A group of young Afghan women secretly held a press conference in a Kabul suburb on August 28 to launch a new women’s movement against the Taliban and present their demands, reports Farooq Sulehria.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
A group of young Afghan women secretly held a press conference in a Kabul suburb on August 28 to launch a new women’s movement against the Taliban and present their demands, reports Farooq Sulehria.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
By Marcheilla Ariesta in Jakarta
Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population with 270 million, has not yet determined its stance towards the Taliban leadership after seizing power in Afghanistan.
It is also the most populous Muslim country.
The Director-General for Asia Pacific and Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdul Kadir Jailani, said the same attitude was also being shown by other countries.
“Why haven’t many countries taken a definitive stance, because the situation is still fluid and (the Taliban) have not yet formed a legitimate government,” said Abdul Kadir in the webinar ‘Post-Conflict Afghanistan: Fall or Rise?’ this week.
According to Jailani, Taliban officials are negotiating with a number of figures in Afghanistan in a bid to form a new government.
In addition to the formation of government, Indonesia is also still waiting for the status of the Taliban in the international community.
Jailani said a common view was needed about the status of the Taliban.
“This understanding is very important, so we can get faster information to determine our attitude towards the Taliban and its government later,” he added.
He said the Indonesian government was also careful in determining its stance because the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan received a “quite warm” and mixed reaction from within Indonesia.
Jailani stressed that Indonesia’s definitive stance would only be conveyed when the situation in Afghanistan became clearer.
The Taliban seized control of the civilian government in Afghanistan on August 15 without any resistance. A few days ago, the Taliban claimed to have pocketed a number of names of figures who would later fill the new government.
Unlike in the 1996-2001 era, the Taliban claimed to be forming an inclusive government that involved all elements and ethnicities in Afghanistan.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
There may no longer be US military boots on the ground in Afghanistan, but there are still plenty of Afghan boots that Washington can mobilize to destabilize the country and, more importantly, the region.
Already there are tribal leaders in the Panjshir province declaring the beginning of anti-Taliban resistance. One of them, Ahmad Massoud, the young leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, wrote an opinion column in the Washington Post last week in which he appealed to the US for weapons and support to “once again take on the Taliban”.
Another allied leader is former Vice President of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, who is also based in Panjshir province – the only area not under the control of the Taliban* – and who has vowed that he will never share the same roof as the dominant militant group.
This week marks a historic and shameful defeat for the United States in Afghanistan after 20 years of futile, destructive military occupation. Two decades since launching a war in the country to oust the Taliban rulers, the latter is back now in power. And what’s more, they are militarily stronger than ever after inheriting entire arsenals of American weaponry abandoned by the fleeing US troops.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, trying to put a positive spin on the debacle, said the military mission was over and “a new chapter” of diplomacy was opening. We can safely bet that “diplomacy” here is a euphemism for Washington’s political sabotage and machinations to ensure Afghanistan feels the full wrath of Uncle Sam’s vindictiveness for years, if not decades, to come.
Early signs indicate the form. Since the Taliban took control of Kabul on August 15, Washington has frozen some $7 billion in foreign assets belonging to the state of Afghanistan. The Americans have also ordered the International Monetary Fund to cut off nearly $400 million in immediate funds that were due to Kabul. This suggests that the US is shaping up for a new chapter of economic warfare against the Taliban in much the same way that it has inflicted on Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 against the US-backed Shah, and also more recently against Syria following the defeat of America’s proxy war for regime change.Many other nations that defy the US militarily end up incurring economic terrorism from Washington. Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela, among others.
However, in addition to economic warfare, the United States could also exercise the option of fueling a proxy military conflict – a civil war – in Afghanistan by sponsoring the anti-Taliban factions. These factions can be traced to the Northern Alliance and the Haqqani Network which the US-backed in the proxy war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. No doubt, the CIA and Pentagon still maintain contact lines with these warlords. The fact that one of them was given a high-profile platform in the Washington Post last week to appeal for weapons to fight against the Taliban is a clear sign of such deep state influence.
It is significant that Russia, China and other regional countries are wary of security repercussions stemming from an unruly Afghanistan. Russia has rebuked the US over its freezing of Afghanistan’s assets, saying that the country needs international support, not isolation, in order to aid war reconstruction and stability. Likewise, China has engaged with the new Taliban authorities with promises of massive economic investment to develop infrastructure and industries in return for guarantees of regional security.
Afghanistan could potentially become a linchpin in China’s global economic development plans. The country sits at the crossroads of China’s new silk routes crisscrossing between Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Given that the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations have all prioritized “containing” China and Russia as “great power rivals”, it seems that postwar Afghanistan presents a different opportunity for American imperial ambitions.
From Washington’s cynical point of view, such a new phase of proxy war in Afghanistan and, more widely in the region, would be a lot less costly compared with the full military occupation over the past 20 years involving $2 trillion expenditure. Plus there are no disturbing scenes of body bags arriving back on American soil.
Thus, celebrating the defeat of the US in Afghanistan comes with caution. The next chapter could be an even more murky and sinister story.
* The Taliban is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries.
* First published in Sputnik
The post What Next After US Defeat? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Finian Cunningham.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
On Tuesday, an American president said the words: “The war in Afghanistan is now over.” One president started it, three presidents shared it and sustained it, and now a fourth president has dropped the curtain at enormous political cost.
Twenty years of sacrifice beyond comprehension, tens of thousands of civilian and military lives lost, including the scores laid low by the Kabul airport bombing. “$300 million a day for two decades,” President Biden explained on Tuesday, a fortune squandered that could have funded health care, child care, housing, education, clean energy exploration. A fortune squandered that could have provided reasons for our youngest generations to look forward to the future instead of down in despair.
After days of merciless pummeling from wildly hypocritical Republicans, a number of purple-district Democrats and a “news” media that was instrumental in foisting this fiasco on us in the first place, Biden rose forcefully to his own defense. “By the time I came to office, the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001,” he explained, “controlling or contesting nearly half of the country. The previous administration’s agreement said that if we stuck to the May 1 deadline that they had signed on to leave by, the Taliban wouldn’t attack any American forces. But if we stayed, all bets were off.”
“So we were left with a simple decision,” Biden continued. “Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops. Going back to war. That was the choice, the real choice. Between leaving or escalating. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit.”
Addressing the chaotic final days of the war, the president stated flatly, “I take responsibility for the decision.” Following this declaration was Biden’s apologia — not apology — for the mayhem of the withdrawal. He painted a picture of a security situation that would have fallen into chaos no matter what plans were executed. While there is a good degree of truth to this, the fact remains that the Biden administration pulled the string on withdrawal while this country’s immigration/refugee assistance programs were in a deplorable state of disrepair. Thanks in large part to the vandalism of prior administration officials including national security adviser and vivid fascist Stephen Miller, our government was ill-prepared for an influx of help/rescue requests from fleeing Afghan civilians. Our allies were similarly unprepared.
Not every voice has been raised against Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. “Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement,” writes David Rothkopf for The Atlantic. “Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of America’s withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history.”
The American public appears to agree. Recent surveys show that a solid majority supports the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a supermajority believes this country failed to achieve its goals in that country. Politically, Biden is laying a huge and thoroughly tactical wager on those numbers. While the administration expects another round of brutal news cycles as the Afghanistan situation is folded into the 20th anniversary of September 11, “they assume that attention will shift back again to the coronavirus pandemic, the president’s proposals for large public works projects and social welfare programs, and a dozen other issues that will absorb the public more than far-off Afghanistan,” according to The New York Times.
It would not have been a speech by an American president without providing a side-serving of menace. “And to ISIS-K,” he growled in an eerie echo of George W. Bush. “We are not done with you yet.” What does that mean? Biden spoke of “the war on terror” and of “over-the-horizon capabilities,” hedged his bets on “boots on the ground,” and made it abundantly clear that the war paradigm which has burdened these last two decades will not be altered by his administration any time soon.
