remained glued to the TV, stunned into immobility by the suicide jetliner terrorists.
Inevitably, global jingoism and xenophobia followed, the assaults on Sikhs merely because they an “Arab look”, the attacks on mosques — in Fiji copies of the Koran were burned — and the abuse directed towards Afghan refugees were par for the course.
Freedom of speech in the United States also quickly became a casualty of this new “war on terrorism”. Columnists were fired for their critical views, television host Bill Maher was denounced by the White House, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau dropped his “featherweight Bush” cartoons and so-called “unpatriotic” songs were dropped from radio playlists. Wrote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:
Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practising intolerance, signalling that anyone who challenges the leaders of embattled America is cynical, political and – isn’t this the subtext? – unpatriotic.
But while much of the West lined up as political parrots alongside the United States, ready to exact a terrible vengeance, contrasting perspectives were apparent in many developing nations.
In the Pacific, for example, while people empathised with the survivors of the terrible toll — 2977 people were killed (including the 125 at the Pentagon), 19 hijackers committed murder-suicide, and more than 6000 people injured — there was often a more critical view of the consequences of American foreign policy and a sense of dread about the future.
Twin Towers reflections
Less than a week after the Twin Towers tragedy, I asked my final-year students to compile some notes recalling the circumstances of when they heard the news of the four aircraft slamming into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon (one plane was taken over by the passengers and it dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and their responses.
One, a mature age student from Fiji who had worked for several years as a radio journalist, said:
I was in bed and woke up about 2.30am. I have a habit of having the BBC running on radio and, half-asleep, I caught the news being broadcast. I pulled myself out of bed and tuned into BBC on Sky TV. The second plane had just hit the second tower, and I ended staying up the rest of the night to watch the unfolding events.
On his impressions, he warned about scapegoats and the media:
The relevance to us here in the Pacific is that terrorists can strike anywhere to get revenge. This conflict could evolve into war, and wars affect everyone. Americans already think Osama bin Laden is the terrorist. Where is the evidence? Americans are looking to get someone quickly, and the media is leading the way.
Another student wrote:
Good, they [US] paid dearly for trying to intervene in Muslim countries … Bin Laden is portrayed as the culprit even though it is not clear who did it. The media is portraying the whole Muslim world as responsible, but actually this is not the case.
A practical joke?
Recalled one:
I was sleeping and my mother woke me up at 6.30am to tell me the news. I was shocked and, still sleepy, I thought my mother was doing one of her practical jokes to get me out of bed … If there is World War Three, it will have a big impact on the Pacific.
America still has some form of control over various Pacific Island countries, and once again it will recruit Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islands are relatively weak and still trying to be developed. Another hiccup could send our economies t the dogs.
Yet another:
I was at home having breakfast, listening to the news on Bula 100FM. My first reaction was disbelief, horror … Ethically, there is a need to remember the people involved and the amount of bloodshed and death. It would be necessary to censor material that would be emotionally upsetting.
One student was
really surprised to see TVNZ instead of the usual Chinese CCTV. The sound was mute so I couldn’t really get what was being said. I was about to turn it off when they showed the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapse. I thought it was a short piece from the movie Independence Day.
Sad, it may seem, but the first thing I thought about as a journalist was that reporters will have a field day … Phrases such as “historical day the world over” and “America under siege” popped up in my head as possible headlines.
I got out my notebook and began writing down the number of people estimated to have died, the extent of the damage, an excerpts from President Bush’s speech. Practically anything that involves the US also affects many people throughout the world.
Inevitably, some commentators began drawing parallels between the terrorism in New York in mid-September 2001 at one end of the continuum of hate and rogue businessman and George Speight’s brief terrorist rule in Fiji during mid-2000 at the other end.
Terrorism as a political tool
Politics associate professor Scott MacWilliam, for example, highlighted how terrorism becomes a political tool deployed by a nation state to support its foreign and domestic policy objectives. He pointed out that many of the fundamentalist groups which now carried out terrorism were “nurtured, trained, financed and incorporated” into the Western security apparatus.
One might ask what had this terrible urban graveyard created by fanaticism got to do with the South Pacific. In a sense, there is a disturbing relationship.
Politics in the region, especially at that time, was increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia, and much of it by the state. And with this situation comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists, for more training and professionalism.
At the time of the 9/11 tragedy, Dr David Robie was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This article has been extracted from a keynote speech that he made at the inaugural conference of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), “Navigating the Future”, at Auckland University of Technology on 5-6 October 2001. The full address was published by Pacific Journalism Review, No. 8.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration. Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective. Mature reflections may be permitted. But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.
The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes. For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.
The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence. It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock. As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.
This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).
With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed. In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.
This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade. Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”
War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight. The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”
The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities. David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.” Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area. Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.” And so rests the case for the prosecution.
In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts. Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.
Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office. Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.
The security propagandists have not done much better. With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial. “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”
A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”
The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention. Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments. Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”. He prefers focusing on scale. “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.” Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.
Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading. “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11? Absolutely. Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11? Absolutely. To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.” Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”
The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever. “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month. “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.” Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition. Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe”. The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.
