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Category: Afghanistan

  • New Zealand should never have joined the war in Afghanistan

    ANALYSIS: By Keith Locke

    After the fall of Kabul, the obvious question for New Zealanders is whether we should ever have joined the American war in Afghanistan. Labour and National politicians, who sent our Special Forces there, will say yes.

    The Greens, who opposed the war from the start, will say no.

    Back in 2001, we were the only party to vote against a parliamentary motion to send an SAS contingent to Afghanistan. As Green foreign affairs spokesperson during the first decade of the war I was often accused by Labour and National MPs of helping the Taliban.

    By their reasoning you either supported the American war effort, or you were on the side of the Taliban.

    To the contrary, I said, New Zealand was helping the Taliban by sending troops. It was handing the Taliban a major recruiting tool, that of Afghans fighting for their national honour against a foreign military force.

    And so it has proved to be. The Taliban didn’t win because of the popularity of its repressive theocracy. Its ideology is deeply unpopular, particularly in the Afghan cities.

    But what about the rampant corruption in the Afghan political system? Wasn’t that a big factor in the Taliban rise to power? Yes, but that corruption was enhanced by the presence of the Western forces and all the largess they were spreading around.

    Both sides committed war crimes
    Then there was the conduct of the war. Both sides committed war crimes, and it has been documented that our SAS handed over prisoners to probable torture by the Afghan National Directorate of Security.

    Western air power helped the government side, but it was also counterproductive, as more innocent villagers were killed or wounded by air strikes.

    In the end all the most sophisticated American warfighting gear couldn’t uproot a lightly armed insurgent force.


    Taliban claims it will respect women’s rights, press freedom. Reported by New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis for Al Jazeera. Video: AJ English

    There was another course America (and New Zealand) could have taken. Back in 2001 the Greens (and others in the international community) were pushing for a peaceful resolution whereby the Taliban would hand over Osama bin Laden to justice. The Taliban were not ruling that out.

    But America was bent on revenge for the attack on the World Trade Centre, and quickly went to war. Ostensibly it was a war against terrorism, but Osama bin Laden quickly decamped to Pakistan, so it became simply a war to overthrow the Taliban government and then to stop it returning to power.

    The war had this exclusively anti-Taliban character when New Zealand’s SAS force arrived in December 2001. The war would grind on for 20 years causing so much death and destruction for the Afghan people.

    The peaceful way of putting pressure on the Taliban, which could have been adopted back in 2001, is similar to how the world community is likely to relate to the new Taliban government.

    Pressure on the Taliban
    That is, there will be considerable diplomatic and economic pressure on the Taliban to give Afghan people (particularly Afghan women) more freedom than it has to date. How successful this will be is yet to be determined.

    It depends on the strength and unity of the international community. Even without much unity, international pressure is having some (if limited) effect on another strongly anti-women regime, namely Saudi Arabia.

    The Labour and National governments that sent our SAS to Afghanistan cannot escape responsibility for the casualties and post-traumatic stress suffered by our soldiers. Their line of defence may be that they didn’t know it would turn out this way.

    However, that is not a good argument when you look at the repeated failure of Western interventions in nearby Middle Eastern countries.

    America has intervened militarily (or supported foreign intervention) in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Somalia and Libya. All of these peoples are now worse off than they were before those interventions.

    “Civilising missions”, spearheaded by the American military, are not the answer, and New Zealand shouldn’t get involved. We should have learnt that 50 years ago in Vietnam, but perhaps we’ll learn it now.

    Former Green MP Keith Locke was the party’s foreign affairs spokesperson. He writes occasional pieces for Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is republished here with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Return Of The Taliban 20 Years Later

    In recent years, the United States has failed to accomplish any of the objectives of its wars. The US entered Afghanistan with horrendous bombing and a lawless campaign of extraordinary rendition in October 2001 with the objective of ejecting the Taliban from the country; now, 20 years later, the Taliban is back. In 2003, two years after the US unleashed a war in Afghanistan, it opened an illegal war against Iraq, which ultimately resulted in an unconditional withdrawal of the United States in 2011 after the refusal by the Iraqi parliament to allow US troops extralegal protections. As the US withdrew from Iraq, it opened a terrible war against Libya in 2011, which resulted in the creation of chaos in the region.

    The post The Return Of The Taliban 20 Years Later appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ​Afghanistan: So What Do the Filthy Commie Peaceniks Say Now?

    Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

    So, people get hurt when you stop waging wars, and peace is dangerous, and . . . and . . . well, women’s rights!

    What do the stupid peace lovers say now?

    Well, here’s what this one says:

    On September 11, 2001, I said, “Well, that proves all the weapons and wars are useless or counterproductive. Prosecute crimes as crimes, and start disarming.”

    When the U.S. government launched an illegal, immoral, sure to be catastrophic war on Afghanistan, I said, “That’s illegal and immoral and sure to be catastrophic! End it now!”

    When they didn’t end it, I said, “According to the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, there’s going to be hell when they end this, and it’s going to be a worse hell the longer it takes them to end it. So, end it now!”

    When they didn’t end it, I went to Kabul and met with all kinds of people and saw that they clearly had a lousy, corrupt, foreign-backed puppet government, with the looming threat of the Taliban, and neither choice was any good. “Support nonviolent civil-society,” I said. “Provide actual aid. Try democracy at home to lead by example. And (redundantly, since democracy at home would have done this) get the U.S. military the @%!%# out!”

    When they still didn’t end it, and when a Congressional investigation found the top two sources of income for the Taliban to be the revived drug trade and the U.S. military, I said “If you wait additional years or decades to get the !^%& out, there’s going to be no hope left. Get the hell out now!”

    When Amnesty International put ads up on bus stops in Chicago thanking NATO for the lovely war for women’s rights, I pointed out that bombs blow up women the same as men, and marched to protest NATO.

    I asked people in Afghanistan, and they said the same thing.

    When Obama pretended to get out, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    When Trump got elected promising to get out and then didn’t, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    (When Hillary Clinton failed to get elected, and evidence suggested that she’d have won had she credibly promised to end the wars, I said, “Do us all a favor and retire for godsake!”)

    When they STILL didn’t end it, I said, again, “According to the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, there’s going to be hell when they end this, and it’s going to be a worse hell the longer it takes them to end it. So, end it now!”

    When Biden pretended to get out while promising to keep troops there and to increase the bombings, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    I encouraged all the insiderish groups that said the same thing super gently and politely. I encouraged all the fed-up groups blocking doors and streets and weapons trains. I supported efforts in every country involved to get their token troops out and stop legitimizing a U.S. crime. Year after year after year.

    When Biden claimed the war was some sort of success, I pointed out how it had spread anti-U.S. terrorism across half the globe, spawned more wars, murdered countless people, devastated the natural environment, eroded the rule of law and civil liberties and self-governance, and cost trillions of dollars.

    When the U.S. government refused to abide by agreements, refused to stop bombing, refused to give credible negotiation or compromise a chance, refused to support the rule of law around the world or lead by example, refused to stop shipping weapons into the region, refused to even acknowledge that the Taliban is using U.S.-made weapons, but finally claimed it would get its troops out, I expected that U.S. media outlets would develop anew a strong interest in the rights of Afghan women. I was right.

    But the U.S. government, according to its own reporting, accounts for 66% of all the weapons exported to the least democratic quintile of nations on earth. Of the 50 most oppressive governments identified by a U.S.-government-funded study, the U.S. arms 82% of them. Here they are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Oman, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen. Israel’s government, notorious for its violent oppression of Palestinian people, is not on that list (it’s a U.S.-funded list) but is the top recipient of “aid” funding for U.S. weapons from the U.S. government. Some women live in Palestine.

    The Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act (H.R.4718) would prevent U.S. weapons sales to other nations that are in violation of international human rights law or international humanitarian law. During the last Congress, the same bill, introduced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, gathered a grand total of zero cosponsors.

    What do you notice about that list of nations? One of them, Afghanistan, was on the list of oppressive governments before the Taliban threatened to take it over. And the other 40 are of truly minimal interest to the U.S. corporate media, much less to any of the “BUT THE WOMEN!” crowd out there moaning in agony that a war might end.

    The same crowd seems to have no objection to the proposal moving through the U.S. Congress to force U.S. women at age 18 to register for a military draft that would force them against their will to kill and die in more of these wars.

    So, what would I propose that the U.S. government do for the women and men and children of Afghanistan now, regardless of horrible decisions in the past that it’s obviously too late to undo and just silly and offensive to rehash like this?

    1. Until it can reform itself into an entity capable of benevolent action, not a goddamned thing.

    2. Stop encouraging the Taliban to think that it can become a model U.S. client state in a few years if it’s mean and nasty enough, by ceasing to arm and train and fund brutal dictatorships all over the globe.

    3. Cease eroding the idea of the rule of law around the world by dropping opposition to the International Criminal Court and the World Court, by joining the International Criminal Court, and by eliminating the veto and democratizing the United Nations Security Council.

    4. Catch up with the world and cease being the leading holdout globally on the most major human rights treaties including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (every nation on Earth has ratified except the United States) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (every nation on Earth has ratified except the United States, Iran, Sudan, and Somalia).

    5. Move 20% of the U.S. military budget into useful things each year for five years.

    6. Move 10% of that rededicated funding into providing no-strings-attached aid and encouragement to the most law-abiding and honest-to-god small-d democratic poor nations on the planet.

    7. Take a hard look at the U.S. government itself, understand the powerful case that the U.S. government could make for bombing itself were it not itself, and take serious steps to remove the bribery from the election system, establish fair public funding and media coverage for elections, and remove gerrymandering, the filibuster, and as soon as possible the United States Senate.

    8. Free, apologize to, and thank every whistleblower who’s told us what the U.S. government was doing in Afghanistan for the past 20 years. Consider why we needed whistleblowers to tell us.

    9. Prosecute or free and apologize to every prisoner at Guantanamo, close the base, and get out of Cuba.

    10. Get out of the way of the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Taliban crimes in Afghanistan, as well as its prosecution of crimes committed there by the Afghan government, and by the militaries of the United States and its junior partners.

    11. Swiftly become an entity that can credibly comment on horrors being committed by the Taliban, by — among other things — caring enough about the horrors coming to all of humanity to invest heavily in ending the destruction of the Earth’s climate and ending the existence of nuclear weapons.

    • First published at World Beyond War.org

    The post ​Afghanistan: So What Do the Filthy Commie Peaceniks Say Now? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan

    “The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed: “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. . . . We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced: “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds.  . . . The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan.”

    For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning.

    The post US Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Advocates Urge Biden to Move Faster to Resettle Afghan Refugees

    President Joe Biden has allocated $500 million in new funds for relocating Afghan refugees following the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. The U.S. had already vowed to help evacuate over 80,000 Afghan civilians who qualify for special immigrant visas and face possible retribution from the Taliban, such as translators and interpreters for the U.S. military or NATO, but critics say the Biden administration needs to move faster and expand refugee resettlement from the country. There is already a backlog of more than 17,000 Afghan nationals and 53,000 of their family members awaiting visa approval. “This entire backlog and this delay in evacuating people could have been handled very differently,” says Manoj Govindaiah, the director of policy and government affairs at RAICES, which has resettled more than 600 Afghan refugees since 2017, including 116 this year alone — among them, 79 children, and a family of 10 just last night. “Trump announced in February of 2020 that he was going to be withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan,” Govindaiah notes. “At that moment, we’ve known that this day is coming and these people are vulnerable.”