Russia and China were not spared the treatment, as Biden rattled the chains for the possible onset of the next Cold War. “The world is changing,” he said. “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.” Nothing about this was demonstrably aggressive, but American leaders seem to do their best politically when the people have a clear and identifiable enemy to seethe at (and be distracted by). In this, the president was old-school normative establishment right down the line.
Notably, the speech also failed to even wink at one likely reason the war lasted so long: the trillions of dollars in mineral, gas and oil deposits lying fallow in Afghanistan. This is a rarely spoken answer to why we remained there for so long after the Taliban was defeated, after al-Qaeda was shattered, and after Osama bin Laden was killed: If the country could be brought under some semblance of control, there were riches to be plundered beyond the dreams of avarice. This, then, was another goal our efforts failed to achieve.
Here — the threats, the vague vocabulary of eternal war, the proffered example of existential menace, all wrapped in a dark fog surrounding our true goals that a thoroughly compromised corporate “news” media appears entirely unwilling or unable to penetrate — are the seeds that, if allowed to germinate again, will make the future look very much like the ash-coated battlegrounds of the present and past.
Biden’s speech on Tuesday was remarkable for one thing: Despite the occasional bouts of bog-standard bombast, it did not bristle with exuberant confidence, or ooze self-congratulation as if such feelings were an unquestioned birthright. It entirely lacked the glossy veneer of “American exceptionalism” that has scarred so many political speeches over the last 20 years and beyond. The president did not say, “We lost the war,” but that solemn message underscored almost every word he spoke.
When he was finished on Tuesday, Biden turned away from the podium, giving his back to a hail of questions from the assembled press. He paused, turned and retrieved a black face mask from the podium. Plodding slowly down the red-carpeted hall, he donned the mask before receding from view. Thus do we all plod into an uncertain future, again, but one with one less war to fight. We hope.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.
Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
The post Afghan Crisis Must End US’s Empire Of War, Corruption And Poverty appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Kabul, Web desk,
Pentagon officials confirmed that US military had held secret talks with Taliban, resultant Taliban commute US citizens in groups to Kabul airport’s secret gates. They were brought back to America by planes.
A day earlier, US General Mackenzie said that the Taliban had cooperated with us in evacuating process from Kabul airport. Another senior official revealed that US special forces had opened a secret gate at Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul and call centers were set up to explain the evacuation process of US citizens.
Through these call centers, were inform US travelers to gather at a secret location near the airport. Taliban checked the US citizen’s identity, documents and escorted them to a secret gate set up specifically for Americans to enter the airport.
The report states that several missions were carried out in a single day of “safe evacuation” with the help of the Taliban.
The gathering place for the Americans was set up in the Interior Ministry building, located a short distance from the gate of Hamid Karzai Airport.
A Pentagon staffer who assisted in compiling the report said that the Americans had been given a number of messages about the gathering and that the process had worked stunningly.
According to CNN, Another senior Pentagon official told that the Elite Joint Special Operations Command and other special operations units had set up separate “call centers” to evacuate US citizens. These call centers instructed Americans to reach the “secret door”, this evacuation is confidential until completed.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
No more profoundly disturbing statement was needed. In the dying days of the official US departure from Kabul, a US drone etched its butcher’s legacy with a strike supposedly intended for the blood-lusty terrorist group ISIS-K, an abbreviation of Islamic State in Khorasan Province. Its members had taken responsibility for blasts outside Harmid Karzai International Airport that had cost the lives of at least 175 individuals and 13 US service personnel. Suicide bombers had intended to target “translators and collaborators with the American army”.
President Joe Biden promised swift retribution. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” American “interests and our people” would be defended “with every measure at my command.”
In his sights was ISIS-K. “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.” A response “with force and precision” would take place “at our time, at the place we choose and a moment of our choosing.”
On August 28, an announcement by the Pentagon was made that two “high-profile” members of the group had been killed in a drone strike in Khorasan Province. That same day, the President warned that the group was likely to conduct another attack. The US military was readying itself.
The following day, to demonstrate such precision and choice, a vehicle supposedly carrying an unspecified number of suicide bombers linked to ISIS-K and speeding towards Kabul airport was struck in a second drone attack. The site of the attack, being a residential neighbourhood in the city, should have given room for pause to those precisionists in the military.
The strike was meant to leave a lasting impression upon ISIS-K fighters. Initially, US officials were pleased to inform the Associated Press that “multiple suicide bombers” had perished in the attack. “US military forces conducted a self-defence unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul, eliminating an imminent ISIS-K threat to Harmid Karzai International Airport,” stated US Central Command spokesperson Capt. Bill Urban.
The outcome of the strike was apparently something to be proud of. “Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.” But this came with a rounding caveat. “We’re assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, although we have no indications at this time.”
The story started to congeal over interviews, discussions and threads. A dribble of information suggested loss of civilian life. A number quickly emerged in the flood that followed: ten family members had lost their lives. From the New York Times, there was Matthieu Aikins patching things together. Bodies were named: Somaya, daughter of Zemari. Farzard, Zemari’s son, also killed. The narrative twists, inverts and disturbs more: Zemari’s nephew, Naser, was an Afghan army officer, former guard of the US military. He had applied for an SIV (Special Immigrant Visa), hoping to flee Afghanistan for the United States.
To the BBC, Ramin Yousufi, a relative of the victims, could only tearfully despair. “It’s wrong, it’s a brutal attack, and it’s happened based on wrong information.” Questions followed. “Why have they killed our family? Our children? They are so burned out we cannot identify their bodies, their faces.”
At a press briefing on August 30, Army Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor of the Joint Staff tried to make something of yet another messy bungle in the annals of the US military. “We are aware of reports of civilian casualties. We take these reports extremely seriously.” John F. Kirby, Pentagon press secretary, was “not going to get ahead of it. But if we have significant – verifiable information that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen.” Urban also stated that the Pentagon was aware of civilian casualties “following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today.”
The attack had that sheen of atrocious incompetence (Kirby preferred the term “dynamic”), but that would be a misreading. Killing remotely is, by its nature, inaccurate, though it has a disturbing fan club deluded into thinking otherwise. The death of civilians, subsumed under the euphemism of collateral damage, is often put down to shonky intelligence rather than the machinery itself. As Rachel Stohl of the Stimson Centre is a case in point. “These are precise weapons,” she erroneously observed in 2016. “The failure is in the intelligence about who it is that we are killing”.
Drone strikes have demonstrated, time and again, to lack the mythical precision with which they are billed. Those in proximity to the target will be slain. Whole families have been, and will continue, to be pulverised. “Gradually,” the New York Times observed with stunning obviousness in 2015, “it has become clear that when operators in Nevada fire missiles into remote tribal territories on the other side of the world, they often do not know who they are killing, but are making an imperfect best guess.”
In 2016, research conducted by the Bureau of Investigative journalism found that the lethal returns from the US-UAV program proved to be overwhelmingly civilian. A mere 3.5% could be said, with any certainty, to be terrorists.
The use of drones in combat is also politically baffling, self-defeating and contradictory. As Michael Boyle has explained, referring to the use of UAV warfare in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, such a counterterrorism strategy was distinctly at odds in providing, on the one hand, a flow of arms and financial resource to the very governments whose legitimacy they undermined through the use of such strikes. By all means, we supply you, but have no trust in your competence.
A mere month after the conviction of whistleblower Daniel Hale, who did more than any other to reveal the grotesque illusion of reliability behind the US drone program, UAV warfare was again shown to be a butchering enterprise praised by the precisionists and found politically wanting. Those attending the funerals of the slain family members, an event taking place in the shadow of US power in retreat, needed little convincing who their enemy was.
The post Droning Disasters: A US Strike on Kabul first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause is the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, 26 August.
