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Category: Afghanistan

  • 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.

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    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.

  • GOP Quietly Deletes Praise for Trump-Taliban Deal From RNC Website

    Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in Manhattan on August 15, 2021 in New York City.

    The Republican National Committee (RNC) removed a webpage praising former President Donald Trump for making a “historic peace agreement” with the Taliban on Monday amid chaos as the group took over the Afghanistan government.

    The page, according to the archival Wayback Machine, was removed on August 15 as the Taliban surrounded Kabul. In an article entitled “President Trump Is Bringing Peace To The Middle East,” the RNC touted a “historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan” made by Trump.

    Though critics argued the agreement didn’t contain enough concessions from the Taliban to be worthwhile for the U.S., it still signalled the beginning of troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which progressives have been pushing for decades. President Obama had pledged but failed to follow through on withdrawing from Afghanistan and it was only after the agreement last year, that Trump began withdrawing troops from the country.

    The RNC deputy chief of staff Mike Reed said that the RNC web page was taken down because the organization is moving to a new website and that its removal on Sunday was a coincidence. But Republican lawmakers and the RNC have also appeared to be reversing course on the issue in recent days, saying now that withdrawing from Afghanistan is a mistake.

    “With the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, America is now less safe. This is the latest real world, horrific consequence of Biden’s weak foreign policy,” tweeted the RNC on Monday.

    Meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers have also reversed course on the issue, as the American Independent pointed out. Rep. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) tweeted in February that Trump’s agreement is “a sign of progress, and a step toward being able to bring our troops home.” But on Sunday, she pinned the entire situation on Biden, criticizing his “rapid and haphazard withdrawal of American troops.”

    Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) took an even sharper heel turn. In February, she tweeted criticism of Biden’s plan to extend the full troop withdrawal to September after it was originally planned for May — an extension that was arguably necessitated by a lack of planning from the Trump administration. Still, Boebert said, “We’ve been in Afghanistan for more than half my life. We need to end the endless wars.”

    By Sunday, Boebert had a different stance — though still, somehow, critical of Biden. “Joe Biden was in the Senate when America pulled out of Saigon in 1975. He didn’t learn,” she said.

    Trump also did a swift turnaround on the withdrawal strategy to criticize Biden. Back in April Trump had said that continuing to withdraw troops was “a wonderful and positive thing to do” while criticizing Biden’s timeline. On Saturday, however, Trump criticized Biden for “[running] out of Afghanistan” and not following Trump’s timeline — though Trump’s deadline passed three months ago.

    It’s hard to say whether or not any troop withdrawal from the country would have caused the current outcome. Biden could likely have taken more precautions, especially with regards to refugees, in the event that the Taliban did take over, but judging by his comments earlier this year, he seemed confident that it wouldn’t happen.

    Biden has said that he was withdrawing because, as progressives have warned over the years, there is no good militaristic solution to the situation. “I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” Biden said in July. Though it appears that his administration had miscalculated the risk of a Taliban takeover, it also didn’t give in to the decades-old lies about the U.S. in Afghanistan holding back terrorism and creating peace.

    Biden re-emphasized that position on Monday in remarks about the Taliban takeover. “Truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” he said. “If anything, the developments in the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

    The president then promised to end American occupation of the country. “I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rapid Taliban Takeover Shows How Little US Understood Afghanistan

    No doubt many Afghans fear a resumption of Taliban rule after two decades, with its draconian rules against music, the cinema and girls going to school. But there is a reason why the Afghan military dissolved before the advancing Taliban, putting up no resistance whatsoever, despite Washington banking on them holding out for at least a month: the Taliban may be rotten but they are Afghans. They may impose an unpopular, repressive regime but they are not a foreign occupation force.

    The post Rapid Taliban Takeover Shows How Little US Understood Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Afghanistan’s Promising Socialist Future Killed Off By U.S. Imperialism

    Since the horrific events of Sept. 11, much has been said about the desperate situation of the Afghani people now crushed under the heel of the theocratic, dictatorial Taliban, and about the role of the Northern Alliance and other Taliban opponents who now figure in Washington’s plans for the region. There has been talk, most of it distorted, about the role of the Soviet Union in the years from 1978 to 1989. There has been talk, most of it understated, about the role of the U.S. in building up the Mujahideen forces, including the Taliban.

    The post Afghanistan’s Promising Socialist Future Killed Off By U.S. Imperialism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Afghanistan Shenanigans

    “It’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Taliban would regain control of the country when occupying western powers withdrew, but I don’t think anyone would’ve put money on it happening this quickly. A few interesting questions have come up about this, like for example how hilarious would it be if after spending twenty years and trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives “fighting the Taliban”, the Taliban suddenly resumed power as a US puppet regime?”

    The post Afghanistan Shenanigans appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee Call for Opening US to Refugees From Afghanistan

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), talks with reporters while leaving the U.S. Capitol on Monday, August 9, 2021.

    Progressive lawmakers are calling on the U.S. to accept Afghan refugees as the Taliban has taken over the country, forcing at least thousands of residents to attempt to flee.

    After the Afghanistan government collapsed, the Kabul airport has been flooded with Afghans desperate to flee the country. Particularly striking footage Monday showed hundreds of Afghans attempting to cling to a U.S. Air Force plane that was taking off. Meanwhile, earlier that day in Afghanistan, five people were killed at the Hamid Karzai International Airport amid chaos.

    The United Nations (UN) has warned of a coming refugee crisis as conditions worsen drastically for the people of Afghanistan. It also said that the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who have fled the country over the past months have been women and children.

    Some countries are bracing for the sudden influx of refugees; Canada last week announced that it would be offering refuge to 20,000 Afghans, with an emphasis on women, children and LGBTQ people. Mediterranean countries have requested European Union-level talks on the situation.

    But the U.S. has yet to announce any mass refugee resettlement plans. President Joe Biden has been relatively quiet and, on Friday, Reuters reported that the U.S. is searching for countries willing to temporarily house Afghan refugees who have worked for the U.S. government. The U.S. is reportedly considering other resettlement plans but officials are still discussing details.

    Biden has announced that he will address the nation on Afghanistan on Monday afternoon.