The post Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The UK Defence Committee has proposed an inquiry into the recent, messy end of the 20 year war in Afghanistan. The scrutiny body has laid out a series of questions it wants answered. But it’s far from the inquiry we need into the decades-long disaster.
Committee chair Tobias Elwood MP said:
The sheer speed of the Taliban takeover following our withdrawal from Afghanistan sent shockwaves across the world. After twenty years of war, the images of Taliban fighters celebrating victory on the streets of Kabul are sobering. It has been a dark and troubling time for the West and supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide.
Certainly the resurgent Taliban is no friend of human rights and democracy. But this isn’t the whole story. The scope of the inquiry will not extend to the legacy of human rights abuses carried out in Afghanistan by the West and its allies.
There is no mention in the proposal of the bombings, the night raids, the drone attacks or the Western-trained death squads – nor the huge profits made by arms firms during the war.
Defense stocks during the War in Afghanistan:
Lockheed Martin: 1,236% return
Northrop Grumman: 1,196% return
Boeing: 975% return
General Dynamics: 625% return
Raytheon: 331% returnMilitary-industrial complex greed kept us in this war. It never had to be like this.
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 26, 2021
The questions proposed are very narrow in scope, often focusing on recent events only. It also covers whether the disaster will affect future UK wars and occupations. One question reads:
What effect will the withdrawal have on future operations, and what will be the impact on the willingness of local personnel to work with, and support, the UK in future operations?
A key priority, then, seems to be the next war. Wherever that will be…
PM Boris Johnson has already rejected the idea of a proper inquiry, as The Canary reported recently. Yet other voices are demanding that the war is properly scrutinised.
Among them is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He challenged Johnson on the matter in the Commons on 7 September.
In response to his statement on #Afghanistan, I asked Boris Johnson if it was not "time for a full inquiry into the whole process that led us into Afghanistan and the whole notion of a foreign policy in which we intervene all over the world." pic.twitter.com/vAZqiNKI9d
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) September 7, 2021
Others have warned that there will be no accountability. Former military officer Frank Ledwidge is among them. And he said this was the case despite the Afghan war being more damaging than the Iraq War in “every respect”. He added:
Over the past 20 years, 457 members of the armed forces have been killed in Afghanistan – and thousands more ruined for life. We don’t count the suicides. We killed thousands of non-combatants in Helmand, and many more insurgents.
There can be no meaningful peace without justice. This is as true in Afghanistan as anywhere else. And that will never be achieved by another narrow inquiry which amounts to the UK warmongering class marking its own homework once again.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Stag Sgt Vince Mancilla
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.
I was 9 years old, living in a small Austrian town on the day of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Even as my Afghan refugee parents were glued to the news, I was impatient to watch my favorite Japanese anime show, “Dragon Ball Z,” a classic tale about good conquering evil. It was only when that was canceled and replaced by footage of smoldering towers that I was introduced to a man named Osama bin Laden, who was said to be hiding in my family’s home country. His name didn’t sound Afghan, but I overheard my father lamenting that the presence of this man meant the United States was surely going to attack Afghanistan.
The next morning and for days on end, as the only Afghan child in my school, I was met with a barrage of questions that quickly turned aggressive. Starting with my teacher’s query, “Emran, you’re from Afghanistan, do you know why they did it?” to taunts from my classmates about how my “terrorist” and “Taliban” relatives were going to be nuked.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan was so popular in the United States that it might have felt inevitable. A Gallup poll from October 2001 found that 88% of Americans supported it. But watching the airstrikes on television, it felt like World War III was coming to my country. Many of our close relatives still lived in Kabul and the northern countryside. It was the era before smartphones and widespread instant messaging, and we went days, sometimes weeks, without hearing from them.
As my parents and I watched an elderly Afghan man telling a television reporter in his native Pashto how he’d been arrested and sexually abused by U.S. soldiers, my mother wept in fear of what was to come.
I decided then that I wanted to bear witness to this war. I wanted to examine what others wanted to keep secret. It was another 13 years before I would begin traveling regularly to my home country as an independent journalist, absorbing and documenting everything I could. My early stories, published in the Austrian and German press, focused on the political intrigue and backroom deals around the Afghan presidential elections. But when I traveled to the countryside, where nearly three-quarters of the population lives, what I found was far, far darker.
This is where the “war on terror” was being waged, not in the capital, Kabul. In villages across large parts of the country, stories of torture and night raids by U.S. and U.S.-trained forces were legion and airstrikes were almost daily occurrences. Almost every family I met when I was traveling through rural provinces in the north, south and east between 2014 and 2021 had stories of how the war they called the “American war” had turned them against the Americans and, ultimately, toward the Taliban.
This is not what Americans were hearing on the nightly news. In the United States, the longest war dragged on for 20 years, largely forgotten by most of the public. They were not hearing about the ravages of the war in the countryside and how it was radicalizing Afghans in village after village, bloating the ranks of the Taliban. That might be why so many Americans were surprised by how quickly the Taliban were able to make advances and ultimately take control of Kabul and the seat of the Afghan government.