As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban, plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.
As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See here.
RT further reports: “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.
Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack? In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?
In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021, deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”
What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police.
Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.
Really? Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.
Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State — ISIS — claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?
Who benefits? Cui Bono?
On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports:
As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.
Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.
But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.
So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?
President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”? Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?
It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?
There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.
The Heroin Trade
There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.
As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021:
One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below)
In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?
There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).
In 2020, at the height of the covid crisis, deaths from opioids and drug addiction increased threefold.
It’s Big Money for Big Pharma.”
See the full report here.
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative
Both China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.
While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan. A reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state — even through the Taliban.
Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organizations. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.
SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as a SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.
Washington, however, dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.
OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty.
The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.
Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind of war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit Biden and his globalist agenda image and standing in a totally misinformed world.
The post Afghanistan: Drug Trade and Belt and Road first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis asks a key question about women’s rights in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover during spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid’s first media conference in Kabul on August 18. Video: Al Jazeera
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who works for Al Jazeera, has been visiting Kabul International Airport – until last Monday the only access point into and out of Afghanistan.
While locals and foreign nationals alike scrambled to leave the country for the past two weeks after the Taliban takeover, Bellis says she will be sticking around for as long as she can.
Bellis tells Jim Mora she was on the New Zealand evacuation list and saw first-hand how Western nations were trying to manage the chaotic situation.
“Most days you get an email saying, ‘okay, if you’re going to try to get out today, go to the North Gate’, then you get an email saying, ‘no, it’s dangerous, go to the South Gate’, and then an email saying, ‘no, don’t go at all, it’s too dangerous, we’ll get back to you’.
“And then finally an email saying, ‘I’m sorry the mission is over, if you didn’t make it, please email us and we’ll do our best to get you out somehow’.”
The danger reached a peak on August 26 and members of the media then agreed not to return to Kabul Airport, she says.
“A few hours later, there were the explosions.
“Even before that, the Taliban were in charge of guarding a perimeter. They were very tense, and firing in the air a lot, and beating people. I saw them running around with machetes… quite a few people left bloodied,” she says.
“A lot of people were scared off and decided not to even try to reach the airport even those who had the correct paperwork.”
Most people heading for the airport were aware of the security issues, Bellis says, but nevertheless many were that desperate to flee.
“A lot of the alerts we got were in English that were circulated in the expat community. Whether or not that filtered down to everyday Afghans trying to get out, I don’t know,” she said.
“There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flight. You can imagine Taliban fighters who may or may not speak various languages, trying to read paperwork, I mean it was just an absolute mare.”
The last frontier against Taliban forces at Kabul airport was a group of CIA-funded militia known as 01 Units which have a “terrible reputation” in Afghanistan, Bellis says.
This group was also due to leave, she says.
“[Afghan president] Ashraf Ghani’s brother told me that [this militia group] are essentially bounty hunters. The Americans gave them a list of names of people they wanted killed and they did it, they did night raids and killed people from their homes.
“There’s been quite a few stories about them over the years, but they were incredibly secretive … they were running security on the north side of the airport for the last two weeks, I went down there and talked to them.”
The Taliban say Kabul Airport will continue to operate, but without air traffic controllers they have asked Turkey for “technical personnel”, Bellis says.
“But whether the Turkish airlines, Emirates, the companies that usually fly in and out, trust them enough to run the airport is another question.”
‘I will stay here for as long as I can’
Charlotte says that working for Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar where negotiations with the Taliban happened, puts her in a better position than journalists working for American news services.
She has also built media relationships with the Taliban. The group have come to know her now, she says, and have even said they would help her safely evacuate if need be.
Being from New Zealand – a country the Taliban does not have major issues with – also helps, Bellis says.
She says she has told the Taliban she will keep asking questions about their actions.
“They’ve said go for it, as long as you’re objective and fair. We welcome criticism, we want to improve and if you ever have any problems, call us,” she says.
“Hopefully that all plays out and I will stay here for as long as I can.”
While the Taliban have claimed they will give women rights, Bellis was one of the first to speak up at their first press conference to ask about this.
“I’ve said to the Taliban, you’ve got a real problem here, because if you’re going to be successful in running the country you need people to trust you and you need to build that trust and you need to be transparent … I think only time will tell.”
The perception of the Taliban in the West is quite flawed, Bellis says.
“We think of them as this inhumane terrorist organisation when in fact, in the leadership at least, there are quite a lot of educated people, they’re quite rational. There’s also groups who just want to fight, then there’s also politicians who will just tell you what you want to hear.
“It depends on who ends up holding the reigns of the organisation.
“Hopefully it is some of the people who I’ve had dealings with, who are more objective, rational, willing to work with the West, and make compromises on certain things and aren’t as conservative as others.”
Challenges to governing
Lack of money and the departure of skilled workers are just a couple of the obstacles facing Afghanistan now, Charlotte says, as the IMF and World Bank hold off funds,” Bellis says.
“They’ve essentially put a stop to any money coming in … this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.
“Everyone is holding their money back and saying to the Taliban you have to play ball, we’re not going to give you money and then watch you close down girls’ schools.
“But the problem is how long will it take for them to trust the Taliban? Because in the meantime people aren’t getting paid and the economy is being run into the ground.”
Meanwhile, it appears the Taliban has been building a behind-the-scenes relationship with China for a few years now, Bellis says.
“There’s been a lot of little things happening, that signalled they are ready to build a relationship together. The Chinese, even before the Taliban took over, were preparing to recognise the Taliban as a government.
“The Chinese have had the rights to minerals here for some time, but they haven’t been able to mine because of the war and security. They’ve had reason to want to see the war end.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Biden’s popular and long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a big media meltdown that exposed its de facto merger with the military.
In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country.
Biden’s failure to establish a plan for evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans seeking to the flee the new Taliban regime made him a soft target for the Beltway media’s furious assault. However, it was Biden’s refusal last Spring to keep 4,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan on an indefinite basis – flouting an aggressive Pentagon lobbying campaign – that initially triggered the rage of the military brass.
The media offensive against Biden’s Afghan withdrawal advanced arguments that the military could not make on its own – at least, not in public. It also provided the military with important cover at the moment when it was at its most vulnerable for its disastrous handling of the entire war.
Among the most disingenuous attempts at salvaging the military’s reputation was a Washington Post article blaming the Afghan catastrophe on an over-emphasis on “democratic values” while ignoring the the tight alliance between the U.S. military and despotic warlords which drove local support for the Taliban.
Playing the al Qaeda threat card
On the eve of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the New York Times’s David Sanger and Helene Cooper fired the opening salvo of the Beltway media’s assault on Biden’s decision. Sanger and Cooper began by acknowledging that the U.S. military had “overestimated” the results of its intervention for years, and that the failure of the Afghan government to pay soldiers for months had sapped the will to resist the Taliban.
But they then homed in on Biden’s refusal to keep troops in Afghanistan for counter-terrorism purposes. Recalling that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley had tried in the Spring to compel Biden to maintain 3,000 to 4,500 troops in the country, Sanger and Cooper cited “intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.”
That speculation was based on the assumption that the Taliban would allow such a development despite its well-established record of opposing al Qaeda’s use of its territory to plan terrorism abroad. In fact, the Taliban’s policy went back to before 9/11, when Osama bin Laden formally agreed to honor the Taliban’s restrictions while secretly plotting the 9/11 attacks in Germany rather than in Afghanistan.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban has an even stronger motivation to prevent any jihadist organizations from planning international terror attacks from Afghan territory.
To support their broadside against Biden’s withdrawal, the Times’ Sanger and Cooper turned to the retired general with arguably the greatest personal vested interest in an indefinite U.S. military presence in Afghanistan: former U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the war effort from 2010 through 2011 and has since led a group of former commanders and diplomats lobbying for an endless US presence in the country.