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    In response to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, President Biden has allocated half a billion dollars in new funds for relocating Afghan refugees, including those who applied for special immigrant visas, known as SIVs. The U.S. had already vowed to help evacuate over 80,000 Afghan civilians who qualify for these visas and risk retribution from the Taliban, such as translators and interpreters for the U.S. military or NATO. There’s already a backlog of more than 17,000 Afghan nationals, 53,000 of their family members, awaiting visa approval.

    For more, we go to Manoj Govindaiah. He is the director of policy and government affairs at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, known as RAICES, which has resettled more than 600 Afghan refugees since 2017, including 116 this year — among them, 79 kids, and a family of 10 just last night.

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Manoj. Start off by saying what is happening. You’re talking about hundreds. The number of people who are trying to get out of Afghanistan right now are in the thousands, perhaps the tens of thousands.

    MANOJ GOVINDAIAH: Thank you so much for having me, Amy.

    Yeah, I mean, we are talking about thousands of people who are trying to flee Afghanistan. About 18,000 to 20,000 have applied for something called special immigrant visas, SIVs, which are available to Afghan citizens who provided valuable and faithful service to the United States government or contractors to support their efforts during the U.S.-led war. The average processing time for this visa is over 800 days. So it takes several years, this process, and it involves all sorts of security checks and background checks and letters of support from U.S. military commanders that confirm an individual’s assistance — you know, all sorts of documents that need to be provided in order for someone to apply for this visa and make their way to the United States with permanent residency and eventually be able to bring their family over.

    Now, of course, if there’s 18,000 people who are in the pipeline, we have known for many years — at least 800 days — that there is this number of people who are trying to make their way here, who appear eligible for permanent residency in the U.S. And yet, our government, the administration, has taken very few efforts, to date, to actually support this population, knowing that we are withdrawing from Afghanistan and that this particular group of people, who have provided support to the United States, are at serious risk of harm once a different government — in this situation now, the Taliban — take over in the country.

    The Biden administration has evacuated, I think, around a couple thousand folks, nearly 2,000, to Fort Lee in Virginia and has announced that they will be working on evacuating additional SIV applicants to other military bases — which is a start, for sure. But, you know, I think the entire process could have been — this entire backlog and this delay in evacuating people could have been handled very differently, because we’ve known — you know, I think Trump announced in February of 2020 that he was going to be withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan. So, at that moment, we’ve known that this day is coming and these people are vulnerable.

    AMY GOODMAN: Are they preparing Fort Bliss, a place you know well because of all of the migrants who have been put there, Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy, as well? Are they preparing these two places for tens of thousands of Afghans?

    MANOJ GOVINDAIAH: Yeah, so, it is our understanding that Fort Bliss, near El Paso, and Fort McCoy, in Wisconsin, are likely to be used to house SIV applicants while they continue with the immigration process in the U.S., after they’ve been evacuated. But, you know, we only know that from the media reports. We don’t have any other information or knowledge to suggest that it’s accurate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressive Caucus Urges US Diplomacy With Taliban

    People display signs urging that no one in Afghanistan be left behind

    Condemning U.S. military action in Afghanistan as an abject and deadly failure, the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Tuesday pressed the Biden administration to engage in diplomacy with the emerging Taliban government and provide as much humanitarian aid as possible to the countless civilians devastated by the past two decades of war.

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the CPC, reiterated her caucus’ support for the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan as the Biden administration faces criticism from Republicans and members of his own party over how the exit has unfolded.

    “We continue to maintain, as the White House clearly does, that even after spending $1 trillion, sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Afghanistan over 20 years, and losing 2,300 American lives, the United States could not have averted this outcome without an endless military presence,” Jayapal said in a statement, referring to the former U.S.-backed Afghan regime’s rapid fall to the Taliban, which took control of the capital of Kabul over the weekend and is currently in talks to form a new government.

    President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Jayapal noted, is “overwhelmingly supported by the American people, with recent polling showing 70% of the country, with bipartisan majorities, supported his plan to withdraw all troops by September 11, 2021.”

    “Despite this consensus, congressional Republicans have disingenuously chosen to play politics at this moment,” the Washington Democrat said. “Republican administrations began the war in Afghanistan, controlled it for 12 of the past 20 years, and initiated the peace process with the Taliban last year that led to an agreement for a U.S. withdrawal. They should participate in the needed examination of why 20 years of war have failed, rather than playing the blame game. Our focus now must be on the human beings on the receiving end of this policy.”

    With millions of Afghans internally displaced and in need of humanitarian aid — and as thousands, including many women and children, attempt to flee the country — the CPC is calling on the Biden administration to “go farther” and “work faster” in its efforts to provide assistance to desperate civilians.

    “The United States must ensure refugee processing moves forward without bureaucratic delay, and with special allowances recognizing the difficulty for people to leave Afghanistan,” said Jayapal. “In addition to the State Department’s work to expedite Special Immigrant Visas, we must also expand these visas and grant Temporary Protected Status to Afghans residing in the United States. We must increase humanitarian aid to support civilians who fled to Kabul and provincial capitals and are without shelter, food, medical assistance, or vaccines.”

    “Finally, we urge the Biden administration to continue engaging diplomatically with the Taliban and regional actors to avoid further bloodshed, protect human rights, and avoid mass migration and instability,” Jayapal added. “This means cooperating with aid agencies, the United Nations, and neighboring countries with an interest in a positive outcome, including Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey.”

    The U.S. shuttered its embassy in Kabul as the Taliban closed in on Afghan capital over the weekend, and the Biden administration is currently in the process of evacuating American diplomats from the country as it moves to end the disastrous — but, for some, immensely profitable — twenty-year occupation.

    While U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said during a briefing Tuesday that the Biden administration intends to pursue diplomacy and a “political settlement” in Afghanistan despite the withdrawal of embassy staff, he warned that the U.S. — in partnership with the international community — could impose “significant costs” on the Taliban government if it “does not respect the basic rights of its people,” a reference to possible economic sanctions.

    As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, the Biden administration has frozen “Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held in U.S. institutions.”

    The move prompted concern that the administration may be planning additional economic measures that could hinder the flow of badly needed humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, where an estimated 18 million people are in dire need of assistance.

    Adam Smith, who served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, told the Post that “it could be cataclysmic for Afghanistan if the administration does not handle the sanctions issue deftly.”

    “This is a potentially serious humanitarian issue that I am hoping people in our government are thinking long and hard about,” Smith said.

    In a statement earlier this week, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — the CPC whip and a Somali refugee — said that U.S. has an “obligation” to help redress the humanitarian crises stemming from “the fundamental failures of our Afghanistan policy over the course of many decades and four presidencies.”

    “Of course, the tragedy did not begin in the last couple of weeks. The hard truth about America’s longest war is that for 20 years, we made promises we couldn’t keep,” said Omar. “The simple fact is that prolonging a war indefinitely would not have delivered a stable, peaceful Afghanistan. I agree with President Biden: an endless American military occupation of Afghanistan was unacceptable. “

    “War and conflict never produce peace and stability,” Omar added. “Violence and militarism, even when cloaked in the language of humanitarianism, are fundamentally at odds with human flourishing and opportunity. Violence only produces trauma, trauma that can turn into anger, vengefulness, and a continuing cycle of violence. That must be a lesson as we deal with conflicts around the world.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Serious News For Serious People: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    BREAKING: Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism now that the terrorists are no longer tied up with the task of occupying Afghanistan.

    ❖

    Welcome back to Serious News Network. For years experts have been trying to understand how dropping military explosives on people could fail to advance humanitarian aims. Here to shed some light on this mystery is an employee of a think tank that’s funded by arms manufacturers.

    ❖

    We will know we are moving toward a healthy society when those who promote war and militarism are not rewarded with esteemed political, media and government careers but chased out of every public area they try to enter and forced to live out their remaining days in lonely misery.

    ❖

    The fact that the mass media continually seek out expert foreign policy analysis from warmongers who’ve been consistently wrong about everything for decades is by itself enough reason to fully dismiss them.

    Case in point:

    ❖

    It’s clear that the plutocratic media are going to be spinning the narrative that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a terrible mistake in every way possible over the coming months in an attempt to discredit opponents of US interventionism on both sides of the aisle.

    ❖

    The only time western news media are allowed to criticize US foreign policy and ask government officials critical questions is to press them to be more hawkish and aggressive than they already are. For a hilarious example, watch this clip:

    ❖

    The US military officially had a $14 billion annual budget for Afghanistan operations in the year 2021. The next official military budget should fall by at least that much. If it doesn’t, you’ve been scammed.

    ❖

    The answer is the US government needs to stay the fuck out of all other nations. Doesn’t matter what the question is.

    ❖

    The lesson from Afghanistan is not just that any US military interventionism will inflict unfathomable death, devastation and trauma at incomprehensible cost, but that the entire power establishment will resist ending it for decades and paint anyone who finally does as a buffoon.

    ❖

    Republicans and Democrats are all talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal completely differently than they would be if it had happened in exactly the same way under Trump. The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show.

    ❖

    Most of the doofy Afghanistan takes you’re seeing from people are the result of the fact that most westerners don’t think very hard about exactly what war is and what it means. They’re weighing things like “women’s rights” against this nebulous, highly compartmentalized thing they’ve never truly examined. They’re just like “Yeah we just put the troops there and we just keep them there and they do whatever it is they do, and then the women get to have rights and go to school! It’s wins all around!” They haven’t looked at that big empty space in their reasoning where the war goes.

    ❖

    Imperial narrative managers like to spin war as this super complicated, esoteric thing that nobody but the most elite scholars can understand, and many unfortunately buy into it. Really it’s the easiest thing in the world to understand: mass murder for power and profit is wrong.

    Many western leftists avoid foreign policy discussions and just focus on domestic policy for precisely this reason: they believe the bullshit spin that it’s this super complicated thing they could never hope to understand. When in reality it’s the simplest aspect of the empire: a globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple. The rest is just details that you can unpack as you learn about each empire-targeted nation.

    ❖

    “OH MY GOD think of the people of Afghanistan!! We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!!”

    I mean I guess we could all open our wealthy nations to all the refugees who want to leave.

    “Oh. Oh no. Haha! No. I just meant dropping bombs on them or something, I’m not a lunatic.”

    ❖

    Boy I sure hope Afghanistan is a sign the US is rolling back its insane policy of endless military expansionism and-

    Oh.

    ❖

    If you view capitalism as the problem, you will see the increasing inequalities and abuses of the so-called Great Reset as par for course. If you think capitalism is great and just needs less interference from government and central banks, you’ll see it as a freakish aberration.

    It used to be common to be able to afford to raise a family on a single income. Now it isn’t, and the wealthy are wealthier than ever. That didn’t happen by accident, it happened because of concerted efforts to manipulate the system which gradually widened the wealth gap to what it is today. The deliberate advancement of agendas like deregulation, globalization, federal ops to sabotage leftist movements, union busting, and the methodical legalization of more and more money in politics have created unjust systems which cause more and more wealth to hemorrhage upward.