But the writing was on the wall for anyone who wanted to see it. For well over a decade now, if you drove a short distance from the provincial capitals of Jalalabad, Asadabad, Khost or Kunduz, you’d find yourself deep inside Taliban country. In my experience reporting there, almost every family has a story about how U.S. and Afghan special forces have killed civilians with impunity.
Noor ul-Hadi, from a village near Jalalabad, told me about repeated night raids by U.S. forces in 2012 and 2013. Even though his father worked for the local election complaints commission and was close to the government, his uncle and cousin were killed in one of the raids. When the family requested an investigation, insisting they were not Taliban members, they were ignored.
“One result of such massacres is that even Afghans who support the government turn away from it,” he told me.
And of course, it wasn’t just the night raids. Afghanistan has the unfortunate distinction of being the most drone-bombed country in the world. When I realized that no authorities, neither American nor Afghan, were keeping track of the deaths from these attacks, I started a virtual drone memorial to account for as many civilian victims as I could.
Khost, a province bordering Pakistan’s North Waziristan, was the heart of the U.S. drone war under President Barack Obama. Pasta Khan, a 55-year-old nomad from the Kuchi tribe, lost six members of his family, including his father and all of his brothers, in a 2015 drone strike. He told me that the men had been returning from a funeral for a relative just across the border in Pakistan when a drone hit their trucks, killing 14 civilians.
Yet after airstrikes or military operations killed civilians, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul offered little in the way of support or redress. “They never come, they never help,” Khan told me. “Is being killed by a suicide attack worse than being killed by a drone?” It was often members of the Taliban who showed up to offer support. (The U.S. maintained that the 14 were insurgents; an investigation was inconclusive.)
The more time I spent in Afghanistan, the more clear it was that the benefits of the American occupation were visible only in the big cities and Kabul in particular. There, Afghans could enjoy fancy coffee shops with $1 cappuccinos, but in the rest of the country, most Afghans lived on less than a dollar a day. Even as investigative journalists and U.S. oversight authorities uncovered how Afghanistan was awash in corruption and how billions of tax dollars spent by Washington contributed to the graft, the Afghan government continued to ally with brutal warlords and drug barons and senior Afghan officials and their families siphoned money into luxury homes in Dubai, crippling any promise of building a functioning society.
Inside Afghanistan, however, there was little appetite for exposing this kind of open corruption. While critics of the Taliban were killed with car bombs, critics of the Afghan government and the U.S. war on terror were also not safe. Last year, I received death threats on social media and a warning that I could meet the same fate as my uncle, a prominent public intellectual and government critic who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 2019.
On each of my visits to Afghanistan, I saw and wrote about how the American war had made it relatively easy for the Taliban to recruit rural Afghans, despite the grim memories of their previous rule. Instead of wiping out terrorism and ushering in a new era of democracy, the staggering corruption, the terror of airstrikes and the horrific abuses by U.S. and Afghan soldiers were radicalizing tens of thousands of Afghans.
With the dramatic return to power of the Taliban in August, I don’t have a lot of hope at this moment. Like so many other Afghans around the world, I’ve spent weeks trying to help my friends and family members who are stuck in Kabul and other parts of the country. Some of them are desperately trying to leave with their families; others, perhaps daunted by the obstacles to leaving, face an uncertain future under Taliban rule. They all feel abandoned by President Ashraf Ghani and his coterie of political elites who fled the country after looting it for years. While they have found safe havens in the United Arab Emirates, millions of ordinary Afghans who don’t want to live under the Taliban are stranded.
Since the last American warplane left Kabul, I’ve been thinking of all the rural Afghans I’ve met. If the withdrawal of U.S. troops brings an end to the daily terror the war has inflicted on them, I know they will be relieved. Of course, with groups like ISIS-K on the rise, it’s ironic to see the United States coordinating with the Taliban, the very enemy it spent over $1.5 trillion fighting for the last 20 years. But with the recent drone strikes after the deadly ISIS-K attack on the Kabul airport, it’s a reminder that the era of terror from the skies might not be over yet. And that’s a reminder to plan my next trip to Afghanistan.
This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Emran Feroz can be reached at emran_feroz@hotmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @emran_feroz.
The Writing Was on the Wall in Afghanistan Years Ago is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse
Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Since 9/11, the power of the U.S. military has been felt around the world in the name of rooting out terrorism. But at what cost? From Fallujah in Iraq to tiny villages in Afghanistan and Yemen, Reveal reporter Anjali Kamat talks to three journalists about how America’s so-called war on terror has shaped an entire generation.
Anand Gopal is a foreign journalist who traveled across the Afghan countryside, meeting with Taliban commanders and trying to understand how people understood the war. He says when U.S. President George W. Bush divided the world into those who are “with us” and those who are “with the terrorists,” it was an oversimplification and had tragic consequences for Afghanistan. Within months of the invasion, the Taliban wanted to surrender, but 9/11 was fresh and the U.S. said no. Instead, the military allied with anti-Taliban warlords and incentivized them to hunt down “terrorists.” Gopal says thousands of innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed – which only galvanized the Taliban and drew more recruits to their ranks.