Petraeus asserted that Biden failed to “recognize the risk incurred by the swift withdrawal” of intelligence drones and close air support, and thousands of contractors who had kept the Afghan Air Force flying.”
Next, Sanger and Cooper turned to Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of one of the most militaristic think tanks in Washington, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
As The Grayzone has reported, CNAS has reaped millions in funding from the arms industry and US government institutions to advance Pentagon and military thinking inside the Beltway. Among the many Beltway media insiders that enjoy writers in residence fellowships at the think tank is the New York Times’ Sanger.
For his part, Fontaine complained that the Biden administration had failed to continue providing the contractors that the Afghan Air Force depended on to keep its planes in the air. But he failed to acknowledge the obvious point that contractors would be unable to function in Afghanistan without sufficient U.S.-NATO troops to provide military protection on the ground.
On August 16, after the US-backed Afghan government was eliminated, the liberal interventionist magazine, Foreign Policy, chimed in with another attack on Biden featuring interviews with “a dozen people who held posts in Afghanistan.”
According to Foreign Policy, current and former diplomats anonymously expressed “deep anger, shock and bitterness about the collapse of the government they spent decades trying to build.” Several currently-serving officials were quoted — again off the record — about their considering resigning in protest, citing an “overwhelming sense of guilt and fear for the lives of former Afghan colleagues and local staff whom the American government left behind.”
That same day, the New Yorker’s Robin Wright expressed similar anguish over the harrowing images of U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. In an article subtitled, “It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably,” she lamented that the United States “is engaged in what historians may some day call a Great Retreat from a ragtag army that has no air power….”
The U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, Wright asserted, is “part of an unnerving American pattern dating back to the 1970s,” starting with Reagan’s pull-out from Beirut and Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Echoing those insisting on an indefinite U.S. military role in Afghanistan, Wright claimed that because the Taliban had “won a key battle against democracy in Afghanistan,” the country would “again, almost certainly become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of al Qaeda or others in search of a sponsor.”
Meanwhile, during an August 21 panel on PBS’s Washington Week, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Anne Gearan of the Washington Post and Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal formed a one-note chorus blaming Biden’s hasty withdrawal for the crowds of anguished Afghans desperately seeking to escape the Taliban at Kabul’s airport.
The implicit – and clearly fanciful – premise of the discussion was that the United States could have somehow embarked weeks or months earlier on a sweeping program to rescue tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of interpreters and other collaborators with the U.S. military, and that it could all be done cleanly and efficiently, without triggering any panic.
A second theme pressed by the New York Times’ Baker was that Biden had been heedless of the risks of his policy to U.S. national security. Baker said Biden had made up his mind a decade ago that the U.S. must withdraw from Afghanistan and was determined to do it “regardless of what Gen. Milley and others might have warned him about the danger of a collapse.” Baker made the same argument, along with the others embraced by his big media colleagues, in a long-winded August 20 news analysis.
Flournoy obscures the real cause of military failure
The Washington Post’s national security reporter, Greg Jaffe, took a different tack from most of his Beltway colleagues in his coverage of the Afghanistan endgame. In an August 14 article, Jaffe implicitly acknowledged the widely-accepted fact that the war had been an abject failure, contradicting claims by military leaders. Unfortunately, the reporter offered space for one particularly credibility-deprived former official that was obviously designed to deaden popular hostility toward those responsible for the fiasco.
Among the most questionable characters to lay into Biden’s withdrawal strategy was Michelle Flournoy, who was expected to be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense until Biden froze her out because of her role in advocating the failed troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration.
Flournoy had been Obama’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and was responsible for supporting the commanders in the field from the Pentagon. Prior to that role, she co-founded CNAS, the arms industry-backed, Democratic Party-affiliated propaganda mill for the Pentagon and military services.
In a revealing interview with the Post’s Jaffe, the former Pentagon official blamed the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan on an excessive commitment to “democratic ideals,” arguing they supposedly blinded the policymakers to the realities on the ground. It all started, she claimed, with “the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and…was trying to create a Western democracy.” The policymakers set the bar “on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context,” she added.
But the problem was not an excessive U.S. concern for promoting democracy, but the way that U.S. policy sold out “democratic ideals” to support a group of warlords who represented the essence of anti-democratic despotism.
In explaining the Obama administration’s decision to more than double the totals of U.S. troops, Flournoy claimed that she and other U.S. officials only discovered the festering wound of Afghan corruption when it was too late, fatally dooming the military strategy. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten,” she insisted.
However, Flournoy deliberately obscured the crucial fact that the U.S. war was based from its very inception on an alliance with a group of corrupt and murderous warlords. The military leadership, as well as the CIA, relied on the warlords because they had militias and were ready to oppose the Taliban. The warlords offered a steady supply of militiamen as police in the provinces and were given well-paid contracts to provide security for the constant flow of convoys to and from U.S. and NATO bases.
But the militia-police maintained their loyalty to their respective warlords, rather than to any civilian government in Kabul, and in return were given a free hand to steal from Afghans, falsely accuse them of crimes, torture them and release them only for a ransom. In many cases, the police extorted money from local families by abducting and raping their wives, daughters and sons — a pattern of abuse documented by Amnesty International as early as 2003.
The Taliban easily ousted the U.S.-supported regime from large parts of Afghanistan’s Helmand province beginning in 2005-06 because of the local population’s hatred of the lawless warlord militias designated by the U.S. military as police. And when U.S. troops re-occupied those districts in 2009, the militias returned to their brutal ways — including abducting and raping pre-teen boys, prompting bitter complaints from the local residents to the U.S. marines and threats to support the Taliban if the U.S. didn’t intervene to stop them. But the U.S. military never moved to disturb its cozy relationship with the warlords.
So Flournoy’s claim that senior military and Pentagon officials were unaware of the corruption of their Afghan allies until after the Obama administration’s massive commitment of troops is simply devoid of credibility. When she and other key policymakers made their “big bet” later in 2009, they were fully aware that the U.S. was backing a group of powerful warlords whose militia-police were committing heinous abuses against the population that forced Afghans to support the Taliban as their only defense.
The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored by a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.
• First published in The Greyzone
The post Afghanistan Collapse reveals Beltway Media’s Loyalty to Permanent War State first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gareth Porter.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
While recent events have destroyed the credibility of militarists who pushed for the invasion and 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, the moral bankruptcy of their supporters in the aid industry has also been stunningly revealed.
A quick Taliban victory over the foreign trained “Afghan army” at least (momentarily) embarrassed Canadian militarists. But what about their camp followers in the NGO universe?
Over the past two decades Ottawa has plowed over $3.6 billion in “aid” into Afghanistan. During this period the central Asian country has been the top recipient of official assistance, receiving about twice the next biggest destination, another victim of Canadian foreign policy, Haiti.
While Afghanistan is undoubtedly deserving of aid, 10 countries have a lower GDP per capita and 20 countries have a lower life expectancy. So why the focus on Afghanistan? Because it was the place where policymakers thought aid was most likely to have positive results? Of course not. The aid was delivered to support the Canadian, US, and NATO military occupation.
Canadian personnel repeatedly linked development work in Afghanistan to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described the Canadian International Development Agency’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”
The CF worked closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.”
The aid was also a public relations exercise. At politically sensitive moments in the war Canadian officials sought to showcase newly built schools or dams to divert attention from more unsavory sides of military conflict. Alarmed about a growing casualty list and other negative news, in fall 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the military to “push” reconstruction stories on journalists embedded with the military. Through an access to information request the Globe and Mail obtained an email from Major Norbert Cyr saying, “the major concern [at Privy Council Office] is whether we are pushing development issues with embeds.” In an interview with Jane’s Defence Weekly’s Canadian correspondent, a journalist described what this meant on the ground. “We’ve been invited on countless village medical outreach visits, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and similar events.” The hope was that reporters embedded at the Canadian base in Kandahar would file more stories about development projects and fewer negative subjects.