    Progressives on Twitter say that the U.S. should open its doors to refugees immediately — not just because of the morality of the matter, but also because of the U.S’s role in imperializing the country and killing civilians, adding to chaos and destruction in the country over the past two decades.

    “Foreign policy matters: After 20 years of U.S. effort,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), “Afghanistan was left with a corrupt government and an ineffectual military. At this moment, we must do everything we can to evacuate our allies and open our doors to refugees.”

    “If we don’t start putting everyday people first, no matter what country they’re born in, this will keep happening,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) on Sunday. “Let’s start by opening our country to shelter refugees fleeing the consequences of our actions.”

    Tlaib also pointed out that, while the U.S. has waged its forever war in Afghanistan, politicians and arms dealers have profited greatly from the conflict. “Innocent people suffer the horrors of war while political leaders and arms-dealing corporations sit back and make billions,” she said.

    Indeed, on top of the hundreds of thousands of people killed over the past 20 years in the country, the U.S. has also spent over $2.2 trillion on the war, according to research from Brown University.

    Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have profited massively from the U.S.’s military spending over the past decades. Members of Congress with stock in such companies, meanwhile, have profited from the aggressive U.S. defense spending — spending that the lawmakers themselves authorize.

    As Republicans scramble over messaging on Biden’s troop withdrawal from the country, liberal and Republican war hawks alike are saying that the Taliban’s takeover is justification for the U.S. troops to stay in the country, citing lies from American officials that the war is effectual in preventing terrorism.

    Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) pushed back against that idea over the weekend. “What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis. Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan,” she wrote. “Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid and resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children.”

    Indeed, many progressive advocates have said for decades that the U.S. should never have engaged in war in Afghanistan to begin with, arguing that the war would and has done more harm than good, especially to the citizens of Afghanistan.

    Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) argued as such last year when she introduced a proposal to accelerate the U.S.’s withdrawal from the country and end the war. But she was shot down by Republicans and a whopping 103 Democrats in the House who voted down her proposal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Taliban Takes Control, What Comes Next for Afghanistan?

    As the Taliban says it will soon declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after seizing control of the country, we discuss their history with award-winning journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of several books, including Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. “These militants have become very well integrated into Afghan society and into Taliban society,” Rashid notes, and if the U.S. wants to capture them, “it’s going to be extremely difficult.” Rashid also looks at the Taliban’s relationship with China, history of human rights abuses against women and whether they will be allowed to continue their education.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the Taliban seizing control of Afghanistan as thousands of Afghans and foreign nationals are trying to flee Afghanistan from the international airport in Kabul. Earlier today, the Taliban released a video from Mullah Baradar Akhund, one of the founders of the Taliban.

    MULLAH ABDUL GHANI BARADAR: [translated] We congratulate the great victory to the whole Afghan nation, especially to the people of Kabul and to our mujahideens. The way we have come through was unexpected, as we have reached a position which was never expected. But with the help of Allah, that he has given us the victory, and there is nothing like this in the history of the world. So we should thank Allah. We should have no arrogance. Now is a time to trial. We will give services to our nation. We give serenity to the whole nation, that will go as far as possible for the betterment of their lives.

    AMY GOODMAN: Still with us is the award-winning journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of several books, including Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. He’s speaking to us from Madrid, Spain.

    Ahmed Rashid, can you comment on what he has said, and also the fact that Kabul fell with, really, hardly a shot being fired? And there’s clearly a coordination between the Taliban and the U.S. right now at the airport, the Taliban letting the U.S. control that, while it has now moved into the palace because President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.

    AHMED RASHID: Well, the Taliban has been saying for several days now that people have nothing to fear in Kabul, and foreigners have nothing to fear, journalists would be protected, so would women. But the problem is that nobody believed them, which is why we are seeing these horrendous scenes at the airport, people trying to get out. And people are very doubtful that they will remain passive and not take revenge, not carry out revenge killings against, for example, soldiers, officers and people who have resisted the Taliban all this time. And the Taliban has to rebuild its credibility, because, remember, just before this takeover, there were months of assassinations taking place in Kabul of top officials, government officials, journalists, women, activists, that the Taliban were going out of their way to eliminate the educated class. And that created real fear and panic in the whole country, not just in Kabul. So, there’s this legacy of brutality, quite recent, which the Taliban has to mitigate in some form or the other.

    Now, the next stage is obviously going to be humanitarian relief. I hope there’s going to be some help from donors who are going to bring in food and supplies, because there’s a chronic shortage of food, water, medicines and everything in Kabul right now. And, you know, business has stopped. Kabul was isolated for many days. All of the produce that normally comes into the city has not been coming in. And so, there is an urgent need for humanitarian relief, food. But also there has to be a way to distribute it. Will the Taliban be given the reins of all this food, etc., to distribute it themselves, or will it be an international NGO, the United Nations or somebody else be given it? All these things will have to be negotiated very carefully with the Taliban.

    AMY GOODMAN: What have you been, Rashid Ahmed — what have you been, Ahmed Rashid, most shocked by in these last few days? I mean you, who are steeped in history. And then, I started by asking Ali Latifi about that history. But if you can even go back to the founding of the Taliban — we just heard one of the founders of the Taliban — and who exactly they are?

    AHMED RASHID: Well, I was one of the first journalists to meet with the Taliban in ’92, the autumn of ’92. And even then, they wanted to be seen as a very pious group who were fed up with the civil war that the elders were fighting with each other, and they wanted an Afghanistan at peace. And they had two claims when they launched themselves. They said, “We will disarm the population,” a highly popular move at that time, “and we will bring peace to Afghanistan.”

    And they did, initially, I mean, the first year or so, when they conquered most of the south, again, without firing much of a shot, because people were so fed up with the civil war and the brutalities of the warlords that they easily succumbed to the ideas of the Taliban and supported them. It’s later, when the Taliban went up to Kabul to try to conquer Kabul, they changed their political stance very drastically. Before that, they had been saying, “We do not want power. We will not take power. We will disarm the population, bring peace, and then ask our elders to choose a new government.” Now, that was something quite noble at that time. But once they captured Kabul, they went back to becoming yet another warlord, saying, “We will now rule Afghanistan according to our own principles,” which were a form of a Sunni sect called Deobandism.