To many Americans, Fallujah is remembered as the site of two brutal battles where many Americans died during the invasion of Iraq. But to journalist Feurat Alani, it’s also his parents’ hometown. While American TVs filled with images of the city as a jihadist stronghold, Alani knew it was a bustling city full of regular people whose lives would be forever changed by the invasion. Alani recounts precious memories of Fallujah, like swimming in the Euphrates River with his cousins and seeing football matches with his uncles. But after the invasion, his family fell apart and the city was reduced to rubble. The football stadium turned into a cemetery, and joyful moments there became somber walks through gravestones.
Finally, journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad talks about what America’s post-9/11 wars have done to Yemen, where drone strikes became part of everyday life for civilians. Al Ahmad recounts what it felt like to ride in a pickup truck, wondering if she would be targeted as the sound of a drone buzzed overhead. She saw on the ground how the tactics of the war on terror in Yemen led to resentment and hostility among people whose lives were upended. While the 9/11 attacks happened 20 years ago, Al Ahmad says that for people in other places, bombings, airstrikes and drone attacks have never stopped. “They’re still living the nightmare that people in New York lived for the day,” she says.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University
Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.
This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.
This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.
The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.
The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.
When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.
The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.
The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.
Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.
The military industrial juggernaut
Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.
This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.
Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.
More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.
The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.
These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.
Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.
Normalisation of the security state
Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.
This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.
Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.
And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.
Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.
Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.
The heavy cost of the war on terror
The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.
Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.
The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.
These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.
Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.
Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.
Life must be precious
Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.
In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.
In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.
As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.
The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.
As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.
Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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The mass media are churning out articles and news segments commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many of them featuring adoring retrospectives of their celebrity president’s actions as a US senator that day. Biden’s ceremonial PR tour to New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon can be expected to receive a great deal of coverage as outrage swells over the president’s controversial new nationwide vaccine mandate.
And it’s all just so very, very stupid. This nation which has spent twenty years weeping about its victimization with Bambi-eyed innocence reacted to 9/11 with wars which killed millions and displaced tens of millions and ushered in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism which has funneled trillions of dollars to some of the worst people in the world.
Compared to the horrors the United States unleashed upon the world under the justification of 9/11, 9/11 itself was a family trip to Disneyland. The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude; hell, this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11.
In a saner, more emotionally intelligent world, it is those deaths that Americans would be focused on this September the 11th.
Found a book, this is gonna be great pic.twitter.com/78BDQ2Sqas
— Kiki Rosecrans (@KikiRosecrans) September 10, 2021
There’s a great thread being shared around on Twitter right now by someone who found a book full of political cartoons published in the wake of 9/11, and it’s a perfect reminder of just how insane people were being driven by mass media manipulation during that time. The brazen Islamophobia, the flag-waving jingoism, the mawkish histrionics and the government bootlicking contained in those vapid comics are like an emotional time portal back to the lizard brain mentality of that point in history. I especially recommend it to those who are too young to remember how people came to support the monstrous foreign policy decisions made in the aftermath of 9/11.
It’s also an excellent lesson into why it is always best to avoid being swept up in the emotionality of a major event that’s getting a lot of narrative push, no matter how loudly the mass media are shrieking about it and no matter how many of the people around you get swept up in it.
There was no real reason Americans needed to respond to 9/11 with slobbering patriotism and the banging of war drums. It would have made sense for everyone to feel shocked, afraid, angry and sad, but that’s all that would have happened had their minds not been manipulated by the mass media and the Bush administration into believing that the sane response to a terrorist attack is to start launching full-scale regime change invasions of sovereign nations.
Americans could just as easily have felt sad for a bit, and had that be the end of it. Imagine. Imagine what a better world we’d be living in if the public had not consented to wars and had instead just felt their feelings for however long it took to feel them, and had that be that.
Without being told so by solemn-looking pundits and politicians, it never would have occurred to ordinary people that the sane response to an attack by Al Qaeda was to invade and occupy Afghanistan, much less Iraq. People would’ve expected to see the individuals responsible for the attacks captured and brought to justice, just as they’d seen happen with every other terrorist attack in their country, but on their own it would never have occurred to them to think of it as an “act of war” for which wars were an appropriate response.
US had decided to overthrow Taliban regime a month before 9/11.https://t.co/rjIHTBbMj7
— Shahid Raza (@schaheid) June 22, 2021
But wars were planned. The US had already been strategizing to oust the Taliban before 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for the Iraq invasion within hours of the planes striking. Further wars were planned within days. The official 9/11 narrative itself was riddled with gaping plot holes. And mass media pundits were fired if they didn’t support the Iraq invasion.
So people were psychologically conditioned by mass-scale propaganda to believe that 9/11 was some unforgivable atrocity so egregious that it could only be paid for by rivers of blood. And that conditioning remains today, as we will see from brainwashed empire pundits weeping their crocodile tears on the 20th anniversary of an event which, compared to the consequences of their government’s retaliation, wasn’t actually a very big deal.
It would have been infinitely better for everyone if America had done nothing, absolutely nothing, in response to 9/11, or better yet if it had left the Middle East altogether to make sure there are no extremist groups wanting them dead due to their actions there. But, again, wars were planned. And the public was psychologically brutalized into accepting them.