At a broader level aid was used to reinforce the foreign occupation. The aim was to support the Afghan forces allied with the US-led occupation. Canada’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a drop in aid, and now that US forces have withdrawn, Canadian aid will likely dry up.
Historically, military intervention elicits aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill, Ottawa provides aid’ principle.
Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the early 1950s Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. Amidst the NATO bombing in 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipient of Canadian assistance. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Canada announced a $300 million aid package to that country.
As mentioned above, Haiti has been the second largest recipient of Canadian aid over the past two decades. While an elected, pro-poor government was in place between 2001 and 2004 Canadian aid to Haiti was reduced to a trickle. But after the US, French and Canadian invasion ousted thousands of elected officials in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti. Throughout the 15-year UN occupation, Canadian aid continued to flow.
In the years after invasions by foreign troops, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian “aid”. The thread that connected those three countries was the presence of Canadian or US troops.
Should it even be called aid when it comes along with foreign soldiers? A better description would be the “break it and you pay for it” principle.
Where is the discussion of all this in the NGO world? Canada’s international assistance policy gets a free ride — of course, we’re a force for good — in the mainstream media. But does anyone really believe it’s good for “aid” to be tied to military occupation?
Will those who uncritically promote increased Canadian “aid” discuss its ties to the disaster in Afghanistan? Are any of the NGOs that followed foreign troops to Afghanistan speaking out about their error?
• Yves Engler’s Stand on Guard For Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military is now available.
The post Afghanistan: a military and an “aid” failure first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States.
The post Did The US Support The Growth Of ISIS-K In Afghanistan? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Following the Taliban’s seizure of power, people across the political spectrum have expressed concern about the fate of Afghans who helped the United States and are therefore at risk of retribution. Pundits and politicians who gave little attention to civilian deaths in Afghanistan during 20 years of U.S. occupation are joining in this outpouring — a dynamic that is building pressure for the Biden administration to extend the U.S. military presence.
The post Afghan Activist: We All Deserve Refuge, Not Just Those Who Served The U.S. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Since the Taliban consolidated control in Afghanistan, a number of articles have pointed out the affinity that some white nationalists feel for the theocratic fundamentalist group. That sympathy is well spotted; however, it has not stopped many far right activists from also working to raise public anxiety about a refugee “invasion” on account of the Taliban’s takeover.
The contrast between those two perspectives is particularly clear when we look at far right actors in the U.S. in comparison with their counterparts in Europe. There, the Taliban has mostly earned renewed scorn from far right nationalists, whereas sympathetic takes are more likely to come from North American white nationalists. The difference in perspective between the European far right and their North American counterparts says a lot about their differing perceptions of the recent history of their respective continents. Still, what they generally share is antipathy toward women, queer people, leftists, Muslims and people with non-European ancestry.
While the Taliban’s worldview may be essentially at odds with white nationalist ideology, which prioritizes race over theology and gives Christianity and/or Western paganism (depending on who you ask) pride of place over all other religions, their specific objectives nonetheless overlap fairly substantially.
Most notably, they tend to share a basic urge to control and silence women, an overtly violent, eliminationist view of gay men, and an overarching disdain for modernity, which they associate with things like egalitarianism, democracy, feminism and interracial relationships. One prominent voice emphasizing that confluence is a Proud Boys-affiliated Telegram channel with an explicitly fascist/national socialist outlook and over 50,000 subscribers. It posted a screenshot on August 17 of a woman reporting from Kabul for CNN and quoted her as saying, “They just told me to stand to the side, because I’m a woman.” The channel’s admins posted the response “let’s have more of that in white countries,” before adding the caveat “the attitude not the people obviously.”
Another overtly neo-Nazi Telegram channel posted a pair of images on August 15: One presumably shows Taliban fighters hoisting a rocket launcher and the other features two men kissing under an arch of swords held by men in dress uniform, seemingly outside a church. The caption on the post reads: “Can you really blame us for Taliban posting?” implying that homophobic theocracy is preferable to tolerance of queer sexuality.
Additionally, neo-fascists and national socialists regard the Taliban’s scruffy guerrilla insurgents as a model for a type of warfare that they envision themselves undertaking in the United States. On August 17, white nationalist website Counter-Currents published an essay dedicated “to the brave mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.” It criticizes mainstream conservative concerns about the U.S. withdrawal, arguing that “this kind of response is blind to the nature of guerrilla warfare.… A guerrilla doesn’t engage the obviously superior enemy in open combat, but rather wages warfare by staying alive, deception, concealment, hit-and-run tactics, attacking soft targets, challenging logistics, and raising the cost of occupation.”
Yet another fascist-identified Telegram channel was even more direct, posting on the same day that “these farmers and minimally trained men fought to take their nation back from globohomo. They took back their government, installed their national religion as law, and executed dissenters. Hard not to respect that.”
Qualified support for radical Islamic fundamentalism is not new among U.S. white nationalists. In the mid-to-late 2010s, the concept of “white sharia” was widely debated in white nationalist circles, specifically with respect to the question of whether or not it was acceptable for movement supporters to seek to emulate the dogmatic beliefs of the most radical practitioners of a religion that white nationalists fundamentally oppose. The concept of “white sharia” eventually went out of fashion amid the post-Charlottesville turmoil that forced North American white nationalists to rethink a lot of their strategy; however, the ideological similarities that made that concept appealing in the first place have remained.
Radical European nationalists’ perspective on the developing situation in Afghanistan tends to be quite different. Although there is some grudging acknowledgment of the objectives they share with the Taliban, there is comparatively little discussion as to the possible value of emulating Muslim fundamentalists.
On the contrary, the current wave of far right xenophobia in Europe owes a great deal of its impetus to the wave of migrants that reached its shores in 2015, largely due to the conflict in Syria. Far right activists have used those events to gain adherents and motivate action by touting an “invasion” of Europe ever since; even the Counter-Currents essay mentioned above notes that “the Dissident Right had a very good year in 2015, when the migrant crisis hit Europe.”
Accusations of widespread and even innate violence among Muslims and immigrants — and particularly violence directed at women and children — are an indispensable mainstay of the European far right rhetorical arsenal. The Finsbury Park van attack in London in June 2017; the shooting of six African migrants in Macerata, Italy, in February 2018; the anti-immigrant riots in Chemnitz, Germany, in August and September of the same year; the failed mosque shooting in Bærum, Norway, in August 2019; the Bayonne, France, mosque shooting the following October; and the shisha bar shootings in Hanau, Germany, in February 2020 all testify to the deadly seriousness with which the European far right views both Muslims and non-European immigrants on European soil.
Their online response to recent events in Afghanistan generally reflects their concern that further repression there under a strict Islamic regime will lead to a new wave of refugees and asylum seekers in European countries. The pan-European ethnonationalist “Identitarian” movement figurehead Martin Sellner immediately identified this as the start of a new round of migration that he believes must be stopped before it reaches Europe. He took to Telegram on August 13 to declare that no fewer than 3 million Afghans were headed to Germany, labeling that a “nuclear strike with the migration weapon.”
On August 12, neo-fascist British group Patriotic Alternative published an article specifically denying any sympathy for the likely victims of Taliban persecution. Commenting on Afghans who worked for the U.S. and NATO, the author writes that a “dispassionate reading of the situation is that these individuals are afraid because they’re traitors to their country. They aided an occupation force killing their own countrymen, which, by any definition, should be considered a treasonous act.”
Denying that support for women’s rights or egalitarianism are ideas that anyone in Afghanistan actually believes in, the author further claims that the only other people who fear the Taliban are not women or girls, but pedophiles and child sex traffickers, who he expects will be gladly received by Western countries. He writes that, “It appears that the West will welcome with open arms the traitors and pedophiles of Afghanistan, who rightly fear justice under the new regime.” Future Afghan immigrants are therefore regarded with suspicion, even before they arrive.