    Deobandis are very strict followers of the prophet’s life. And they are originated in India and are quite predominant in Pakistan, and that is where a lot of the Taliban learned their religious observance and their very strict adherence to these regulations regarding women, etc. So what we had was a very severe form of Islamic teaching which the Taliban followed, and which none of the rest of the country really had any truck with. They weren’t interested in becoming full Deobandis. The Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras and even many of the Pashtuns had no interest in this. And the Taliban imposed this religious cult, if you like, on everybody else. And that was where the real conflict began.

    And that is what is really upsetting people today in Afghanistan, because they don’t want to see the return of this kind of strict Deobandi Islam, when they practice an altogether different Islam. And they’ve been through 20 years now of getting education, especially the young, who have seen — who have got jobs, who had an education, who were able to move around the country freely, go abroad, study, get scholarships, come home. All that now, they see, is coming to an end.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, these breaking news alerts keep coming in. And a Taliban official says the group will soon declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Also, the question of the relationships with China, AFP reporting China is ready to deepen, quote, “friendly and cooperative” relations with Afghanistan, said a government spokesperson after the Taliban seized control of the country. The relationship Afghanistan will have with, for example, China, with Iran? And do you think the Taliban might take a more moderate approach now in the — what they are calling the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan? And particularly say more about women.

    AHMED RASHID: Well, this is — I mean, the whole idea of the Islamic Emirate is what they established after they conquered Kabul in ’96. And it was not accepted by anyone, anyone in Afghanistan and anyone outside of Afghanistan, except for three countries who recognized the government: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

    Now, the Taliban are very keen now on getting international recognition. They’ve gone out of their way to travel to neighboring states to win them over. And the most recent visit they had was, in fact, to China, where they met the foreign minister of China, the highest-level official who had ever met with the Taliban. And he asked them to make sure that they did not encourage the Uyghurs, the Muslim Uyghur population, which has been under tremendous repression in China, not to allow the Uyghurs into — not to give them training and not to turn them into guerrillas. And the Taliban, despite their Islamic zeal and their condemnation of non-Muslims and all the rest of it, they have said, “Fine, we’ll do that. We will restrict the activity of Uyghurs in Afghanistan so they do not create any problem for you.” And it was an amazing declaration of the Taliban.

    Now, whether it is going to be kept — because, don’t forget, the Uyghurs and many other militant groups from Central Asia, Pakistan, are all very active in Afghanistan. And people don’t see at the moment how the Taliban is going to get rid of them, even if they want to. And these groups include al-Qaeda, of course, much depleted and reduced but still very much a factor in Afghanistan. And a lot of these militants have been fighting alongside the Taliban. So, it’s not that the Taliban can just dump these people or shoot them. Many of them have settled down. They’ve got married in Afghanistan. They’ve got Afghan wives. And these militants are speaking the local languages. So these militants have become very well integrated into Afghan society, into Taliban society.

    Now, how the Taliban are going to deal with this is going to be the main preoccupation of the West, I think, and especially the United States, because right now if there are any militant groups around and the U.S. wants to bomb them, kill them, capture them, whatever, it’s going to be extremely difficult, because the closest American forces are much behind in the Gulf, in the Gulf countries, and possibly in Turkey, which is a long way away from Afghanistan.

    And the role of women, simply, I think, is also — we have to wait and see. I think they will allow minimal — I mean, what I’ve heard about education, for example, is that women will be allowed to study until grade 12, but they will not be allowed to go to university and other centers of higher learning. Now, that may be true; it may not be true. It may be a declaration that will be made but will not be implemented by some of the militants in the provinces, or it will be implemented in full by Taliban who control the cities and who come into contact with men and women who are well-educated every day. So, it’s touch and go.

    And I think the main issue right now is what kind of government are they going to form. Will it include non-Taliban politicians, warlords, tribal elders, etc.? Or is it just going to be an exclusive Taliban government? That’s what they really want, an exclusive Taliban government, no interference from, you know, wannabe politicians. But, of course, that will not be a representative government. And the danger always for the Taliban is going to be watching the ethnic minorities, making sure that they do not rise up in revolt down the road.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ahmed Rashid, we’re going to have to leave it there, but we hope to have you back soon, as these developments are fast unfolding. Ahmed Rashid is a writer, award-winning journalist, author of several books, including Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. And also, thanks so much to Ali Latifi, journalist, joining us from Kabul. Of course, we’ll continue to cover this tomorrow and in the days to come.

    Coming up, we go to Haiti, where the death toll has reached 1,300 people, following the 7.2 magnitude earthquake. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Opening And Closing US Embassies-From Sierra Leone To Afghanistan

    While the people of Afghanistan are in a state of fear of the Taliban who now control Afghanistan, its capital, major cities and countryside after the U.S. and NATO occupation of twenty years, please pardon my personal observances of some of my experiences during sixteen years in the U.S. diplomatic corps and opening and closing U.S. Embassies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and the effects on the civilian populations of the countries involved.

    In December 2001, I was a part of a very small team from the U.S. Department of State that was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan to reopen the U.S. Embassy.  The Embassy had been closed for 12 years following the Soviet exodus from Afghanistan and the subsequent civil war between the warlord militias that fought to gain land and influence. 

    The post Opening And Closing US Embassies-From Sierra Leone To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The UK must open its borders to help Afghan refugees

    The increasingly desperate situation in Afghanistan has led to widespread calls for the UK to welcome Afghan refugees despite Priti Patel’s plans to crack down on immigration.

    Refugee Action summed up the situation:

    When Parliament reconvenes to discuss the crisis, the Government must recognise the cruelty of its current position, and abandon it. Can its message to desperate Afghan people really be that they must go to local embassies for visas and book commercial flights?

    Do they really think people in fear of their lives are going to wait around for a ‘safe route’ to be created by the UK Government, when it currently offers none?

    It also highlighted the need for “concrete action”:

    Thousands of Afghan people are currently trying to escape from Afghanistan. But the Home Office has yet to confirm how many refugees it will welcome.