    What we’re seeing in the wealth transfers etc since the Covid outbreak is more of the same, with small businesses collapsing while billionaire megacorporations rake in unprecedented profits. We’ll be seeing more such things as capitalism moves to its next infernal iteration.

    Most of what rightists are saying when they object to Covid measures funneling more and more wealth and control upward basically boils down to “No! Stop! You’re breaking the capitalism!” But they are not breaking the capitalism, they’re fulfilling it. The capitalist class is carrying capitalism to the end of the Monopoly game.

    This is one reason rightists are (generally speaking) more freaked out about all this than leftists. They’d be happy to see capitalism returned to its 2019 levels of oppression, which in reality would just be rewinding to immediately before another similar kleptocratic move anyway. Leftists would not be content with this; they want to end the entire system which gave rise to this occasion.

    So now what we’ll probably be seeing is more and more rightists who used to yell “Get a job!” or “Get a better job!” at people who complained about poverty getting screwed over and thrown into poverty themselves by the same system which was screwing over the people they used to yell at. More people will likely come to understand that their businesses closing and their work vanishing was the result of the system screwing them, and hopefully recognize that the same is true for the poor people they used to turn up their noses at.

    If that happens, maybe we’ll see real movement.

    Which is what leftists have wanted all along. Leftists have always wanted a mass-scale uprising against the systems of exploitation, inequality and injustice which gave rise to the situation we now find ourselves in. It’s just that other ideologies are now, perhaps, starting to catch up.

    ______________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Sturgeon calls on UK government to do more to help Afghan refugees

    Scotland’s first minister has criticised the UK government for failing to do enough to help Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of the country.

    Abandoning the Afghans

    Following its defeat in Afghanistan, the UK government has announced plans to resettle 20,000 vulnerable Afghans – particularly women and girls – with 5,000 arriving in the first 12 months.

    Nicola Sturgeon said more needs to be done to help and Scotland stands ready to play its part. She told the PA news agency:

    I don’t think the UK Government is doing enough or stepping up and meeting its responsibilities.

    Twenty-thousand (refugees) over what they’re describing as the long term – I don’t know exactly what they mean by that – doesn’t even live up to the Syrian resettlement programme. I think the commitment is only for 5,000 in this first year.

    What’s unfolded in Afghanistan over the past days and weeks is horrifying and it has been contributed to because of the abrupt, unmanaged withdrawal of troops.

    I think countries across the world have a real obligation – for humanitarian and human rights reasons – not to simply abandon the people of Afghanistan, women and girls in particular, to the mercies of the Taliban and to whatever fate has in store for them.

    Instead, we must show willing to provide help, support and refuge, so I would call on the UK Government to build on its announcement today, for them to do more, and I will repeat the commitment that – just as we did in the Syrian resettlement programme – the Scottish Government stands ready to play our full part in helping meet that obligation.

    She said the Scottish Government is considering using its Humanitarian Emergency Fund to provide aid for Afghans.

    Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan
    A plane lands at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, carrying British nationals and Afghans escaping Kabul (Mark Large/Daily Mail/PA)

    Collapse

    MPs returned from recess for an emergency sitting of Parliament on 19 August to debate the situation in Afghanistan.

    Prime minister Boris Johnson told the Commons it is an “illusion” to believe the UK alone could have prevented the collapse of Afghanistan after US troops withdrew. Speaking on the matter, Johnson suggested that the Taliban may have been surprised by how vulnerable to defeat the US-implemented government was:

    I think it would be fair to say that the events in Afghanistan have unfolded and the collapse has been faster than even the Taliban themselves predicted

    He further suggested that the rapid collapse of the country to the very forces the coalition sought to defeat was “part of our planning”:

    What is not true is to say the UK Government was unprepared or did not foresee this. It was certainly part of our planning – the very difficult logistical operation for the withdrawal of UK nationals has been under preparation for many months.

    He said the priority was to evacuate as many of the remaining UK nationals and Afghans who had worked with the British in the country as quickly as possible.

    ‘Massive failure’

    Speaking in the Commons debate, the SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford repeated calls for a future “judge-led inquiry” into the war in Afghanistan, saying it is needed to ensure “such a massive foreign policy failure is never again repeated”.

    He also again called for a summit of the four UK nations to house those fleeing Afghanistan and said the UK government’s approach to refugees needed “fundamental change”.

    The Scottish Refugee Council’s chief executive Sabir Zazai said:

    The UK Government’s announcement of an Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme is a welcome first step but we also need to provide immediate help to those fleeing the crisis in Afghanistan.

    The sad truth is that not everyone who needs to reach safety from Afghanistan will be able to do so through this scheme. The scenes at Kabul Airport are a reminder that people don’t get a choice over the way they escape.

    He called on the UK to commit to a “fair and humane asylum system”, drop plans for the Borders and Nationality Bill, give refugee status to Afghan nationals currently in the UK asylum system, and commit to widening family reunion laws.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Malalai Joya: We need aid, not war machines

    The situation in Afghanistan is critical, writes Malalai Joya. For ordinary people, especially for women, this means more suffering. Progressives are in more danger than ever.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Afghanistan and the defeat of the US military

    The US “war on terror” was portrayed as a just response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocity, writes Rupen Savoulian. This rationale stands exposed as utterly hypocritical.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Afghanistan:  Longest US War Continues to a New Stage

    The longest of the United States’ “forever wars” in Afghanistan was supposed to end August 31 after President Biden extended his predecessor’s withdrawal date from May of this year. But what will be ending is not clear; certainly not the imperial mission of the world’s superpower. If the US determines that it cannot impose its hegemony on that corner of the world through a compliant client state, it will opt for chaos instead.

    Puppeteer departs – puppet forces collapse

    In recent weeks, the Taliban military rapidly advanced, taking provincial capitals in Afghanistan and then the capital city of Kabul on August 15. The US-backed former President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in a helicopter packed with cash, the US embassy took down the stars-and-stripes, and Western governments evacuated personnel.

    In the leadup to the debacle, the US bombed a country, which has minimal air defenses, in a war that has cost at least 171,000 to 174,000 lives. Along with Qatar-based long-range B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers and AC-130 Spectre gunships, MQ-9 Reaper drones were deployed.

    While claiming it would end the war, the US had intended to continue to bomb Afghanistan at will and to keep private military contractors (i.e., mercenaries) there, along with some uniformed US and allied NATO troops such as those from Turkey. The New York Times conceded that: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.” All those plans are now being reevaluated.

    Even before the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were slated to come to the US with Washington already releasing $300 million in the effort. Under the US Refugee Admissions Program, the former collaborators with the US occupation of their country will likely form a bastion of rightwing sentiment similar to the role that anti-Cuban Revolution refugees play in the US.

    The US had spent $2.3 trillion on the war and over twenty years building the Afghan Armed Forces. In a matter of days that army capitulated. Indications are that the clearly repressive religious extremist Taliban was not so much welcomed by most Afghans as much as the US and its NATO allies were rejected.

    Only a month ago, Biden confidently proclaimed a rout of the Afghan Armed Forces by the Taliban was impossible: “Because you have the Afghan troops that’s 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.” Yet the Taliban with far fewer fighters, backed by no foreign power, and severely inferior in terms of equipment – never a commanding military force – prevailed because their adversary was so profoundly repugnant. They were natives, not occupiers.

    US as the midwife to the birth of the Taliban

    The antecedents of the Taliban date to the CIA-backed insurgency against the socialist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which was instituting modernization, emancipation of women, literacy, and land reform programs starting in 1978. The US war in Afghanistan is longer than just two decades. An extension of the old Cold War, the Afghanistan phase started with Ronald Reagan’s support of the mujahadeen “freedom fighters” back in the 1980s in a US jihad against the Soviet Union. And “the longest war” is continuing today with Joe Biden’s New Cold War.

    Back then, the Soviet Union was allied with the socialist government in Afghanistan. Soon Moscow was caught in a lose-lose situation of either allowing a nearby country to be subverted by the West or dispatching troops there to defend against a foreign-instigated insurgency. US President Carter’s National Security Advisor Brzezinski saw Afghanistan as a trap to get the US’s adversary into a Vietnam-like quagmire “to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible.” The cost of having Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 is believed to have contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.

    Various mujahideen elements backed by foreign powers, particularly the US coordinating with Pakistan, were used to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992. In the following Afghan Civil War period, the Taliban arose in 1994 out of the contending mujahideen armies. By 1996, it had emerged triumphant against five rival mujahideen factions.

    From being a US ally and asset, the Taliban became the enemy in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan was somewhat speciously justified with allegations that under Taliban rule the country had harbored terrorists and had links to al-Qaida. More to the point, the long occupation of Afghanistan was a projection of US military capacity into central Asia. Especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the US client regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the US needed military and surveillance bases close to the belly of Russia and China.

    Restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the prospects of chaos

    With the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban just days ago, the prospect of a nation ruled under strict Sharia law with brutal penalties for noncompliance is chilling. Interference in Afghanistan by the US was never motivated by its abhorrence to fundamentalist theocracies or the Taliban’s repulsive record on women’s rights, as evidenced by Washington’s fawning treatment of the Saudi dictatorship.

    The Taliban is primarily drawn from the Pushtun ethnic group, which comprises nearly half of the Afghan population. However, the Taliban does not have consolidated support among other ethnic groups, especially in the north, or even within the Pushtun population. One of the poorest countries in the world with one of the highest birth rates, Afghanistan faces rampant COVID, drug addiction, and food shortages. Further, the Taliban lacks the experience for national rule and is not popular outside their rural bases, making for an extremely volatile situation.

    It is not clear what the US role will be now regarding Afghanistan. The precipitous US retreat may not mean a complete defeat; timing should not be confused with the substance. The US could still reach a new accommodation with the Taliban to further US strategic and economic interests, while exploiting the Taliban’s brand of Sunni zealotry to destabilize nearby Shi’ite Iran, Russia with its Chechnya insurgency, and China with its Uyghur insurgency.

    Both China and Russia have officially met with the Taliban in the last month precisely to try to forestall the exportation of extremist Islamic insurgency within their borders. Also in July, representatives from the Taliban and the Afghan government were hosted in Tehran, and Iran remains “cautiously open” to the new government in Kabul with whom they share a 572-mile border.

    Chaos in Afghanistan with the prospect of disorder spilling over regionally, while perhaps not the preferred option for the US, could have the advantage for the US imperial project of derailing development initiatives in Russia and especially China with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative extending into Afghanistan. In a not unsimilar situation after the US was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, Brzezinski claimed he encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot and the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge.

    Afghanistan is now in far worse a condition than before the US invasion. Afghanistan is the world’s leading source of illicit drugs, followed by the US client state of Colombia. Under US occupation, Afghanistan became the “world’s first true nacro-state.”

    While the current military advances of the Taliban look like defeats for the US imperial project, this is not the same as a victory for the WAfghans whose progressive secular government, the socialist Democratic Republic, was quashed three decades ago. Once again, the US empire offers the world a binary choice between submission to its “rules-based order,” where the US makes the rules and disregards international law, or chaos.