Some European nationalists see the problem as larger than only Afghan refugees per se. In a Telegram post on August 16, French fascist channel “Zentropa” warned that the situation in Afghanistan could produce a domino effect with repercussions in Tunisia, which is “just a little more than 100 km [62 miles] from Europe’s borders.”
It should be noted that there is not always a simple, clean division between North American far right actors who are soft on the Taliban and their European counterparts, who see the events in Afghanistan only as portents of chaos in Europe. On one hand, even North American far right actors who identify and share objectives with the Taliban are often quick to emphasize their disdain for Islam when they make “white sharia”-style arguments. Moreover, after an initial burst of enthusiasm for the looming repression in Afghanistan, many far right actors in the U.S. have resumed promoting the idea of a refugee “crisis.”
On the other hand, some of their European analogues have found shared interests with the Taliban. On August 14, for example, a French neo-Nazi podcast celebrated the fact that the Taliban had “saved” Afghanistan from the destruction of its civilization at the hands of “Jews and women” and crowed that the group constituted “the world’s first antivax insurrection. And it is a victorious antivax insurrection.”
The Taliban did, in fact, shutter COVID-19 vaccination drives in a province in eastern Afghanistan after it took over, leading some on the far right to conclude that the group is against vaccines altogether. However, the Taliban has also supported COVID-19 vaccinations in other times and places. Meanwhile in the West, opposition to the vaccines has become both a significant rallying point for white nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic and a tool for integrating themselves into reactionary as well as liberal movements.
All these responses to recent events in Afghanistan can be understood as manifestations of the fantasies that drive the far right’s collective imagination. From QAnon to the neo-Nazi dystopian 1978 novel The Turner Diaries and beyond, these movements have long indulged visions of a world that is either deeply corrupted and in need of cleansing through violence or under attack and in need of defending through violence.
In recent years, the urge for cleansing violence has encouraged, for instance, fantasies about state violence — such as the arrest and execution of leading Democrats — and ghoulish voyeurism directed toward dictators abroad. Among other things, this has taken the form of sympathizing with the 2020 military coup in Myanmar, vocally supporting the ruthless violence of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and idolizing the late Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet.
Their fantasies about invasion and the putative need for violent defense often resort to allegories drawn from films like 300 (2007), which is about a battle in ancient Greece against an invading Persian army; or novels like the 1973 The Camp of the Saints, about a flotilla of refugees who land in the south of France. Both of these dramatize brutal encounters between nameless hordes of nonwhite people and small groups of heroic European defenders.
Of course, these kinds of fantasies also have a way of transforming into real-world action. For example, the 2019 El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter, who killed 23 people and injured 23 more, claimed that he was resisting a “Hispanic invasion,” while the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Plymouth, England, on August 12 was motivated by hatred of women and complained that they “don’t need men no more” in modern society.
White nationalism and related far right ideologies are unlikely to dissipate any time soon, in part because there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems they pose. Even the apparent discrepancy between a qualified affinity for the Taliban and anxiety about Afghan refugees amounts to different perspectives within the same ideological framework and is not a substantial cleavage that anti-fascists can easily exploit. However, the tools that we do have for combating them generally start with monitoring groups and individuals locally, interpreting their — often coded — language, and using that knowledge to inform and organize community members. Doing that work requires an understanding of how they think and what their objectives are.
Moreover, while these ideologies can and should be understood as a global phenomenon, local specificities can say at least as much as a macro-level perspective about their larger worldview. Keeping tabs on apparent discrepancies can help us stay clear on the actual scope and the danger of what we are facing.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Boris Johnson has “full confidence” in Dominic Raab despite bitter Whitehall infighting about the performance of the foreign secretary as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.
Downing Street said there were no plans for a reshuffle following widespread reports claiming that Raab’s position is under threat. Hostile briefings from government insiders have seen the foreign secretary labelled a “control freak” who would be “toast” when the prime minister carries out a shake-up of his Cabinet.
The prime minister’s official spokesman told reporters there were “no plans for any reshuffle”. They added:
The Prime Minister has full confidence in his Foreign Secretary
The foreign secretary, who was on holiday in Crete as the Taliban swept away opposition, has denied claims that he did not speak to ministers in Afghanistan and Pakistan for months ahead of the evacuation crisis. He called the allegations “not credible and deeply irresponsible”.
The Sunday Times reported that the foreign secretary had “shown no interest” in taking calls from either country’s government in the six months before the evacuation. The newspaper cited an unnamed Pakistani official, who said Raab had thought of Afghanistan as “yesterday’s war”.
On 31 August, Raab hit back at the claims, and said there had been a “team effort” across the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to communicate with the two countries. He told Sky News:
Anyone that is toddling off to the Sunday Times or any other newspaper at a time of crisis, including the evacuation which has been two weeks running, giving buck-passing briefings either at me or the FCDO is, frankly, not credible and it is deeply irresponsible.
The Cabinet minister added that he had spoken to Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi “more intensively given the evacuation” and defended the Foreign Office’s record in Afghanistan, because it has supported the evacuation of 17,000 people since April.
However, he was unable to name any time before the last few weeks in which he had spoken to ministers from either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
He told LBC:
I can’t tell you my precise call sheet for the last six months.
He claimed he was part of a “team of ministers” and delegated phone calls to colleagues, including Foreign Office minister lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, who had led the UK’s relationship with the Afghan government.
Raab added:
It is right that you have delegation, a division of labour, if you are going to operate effectively as a team. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not done a job like this.
The Foreign Office told the Sunday Times that Raab had spoken to Pakistani minister Qureshi on 22 and 27 August – both dates after the fall of Kabul – but could not cite any earlier conversations between the two men in the last six months. It instead said that Ahmad was responsible for communicating with Pakistan and Afghanistan as the minister for South Asia.
Raab faced criticism for not returning early from his holiday in Crete earlier this month, as Kabul was seized by the Taliban. The foreign secretary has said that “with hindsight” he would have abandoned his holiday sooner.
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Pakistani leftist Farooq Sulehra interviews Sudaba Kabiri, one of the women who organised the first protest against the Taliban in Kabul.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Pakistani leftist Farooq Sulehra interviews Sudaba Kabiri, one of the women who organised the first protest against the Taliban in Kabul.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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The US has officially announced the completion of its military withdrawal from Afghanistan, minus of course the CIA ops which will continue in that country and the bombs that will likely continue to rain down in the name of fighting terrorism.
There are a lot of warmongers rending their garments over the termination of a decades-long military occupation which accomplished nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Almost as ridiculous are the countless pundits and politicians hailing this as some kind of major accomplishment that Americans should be proud of.
Pride, praise and celebration are not the appropriate emotional response to the day. The appropriate response to a decades-overdue withdrawal from a war that should never have happened in the first place is rage. Unmitigated rage at an unforgivable atrocity which amassed a mountain of corpses for no legitimate reason, from which the region will probably not recover in our lifetime. Unmitigated rage at those responsible for starting and maintaining this horror all this time.
This is not something that Biden should be applauded for. Nobody deserves praise or credit for ending a twenty-year disaster, especially one they helped start. Nobody applauds the mass shooter for finally setting down the rifle.
Every single allied soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. They died fighting not for national security, freedom, or democracy, but for war industry profit margins and for the idiotic geostrategic agendas of globe-dominating imperialists. This is also the reason every Afghan soldier and Afghan civilian was killed during that time.
They all died in vain. We shouldn’t concoct sugary fairy tales about this, we should try to prevent it from happening again.
Who knows where Afghanistan would be if the US and its allies had stayed out of the nation two decades ago? Who knows where they’d have been had the US not begun arming the mujahideen against the Soviet Union four decades ago? We will never know what could have been for those people. The opportunity to find out was taken away from them. Stolen forever.