    Fear in Afghanistan

    The Taliban took control of Kabul early on Sunday 15 August, and Afghanistan’s president has fled the country. The takeover is expected to mark the beginning of a new era of Taliban rule. The UNHCR reported in July that Taliban advances had already displaced 270,000 people in Afghanistan this year. As Taliban control increases across the country, this figure will only grow.

    Afghan women are scared they won’t be able to continue their education, careers, or independence. Writing in the Guardian, one women stated:

    I worked for so many days and nights to become the person I am today, and this morning when I reached home, the very first thing my sisters and I did was hide our IDs, diplomas and certificates. It was devastating. Why should we hide the things that we should be proud of? In Afghanistan now we are not allowed to be known as the people we are.

    International action?

    Despite the dire situation, international action in welcoming refugees has been slow.

    Canada has pledged to accept 20,000 ‘vulnerable’ Afghans who need protecting from the Taliban.

    But EU countries Germany, Greece, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium asked the EU for permission to continue deporting Afghan refugees they had already rejected for asylum. Since then, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands have reversed their position and paused deportations.

    Many are calling on the UK to follow in Canada’s footsteps.

    Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey said:

    Gov must provide answers and assurances today about what they will do to help those at grave risk in Afghanistan. They have a moral responsibility along with the international community to urgently evacuate refugees under threat to a safe and welcoming place.

    But these figures are a drop in the ocean when figures from July show that total number of displaced people is 3.5 million.

    The UK and refugees

    Home secretary Priti Patel recently criticised France for ‘failing’ to stop migrants crossing the channel. She further warned that the UK would be seeing more people wanting to enter the country due to them fleeing Afghanistan.

    The Home Office recently abandoned numerical targets for resettling refugees, instead claiming it will strengthen “safe and legal” ways for refugees to enter the country by ensuring:

    resettlement programmes are responsive to emerging international crises – so refugees at immediate risk can be resettled more quickly.

    This has left people in the UK asking where the UK’s response is.

    “Wrong and unsustainable”

    But the Home Office’s hostile environment is likely to only make the situation worse for those trying to flee to the UK. Refugee advocates have warned that the Nationality and Borders Bill, currently at the committee stage, could prevent thousands of people from claiming asylum in the UK.

    Refugee Action said that the bill could leave Afghan refugees unable to claim asylum, left in barracks, or sent elsewhere.

    It further stated:

    The #AntiRefugeeBill and the lack of commitment to resettlement are wrong and unsustainable. Both must now be swept away on the tide of compassion brought by the events in Afghanistan. We are witnessing how quickly people can be left desperately struggling to find safety.

    Welcoming refugees

    The UK must allow, pro-actively help and welcome Afghan refugees fleeing persecution and fear. And it must go further than following the Canadian model of accepting just 20,000 people.

    It is the UK that helped create the current situation and it is down to the UK to urgently take action and help those facing an increasing desperate situation. It must happen quickly and it must mean giving people housing and rights – not condemning people who have already suffered so much to unsafe and appalling conditions in places like Napier Barracks.

    This crisis further highlights the fight we have in ahead of us against the racist Nationality and Borders Bill. This bill, and the hostile environment created by this government, must be stopped.

    Featured image via YouTube/Al Jazeera English

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Afghanistan meant nothing

    This story was originally published on August 15, 2021, by Laura Jedeed, and is reprinted here with permission.

    By the time you read this, the Taliban may already be in Kabul. If not now, then soon.

    Nixon wanted—and got—his decent interval between the United States pullout of Vietnam and the inevitable North Vietnamese takeover. Afghanistan’s interval was never going to be decent, but I confess I expected an interval. We’re scrambling to leave in time, we’re racing for the helicopters as the Taliban burns through Afghanistan like a forest fire.

    I remember Afghanistan well. I deployed there twice—once in 2008, and again in 2009–2010. It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left. And here we are today.

    I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little boys. I know what they’re going to do to the interpreters and the people who cooperated with us, it’s awful, it’s bad, but we are leaving, and all I feel is grim relief.

    [F]inally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.

    This is what I remember:

    I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.

    I remember going through the phones of the people we detained and finding clip after clip of Bollywood musicals, women singing in fields of flowers. Rarely did I find anything incriminating.

    I remember finding propaganda footage cut together from the Soviet invasion and our own Operation Enduring Whatever. I remember laughing about how stupid the Afghans were to not know we aren’t the Russians and then, eventually, realizing that I was the stupid one.

    I remember how every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields. There were a few options. You could leave the fields alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons. Or, you could carpet bomb the fields, and then the farmers would join the Taliban for reasons that, to me, seem obvious.

    The third option, and the one we went for while I was there, was to give the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium poppy. The farmers then sold the fertilizer to the Taliban, who used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million dollar MRAP and maim everyone inside.

    I remember we weren’t allowed to throw batteries away because people who worked on base would go through the trash and collect hundreds of dead batteries, wire them together so they had just enough juice for one charge, and use that charge to detonate an IED.

    I remember the look on my roommate’s face after she got back from cutting the dead bodies of two soldiers out of an HMMWV that got blown up by an IED that I have always imagined was made with fertilizer from an opium farmer and detonated with a hundred thrown-out batteries.

    I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we called Cowboy. He always wore this cowboy hat and an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school age.

    Cowboy was a good student. His family, who all worked on base, was incredibly proud of him. He wanted to go to college in America. But there weren’t colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too shit. No program to help kids like him. I looked.

    I wonder if he’s dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different.

    But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.

    We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.

    And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.

    I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever.

    There is no third team.

    And so I sit here, reading these sad fucking articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.

    No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more hypocrisy.

    No more pretending it meant anything. It didn’t.

    It didn’t mean a goddamn thing.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • ‘We see silence filled with fear’: female Afghan journalists plead for help

    Women in media in Kabul tell of trying to destroy traces of their identity as they brace for Taliban retribution

    When president Ashraf Ghani slipped out of Afghanistan with no warning, he took with him any glimpse of hope left for the nation’s women – especially those who are educated and outspoken.