    Meanwhile inside the beltway and beyond, recriminations about US policy failures in Afghanistan are being hurled in all directions. US President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 obituary on the US people’s objection to endless imperial war – “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” – may yet prove to be premature.

    The post Afghanistan:  Longest US War Continues to a New Stage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Wounded Paternalism: Biden and the US Imperial Complex

    Civilisation has tended to be seen like a gift by those claiming to grant it.  It is done, in the sense Rudyard Kipling intended it, with solemn duty.  It is a task discharged as a burden borne heavily.  In its modern form, notably in the hands of the US, it comes with fast food, roads, schools and blue chip stocks.  Civilisation, in this context, is also unsolicited, imposed upon a country, whether they would wish it to be.  Autonomy comes into it superficially: the custodianship of a puppet regime, often rapacious.

    The results of such unsolicited gifts are there to be seen by the proclaimed civilisers who eventually leave, of which Afghanistan is simply another example.  They create classes and groups of citizens who risk being compromised by the forces that seize power. They cause discord and disruption to local conditions.

    When the paternalism of civilisation’s builders goes wrong, the only ones blamed are those who either did not understand it, or ignored its beneficent properties.  This was the implication in the August 16 speech by President Joseph Biden.  To be fair, Biden had never believed in a “counterinsurgency or nation building” mission to begin with.  Being in Afghanistan had, in his mind, only one purpose: counterterrorism.  And the threat had changed, “metastasized” to include a global consortium of challenges: al-Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, the efforts of ISIS.

    While the speed of the Taliban’s advance had surprised the president, he noted those Afghan “political leaders” who “gave up and fled the country.”  The US-armed Afghan military had “collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”  All of this provided firm reassurance to him “that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”  US troops “cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

    An acknowledgment was also made about the money, training and material provided – those attributes of imperial supply – to local soldiers who simply would not pull their weight.  “We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong – incredibly well equipped – a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”  Such a picture of ingratitude!

    The paternalists, stricken by a misplaced sense of duty of care, insist that more must be done to save personnel who worked for Coalition forces and Afghans who served their projects.  Washington’s allies have been scolding, accusing Biden of not carrying the standard of Western values high enough, let alone long enough.  Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee, assessed the withdrawal as fundamentally damaging “to the political and moral credibility of the West.”  These were “bitter events” for the believers “in democracy and freedom, especially for women”.

    German politicians had gone so far as to see the mission in Afghanistan in moral terms.  It was meant to be an invasion without those historically militarist overtones that had characterised previous uses of German military strength.  “The security of the Federal Republic of Germany,” declared former Defence Minister Peter Struck in justifying the troop presence, “is also being defended in the Hindu Kush.”

    Tom Tugendhat, Conservative chair of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee, put a touch of Britannic gloss on the episode, using all the themes that come with benevolent, and eventually departing, empire.  “Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez.  We need to think again about how we handle friends, who matters and how we defend our interests.”

    In the US itself, the worried paternalists on the Hill are many.  Democratic Senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire have women’s rights on their mind.  In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the signed parties “strongly” urged the creation of “a humanitarian parole category especially for women leaders, activists, human rights defenders, judges parliamentarians, journalists, and members of the Female Tactical Platoon of the Afghan Special Security Forces and to streamline the paperwork process to facilitate referrals to allow for fast, humane, and efficient relocation to the United States.”

    For these worried souls, the demonic Taliban is responsible for war crimes, summary executions, public beatings and flogging of women, sexual violence and forced marriage, as well as a press “clampdown”.  There is no mention of a restoration of order, the reining in of banditry, and the protection of property.  Their version of the Afghan conflict is one resolutely cockeyed.

    Shaheen of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees issued a plea to Biden for “swift, decisive action” lest Afghan civilians “suffer or die at the hands of the Taliban.”  Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton chastised the leaders from both parties who refused to go on with the occupation.  They had “failed to hold the votes for re-authorizing this conflict for the last two decades since we invaded to find Osama bin Laden.  For that, all of us in Congress should be ashamed.”

    The subtext to all of this: we should be telling the Afghans what to do, how to sort out squabbles and how to march to the beat of our nation-building tune.  Like fans of the deceptively named “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, it is left to powerful states to determine the conditions under which such responsibility is determined, and when the gift of civilisation shall be provided.  The line between the duty to protect and the idea of might is right is not only crossed but rubbed out altogether.

    Amidst the warnings, pleas and bleeding heart urgings, the apologists ignore that the mission civilisatrice in Afghanistan came with its own barbarisms: atrocities, torture, the use of drones and an assortment of devilishly lethal weapons.  But these were seen as a necessary toll.  The events unfolding over the last few days should be offering US lawmakers and Washington’s allies firm lessons.  These promise to be ignored.

    The post Wounded Paternalism: Biden and the US Imperial Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Afghanistan: Mirage Of The Good War

    Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Support for the war was universal in the chanceries of the West, even before its aims and parameters had been declared. nato governments rushed to assert themselves ‘all for one’. Blair jetted round the world, proselytizing the ‘doctrine of the international community’ and the opportunities for peace-keeping and nation-building in the Hindu Kush. Putin welcomed the extension of American bases along Russia’s southern borders. Every mainstream Western party endorsed the war; every media network—with bbc World and cnn in the lead—became its megaphone.

    The post Afghanistan: Mirage Of The Good War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Afghanistan – Longest US War Continues To A New Stage

    In recent weeks, the Taliban military rapidly advanced, taking provincial capitals in Afghanistan and then the capital city of Kabul on August 15. The US-backed former President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in a helicopter packed with cash, the US embassy took down the stars-and-stripes, and Western governments evacuated personnel.

    In the leadup to the debacle, the US bombed a country, which has minimal air defenses, in a war that has cost at least 171,000 to 174,000 lives. Along with Qatar-based long-range B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers and AC-130 Spectre gunships, MQ-9 Reaper drones were deployed.

    While claiming it would end the war, the US had intended to continue to bomb Afghanistan at will and to keep private military contractors (i.e., mercenaries) there, along with some uniformed US and allied NATO troops such as those from Turkey.

    The post Afghanistan – Longest US War Continues To A New Stage appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The US occupation took only human lives: Taliban victory is not a sign of peace

    The Taliban’s victory is not a sign of peace but a message of perpetual civil war, writes Farooq Tariq.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Afghanistan And The US Imperial Project

    On August 16, 2021 President Biden addressed the nation to explain why the US military is pulling out of Afghanistan. To a lesser extent, he also tried to explain why the Afghan government and its 300,000 military forces imploded over the past weekend. With the Afghan State’s quick disappearing act, in a puff of smoke up went as well the more than $1 trillion spent by the US in Afghanistan since 2001.

    Biden glossed over the real answer to the first point why the US is now pulling out. The second he never really answered.

    The real answer to the first point is simple: the USA as global hegemon can no longer afford the financial cost of remaining in that country, so it is pulling out.

    The post Afghanistan And The US Imperial Project appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Only Truth About Afghanistan War Is That It Was All Based On Lies

    The stunning victory of the Taliban over the US-backed Afghan government raises more questions than it answers as to how this happened. In the search for answers, however, don’t ask the generals who fought the war – they all lied.

    Let me begin with full disclosure – I have never set foot in Afghanistan. I have zero skin equity in this current debacle. I have lost very close friends to the conflict that tore that country apart these past 20 years, and I do mourn their loss. What I lack in on-the-ground warfighting resume entries, however, is somewhat compensated by a more intellectually based approach toward the conflict in Afghanistan.

    As a historian, I have studied the tribes of Afghanistan, especially their penchant for conflict against ruling authority which deviates from what they expect from their leaders.

    The post The Only Truth About Afghanistan War Is That It Was All Based On Lies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 13 Fijians trapped in Afghanistan safe as Suva plans bid to repatriate them

    By Shanil Singh in Suva

    Immigration Secretary Yogesh Karan has confirmed that 13 Fijians who are currently stuck in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover last Sunday are safe and officials are working to repatriate them as soon as possible.

    Karan said two worked for private contractors and the other 11 were with international organisations.

    He said they had had a discussion with the Australian High Commission which gave an assurance that they would make every effort to “include our people in the evacuation flight”.

    Karan said it was very difficult to contact them because Fiji did not have a mission in Afghanistan and they are trying to contact them via New Delhi.

    He added Fiji was also working with UN agencies and the Indian government to get them out of there as quickly as possible.

    Karan was also requesting anyone who had contacts with anyone in Afghanistan to let the ministry know so they could note their details.

    NZ promises repatriation
    RNZ News reports that people promised help in getting out of Afghanistan were desperate for information, saying they did not know where they should be or who to contact.

    New Zealand citizens and at least 200 Afghans who helped New Zealand’s efforts in the country were expected to be repatriated.

    Diamond Kazimi, a former interpreter for the NZ Defence Force in Afghanistan, who now lives in New Zealand, has been getting calls from those who helped the military and wanted to know when help is coming.

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular assistance to 104 New Zealanders in Afghanistan but would not say where they were, what advice they were being given, or how they planned to make sure they were on the repatriation flight.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • AOC Stresses Moral Obligation to Afghan Refugees as Fox Revives Racist Tropes

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has called on the United States to fulfill its “moral obligation to the Afghan people” by swiftly accepting refugees into the country in light of the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan.

    But even as Ocasio-Cortez and progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) call for a more humanitarian approach toward those affected by the U.S.’s 20 years of military occupation and sudden departure from Afghanistan, right-wing media have resorted to racist and exclusionary language in speaking of the refugees.

    In a series of tweets on the matter, Ocasio-Cortez explained why she felt it was important for the U.S. to assist thousands of refugees affected by the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan this past week.

    “We must waste no time or expense in helping refugees safely & swiftly leave Afghanistan,” the New York congresswoman wrote. “We must immediately welcome them to the U.S. & provide real support as they rebuild their lives.”

    “For all those who lost, sacrificed, suffered, and served in the last 20 years of war and occupation, the United States has a singular responsibility in extending safe refuge to the Afghan people,” she added. “That is the absolute floor.”

    A number of mainstream conservative voices, however, including Fox News personalities Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, described Afghan refugees in bigoted terms, using racist tropes that have been historically used against immigrants and refugees before.

    “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan?” Ingraham asked her viewers. “All day, we’ve heard phrases like, ‘We’ve promised them.’ Well, who did? Did you?”

    Ingraham’s qualms don’t match reality. The process of accepting refugees into the United States is notoriously (and oftentimes painstakingly) thorough, and can take years to complete in many cases. Each individual’s background — including their political affiliations, identity, and more — is deeply examined by a number of U.S. security agencies, a point that Ingraham omitted from her diatribe.

    Carlson also criticized calls for accepting refugees into the U.S.

    “We will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country, and over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade, and then we are invaded,” he said.

    The comments from Carlson, Ingraham, and others were described by The Daily Show digital producer Matt Negrin as “openly reciting” concepts ascribed to “white replacement theory” — a white supremacist belief that there is a conspiratorial movement to reduce the white population in the U.S. and elsewhere.