And of course no lessons were learned from this by anyone who will be making decisions about the actions that will be taken by the most powerful military force in history. America’s bloated military budget will continue to swell, and its arsenal and that of its allies will pivot toward new enemies.
The only sane response to all this is rage, and disgust. And a firm commitment to trying to end this madness.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
New adviser on resettling Afghan nationals says immediate focus will be on mental health services for evacuees airlifted out of Kabul
The Australian government’s newly appointed adviser on resettling Afghan nationals has predicted the “residual trauma” among those fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will be “amongst the highest levels of any groups we’ve ever resettled”.
Paris Aristotle, the co-chair of an advisory panel announced on Monday, also said he welcomed signals from the government that it was open to taking more than the 3,000 Afghan nationals it initially pledged to accommodate by June next year.
Related: Afghan allies feel ‘abandoned’ by Australia and New Zealand, as Kabul evacuation flights end
Related: Family of Australian man beaten by Taliban plead for government to help evacuate him
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
New adviser on resettling Afghan nationals says immediate focus will be on mental health services for evacuees airlifted out of Kabul
The Australian government’s newly appointed adviser on resettling Afghan nationals has predicted the “residual trauma” among those fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will be “amongst the highest levels of any groups we’ve ever resettled”.
Paris Aristotle, the co-chair of an advisory panel announced on Monday, also said he welcomed signals from the government that it was open to taking more than the 3,000 Afghan nationals it initially pledged to accommodate by June next year.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
President Joe Biden’s decision to end the Afghan war – one that should never have been fought in the first place — was correct. Missing from the national discourse, however, is analysis of the illegality of the 2001 U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan (dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom”) and resulting war crimes committed by four U.S. presidents and their top officials and lawyers. Once again, the United States has lost a war it started illegally. But as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the Biden administration continues to kill — and promises to persist in killing — Afghan people.
Twenty years of the U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan cost at least $2.26 trillion and resulted in the deaths of more than 2,300 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. The “war on terror” George W. Bush launched with his “Operation Enduring Freedom” has included the torture and abuse of untold numbers people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo and the CIA black sites. It has exacerbated right-wing terrorism in the United States and provided the pretext for the ubiquitous surveillance of Muslims and those who dissent against government policy. And whistleblowers who expose U.S. war crimes have been rewarded with prosecutions under the Espionage Act and lengthy prison sentences. We must not forget the illegality, death and destruction that the war in Afghanistan has caused over the decades, lest we repeat our lethal mistakes.
Like the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was unlawful and led to the commission of torture and targeting of civilians, which constitute war crimes. All three of those wars caused the deaths of thousands — even millions — of people, cost trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, and devastated the countries of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Bush administration began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than one month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As I explained at the time, the U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan violated the United Nations Charter, which does not permit the use of military force for retaliation. The Charter mandates that countries settle their disputes peacefully using diplomatic means. But the United States repeatedly rejected diplomatic attempts at peaceful resolution.
On October 15, 2001, The Washington Post reported, “President Bush rejected an offer from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to turn over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to a neutral third country yesterday as an eighth day of bombing made clear that military coercion, not diplomacy, remains the crux of U.S. policy toward the regime.”
Moreover, in late November 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar approached Hamid Karzai, who shortly thereafter became interim president of Afghanistan, in order to negotiate a peace deal. The U.S. rejected that overture. “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said. He added that the U.S. did not want to leave Mullah Omar to live out his life in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or killed.
The Charter says that a country can use military force only when acting in self-defense or with permission of the UN Security Council. Neither of those preconditions was present before the United States invaded Afghanistan (or Vietnam or Iraq for that matter).
In order to constitute lawful self-defense, an act of war must respond to an armed attack by another state. According to the Charter, the need for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation,” under the well-established Caroline Case. This bedrock principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was conducted in 1945 to 1946 to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals, and the UN General Assembly.
The bombing of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under the Charter because Afghanistan did not attack the United States on September 11, 2001. The 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not armed attacks by another state. The hijackers were not even Afghans; 15 of the 19 men came from Saudi Arabia. Moreover, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the U.S. after September 11, or the United States would not have waited nearly a month before initiating its bombing campaign.
Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States. The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted evidence that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him. That proof was not forthcoming so the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden. Bush began bombing Afghanistan.
Although the Security Council had passed Resolutions 1368 and 1373, neither authorized the use of force in Afghanistan. Those resolutions condemned the 9/11 attacks; ordered the freezing of assets; criminalized terrorist activity; mandated the prevention of terrorist attacks and the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urged the ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.
The U.S. failure to commit to multilateralism — the cornerstone of international law at the heart of the UN Charter — is the fundamental flaw of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
Since the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court did not come into effect until 2002, the crimes against humanity perpetrated on 9/11 should have been prosecuted in domestic courts under the well-established doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allows countries to prosecute foreign nationals for the most heinous of crimes. Also, the Security Council could have established. And the Security Council could have established a special tribunal for the 9/11 attacks, like it did in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was illegal.
The illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and resultant “war on terror” led to the commission of war crimes, including torture and targeting civilians.
Bush’s administration instituted a widespread program of torture and abuse. A 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documented the use of waterboarding, which constitutes torture, and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Detainees were slammed into walls; hung from the ceiling; kept in total darkness; deprived of sleep, sometimes with forced standing, for up to seven and one-half days; forced to stand on broken limbs for hours on end; threatened with mock execution; confined in a coffin-like box for 11 days; bathed in ice water and dressed in diapers.
On March 5, 2020, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ordered a formal investigation of U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials for war crimes, including torture, committed in the “war on terror.” The ICC prosecutor found reasonable grounds to believe that, pursuant to a U.S. policy, members of the CIA had committed war crimes. They included torture and cruel treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity, rape and other forms of sexual violence against people held in detention facilities in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.
During the Obama administration, prisoners held at Guantánamo were force-fed, which amounts to torture. Obama’s use of drones to kill people in seven different countries violated the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
Donald Trump conducted airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that killed record numbers of civilians, also in violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
As Biden completes the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, his administration continues to kill people there.
On Thursday August 26, Islamic State Khorasan (or ISIS-K) detonated a suicide bomb outside the Kabul airport. As many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members were killed. BBC reporter Secunder Kermani cited eyewitnesses who said that a significant number of those killed were shot by U.S. troops “in the panic after the blast.” Indeed, The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials admitted “that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.”
Nevertheless, on August 27, Biden retaliated with a drone strike that apparently killed “an ISIS-K planner,” even though “there was no evidence so far that he was involved in the suicide bombing near the airport on Thursday.” The U.S. Central Command released a statement that said, “We know of no civilian casualties” from the U.S. drone strike. But according to The Guardian, an elder in Jalalabad reported that three civilians were killed and four were injured in the U.S. drone strike.
On August 27, the United Nations Security Council issued a press release affirming that “all parties must respect their obligations under international humanitarian law in all circumstances, including those related to the protection of civilians.” The Council stated that “any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed.” Moreover, the Council “reaffirmed the need for all States to combat by all means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other obligations under international law . . . threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.”
Nonetheless, on August 29, Biden launched another drone strike against suspected members of ISIS-K, blowing up a vehicle apparently containing explosives. The Central Command did not know whether the strike caused civilian casualties, calling the attack “a self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul.”
Biden’s administration has pledged to conduct “over-the-horizon” operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. plans to monitor terror threats with surveillance and execute air strikes from beyond Afghanistan’s borders, particularly in the Persian Gulf. But as the Security Council stated, all countries have a legal duty to comply with international law.