    Aaisha* is that and more. As a prominent news anchor and political talk show host, she has watched her life’s efforts crumble in what felt like seconds.

    Related: An Afghan woman in Kabul: ‘Now I have to burn everything I achieved’

    Related: Afghan women’s defiance and despair: ‘I never thought I’d have to wear a burqa. My identity will be lost’

    Continue reading…

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

  • Former PM Helen Clark says Taliban control ‘massive step backwards’

    RNZ News

    Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark says the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan shows “a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy” and to say that she is pessimistic about the country’s future would be an understatement.

    Taliban insurgents have entered Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani has fled Afghanistan, bringing the Islamist militants close to taking over the country two decades after they were overthrown by a US-led invasion.

    Clark has also served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for eight years and has advocated globally for Afghan girls and women.

    She sent New Zealand troops to Afghanistan in 2001 during her term as prime minister and said it was surreal to see what had happened.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today after the cabinet meeting this afternoon that the government had offered 53 New Zealand citizens in Afghanistan consular support.

    “We are working through this with the utmost urgency,” she said.

    The government was also aware of 37 individuals who had helped the NZ Defence Force (NZDF).

    Gains for women, girls
    Clark said today: “Twenty years of change there with so many gains for women and girls in society at large and to see what amounts to people motivated by medieval theocracy walk back in and take power and start issuing the same kinds of statements about constraints on women and saying that stonings and amputations are for the courts – I mean this is just such a massive step backwards it’s hard to digest.”

    Clark said to find out what had gone wrong it was necessary to look back a couple of decades and it was not long after the Taliban had left that the US administration started to look away from Afghanistan, turning instead towards its intervention in Iraq.

    “With the gaze off Afghanistan the Taliban started to come back. When I was at UNDP I would meet ambassadors from the region around Afghanistan and they would say ‘look 60 percent of the country is in effect controlled by the Taliban now’ and I’m going back four or five years, six years in saying that.”

    Former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark
    Former NZ prime minister Helen Clark … extremely dubious that this is “a new reformed Taliban”. Image: RNZ/Anadolu

    Helen Clark is extremely dubious that this is “a new reformed Taliban”. Photo: 2018 Anadolu Agency

    Clark said at that time the Taliban did not have the ability to capture and hold district and provincial capitals, but the Taliban was waiting for an opportunity and that came when former US president Donald Trump indicated they would withdraw troops from Afghanistan and current US President Joe Biden then followed through on that.

    “Looking at it from my perspective I think the thought of negotiating a transition with the Taliban was naive and I think the failure of intelligence as to how strong the Taliban actually were on the ground is, as a number of American commentators are saying, equivalent to the failure of intelligence around the Tet Offensive in 1968 in Vietnam – I mean this is a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy,” she said.

    Clark said the Taliban would be under pressure from Western powers to do anything if it was able to enlist the support of other powers.

    Pessimistic about Afghanistan’s future
    She said to say she was pessimistic about Afghanistan’s future would be an understatement and there were already reports of women being treated very badly in regions where the Taliban has taken over.

    “We’re hearing stories from some of the district and provincial capitals that they’ve captured where women have been beaten for wearing sandals which expose their feet, we’re hearing of one woman who turned up to a university class who was told to go home, this wasn’t for them, women who were told to go away from the workplace because this wasn’t for them.”

    Clark said she very much doubted that this was “a new reformed Taliban”, an idea that was accepted by some negotiators in Doha.

    She said she did not expect that the UN Security Council would be able to do anything to improve the situation.

    Clark said it met about Afghanistan within the last couple of weeks and the Afghanistan permanent representative pleaded on behalf of his elected government for support but there was no support forthcoming.

    Clark said the UN Security Council was unlikely to get any results and the UN would likely then say that it needed humanitarian access.

    Catastrophic hunger
    “Because these developments create catastrophic hunger, flight of people, illness — but you know the UN will be left putting a bandage over the wounds and there will be nothing more constructive that comes out of it.”

    Clark said Afghanistan’s problems were never going to be solved in 20 years.

    “I understand that the Americans are sick of endless wars, we all are. But on the other hand they’ve kept a 50,000 strong garrison in Korea since 1953 in much greater numbers at times, they maintain 30,000 troops in the Gulf. They were in effect being asked to maintain a very small garrison which more or less kept the place stable enough for it to inch ahead, build its institutions and roll out education and health, when that commitment to do that failed then the whole project collapsed.

    “This is not so much a Taliban takeover as simply a surrender by the government and by forces who felt it wasn’t worth fighting for it.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Taliban take Kabul

    It unfolded as a story of fleeing.  The Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, taking flight to Tajikistan, giving little clue of his intentions to colleagues.  The fleeing of the infamous Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord assured to fight another day. The fleeing of tens of thousands of residents out of the city of Kabul, long seen as beyond the reach of insurgents.  The fleeing of Coalition embassy personnel, aided by freshly deployed troops from the United States and the UK sent into Afghanistan as a matter of urgency. The Taliban had taken Kabul.

    In departing and leaving stranded colleagues to their fate, the bookish Ghani, preferring pen to gun, had time to leave a message on Facebook.  One could never accuse the man of having wells of courage. He reflected on either facing armed Taliban fighters or leaving his beloved country.  In order to avoid immolating Kabul, which “would have been a big human disaster”, he chose a hasty exit.

    Only a few days prior, on August 11, Ghani had flown to Mazar-i-Sharif, in the company of the blood lusty Uzbek Dostum, supposedly to hold the fort against the Taliban with another warlord, the ethnic Tajik Atta Muhammad Noor.  Noor had pledged in June to mobilise the citizenry of Balkh province to fight the Taliban.  “God forbid, the fall of Balkh,” he declared at the time, “means the fall of the north and the fall of the north means the fall of Afghanistan.”

    This was not a move greeted with universal joy.  Habib-ur-Rahman of the leadership council of the political and paramilitary group Hizb-e-Islami saw a bit of self-aggrandizing at work, hardly remarkable for a warlord keen to oversee his bit of real estate.  “The mobilisation of the people by politicians under the pretext of supporting security forces – with the use of public uprising forces – fuels the war from one side and from the other it affects Afghanistan’s stance in foreign policy.”