    “Journalists unfamiliar with Fox should call this white supremacy, not just ‘anti-refugee rhetoric,’” Negrin wrote on Twitter, sharing screenshots of what the Fox News hosts and other far right voices had said publicly about refugees.

    Negrin elaborated on his views by sharing more images of media organizations using tampered language to describe how right-wing commentators were discussing the matter.

    “The press’s inevitable unwillingness to call this what it is — the same way they wouldn’t call Trump racist — is their tacit gift to Republicans who know they can spray their audience with carbon copy nazi manifestos and enjoy being described by mainstream outlets as ‘firebrands,’” Negrin added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With the Taliban return, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

    ANALYSIS: By Azadah Raz Mohammad, The University of Melbourne and Jenna Sapiano, Monash University

    As the Taliban has taken control of the country, Afghanistan has again become an extremely dangerous place to be a woman.

    Even before the fall of Kabul on Sunday, the situation was rapidly deteriorating, exacerbated by the planned withdrawal of all foreign military personnel and declining international aid.

    In the past few weeks alone, there have been many reports of casualties and violence. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes.

    The United Nations Refugee Agency says about 80 percent of those who have fled since the end of May are women and children.

    What does the return of the Taliban mean for women and girls?

    The history of the Taliban
    The Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, enforcing harsh conditions and rules following their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

    A crowd of Taliban fighters and supporters.
    The Taliban have taken back control of Afghanistan with the withdrawal of foreign troops. Image: Rahmut Gul/AP/AAP

    Under their rule, women had to cover themselves and only leave the house in the company of a male relative. The Taliban also banned girls from attending school, and women from working outside the home. They were also banned from voting.

    Women were subject to cruel punishments for disobeying these rules, including being beaten and flogged, and stoned to death if found guilty of adultery. Afghanistan had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.

    The past 20 years
    With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the situation for women and girls vastly improved, although these gains were partial and fragile.

    Women now hold positions as ambassadors, ministers, governors, and police and security force members. In 2003, the new government ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which requires states to incorporate gender equality into their domestic law.

    The 2004 Afghan Constitution holds that “citizens of Afghanistan, man and woman, have equal rights and duties before the law”. Meanwhile, a 2009 law was introduced to protect women from forced and under-age marriage, and violence.

    According to Human Rights Watch, the law saw a rise in the reporting, investigation and, to a lesser extent, conviction, of violent crimes against women and girls.

    While the country has gone from having almost no girls at school to tens of thousands at university, the progress has been slow and unstable. UNICEF reports of the 3.7 million Afghan children out of school some 60 percent are girls.

    A return to dark days
    Officially, Taliban leaders have said they want to grant women’s rights “according to Islam”. But this has been met with great scepticism, including by women leaders in Afghanistan.

    Indeed, the Taliban has given every indication they will reimpose their repressive regime.

    In July, the United Nations reported the number of women and girls killed and injured in the first six months of the year nearly doubled compared to the same period the year before.

    In the areas again under Taliban control, girls have been banned from school and their freedom of movement restricted. There have also been reports of forced marriages.

    Afghan woman looking out a window.
    Afghan women and human rights groups have been sounding the alarm over the Taliban’s return. Image: Hedayatullah Amid/EPA/AAP

    Women are putting burqas back on and speak of destroying evidence of their education and life outside the home to protect themselves from the Taliban.

    As one anonymous Afghan woman writes in The Guardian:

    “I did not expect that we would be deprived of all our basic rights again and travel back to 20 years ago. That after 20 years of fighting for our rights and freedom, we should be hunting for burqas and hiding our identity.”

    Many Afghans are angered by the return of the Taliban and what they see as their abandonment by the international community. There have been protests in the streets. Women have even taken up guns in a rare show of defiance.

    But this alone will not be enough to protect women and girls.

    The world looks the other way
    Currently, the US and its allies are engaged in frantic rescue operations to get their citizens and staff out of Afghanistan. But what of Afghan citizens and their future?

    US President Joe Biden remained largely unmoved by the Taliban’s advance and the worsening humanitarian crisis. In an August 14 statement, he said:

    “an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”

    And yet, the US and its allies — including Australia — went to Afghanistan 20 years ago on the premise of removing the Taliban and protecting women’s rights. However, most Afghans do not believe they have experienced peace in their lifetimes.

    Now that the Taliban has reasserted complete control over the country, the achievements of the past 20 years, especially those made to protect women’s rights and equality, are at risk if the international community once again abandons Afghanistan.

    Women and girls are pleading for help. We hope the world will listen.The Conversation

    Azadah Raz Mohammad, PhD student, The University of Melbourne and Dr Jenna Sapiano, Australia Research Council postdoctoral research associate and lecturer, Monash Gender Peace & Security Centre, Monash University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Corporate Media Are Erasing US’s Long-Term Culpability for Afghanistan War

    George W. Bush is interviewed while surrounded by his "paintings"

    For a time back in the bad old days of Donald Trump, it seemed as if the corporate “news” media had ever so slightly corrected their hard-wired rightward tilt. They were still awful when viewed from a progressive vantage point, and Fox News was going to Fox News no matter what, but as the daily grind of the Trump presidency grew into a roaring existential threat to the country, that media often said what needed saying, providing context, background, fact checks and experts by the score to warn against “normalizing” fascism.

    Maybe it was only a sense of self-preservation that wrought the change — the news media are, of course, “the enemy of the people” according to Trump, and would have been a certain target of his wrath had he ever been able to fully slip the leash. Having the angry mob turn its eyes to you, knowing that they know your name, has a mystic way of concentrating the mind.

    That appears to be over now as the world encompasses the sudden change of power in Afghanistan, and it’s ugly as hell.

    As always, Fox News is going to Fox News, but that network is outdoing even itself when it comes to dangerous and misleading coverage of the situation in Afghanistan. During his Monday broadcast, vile potato monster Tucker Carlson warned that the collapse of the Afghan government would release a death tide of refugees that would wash over the U.S. and straight up your driveway.

    “If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we’ll see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months,” Carlson intoned, “probably in your neighborhood. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade and then we’re invaded.” Laura Ingraham went on to push the theme: “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan?”

    “Probably in your neighborhood.” If you were wondering whether incoherently hateful immigration polemics were again going to be a GOP staple of the upcoming campaign season, look no further. Fox got the RNC talking points and lacquered them to the bathroom doors, probably.

    Take a deeper dive into that, and what you see is a brazen example of a news network running as fast as it can from a mess of its own devising. Among a variety of things, the collapse of Afghanistan can be laid at the feet of two decades of presidents, politicians and military commanders deliberately bullshitting the public on the actual situation in that country. During that time, the main delivery vector for flag-humping hyper-nationalistic rubbish like that has been Fox News.

    That streak remains unbroken. The daytime Fox broadcasts spent most of their time yesterday breathlessly blaming President Biden for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, gleefully bypassing an ocean of history and nuance that — if provided — might help the right-leaning public avoid getting led by the nose into another war that is almost old enough to buy a beer. By the evening, they were folding their nonsense coverage into racist GOP talking points. An opportunity squandered, try to contain your shock.

    The other alphabet soup networks, along with a forest’s worth of newspapers, have fared little better in the delivery of useful information. Instead, we have been fed a steady diet of pundit-heavy drivel about “winners and losers,” with an unmistakable avoidance of anything which might remind viewers and readers that, more often than not, this sort of galloping tragedy is what happens when a war is lost.

    I’m not here to stand in front of Joe Biden. He voted for this mess back in 2001, and while it is abundantly clear more should have been done to extricate our allies and personnel before the country fell, he faced a grim Hobson’s Choice: Get out the way we did, or begin pulling people out months ago and perhaps precipitate a running slaughter all the way to Kandahar and Kabul. Nothing is more vulnerable than an army in retreat, and that’s precisely what we were.

    That being said, the president deserves at least some of his lumps, if for no other reason than because he’s where the buck stops. Yet this buck has stopped a few places before landing on Biden’s desk, but you’d never know it listening to the broadcasts or reading the boiling-oil editorials.

    Former President Obama has barely merited a mention, despite having presided over and expanded this war, and despite having clearly failed to end it. Former President Trump signed a half-assed peace deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, which essentially handcuffed the Biden administration to some form of the current outcome.

    The top-page motive behind Trump’s deal in Doha, according to BBC News: “The move would allow US President Donald Trump to show that he has brought troops home ahead of the US presidential election in November.” The GOP is so proud of all this, in fact, that they removed an RNC web page praising Trump for the deal.

    And let us not forget the biggest soup bone in this particular stew, though the corporate “news” media devoutly wishes we would. You will be heartened to know that George W. Bush and his wife Laura have been “watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness.” One would hope so. After all, here is the man who started the war, and then abandoned it for his Iraq misadventure without ending it, leaving office with the Afghanistan mission a rudderless mess that set the tone for the next dozen years to come.

    Journalist Eric Boehlert has some thoughts:

    The U.S. has spent trillions in Afghanistan stretching back 20 years, yet Biden, who has been in office for seven months and who campaigned on bringing the troops home, is being tagged as an architect for the Taliban’s inevitable rise to power there. A convenient, gaping hole in the coverage and commentary? The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was unalterably damaged when President George W. Bush hijacked that post-9/11 military mission and foolishly turned the Pentagon’s time, attention, and resources to a doomed invasion of Iraq….

    Today the media’s role in marketing the Iraq War has been flushed down the memory hole, even though Iraq should be central to any discussion about the U.S.’s running failure in Afghanistan. “Remarkably, the word ‘Bush’ was not mentioned once on any of the Sunday shows” this weekend as they focused nonstop on Afghanistan, noted Jon Allsop, at the Columbia Journalism Review. You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.

    There is more to this than the corporate “news” media’s self-serving, myopic coverage. The United States lost the war in Afghanistan, just as we lost the war in Iraq, just as we lost the war in Vietnam not so terribly damn long ago. These wars represent more than 60 years of profiteering to the benefit of a preciously guarded few, while the rest of us drown in the blood and soot of aftermath.

    These things are not discussed by the corporate “news.” Bad for business, you see.

    However, if you are looking for a bit of context, here is some to consider: After the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S.S.R. collapsed and ceased to exist only two years later. The Soviet Union’s war was ten years shorter than ours, and it was not contending with viral variants of COVID-19 when it left.

    I doubt the corporate “news” media will talk about that, either, but it’s the truth.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Deadly US Air War in Afghanistan Helped Taliban Gain New Recruits

    Investigative journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported extensively in Afghanistan, says President Joe Biden has not yet addressed the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the Afghan government. In remarks on Monday, Biden “really focused on the decision to end the war” and ignored criticism about chaos at the Kabul airport and the abandonment of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. over the last 20 years. “None of that was really discussed in any detail,” Khan says. She also discusses why the Afghan military fell so quickly to the Taliban, its overreliance on U.S. air power, how civilian casualties weakened support for the U.S.-backed government, and the massive profits the two-decade-long war generated for U.S. defense contractors.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: Let’s bring in Azmat Khan, the investigative reporter, who’s covered Afghanistan for years. Your response to President Biden, to the complete chaos at the airport, the thousands of Afghans who are trying to leave, and the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, overall?