The United States must completely refrain from using military force in Afghanistan. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) said, “the answer cannot be more war and violence. The answer cannot be launching more ineffective and unaccountable counterterrorism operations.” Jacobs added that the United States “owe[s] it to all those who lost their lives to not commit the same mistakes” it made nearly 20 years ago after the September 11 attacks.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It began as it always seems to, with some entrenched stakeholder in the foreign policy establishment solemnly invoking their idea of The Right Thing To Do. “[B]ottom line is that our work is not done in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta during a CNN appearance on August 27. “I know we’ll be removing our troops by a certain date, but the bottom line is our work is not done…. We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS.”
Twenty years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, these people still think flapping “our work is not done” remains a viable argument for the Forever War, i.e. the so-called “war on terror.” Even after getting battered for days with images of the mayhem at Kabul airport, American opinion remains solidly against continuing our failed war in Afghanistan, which has prompted the stay-forever advocates to ramp up the volume.
“The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof,” announced Lindsey Graham as he twirled the old, bloody shirt. “This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, much worse than Saigon,” snarled Mitch McConnell with brazen incoherence; does he think we should still be fighting the Vietnam War? “It’s been a catastrophe and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse,” opined alpha warmonger John Bolton. Even Donald Trump, who ran for president on withdrawing from Afghanistan and brokered the deal that led to this mess, dropped in his two cents. “This is not a withdrawal,” he howled at a rally in Cullman, Alabama. “This was a total … surrender.”
In their haste to reactivate the war-profit ATM and trillion-dollar mineral/gas rights bonanza that is and has been Afghanistan, our pals in the establishment have either glossed over or gruesomely perverted a few pertinent facts.
First and foremost, the Taliban clearly perpetrates horrific violence, repression, and misogyny … but they also despise the Islamic State and ISIS-K (or “ISIS-X,” as Trump named them the other day when he flubbed the teleprompter again). Beyond cultural and religious differences is the fact that members of ISIS, like al Qaeda, want to violently spread their influence worldwide. Allowing al Qaeda to do so bought the Taliban 20 years of war and a prolonged near-death experience. They have not forgotten the lesson.
The Taliban were furious over the Kabul airport bombing, just as they were unhappy with the 9/11 attacks. They want to make Afghanistan into their own far-right religious fascist arena, and are not interested in going beyond their borders. When ISIS or al Qaeda start murdering citizens of other countries within their borders and without, it messes with their plans. Because of this, it is not a reach to conclude that the best people to “get ISIS” are the ones who are already there.
This decision would not be unprecedented. An earlier phase of the war in Afghanistan bore witness to “an all-out military challenge by the Islamic State to the Taliban’s supremacy as Afghanistan’s Islamist guerrilla force,” according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic. “These two factions fought a war — and even though the Taliban had a decades-long head start, the competition was a close one in certain areas, particularly eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. intervened to help the Taliban.”
It’s a bleak option, the very idea of considering the Taliban to be some sort of ally in this specific struggle. By doing so, we would be giving tacit endorsement to their nascent government, and through that, endorsement to the various shades of hell they will almost certainly inflict on civilians, particularly women. It is a jagged rock to swallow, but it is also what happens when you lose a war. When the Visigoths crested the seventh hill of Rome, Emperor Honorius was not waiting at the gate with a list of insistent demands. They would have flung his body from the walls with that list jammed down his throat. It just doesn’t work like that.
What demands we can make will come couched in a coalition of 98 countries, which have banded together with the U.S. to apply as much economic pressure on the Taliban as possible. “The United States and 97 other countries said on Sunday that they would continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan after the American military departs this week,” reports The New York Times, “and had secured an agreement with the Taliban to allow safe passage for those who are leaving.”
The Times goes on to state that the dialog from these 98 countries “was meant to convey an implicit message about incentives — namely, foreign aid to the government — that the international community would use to enforce it.” Make no mistake: With hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghan allies still trying to flee Afghanistan, this offer amounts to nothing more or less than a ransom, one these countries hope the Taliban will accept. Again, this is what happens when you lose a war.
It is to be hoped that this devil’s bargain will buy safe passage for those who have been left behind amid the efforts being put forth to extract as many as possible. Of course, efforts must be made to allow for many more people to leave — including people who haven’t collaborated with the United States.
But the war-shouters are looking desperately for any reason to return to Afghanistan, because they believe such a return will wipe the slate clean of the compounded follies that led us to this desperate place to begin with.
Make no mistake: The guilty parties passing as the “foreign policy establishment” — the Panettas, the Pompeos and the Boltons, the battalions of guilty-ass former administration bigheads who put us there in the first place and kept us there for a generation — will try, regardless of circumstances, to push us back into full and open conflict.
A subtle-not-subtle propaganda effort along these lines revealed itself over the weekend.
The papers on Sunday morning were filled with the faces of the 13 servicemembers who died in the Kabul airport bombing, after a Saturday release by the Pentagon of their personal information. The TV networks have been equally tenacious in putting the names to the faces, with anecdotes for each of the fallen — which is as it should be. Nicole Gee just made sergeant; her car is still parked at the base back home. Ryan Knauss was drawing pictures of himself as a Marine when he was in second grade. David L. Espinoza called his Mom the day before he died to tell her he loved her, and that he was safe with his teammates.
This is just and proper. These 13 were tasked with an impossible job amid lethal circumstances. They were not killing civilians, but saving them from the folly of their own government, and more than 100,000 people have been lifted to safety because of the efforts they and their compatriots have given. Their loss is utterly heartbreaking.
During another filthy, useless war, the one in Vietnam, my father won the Bronze Star for organizing and executing a similar rescue: Getting civilians out of the way of another of our lethally bad ideas. He wore a small lapel pin of that decoration to his dying day, most proudly whenever he found himself surrounded by the flapping chickenhawks of war in the aftermath of 9/11.
Yet I am freighted with too much dismal memory to take these recent tributes to fallen servicemembers at face value. During the long years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when “we don’t do body counts” was the watchword of the Pentagon, you had to do quite a bit of digging to find the names of the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of US servicemembers who were killed over there. George W. Bush, may his name be forever cursed, closed Dover Air Force Base to the press, so the American people could not see the caskets coming home for processing.
The Pentagon did not hand out pictures and detailed biographies, as they did on Saturday. The dead were a dirty secret, and bad for the war effort.
There was a time — a long time, years — when I sometimes felt like I was one of the few people putting names to the numbers. I did so diligently with Truthout, as often as I could, and I would weep over my keyboard on occasion because of it … because after a while, some of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, the families of those fallen would reach out to me with emails asking why their beloved was dead. It was my own little John Kerry conundrum: How do you tell a mother her son died for a lie? I did my best, and it burned me down.
In 2004, I wrote an article called The 500, about the latest round of dead soldiers the Iraq war had produced. I named them, and at the beginning and end of the piece, I quoted Wilfred Owen, a WWI soldier/poet who died on the last day of the war, when they were ringing the church bells in celebration.
The similarity between Owen and these 13 — dying on the doorstep of the end of it — is almost too much to bear. But if we are to be honest citizens of this berserk nation, we have to ask why these 13 suddenly merit such attention, when the thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years barely merited notice, and needed nigh-anonymous people like me to say their names.
These 13 deserve to be honored. They do not deserve to be exploited to whip up public emotion to re-enter a lost war because the “Establishment” wants back into Afghanistan to obscure its serial failures over the last two decades. That, I fear, is the case here. It’s the oldest goddamned trick in the book, and the “news” media falls for it each and every time. Ratings, you see.
President Biden met the bodies of the 13 at Dover when they arrived home. Because of his son, I do not believe this was theater, but I don’t trust the rest of them any further than I could throw them. These 13 names are worth running across the sky — they are — while most of the thousands and thousands of others who are equally dead thanks to the twin disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq remain as anonymous as a shadow in the dark.
There is deliberate purpose behind both the silence then and the siren now, and each purpose is equally gut-wrenching. Some 26,000 Afghan children have been killed or severely injured in our Afghanistan war since 2005. Do not let the “Establishment” get away with this again.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.