    The shoring up mission led by Ghani would do little to conceal the historical differences between Noor and Dostum.  The former had done battle with Dostum’s troops during the latter’s time as a regional commander in the ailing Soviet-backed Afghan government.  Dostum’s defection from the government (one spots the common theme) in 1992 to form the Junbish-e-Milli party presented Noor with a chance to join forces.  But the Tajik left Dostum in 1993 citing irreconcilable ideological differences.  With the initial defeat of the Taliban, Noor triumphed in several military encounters with the frustrated Uzbek, seizing the Balkh province in its entirety.

    The accord reached between the parties on this occasion certainly did not involve agreeing to fight the Taliban.  Both had come to the conclusion that scurrying to Uzbekistan was a sounder proposition.  Noor subsequently justified the measure by claiming enigmatically that, “They had orchestrated the plot to trap Marshal Dostum and myself too, but they didn’t succeed.”  Ghani would soon follow.

    Members of Ghani’s imploding government have not taken kindly to the flight of their leader.  “Curse Ghani and his gang,” wrote acting defence minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi.  “They tied our hands from behind and sold the country.”

    The head of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah also released a video withering in announcing that, “The former president of Afghanistan” had “left the country in this difficult situation.”  God, he suggested, “should hold him accountable.”  Abdullah, along with former President Harmid Karzai and Hizb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are currently in negotiations with the Taliban over the formal transfer of power.

    The US and UK have deployed personnel in a hurried panic.  Over the weekend, President Joe Biden, in announcing the deployment of 5,000 troops, told the press that they would ensure “we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.”  Another thousand have also been added to the complement.

    There was much embarrassment in all of this.  The US and its allies made the fundamental error that training, money and expertise would somehow miraculously guarantee the stability, continuity and reliability of a ramshackle regime.  Biden, in coming up with his own phraseology, had stated that a Taliban victory was “not inevitable”.  In July, we were given a nugget of Bidenese that, while he had little trust for the Taliban, he did “trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- – more competent in terms of conducting war.”

    As the Taliban was securing the capital, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken parried evident parallels with the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.  “This is manifestly not Saigon,” he said with little conviction.

    Now, the scene was one of grave, turbaned and bearded men, armed to the teeth, overseeing the desk which Ghani previously occupied in the presidential palace.  They had survived and outwitted an army better armed and supposedly better trained. They had survived airstrikes launched from within the country and from bases in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, via heavy bombers and lethal drones.  They had survived the forces of the US, NATO and rival militias.

    They now find themselves in control of an entity they wish to be recognised as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.  History has come in its full violent circle.  A group of insurgents dismissed as fundamentalist mountain savages who would be vanquished before the modernising incentives of the West have shown up, as previous Afghan fighters have, the futility and sheer folly of meddling in their country’s affairs.

    The post The Taliban take Kabul first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan Shenanigans

    Things have been moving very rapidly as Taliban forces immediately closed in on Kabul after the end of the occupation. The US is frantically evacuating people, former Afghan officials are fleeing the country, and a transition to Taliban control is a done deal.

    It’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Taliban would regain control of the country when occupying western powers withdrew, but I don’t think anyone would’ve put money on it happening this quickly. A few interesting questions have come up about this, like for example how hilarious would it be if after spending twenty years and trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives “fighting the Taliban”, the Taliban suddenly resumed power as a US puppet regime?

    I mean, what’s going on here?

    And here?

    And here?

    I’m not the first person to speculate about this:

    And this all comes just months after the Taliban renewed its earlier pledge to guarantee safety to a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, which many like journalist Whitney Webb have suggested was a major reason for the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.

    So who knows what’s going on, but it wouldn’t be surprising if shenanigans were afoot in Afghanistan.

    Meanwhile this all has a lot of people outing themselves as believers in benevolent imperialism, with many westerners across the political spectrum arguing that the US needs to continue its military occupation in perpetuity to protect women’s rights.

    It is now suddenly the wokest of feminisms to want an empire whose interventionism is literally always disastrous to re-invade Afghanistan and occupy their land for generations and keep murdering anyone who tries to fight back in order to force them all to espouse our white liberal values.

    Exactly zero of the shitlibs demanding troops stay to prevent Taliban rule at gunpoint would fight the Taliban themselves. Exactly zero of them would even be willing kill Taliban forces sitting miles away safely piloting a drone. This is a game to them. A complete abstraction. I mean, can you picture Marianne Williamson charging at Taliban forces firing an M4 carbine? I can’t.

    If the US empire hadn’t manufactured consent for the invasion by aggressive narrative management about Taliban oppression westerners would give zero fucks about women in Afghanistan, just like they give zero fucks about women in all the other oppressive patriarchal nations. This is all just people who don’t think much about the consequences of US warmongering having an emotional reaction to their sudden realization that US warmongering has consequences.

    Maybe, just maybe, it was dumb to believe the invasion of Afghanistan ever had anything to do with helping women in the first place? The US military is the very last institution on earth who’d ever actually do anything in the interests of humanitarianism and the very last institution you’d ever want to.

    No matter what exactly is happening in Afghanistan, everything you’re seeing there today is the fault of the US-centralized oligarchic empire. Every little bit of it. Not just starting with the insane 2001 invasion which cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives but long before it, when US government agencies backed the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the eighties and actively radicalized them. This entire mess is the result of a bunch of imperialists deciding that the entire planet needs to be dominated by a single power structure and that it’s fine to play with human lives like chess pieces in order to make that happen.

    These bastards are going to keep murdering people around the world while robbing and oppressing their own citizenry at home until their fingers can be pried off of the world’s steering wheel for good. Only then will we ever have a chance at creating a healthy world.

    ____________________________

    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, . 

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    Featured image via Sam Shepherd,(CC BY 3.0 NZ)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • NZ ramps up efforts to get 30 citizens out of Kabul as Taliban take capital

    RNZ News

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says work to get New Zealanders out of Afghanistan has ramped up, as commercial options become unavailable.

    Yesterday the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was aware of 17 New Zealanders who were in Afghanistan, but Ardern said that number is now believed to be closer to 30 when citizens and family members were taken into account.