    AZMAT KHAN: So, President Biden really focused on the decision to end the war, and not on that searing criticism of this withdrawal, the chaos we’re seeing at the airport, the leaving behind of many people to whom the United States had made promises, people like translators, people like local journalists who were working with American journalists, as well as activists, who now face not just great uncertainty, like was earlier being talked about, but significant threats to their lives and safety. So, none of that was really discussed in any detail.

    But I think another omission that really needs to be highlighted is the fact that President Biden took this negative view of Afghan security forces for, quote, “not fighting,” and that’s not accurate. You know, as the earlier speaker was describing, many Afghan soldiers have died fighting the Taliban over the last 20 years, countless, whereas American soldiers, since Operation Freedom’s Sentinel began in 2015, you know, we’ve lost 64 American soldiers in hostile deaths in Afghanistan. So there is a real disparity about who was paying that human costs of that fight, at least from the side that’s fighting the Taliban.

    But at the same time, what he didn’t acknowledge was the fact that the entire way that those soldiers were doing that fight was with the support of U.S. air power. So, the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate. So, even with incredible bombs dropping, you know, this was the deal they were able to get. And even then, look at how many Afghan soldiers were dying. Now, once you take that level of air power out of the mix, who would expect any Afghan soldiers to continue to fight? If that many Afghan soldiers died with the support of air power, what happens when you take that out of the mix?

    Now, on top of that, I just need to say that that air power may have helped keep this tenuous hold that the Afghan government had on the country, but it also killed scores of civilians in rural areas, areas that don’t often get talked about. Nearly three-quarters of Afghanistan is rural countryside. The majority of the population comes from these kinds of areas, populations that have seen the brunt of the war and we rarely hear about. And they’ve suffered not just bombings, airstrikes and night raids, but also Taliban attacks. And many of them wanted this war to end. And you can’t really talk about that air power and the tenuous grip that the government had without also acknowledging the ways in which that has created space for the Taliban, where even civilians who didn’t like the Taliban just wanted the war to end.

    So it kind of makes sense, once you take air power out of the mix, that sort of tenuous hold falls, but at the same time, at this point, the Taliban has resuscitated itself and grown. You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties. So, in many ways, as surprising the swiftness of it was, it also makes sense, what we see happening right now.

    AMY GOODMAN: The Intercept reports that military stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58% during the Afghanistan War, including Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. Quote, “[F]rom the perspective of some of the most powerful people in the U.S., [the Afghanistan War] may have been an extraordinary success. Notably, the boards of directors of all five [military] contractors include retired top-level military officers.” You have written extensively, Azmat, about these contracts and who financially profited from this war.

    AZMAT KHAN: It’s really stunning. It’s incredibly stunning, because people don’t often talk about the massive wealth, the people who maybe went to Afghanistan temporarily, got hazard pay and built themselves homes, wealthy businessmen, military — former military officials — who now, by the way, come on television talk shows to give their views, without concealing necessarily their own — the fact that they’re on boards of many of these defense contractors. So, there has been incredible corruption on the part of many Americans, on the part of many contractors, as well as just on the ground, that has really helped to isolate local people from the Afghan government.

    And so, just to give you some examples, you know, I spent a lot of time investigating U.S.-funded schools in Afghanistan, something that we might consider the kind of untouchable success of the war — right? — that in these 20 years, the United States has radically transformed education for Afghan children, and, in particular, girls. And I really dug into the schools the United States had funded, and picked 50 of them in seven battlefield provinces and went to go see, well, you know, what’s happening at these schools now. And when I would dig into it, I think 10% of the schools either were never built or no longer exist. A vast majority of them were falling apart.

    And then, when I would try to understand what happened — you know, for example, in one case, there was a school that was missing. Turns out it was built in the village of a notorious Afghan police chief who was allied with the United States, Abdul Raziq, known for many human rights abuses. And the local education chief said, “Yes, we built it here, and there were no children in this village for three years, so nobody really attended. The school never opened for a number of years.”

    In another instance, the school I arrived at was empty, incomplete, never finished, and all the kids were across the street at a mosque having a religious education, not the curriculum that they were on the books as recording having had. And when I tried to figure out what happened, it turned out the contract for the school went to the brother of the district governor, who then, you know, pilfered the money, and it was never finished as a result of that.

    Down the block in another part of Kandahar, the contract for a school was given to a notorious local warlord, who’s — actually, for the clinic that was going to be built next to the school — was given to this notorious warlord, who basically wound up being the source for the rise of the Taliban in many ways. His family was part of that sort of corruption in the early years that preceded the Taliban, that really riled up individuals to support the Taliban because of the massive corruption and the human rights abuses that were happening to Afghan people.

    So, even something as noble and as worthy of effort as education has been mired in this kind of corruption, this kind of wheeling and dealing. And if we had to understand why, I think it’s the fact that counterterrorism goals were baked into every single aspect of the American project in Afghanistan. So, even something great like schools, you know, had these metrics, had this desire to imbue a counterterrorism narrative of some kind, that left them willing to work with people who were abusive actors in the name of fighting terrorism, when in reality they often undercut Afghan people and a lot of the promises of the United States at on almost every level.

    AMY GOODMAN: Azmat Khan, I want to thank you for being with us and give Lieutenant [sic] Colonel Ann Wright the final word. As you speak to us now from Honolulu,, from Hawaii, and you look at what’s happening in Afghanistan, where you were almost two decades ago, what you think needs to happen, and what you think Americans should understand about the U.S. War in Afghanistan?

    ANN WRIGHT: Well, I think that the U.S. public ought to be very wary of every administration that thinks that we should take a military option in trying to resolve any sort of conflict. We have seen that the United States in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan — the lies that are told to us about why we need to go into countries with our military versus having some nonmilitary resolution to these issues is really, really important, and particularly as we face our government right now that’s saying that China and Russia are enemies that are threats to our national security. We, the U.S. people, have to push back against our government, against any more military invasions, occupations, attacks on any country.

    And my heart goes out, it bleeds for the people of Afghanistan, who have suffered through these decades long of war, of violence. And I certainly hope that the next years somehow calm down and that the Taliban takes a very different tact than what it had when it was in power from 1996 to 2001, because the people of Afghanistan deserve much better than what they have had. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, and of course we’ll continue to cover this. I demoted you, Ann. Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. State Department official who was part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001. And Azmat Khan, investigative reporter, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, we’ll link to your articles, including the one you described, “Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools.”

    When we come back, we go to Haiti, where the tropical storm has slammed the same parts of the country shattered by the earthquake on Saturday that’s killed more than 1,400 people. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Policy Toward Afghanistan Was a Recipe for Collapse From the Start

    George W. Bush

    We must not allow the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan to be used to rewrite history and teach the wrong lessons.

    The rapid fall of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan and the takeover of that country by Taliban extremists has stunned the world. President Joe Biden has nevertheless defended his decision to withdraw U.S. forces, arguing that Americans should not be forced to fight and die for a government when Afghans were themselves unwilling to do so.

    Yes, the Biden administration grossly miscalculated how quickly Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban and there should be a thorough investigation. And there should have been broad, concrete plans to open the U.S. to Afghan refugees, as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Barbara Lee are now proposing. However, Biden was still correct to follow through with Donald Trump’s agreement to withdraw U.S. forces, which polls show had the support of nearly three-quarters of the American public.

    We must not erase the U.S.’s longtime role in the creation of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan: The current chaos and violence have been nearly 20 years in the making. Indeed, Biden actually delayed the withdrawal for several months beyond Trump’s May deadline, making claims by the former president and his supporters that Biden had suddenly decided to “surrender” to the Taliban particularly absurd.

    Gerald Ford is generally not blamed for the Communist victory in Vietnam simply because he was president at the time the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon finally collapsed. Similarly, Biden should not be primarily blamed for the Taliban victory in Afghanistan.

    The Afghan army officially had 300,000 troops, four times the number of Taliban soldiers. In addition, they had an air force, heavy weapons and had received hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of training, weaponry and equipment from the world’s military superpower. By contrast, the Taliban had no significant foreign backing, no air force, and only light weaponry they had captured or otherwise managed to procure through underground means. Similarly, since there were only 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for most of the past year, their withdrawal should not have made much of a difference in terms of the strategic balance.

    Militarily speaking, there was no reason for the Afghan government to lose and little more the United States could do. This was not, therefore, a military victory by the Taliban. It was the political collapse of the U.S.-backed regime. It is hard to imagine that, after nearly 20 years of U.S. support, had Biden decided to send more arms, more money or more troops, it would have led to a different outcome.

    University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, one of the more prescient observers of U.S. policy in the greater Middle East in recent decades, described the United States’ policy in Afghanistan as essentially a Ponzi scheme based on an unsustainable system utterly dependent on foreign support in which an eventual collapse was inevitable.

    While Biden was correct to point out the corruption and ineptitude of the Afghan government, he unfortunately failed to acknowledge how the United States was largely responsible for setting up and maintaining that decrepit system. And the costs were huge: over $1 trillion, 2,500 Americans killed, 1,000 other NATO soldiers, 4,000 civilian contractors, 70,000 Afghan soldiers and police, and 47,000 civilians.

    It would be ironic if — given Biden’s strident support for the invasion of Iraq, his defense of Israel’s recent war on Gaza, his insistence on maintaining an obscenely bloated military budget, his backing of allied military dictatorships, his providing jet fighters to those responsible for the terror bombing of Yemen, and other policies — a narrative takes hold that he is not militaristic enough.

    There are certainly areas regarding Afghanistan policy for which Biden should be criticized, such as the failure to adequately prepare for such a quick collapse of the regime in terms of evacuating Afghan translators, government officials, human rights activists and others now at serious personal risks under Taliban rule. In addition, he should have never supported the September 2001 war authorization which went well beyond targeting Al-Qaeda and left the door open for decades of open-ended conflict in Afghanistan. On that war resolution, of course, he was certainly not alone: only one of the 535 members of Congress voted against that resolution, despite people like me warning at that time that sending U.S. ground forces into Afghanistan would result in “an unwinnable counter-insurgency war in a hostile terrain against a people with a long history of resisting outsiders.”

    Even more problematic was Biden’s key role in pushing the 2002 Iraq War Authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate, which — unlike the authorization for the war in Afghanistan — was opposed by the majority of congressional Democrats. The Taliban had essentially been defeated by that time. However, the George W. Bush administration, supported by then-Senator Biden and some others, decided not to finish the job but to instead put the focus of our troops, our generals, our intelligence, our satellites, our money, and pretty much everything else on invading and occupying Iraq. It was during the years of counter-insurgency war in Iraq that the Taliban made their comeback, crossing back over from Pakistan to re-consolidate their control in rural Afghanistan and begin their gradual takeover of the country, culminating in their recent takeover. If the Bush administration and its congressional allies like Biden hadn’t insisted on invading Iraq, the Taliban might have remained a small exile group in the Pakistani tribal lands.