This is what we should all remember on 9/11. Not those 2,977 deaths on US soil. As sad as they were, they’ve been grieved more than enough by the general public. Now it’s time to begin addressing the giant stain upon our collective soul that is the vastly greater evils those deaths were exploited to justify.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
On August 31, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. stepped up to the White House podium, squared his shoulders, looked the American public straight in the eye — and told them the biggest lie of his Presidency (so far). What he said was: “Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history.” But the U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end on August 31. It has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that may be less visible—and therefore more politically sustainable.
The post “America’s Longest War” Is Not Over! appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Human rights official says group conducting house-to-house searches and threatening journalists
The Taliban’s violent crackdown on protests against their hardline rule has already led to four documented deaths, according to a UN human rights official who said the group had used live ammunition, whips and batons to break up demonstrations.
Ravina Shamdasani, the UN’s rights spokesperson, told a briefing in Geneva that it had also received reports of house-to-house searches for those who participated in the protests.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
US news outlets have reported stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan with caution, often noting that claims from the Taliban had not been independently verified. But many outlets showed no inclination to be equally careful when evaluating the Pentagon’s line on casualties.
CNN, for example, ordered reporters to frame reports of civilian deaths with reminders that “the Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize” such casualties, and that “the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the September 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the US” (Washington Post, 10/31/01).
Brit Hume, host of Fox News Channel’s Special Report (11/5/01), wondered whether civilian deaths were getting too much attention, with or without disclaimers. “The question I have,” said Hume, “is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they’ve been?”
The premise that civilian casualties have been “big news” in the US is dubious. The Fox discussion seemed motivated in part by a study of network news broadcasts done by the conservative Media Research Center; the group criticized ABC World News Tonight in particular for apparently giving civilian deaths too much airtime—nearly twice as much as NBC Nightly News and almost four times as much as the CBS Evening News. A close look at ABC’s reporting, however, turns up only three segments during the MRC’s three-week study period (10/8/01–10/31/01) that were primarily about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The subject was mentioned in passing a few other times, sometimes to stress the Pentagon’s claim that civilians were not being targeted. ABC reporters in general emphasized the difficulties in assessing claims made by the Taliban.
Nonetheless, Fox pundit Mara Liasson from National Public Radio seemed to feel that this was too much coverage: “No,” she said in response to Hume’s question. “Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.” Liasson added that she thought what was missing from television coverage was “a message from the US government that says we are trying to minimize them, but the Taliban isn’t, and is putting their tanks in mosques, and themselves among women and children.” (The Pentagon’s assertions that it was avoiding civilian casualties were routinely featured in network newscasts; the uncorroborated claims that the Taliban were employing civilians as human shields were also featured in TV news.)
Fox commentator and US News & World Report columnist Michael Barone echoed Hume’s earlier remarks: “I think the real problem here is that this is poor news judgment on the part of some of these news organizations. Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany wars.”
If journalists shouldn’t cover civilian deaths because they are a normal part of war, does that principle apply to all war coverage? Since dropping bombs is also standard procedure in a war, will Fox stop reporting airstrikes?
Fox’s marketing slogan is “We report, you decide,” but these Fox pundits have decided for you that some deaths aren’t worth reporting. Then again, being impartial journalists might not be the first order of business. As Hume told the New York Times (11/7/01), “Look, neutrality as a general principle is an appropriate concept for journalists who are covering institutions of some comparable quality. . . . This is a conflict between the United States and murdering barbarians.”
With both Fox and CNN trying to marginalize or minimize coverage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, it’s little wonder that self-censorship is taking place at smaller outlets. A memo circulated at the Panama City (Fla.) News Herald and leaked to Jim Romenesko’s Media News (10/31/01) warned editors:
DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the US war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like…. DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the US war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the US hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children.
This policy of consistently burying the facts about the impact of the war on Afghanistan must make the pundits at Fox proud. But journalists who care about the principles of the profession should be embarrassed.
The post Civilian Deaths Aren’t News for Fox News appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., we look at a new five-part documentary series on Netflix about the attacks and the response from the United States, both at home and abroad. Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attacks, U.S. officials, former CIA members and veterans, as well as soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army, Taliban commanders, and Afghan officials, warlords and civilians. “What we really wanted to do was tell the story not just of what happened that day, but how we got there and where our response to those attacks took us as a country,” says director Brian Knappenberger. We also speak with co-executive producer Mohammed Ali Naqvi, an award-winning Pakistani filmmaker, who says the film was an attempt to go “beyond the binary narrative of good versus evil.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center here in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. We begin today’s show with a comprehensive five-part documentary series on Netflix that examines the attacks, as well as the response from the United States both at home and abroad. The film was released just after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, and it features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attacks, U.S. officials, former CIA members and veterans, as well as soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army, Taliban commanders, Afghan officials, warlords and civilians. This is the trailer for Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.
MARILYN WILLS: It was a beautiful fall morning. There was the loudest noise I had ever heard.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Pieces of the story continue to come together. I have never seen anything like this.
ANDREW CARD: I whispered into the president’s ear, “America is under attack.”
REP. BARBARA LEE: I am convinced military action will not prevent acts of terrorism.