    “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade have been actively trying to contact those that they believe may be in Afghanistan and working to get people out,” she said.

    “Previously there have been commercial options for people to leave on if they’re able to get to the point of departure. That will increasingly, if not already, no longer be an option,”

    She said that was when the government would step up the work it was doing to try to get them out.

    Ardern said that the situation was moving fast and quick decisions would need to be made in terms of those New Zealanders in Afghanistan.

    “That is something we’ve been working on, as you can imagine, in a very changeable environment for the past, wee while and is something we will continue to work on.

    Additional consideration
    “There’s also for us … the additional consideration of those who may have who may have historically worked to support the New Zealand Defence Force or who may have been on the ground over many years in Afghanistan their safety situation, so that’s also something we’re moving as quickly as we can on,” she said.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern … “There’s also for us … the additional consideration of those who may have who may have historically worked to support the New Zealand Defence Force.” Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ

    Ardern said New Zealand had been working with partners to try and determine a safe passage for these New Zealanders, but would not give details about which other countries had been approached.

    “There will be security issues around me giving much more detail than I’ve given now, but I can tell you we are working at the highest level alongside our partners to support those New Zealanders who may be on the ground.”

    Interpreters contact NZ government
    Cabinet is meeting today to consider whether New Zealand can evacuate Afghanistan nationals who supported our military efforts there. The situation is urgent, with civilian lives believed to be in danger.

    A small group of people who were not eligible for the Afghan interpreters package in 2012 have now made contact with the New Zealand government, Ardern said.

    She said fewer than 40 people, have identified themselves as having worked alongside New Zealand forces, but the majority of these cases are historic and they were not eligible under the previous National government’s “interpreter package”.

    Ardern said at that time they were not seen as directly affected or at risk from the Taliban but the current situation has changed dramatically.

    “It was basically interpreters at that time who were brought over as they were considered to have the strongest, or face to strongest risk at that time, there were others who weren’t eligible for that who have subsequently made contact.

    “Cabinet will be discussing today what more needs to be done to ensure the safety of those who are directly connected to them.”

    Ardern said they would need to ensure that these people were in fact working directly alongside the NZ Defence Force and that would be considered by Cabinet today.

    Focused on security
    She said it was too soon to look ahead with the international community to what would be done regarding the Afghanistan situation.

    “We’re quite focused on the security situation on the ground right now, getting those who need to get out out, and doing what we can to support those who supported us, so that’s our immediate consideration I think then we’ll be looking over the horizon to what next with the international community.”

    Ardern said it was devastating to see what was happening in Afghanistan now, but that did not diminish the roles of those New Zealanders who served there.

    “Everyone makes the best decisions they can at the time they’re made … and in the environment in which they’re made and all I would say to our New Zealand troops who were in there, they would have seen for themselves the difference that they made at that time,” she said.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • US Embassy Staff Flee Kabul As The Taliban Takes Control

    Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Sunday and sought the unconditional surrender of the central government, officials said, as Afghans and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

    The beleaguered central government, meanwhile, hoped for an interim administration, but increasingly had few cards to play. Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings.

    Helicopters buzzed overhead as part of an evacuation of personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Several other Western missions were also preparing to get staff out.

    In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.

    The post US Embassy Staff Flee Kabul As The Taliban Takes Control appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As the Taliban take over Afghanistan, let’s remember the US’s role in their creation

    The US‘s withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan has gone alongside a stunning recapture of much of the country by the Taliban. This has naturally raised predictable whines from neoconservative elements who believe that withdrawal has “led to a Taliban triumph”.

    However, not only is continuing the occupation of Afghanistan an abject exercise in futility, the US also has partly itself to blame for the rise of the radical Islamist group. A closer examination of history shows that this ascendency traces its roots to US interference in earlier decades.

    Taliban sweeps up control of most of the country

    On 14 August, the Guardian reported that the Taliban had taken control of Mazar-i-Sharif. This is Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city and “the government’s last major stronghold in the north”. On the same day, the New York Times reported:

    President Biden’s top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban that now threatens Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.

    President Biden repeated that he wouldn’t reverse his decision. He pointed out that four presidents have presided over the US occupation of Afghanistan. He affirmed that he “would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth”. Biden first announced a US withdrawal on 14 April. He had set a deadline of 11 September, 2021 – the 20 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

    Another attempt at peace?

    Meanwhile, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani said in an address to the nation that he would reorganise the military and begin a process of consultation with Afghan society and international allies. Rumours have been swirling that Ghani might step down as part of some kind of peace deal. In 2018, the Trump administration sent a ‘special envoy’ to begin a peace dialogue with the Taliban. The US then agreed to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for a ceasefire in 2020.

    The Taliban eventually agreed to peace talks with the Afghan government in that same year, but the talks didn’t go anywhere. The former didn’t have much incentive to negotiate even then given their military strength throughout the country. The Afghan government, meanwhile, has never had much credibility. It’s largely considered a US puppet that owes its position to the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the then-Taliban-led government.

    A proxy war with each of the world’s superpowers on either side

    There is a stunning irony to this. The US labelled the Taliban an enemy in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks (based on arguably dubious allegations that the Taliban had ‘harboured terrorists’ and had links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida). The reality, however, is that the Taliban owe their rise in part to US interference in Afghanistan.

    During the Cold War, Afghanistan became a major focal point of proxy conflict between the world’s then dominant powers, the US and the Soviet Union (USSR). The USSR was allied to Afghanistan’s socialist government of Mohammed Najibullah. So the US intervened on the side of its opponents by launching ‘Operation Cyclone’.

    Most expensive covert action in history

    The operation was hatched by the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Its aim was to covertly arm and finance a group of rebel guerrilla fighters called the ‘mujahideen’. It ultimately channeled $2bn to the Islamist group in what became the most expensive covert action in history.

    Hostilities culminated in the Afghan Civil War, which pitted US-backed mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government. The problem was that, having now given this latter group support, the US couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. When hostilities ended in the early 1990s, the Taliban emerged as a mujahideen splinter group. By 1996, it had taken control of most of the country and was essentially the government of Afghanistan.