    The Washington Post has published a series of articles on how, particularly under President Bush, the U.S. government systematically lied to the American people about the supposed progress being made in the Afghan War. Despite claims of strategic gains by U.S. and Afghan government forces, the heavy bombing of the countryside, the search-and-destroy operations, the raids on villages, and the tolerance for rampant corruption ended up alienating much of the Afghan population from the United States and its allies in Kabul. Much of the Taliban’s support over the past decade has come not from the small minority of Afghans who embrace their reactionary misogynist ideology, but those who saw them as the vanguard of resistance against foreign occupiers and their corrupt puppet government. The United States allied with warlords, opium magnates, ethnic militias, and other unrepresentative leaders simply due to their opposition to the Taliban and with little input from ordinary Afghans themselves.

    In my nearly 20 years of working with Afghans and Afghan Americans, including those from prominent political families, my strong sense is that most them supported an active and ongoing U.S. role in Afghanistan in principle, but believed that it should have been about 10 percent military and 90 percent focused on grassroots political and sustainable economic development, especially empowering civil society. Instead, U.S. funding and the overall focus of U.S. officials was 90 percent military, and much of the development work consisted of top-down projects of dubious merit through corrupt elites.

    And no analysis of the Afghan tragedy would be complete without observing how the United States played a critical role in the emergence of the Taliban in the first place: In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was less interested in liberating the Afghan people from the Soviet-backed Communist dictatorship than they were prolonging a counter-insurgency war that would weaken the United States’ superpower rival. They figured that the most hardline elements of the anti-Communist resistance were less likely to reach a negotiated settlement. Of the six major mujahidin groups fighting the Afghan government and its Soviet allies, 80 percent of U.S. money and arms went to Hesb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who subsequently became a close Taliban ally. For similar reasons, the United States and its Saudi allies promoted religious studies along extremist and militaristic lines among Afghan refugees in Pakistan, out of which emerged the Taliban — the Pashtun word for “students” — in the 1990s.

    There is plenty of blame to go around for the tragic turn of events in Afghanistan. It should not, however, be focused on Biden’s reasonable refusal to break off the withdrawal agreement of his predecessor, which would have inevitably led to the resumption of never-ending combat operations by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

    As reports of Taliban atrocities come out in the coming weeks, months and years, we must not allow the advance of a narrative which argues that the U.S. war in Afghanistan should have been bigger and longer or that Biden is inadequately supportive of U.S. military intervention overseas. While we should certainly hold Biden accountable for his role in initiating and fueling this war, it’s also important to refute spurious accusations from the right, which could lead future presidents to needlessly prolong unwinnable wars.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Year of Afghanistan War Spending Could Resettle 1.2 Million Refugees

    Refugees line up at night to board a plane

    As the Biden administration faces criticism for not doing enough to assist those fleeing Afghanistan, an analysis released Monday showed that the roughly $19 billion the Pentagon budgeted for the U.S. occupation of the country in 2020 alone could cover initial resettlement costs for 1.2 million refugees.

    Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project estimated that the $18.6 billion the Pentagon allocated for its 2020 operations in Afghanistan — where the Taliban is in the process of retaking power after two decades of deadly U.S. occupation — could pay up-front refugee relocation costs of $15,148 for the more than “250,000 Afghans displaced since the end of May (and growing)” and “a significant chunk of the 3.5 million Afghans who were internally displaced as of July.”

    “Refugees typically receive some assistance after their arrival, but even if we expanded to cover an additional four years of the approximately $4,600 in annualized social service aid that refugees typically receive, we could still resettle more than half a million people, for just one year’s worth of the cost of fighting,” Koshgarian noted. “We’d face even lower costs to help resettle Afghans in countries closer to home — all the more reason after 20 years of war to step up with some serious resources and get it done.”

    “After twenty years,” she added, “we owe the Afghan people at least that much.”

    The analysis came as progressive lawmakers in the U.S. and global humanitarian organizations implored the Biden administration to open the U.S. to vulnerable Afghans attempting to escape a growing humanitarian crisis and Taliban rule. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 80% of those currently trying to flee Afghanistan are women and children.

    In a speech on Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden said that “in the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more [Special Immigrant Visa]-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.” The Pentagon confirmed Monday that it is planning to house up to 22,000 Afghans at two U.S. bases — Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.

    “We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy: U.S. non-governmental agencies — or the U.S. non-governmental organizations; and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk; and U.S. news agencies,” the president added.

    Following his remarks, Biden directed the U.S. State Department to use up to $500 million from the nation’s Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund to meet “unexpected urgent refugee and migration needs of refugees, victims of conflict, and other persons at risk as a result of the situation in Afghanistan, including applicants for Special Immigrant Visas.”

    But critics have accused the Biden administration of failing to adequately plan for the rapid collapse of the Afghan government that followed the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country — a still-deteriorating situation that has left countless people in limbo as they seek safety for themselves and their families.

    In his speech Monday, Biden claimed the administration didn’t begin evacuating at-risk civilians sooner “because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.’”

    Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department expanded eligibility for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, opening it to tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for U.S. government contractors, U.S.-based media outlets, and U.S.-based non-governmental organizations. The families of eligible Afghans also have access to the program, whose application process consists of an arduous 14 steps.

    And as the Wall Street Journal observed on Monday, the program excludes the poorest Afghans by design. “To claim refugee status,” the Journal noted, “the Afghans must enter through a third country and cover the costs of travel and lodging on their own — a hurdle that is nearly impossible to surmount under the current, chaotic circumstances.”

    In a letter to Biden on Monday, the advocacy organization Refugees International called on the administration to “express its willingness initially to resettle up to 200,000 Afghan refugees, as part of an international responsibility-sharing effort to rescue and resettle Afghans at risk.”

    “While most would be resettled from countries of asylum,” the group wrote, “a program ultimately could involve direct resettlement from Afghanistan, akin to the Orderly Departure program that resulted in the resettlement of many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese directly from their country of origin.”

    Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), part of a chorus of progressive lawmakers pushing Biden to do more to welcome refugees — in addition to ending the interventionist foreign policy approach that creates such humanitarian crises — noted in a tweet Monday that the U.S. “welcomed 120,000 refugees in a single year” in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

    “Yet the United States has only taken in ~2,000 Afghan refugees thus far,” Bush wrote. “We have a duty to save lives — and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Wondering who benefited from the war in Afghanistan? They’ll be meeting in London next month.

    As the Taliban take over Kabul’s presidential palace, you’d be forgiven for wondering who it is that two decades of war and foreign occupation has benefited.

    In 2001, the US, UK, and their allies invaded Afghanistan. The invasion certainly hasn’t benefited the people of Afghanistan; since 2001, an estimated 47,245 civilians have been killed.

    Most people in the US haven’t benefited either, with $2.261tn spent on the war, and 2,442 military personnel killed.

    Neither has it helped ordinary people in the UK. More than 450 British soldiers have been killed, and in 2013, the estimated cost of the UK’s war in Afghanistan stood at £37bn. Most UK combat troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2014, but 750 remained until this summer as part of NATO’s force.

    So who has benefited?

    One of the groups of people who have clearly benefited from two decades of war are the CEOs and directors of international arms companies.

    For example, British weapons company BAE’s profits shot up after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Many of the people who’ve been at the helm of the UK’s Afghanistan policy have also directly had skin in the arms game.

    Defence secretary Ben Wallace cried crocodile tears on LBC recently. But what he didn’t mention is that he used to be a director of QinetiQ, an arms company whose share prices were soaring 11 years ago after it gained contracts to supply weapons for the war in Afghanistan. British rapper Lowkey tweeted:

    The revolving door goes the other way too. Data from Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) shows that 196 ex-public servants are now in arms trade jobs.

    And they’re meeting in London this September

    From 14-17 September, one of the world’s largest arms fairs is coming back to London’s Docklands. At least 1,700 arms companies will be exhibiting, and official delegations and government employees from the UK and abroad will be doing their shopping. No doubt the industry attendees will be counting their profits from two decades of war in Afghanistan and looking for new conflicts to exploit.

    It’s worth remembering that the Defence Security and Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair was underway 20 years ago, on 11 September 2001, when the planes hit the World Trade Center and lit the spark which paved the way for the US’s disastrous ‘War on Terror’.

    One person who was at the demonstration back in 2001 reflected:

    On [September 11] I was among about the hundreds of people taking part in a protest organised by CAAT outside the DSEi arms fair. Many events were cancelled that day and in the following days and weeks. Sports events, cultural events, political events, the UN Special session on Children, which I was had been doing some work around  –  all these we cancelled. The arms fair however, continued.  More deals were signed and more arms contacts were made even in the light of that awful mass killing.

    Whilst the fact that there was a major arms fair taking place in the UK at the very same time as this awful act of terrorism was something of a coincidence I think there are [connections] here. I think there are real connections between for example, our proliferation of weaponry through the arms trade and our real insistence – despite all evidence to the contrary –  that world security is best served by an ever increasing ability to inflict death and destruction on others  – and that  desperate, awful, self-destructive act of mass violence.

    The Canary‘s senior editor, Emily Apple, was also at the protests that week:

    On 12 September, share prices across the world had crashed and many major events were cancelled. But DSEI continued and arms company share prices soared. So we were back on the streets, blockading arms dealers from reaching the fair. We were told by the police that we should be ashamed of ourselves, that we had no respect for the dead because we were out protesting. But they didn’t think to question the fact that DSEI continued, didn’t care that those who’d make obscene profits from the attack, and the inevitable subsequent war, were continuing their business as usual.

    Two decades of resistance

    DSEI has encountered over two decades of mass street resistance. As the US’s ‘War on Terror’ got underway – a smokescreen for neo-colonial foreign policies – thousands took to the streets. Shoal Collective interviewed anti-militarist organiser Sam Hayward in Red Pepper:

    That year, millions of people were involved in the opposition to the invasion of Iraq,’ Sam says. ‘When the war began it wasn’t clear how to oppose it and many anti-militarist activists fell away, not knowing what to do. I started thinking about how imperialist wars couldn’t happen without the weapons being manufactured and sold by the arms companies — beneficiaries of aggressive imperialist wars.’

    One tactic at DSEI 2003 was to stop the arms dealers from getting to the ExCeL Centre. Sam explains how this happened: ‘Activists climbed onto the roofs of DLR trains and locked themselves on, stopping the trains. As a result, the arms dealers were brought in on buses. Protesters stopped the buses, laying down in front of them. Delegates started arriving by taxi and on foot, so people blocked the roads. There were thousands of activists involved. It was successful in delaying the arms dealers getting there, but ultimately the arms fair still took place’.

    In 2011, anti-militarists rowed kayaks into the path of a battleship, which was on the way to be used as a reception area at the DSEI arms fair. One of them told Red Pepper: 

    Four of us launched inflatable kayaks from a hidden spot in the Thames, so we were on our way before the river police spotted us. The ship was equivalent to about three storeys tall.

    “blocking the DSEI arms fair is an obligation”

    In 2019, I joined the resistance against DSEI along with several other writers from The Canary. One of them was Canary journalist Eliza Egret, who wrote at the time:

    For me, blocking the DSEI arms fair is an obligation. My activism and writing has taken me to Palestine, Kurdistan and Syria. I have seen first-hand the devastation caused by this sickening arms industry. I have interviewed families whose children have been murdered with weapons made in Europe. I have met a 10-year-old boy who miraculously survived after an Israeli sniper shot a bullet through his brain. I have had tear gas and sound grenades fired at me in Palestine, and I have been surrounded by armoured vehicles in Kurdistan. I have stood on rubble that was once family homes, and I have seen human blood splattered on the walls of buildings.