SOLDIER 1: Let me know where they’re shooting from!
SOLDIER 2: Keep moving! Keep moving!
THOMAS DRAKE: There’s before 9/11, and there’s after 9/11.
BRUCE HOFFMAN: In the 1990s, we were fixated on a new world order that would spread democracy throughout the world.
GARRETT GRAFF: 9/11 brought war home. It made America afraid.
THOMAS DRAKE: The NSA said take as much data as we can.
JAMES RISEN: This was the electronic version of an unauthorized government raid on your house.
ALBERTO GONZALES: The United States had to punish those responsible for these attacks.
DEXTER FILKINS: There was no higher mission than finding Osama bin Laden.
REP. ERIC CANTOR: The perpetrators of terrorism only understand the use of force.
CRAIG WHITLOCK: They knew all along these major problems that were going to prevent us from winning.
SOLDIER 3: No one even, like, really mentions 9/11 anymore. And to me, that’s the whole reason that I’m over here.
UNIDENTIFIED: Any power without constraint always leads to abuse.
REP. BARBARA LEE: September 11th changed the world. Let’s think through our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.
AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, a new Netflix five-part docuseries. We’re joined now by its director, Brian Knappenberger, the award-winning filmmaker, and co-executive producer Mohammed Ali Naqvi, the award-winning Pakistani filmmaker.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! and welcome you back, Brian. Brian, let’s begin with you. This is deep. It is comprehensive. It starts with the attacks on 9/11 but then goes back in time and, of course, moves forward over these 20 years. You were among the last to interview members of the Afghan army, as well as the people who now comprise the inner circles of the Taliban leadership. Can you talk about the scope of this series and what you’re trying to do with it?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yes, and thank you for having us on.
You know, I just thought that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — I mean, what we really wanted to do was tell the story not just of what happened that day, but how we got there and where our response to those attacks took us as a country. You know, 9/11 was one of the most transformative geopolitical events of my life. And on the first anniversary of 9/11, I happened to be in Afghanistan creating one of my first films. I’ve always wanted to look in a big way at the war on terror, and particularly the War in Afghanistan.
And so, to do that, we go back in history. We start, essentially, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in which the — you know, with the CIA kind of creating a proxy war with the Soviets by supporting the mujahideen there. We look at the formation of al-Qaeda, the collapse, ultimately, of Afghanistan into a bloody civil war after the Soviets leave Afghanistan. We trace the increasing violent attacks of al-Qaeda throughout the ’90s. And we sort of frame all this also with firsthand accounts of people on the day of 9/11, what happened that day.
But I think primarily what we’ve looked at in the series is what comes next. So we trace the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We look at enhanced interrogation, or the torture program, as well as the effect of 9/11 on the United States — the rise of Islamophobia, mass suspicionless surveillance within the United States with programs like Stellar Wind. And so, we try to look at the full range of what 9/11 meant, both where it came from and what — the choices we made after 9/11, where that led us.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mohammed Ali Naqvi, if you could say a little bit more about the focus in the film, at least in the early parts of the film, on the effect of the Soviet occupation on what transpired in subsequent years? One of the points that the film makes is that it became very common in Muslim countries and among Afghans also to believe that the mujahideen actually fought the Soviets and defeated them, and this despite the fact that 2 million Afghan civilians were killed during the Soviet occupation. So, could you say what you think the significance of that has been?
MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: Well, I think it’s highly significant in the sense that we got a chance to explore a narrative beyond the binary narrative of good versus evil that kind of existed post-9/11 and in the Bush-Cheney years, and we actually, as Brian was saying, got to look at how we got to this point. And one of the pivotal questions that the documentary asks us is: Why do they hate us? And I think the United States and other powers had a big hand in creating these mujahideen, in empowering them, in giving them weapons, in giving them a lot of money. So, I think no one really appreciated the effect that this was going to have later. And so, it was very important for us to definitely feature that and show that in the documentary and, you know, feature subjects like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for example, the Afghan warlord, or Younus Malkhan [phon.] and others, and the part that they played in, well, first of all, defeating the Soviets and then, of course, the implications of what was going to be the reaction of backing different types of warlords in Afghanistan and how that contributed to, you know, al-Qaeda joining up, for example, and the rise of the Taliban.
AMY GOODMAN: Mo, I wanted to play a few of the clips from the series because of the timeliness of this. In this clip, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, we hear from the soldiers with the Afghan National Army.
GEN. YASIN ZIA: [translated] The only thing that exists is that the Taliban believe they have won this war, the United States is escaping, and they should be handed the keys to the door of this country, so they can come and establish their own emirate.
SGT. SUHAILA JAFARI: [translated] Even if the Americans withdraw their forces, we are prepared to fulfil our duties. We’ll be standing to defend our country as long as there’s blood in our bodies. We’re not going to surrender our country to the Taliban.
SGT. AHMAD FARHAD: This is our fight. This is my country. This is my people. This is my army. Remember this face. This is not the old Afghanistan. This is the new generation. This is the new people, the new young generation and the new army.
AMY GOODMAN: So, those are members of the Afghan army. This is another clip from Turning Point, former senior Taliban leader Jalaluddin Shinwari and former Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud discussing what will happen after the U.S. departs Afghanistan.
AHMAD ZIA MASSOUD: [translated] The moment the Americans leave Afghanistan and their forces are not here, international terrorism will come back. And all that investment that has been made in Afghanistan over the last 19 years will all be gone.
JALALUDDIN SHINWARI: [translated] The Taliban logic and reason is that the government of Afghanistan is the outcome of the occupation of Afghanistan. When the Americans leave, the outcome of their occupation must be destroyed, too, and establish a new government that is acceptable for all the people of Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Taliban leader Jalaluddin Shinwari, who was one of the negotiators in Qatar with the United States, and then, before that, the former Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud. Mohammed Naqvi, if you can talk about the circumstances of these interviews, when you did these? Because, of course, now deeply relevant, though they happened before the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: So, we were actually filming outside of the United States. We also filmed in Qatar and Doha, the negotiations themselves. And then, of course, we also filmed in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. And Ahmad Zia Massoud, we filmed in — I believe it was in November of 2020. And Jalaluddin Shinwari also, we filmed in November of 2020. So, this was in Kabul. And if you remember, at those times, the negotiations were still happening, and, in fact, the Taliban had gained major ground. And frankly, they were quite arrogant during their negotiations with the Afghan government, because they felt that they were in a position of power and they didn’t really have to concede much. And at that time, I think the U.S. was just trying to find a way out and just to exit. So this was around the time that we actually interviewed them.
AMY GOODMAN: And their comment, Brian Knappenberger, for example, Jalaluddin Shinwari saying, “We will destroy everything the U.S. left in Afghanistan”?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so striking to hear that now. It was powerful at the time. And if you go back to that period of time that Mo was just describing, there was a lot of talk about, you know, a potential coalition kind of government, right? And our interview with him suggested something otherwise, that anything — that the outcome of their occupation, meaning the Afghan government, must also be destroyed. Those are chilling words and very striking up against the words of Massoud, who was sort of — I think, called it accurately, and then also the very moving interviews that we did with the Afghan soldiers, who it genuinely seemed were — felt like they could make a stand against the Taliban. So, that all — as you can imagine, all of that, those interviews, changed dramatically, almost by the week, right before we published the series on Netflix.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mohammed, could you talk about how you made the decision to interview people? How did you select the people to interview? I mean, this film has been receiving excellent reviews. It’s one of the top 10 viewed series on Netflix at the moment in the U.S. But one of the criticisms that’s been made is that the documentary focuses far too much on U.S. voices and only politicians in Afghanistan, not so much victims or survivors of the war in Afghanistan.
MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: Well, for me, it was — this was quite a significant project to work on. I think when I met Brian and Eve — Eve, who is also — Eve Marson, who’s also an executive producer on the series — I immediately jumped at the chance, because a lot of my body of work was informed by 9/11. It was a very seminal event in my life. Being a Muslim American and being in New York at that time, it really informed the trajectory of the body of work that I was doing. And a lot of the work that I did do was specifically related to 9/11.
In this, I really wanted to look beyond just, you know, American voices, and I think Brian and the rest of the team were very amenable to my suggestions of actually featuring some Afghan voices, like Afghan warlords, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and some of the politicians. But beyond that, we also featured voices such as the drone attack victims in Pakistan, in the KPK region, and, of course, a powerhouse member of Parliament and women’s rights activist Fawzia Koofi from the Afghan government. So, obviously, we did feature all those diverse voices, because we wanted to have a more robust and well-rounded picture of Afghanistan, and beyond even Afghanistan, just the region and in Pakistan, as well, and how American foreign policy affected them. And I would defer to Brian in terms of, like, just some of the editorial things.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Brian, could you respond also to the question of how interviewees were selected?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, we — yeah, I guess I would push back on that a little, that I think we got a pretty wide range of interviews in Afghanistan. We were inside the peace talks at Doha. You know, we talked with the Taliban. We talked with Afghan civilians. Some were in Guantánamo Bay. Some were drone attack victims. We tried to get as broad a picture as we could from the Afghan side, too, including in the historical perspective, interviewing figures like Ismail Khan and Massoud and also Hekmatyar, things like that. So, I think we tried to get as broad a range as possible in the series, and that actually was a priority for us.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, something that didn’t get a lot of attention in the United States this week, as we come to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is what’s happening at Guantánamo.
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The Guantánamo so-called trials. But I first want to go to a clip from Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror that features the U.S. assistant attorney general from 2003 to ’04, Jack Goldsmith, talking about former Vice President Dick Cheney. The clip ends with Mark Fallon, former deputy commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo Bay.
JACK GOLDSMITH: Going back to the Ford White House, when Cheney was chief of staff, at least that far back, Dick Cheney developed a very robust view about the president’s powers under the Constitution, especially as those powers related to national security and war. And his basic view is that when it comes to war and national security, the president is in charge, and he can do what he thinks is necessary, and Congress basically can’t get in the way, and if Congress does get in the way, the president can ignore it. That was his legal view. It was an absolutist view of the president’s powers in wartime.