    So it is my duty to take action against this disgusting weapons exhibition. As I write this, arms deals are being made, mostly by privileged men who have never had to experience the terror of living in a war zone.

    Two of us from The Canary also launched kayaks on to the water and disrupted a military boat display by BAE Systems at the fair.

    Join us at DSEI 2021

    In 2021, campaign group Stop the Arms Fair is calling for people to take action to disrupt the setting up of the arms fair. The set-up of DSEI is a major operation, as the exhibition itself takes place on 100,000 square metres of land at the ExCeL Centre in London’s Docklands. It set out some of the actions that have happened in previous years:

    As lorries and trucks transporting armoured vehicles, missiles, sniper rifles, tear gas and bullets attempted to get on site, people from around the world were there to put their bodies in the way.

    Dabke-dancing, aerobics, an academic conference, a gig on a flatbed truck, abseilers dangling from a bridge, theatre, military veterans undertaking unofficial vehicle checks for banned weapons, Kurdish dancers, rebel clowns, religious gatherings, hip-hop artists, radical picnics, a critical mass of cyclists, Daleks, political choirs, and lots of people in arm-locks all blocked the entrances to the DSEI arms fair repeatedly over the course of a whole week.

    Thousands more amplified the protests by signing petitions, lobbying decision-makers, speaking out online and in their own communities, and helping in diverse ways to make the protests possible.

    In September, arms dealers, many of whom will have profited from Afghanistan, will be coming together to make more deals that will cause more war and suffering.  It’s important to be there to resist the fair, and to show solidarity with those who are under attack by state militaries armed with weapons bought at DSEI.

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Now Would Be A Great Time For George W Bush To Shut The Fuck Up

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    George W Bush has issued a statement on the situation in Afghanistan, and there are not enough shoes in the world to adequately respond to it.

    “Laura and I have been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness,” the Hague fugitive writes. “Our hearts are heavy for both the Afghan people who have suffered so much and for the Americans and NATO allies who have sacrificed so much.”

    Bush tells the US Armed Forces, diplomatic corps, and intelligence community how proud he and his wife are of their “sacrifice” and “courage” and that they “kept America safe” and “made America proud” with their decades-long occupation which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people very rich. And, it won’t surprise you to learn, the statement contains exactly zero apologies to anyone for anything.

    Can you believe this person? Imagine being George W Bush in the middle of August 2021 and saying to yourself, “I know just what people need: a pep talk on Afghanistan from me, George W Bush!”

    I mean, the gall. The absolute gall.

    This is after all the same man who ordered the disastrous invasion in the first place under the justification of the plot hole-riddled 9/11 narrative after already having decided to oust the Taliban a month before the towers came down. The same man who rejected the Taliban’s offer to turn over Osama Bin Laden in October 2001 if the US would just show proof that he is guilty and end its bombing campaign. The same man who repeatedly rejected Taliban offers to surrender after the invasion began. The same man who initiated decades of lies about what was happening in Afghanistan in order to justify an occupation maintained for power and profit.

    And after all that phony hand-wringing about “the oppressed people of Afghanistan“, the United States is after twenty years of occupation leaving the Afghan people the single most miserable population of any nation on earth. After all that phony hand-wringing about “the Taliban’s war on women“, Afghanistan has remained the worst place in the world to be a woman throughout the entirety of the occupation.

    And it is entirely the fault of the US-centralized empire. The Taliban only came to power in the first place because the US backed their predecessors (whom they also actively radicalized) against the Soviet Union and its leftist Afghan allies in the eighties, then Bush invaded and rained explosives from the sky for twenty years, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

    After four decades of interventionism and two decades of full-scale occupation following generations of shocking savagery and terrorism being inflicted upon the Afghan people by the British, it is perfectly fair to say that one hundred percent of Afghanistan’s problems today can be blamed entirely on the US and its allies.

    So now, as the nation reverts back to Taliban control after a long and sadistic intermission and many Afghans are so fearful that some fell to their deaths desperately clinging to departing US military planes, it would be a fantastic time for George W Bush to shut the fuck up.

    But George W Bush did not shut the fuck up. Not only did George W Bush not shut the fuck up, but Bush administration war architects like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz are being interviewed by the mass media for their opinions on whether it was wise to finally end one of Bush’s wars. Bolton was given a platform on NPR to tell the world that the withdrawal is a “catastrophic failure of American leadership” and that the US should intervene to oust the Taliban once again. Wolfowitz was interviewed by BBC Radio where he said he feels “deep trepidation” about the withdrawal and called it a boon to China and to terrorists everywhere.

    Yeah that’s sane and normal. Hello I’m a very serious newscaster; now here to explain what’s happening in Afghanistan let’s turn to a Bush administration PNAC neocon who’s helped create mountains of corpses and who is literally always wrong about literally everything. This could only happen in a media environment where blatant war propaganda is routinely disguised as news reporting.

    What the US empire has done to Afghanistan is unforgivable. Utterly unforgivable. Never forgive those monsters. Never forget what they did to that poor country. Never forget that the next time you are asked to support another act of US military interventionism it will with absolute certainty be based on lies, fail to accomplish what its proponents claim, end in disaster, result in many broken promises to all parties involved, cost trillions of dollars, and benefit nobody but the very worst among us.

    ________________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Facebook confirms ban of Taliban-related content

    BBC/ Web Desk:

    The rapid takeover of Afghanistan raises fresh challenges for technology firms on how to deal with content related to the group.

    “The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies. This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them,” a Facebook spokesperson told the BBC.

    According to the BBC, Facebook says it has a dedicated team of Afghan experts to monitor and remove content linked to the group.

    “We also have a dedicated team of Afghanistan experts, who are native Dari and Pashto speakers and have knowledge of local context, helping to identify and alert us to emerging issues on the platform,” they added.

    The social media giant said it does not make decisions about the recognition of national governments but instead follows the “authority of the international community”.

    Facebook highlighted that the policy applies to all of its platforms including its flagship social media network, Instagram and WhatsApp. However, there are reports that the Taliban is using WhatsApp to communicate. Facebook told the BBC that it would take action if it found accounts on the app to be linked to the group.

    Rival social media platforms have also come under scrutiny over how they handle Taliban-related content.

    In response to BBC questions about the Taliban’s use of Twitter, a company spokesperson highlighted policies against violent organizations and hateful conduct. According to its rules, Twitter does not allow groups that promote terrorism or violence against civilians.

    YouTube did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment on its policies in respect to the Taliban.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • JERAA calls for urgent action to support Afghan journalists

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Journalism Research and Education Association of Australia (JERAA) has urged the Australian government to make a strong commitment to supporting journalists and media personnel in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of international forces.

    JERAA said in a statement today it had endorsed the calls of Australia’s Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) and International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) for urgent action to provide humanitarian visas and other support to those attempting to flee the country.

    In the current upheaval, it is difficult to obtain figures on how many journalists have been attacked, but the Afghan Independent Journalist Association and Afghanistan’s National Journalists Union express grave concerns for the well-being of journalists and media personnel.

    Nai, an Afghan organisation supporting independent media, released figures indicating that by late July, at least 30 media workers had been killed, wounded or tortured in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2021.

    UNESCO has recorded five deaths of journalists in Afghanistan in 2021, making it the country with the world’s greatest number of journalists’ deaths this year. Four have been women, reflecting the higher risk of attacks on female journalists.

    Current figures are likely to be incomplete due to the challenges of obtaining information. They do not include deaths of professionals in related industries, such as the murder of the Head of Afghan government Media and Information Centre on August 6.

    The Taliban has a long-established pattern of striking out against journalists.

    A Human Rights Watch report, released in April 2021, in the lead up to the United States and NATO troop withdrawal, noted that Taliban forces had already established a practice of targeting journalists and other media workers.

    Journalists are intimidated, harassed and attacked routinely by the Taliban, which regularly accuses them of being aligned with the Afghan government or international military forces or being spies.

    Female journalists face a higher level of threats, especially if they have appeared on television and radio.

    International Press Institute figures, released in May 2021 at the start of the troop withdrawals, also showed that Afghanistan had the highest rate of deaths of journalists in the world.

    The IPI expressed concern about an intensification of attacks on journalists and the future of the news media in Afghanistan.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Taliban victory the product of US-NATO intervention

    If any proof was needed that the Afghani government was a puppet of Washington, it was shown by its quick collapse, writes Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • US must protect Afghan journalists as Taliban take power

    Hundreds seek assistance, relocation amid threat from militant group

    New York, August 16, 2021 – The United States must do more to ensure the safety of Afghan journalists as the county falls under the control of the Taliban, including facilitating safe passage out of the country and providing emergency visas, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ is deeply concerned for the safety of hundreds of local journalists and media workers who could be targeted by the emerging Taliban regime.

    “The United States has a special responsibility to Afghan journalists who created a thriving and vibrant information space and covered events in their country for international media,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “The Biden administration can and should do all within its power to protect press freedom and stand up for the rights of the vulnerable Afghan reporters, photographers, and media workers.”

    CPJ has registered and vetted the cases of nearly 300 journalists who are attempting to reach safety, and there are hundreds more whose cases are under review. Because of the deteriorating security situation at the airport, only a handful have been able to board a flight to the U.S. or a third country where their visa requests can begin being processed. The vast majority of threatened journalists remain in hiding.

    Afghan journalists working with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have been unable to board a flight out of the country, the Post reported today. In a joint statement sent to President Biden, the news outlets called on the U.S. to do more to guarantee safe passage out of the country for journalists and media workers who have supported their news operations.

    “The international community’s understanding of what is happening in Afghanistan will depend on the survival of what was once a thriving independent press, even if much of the reporting takes place from exile,” Simon continued. “The local knowledge of Afghan journalists cannot be replaced.”

    CPJ has long advocated globally for emergency visas for journalists at risk precisely to avoid temporary or improvised responses when new threats emerge.

    To date, CPJ has registered and vetted 45 high priority cases of Afghan journalists in which the threat from the Taliban is clear and imminent. Many are female journalists whose record of reporting on women’s rights has exacerbated the risk. CPJ has also registered and vetted 127 other cases of Afghan media members who face significant risk, along with 119 journalists affiliated with U.S. news organizations. CPJ’s list of cases does not take into account family members who would also be eligible for relocation. Over the last 24 hours, CPJ has received an additional 475 email requests for assistance, which are undergoing review.

    Note to editors:

    In recent days, CPJ intensified its collaboration with government officials and a broad network of local and global partners to provide emergency assistance and bring Afghan journalists to safety. Information about these journalists has been made available to the U.S. and several other governments willing to evacuate or accept journalists.

    In Afghanistan, at least 53 journalists have been killed since 2001, and five were killed last year alone, CPJ research shows. Requests for help from Afghan journalists have been coming in to CPJ since the start of the year and have increased as the U.S. and NATO troop withdrawal drew nearer and Taliban militants expanded control over the country.

    ###

    Press contact

    Bebe Santa-Wood

    Senior Communications Associate

    917-972-3305


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.