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: So, it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal — disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
MARK FALLON: That was frightening to me. It was frightening to hear the vice president of the United States, publicly, on a television show, where he should have been calming the nation down, where he should have been depressurizing, he was upping the pressure, upping the ante. And so I feared that we would do things that would be to our detriment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you hear Vice President Dick Cheney, then that last voice, Mark Fallon, former deputy commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo Bay. This comes as the five men accused of plotting the September 11th attacks appeared in a Guantánamo Bay military court Tuesday for the first time in over a year. The resumption of the pretrial hearings comes just days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks. The case against the five men includes suspected mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It’s been riddled with procedural problems, including the admissibility of evidence that was obtained under torture by CIA agents. The pretrial hearings, which have been prolonged for at least nine years, were suspended well over a year ago, in February 2020, due to the pandemic. The selection of a military jury will likely not begin until next year.
So, Brian Knappenberger, in the documentary series, you interview the lawyer, who has since resigned —
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — saying Guantánamo is — you could say, is in outer space, when it comes to the U.S. justice system, exactly why these men are still being held there, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded how many scores of times, put under sleep deprivation for nearly 200 hours. Talk about what’s happening now.
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah. So, that’s a big part of the series. We look — we trace Guantánamo Bay, what — the decisions that were made in order to initially bring prisoners there, why Guantánamo Bay was chosen in the first place, what we knew about it at the beginning, and we go through — you know, we understand what we know about now what was going on at Guantánamo Bay.
But we also kind of focus in on the military commissions process, which has been a kind of stop-and-start process over years, which has really been described to me as a kind of Potemkin village sort of set up, where people have been — this kind of military trial process that has never really worked well. And so, the person you mentioned, Jason Wright, was assigned to be counsel to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And he believed he would be able to mount a defense for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and realized that the system was set up kind of against him right from the beginning, and eventually couldn’t be a part of it and, kind of in a conscientious way, left that position.
But it’s been ongoing for a very long time. You’re correct that part of the debate has been evidence that was — that may or may not have come from torture and whether that’s admissible. But it is striking that 20 years after 9/11 we’re still wondering about what to do with the people who attacked us. And I think the fact that that’s just started up again now kind of underscores that point.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you —
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Nermeen.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, I was just going to say, following up on what you said, Brian, it’s not just that the film details the problems with the testimonies given under torture in Guantánamo, but also a very good background on how people were selected by the U.S. military to go to Guantánamo in the first place and the problems associated with getting the wrong people as a result of the bounties that were offered. Could you talk about that?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, it’s one of those kind of striking things, you know, that you go back to and you realize — you know, so much of the war on terror, you just didn’t — you know, you maybe read a press release here or there or a story here and there. But that was one thing that was very striking, how people were rounded up in Afghanistan. There were leaflets dropped from airplanes that were sort of promising rewards for members of al-Qaeda or members — for people to sort of turn in people. And that was tragic, ended up being a very, very tragic part of the story, because, you know, of course, people would turn in their enemies and neighbors that they didn’t like, or just kind of use it — it was abused in all sorts of ways. And so, Mark Fallon, in the series, describes it as “bounty babies,” where a lot of people were just turned over in the kind of rush, and in the fear and anger that came out of that period of time, a lot of innocent people got swept up and sent to Guantánamo Bay. It’s a pretty disturbing part of that story.
AMY GOODMAN: And we just have a minute, but, Brian Knappenberger, your previous films include We Are Legion about the Anonymous hacktivist collective, and The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. And that’s significant, given the point that Congressmember Barbara Lee makes. And we’re going to have Congressmember Lee on tomorrow on Democracy Now!, the sole member of Congress who stood up against the authorization of military force right after the 9/11 attacks. But she talks about how the authorization of military attacks was used not only to attack places like Yemen and Somalia, but to create a surveillance state at home. Can you end there, Brian?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: I think the vote that you just mentioned is one of the most courageous legislative votes in my lifetime. To be the only person that stood up against the AUMF at that moment, when the entire nation was ready to — you know, almost unified in their hunger for war, just shows a leadership that we just don’t — we don’t often see. So, I was profoundly moved by that. And that’s one of the first people I mentioned I wanted to interview when we started this series. She took a — she got many, many death threats. She said she would — I mean, she describes it in the series, the kind of pushback that she got. It’s very, very significant. But she was right, and history has proven her right.
I was surprised, very surprised, actually, when I asked Alberto Gonzales if that — the architect, one of the architects of the AUMF, about it, and he said that it should also be — we should get rid of it. I was actually surprised by that. I didn’t expect him to say that. But it’s, you know, this open-ended call for war that has brought the United States troops all over the world. It just needs to end. You know, wars — it’s part of the responsibility of Congress to OK wars, and the AUMF has been a way around that. It’s long past time to get rid of it.
AMY GOODMAN: Brian Knappenberger, director, and Mohammed Ali Naqvi, co-executive producer, of the new five-part Netflix docuseries, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.
We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.
That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.
Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”
“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”
Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.
By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.
In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.
The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.
Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.
Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.
Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.
These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.
But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.
The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.
The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.
By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.
America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.
But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.
— We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” — please join us!
— We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
— We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.
— And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.
Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