    A vicious cycle

    So when the US invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, it was toppling a ruling faction that it had helped create in the first place. And this shines a light onto the vicious cycle that can emerge when Western powers interfere. Initial interference creates unintended consequences that then provide a ruse for further interference.

    Another example is that of Vietnam. The country’s move toward communism was sparked in large part by French colonialism. (The communists were, after all, the most militant and committed of the anti-colonial movement’s factions.) This ‘problem’ was then ‘solved’ by the US first backing a puppet government in South Vietnam. It then invaded when this weak and unpopular government struggled to resist both an invasion from the communist-controlled north and an internal guerrilla insurgency.

    Let Afghans lead the fight against the Taliban

    To be clear, given its poor record on issues like women’s rights, the Taliban’s return to power is nothing to celebrate. But those who actually have credibility when it comes to opposing the Taliban are local Afghan democratic socialist factions like the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan (SPA). Though these parties unequivocally stand against the Taliban, they stand against the US occupation in the same way. In fact, the SPA boycotted the last election since it claims no one can get elected without US support.

    The US, on the other hand, obviously doesn’t have a shred of credibility when it comes to opposing the Taliban. Because just like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the US created a problem that it ultimately couldn’t contain. Worst still, Washington then ended up using that problem to provide bogus justification for its self-serving foreign policies. It’s time to break this vicious cycle of interference begetting further interference.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons – isafmedia

    By Peter Bolton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • A Taste of Panic: The Taliban Continues its Advance

    The historical vectors are moving with conviction and purpose; the weak and lacking in conviction are in retreat and the gun is doing the talking.  The government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the security services and the Afghan National Army, seem to be either huddled in despair, capitulating or fleeing before the inexorable advance of the Taliban.  They have the upper hand, the cards, the means, storming through and winning half of the country.

    For months, it was assumed that the Taliban would not have the means to capture cities.  The National Army would be able to garrison and lord in the cities, offering protection.  In July, US President Joseph Biden claimed that, while he did not trust the Taliban, he did “trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- – more competent in terms of conducting war.”

    Then, the cities started falling. Kandahar, Ghazni, Herat.  On August 14, Taliban fighters captured Mazar-i-Sharif, finding itself ever closer to the capital.  Members of the Afghan army and security personnel had reportedly made a highway dash north to Uzbekistan.

    The US is hurriedly deploying 5,000 troops in an exercise of circularity, given that they were already leaving in numbers even prior to July 2.  As Biden tried to explain on August 14, the troops would ensure “we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.”

    His statement, for the most part, was a spiritless effort to justify some continued role of the US in Afghanistan even as it cuts the cord to their corrupt clients in Kabul.  The Armed Forces and Intelligence Community had been “ordered” to keep an eye on “future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.”  Secretary State Anthony Blinken had been “directed to support President Ghani and other Afghan leaders” in their efforts to avoid “further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement.”  There was some finger wagging regarding the Taliban, warning that any military acts against US personnel or its mission would “be met with a swift and strong US military response.”

    Within the crumbling layers of the Kabul government, there is much quaking, shifting and internal bloodletting. As has been pointed out by Candace Rondeaux, “the greater threat to Afghanistan’s stability has always been the fecklessness of so many in positions of power in the Afghan government.”

    The defence minister Hayatullah Hayat has been given the heave-ho by Ghani, to be replaced by General Bismillah Khan Mohammadi on Wednesday.  Khan is a testament that current events in Afghanistan are always reminders of history: he was a former member of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a body that was favoured by the now defunct Soviet Union.

    US forces find themselves again being drawn into the maelstrom.  There are the warnings, almost shrill, that forces must recommit, and decisions reversed.  Former CIA director General David Petraeus wishes for a proper re-deployment of troops to prevent the consignment of a “country of 40 million people to a medieval, theocratic, ultra-conservative Islamist emirate.”  The editors of the conservative National Review envisage the creation of a “launchpad of a global movement that had for years been kept at bay by the presence of US forces – most recently a small, relatively low-cost contingent”.

    Such sentiments are also being echoed in Britain, which is also sending 600 troops.  Conservative chairman of the Commons Foreign Select Committee Tom Tugendhat reminisced that, “We got to the point where the insurgent forces were outmatched and a standoff saw civic institutions grow.”  The chair of the Defence Select Committee, Tobias Ellwood, told the BBC that the UK “should really be reconsidering what’s going on”, warning that the withdrawal would precipitate a “massive humanitarian disaster” and permit terrorism to “raise its ugly head again”.

    This is charmless window dressing.  When chaos is spoken of in tones of panic, it is often forgotten how significant Washington’s own disruptive role has been.  The US continues its less than angelic streak in Afghanistan, funding cut throat militias – many co-opted by the Ghani government – for the simple vulgar purpose that they are against the Taliban.  (This is unlikely to change in the long term.)

    Characters such as the blood soaked Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notorious warlord who has had it all ways, promises to remain in the mix.  Last year, he felt that loyalty to the Ghani government needed some recognition.  His absurd promotion to the rank of marshal was considered fitting, and did nothing to hide a butcher’s record almost without peer.  With a crude Falstaffian wisdom, Dostum is a character who knows that cowardice is useful to draw upon when facing a losing cause.  As Taliban fighters made their way unopposed into Mazar-i-Sharif, he was fleeing to safety.

    A blind eye has been given to other militias who threaten to cause mischief in due course, a point which only serves to strengthen the Taliban’s cause.  One of them is Iran’s Shia Fatemiyoun militia.  In February 2020, Rahmatullah Nabil, head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency through periods over the last decade, told Radio Free Europe that the Fatemiyoun did not pose an “immediate threat to Afghan national security”.  Call it what you will: having such agents milling about in the landscape does every little bit to add to the chaos so lamented by the commentariat.

    Any victory for the Taliban will be premised upon the fundamental failure of a rotten centre, the decay of which has been encouraged for years behind the mirage of development, the building of schools and women’s rights.  The pantomime that is Afghan governance has always existed on borrowed time.

    The Biden administration, short of reawakening a bloodlust to re-intervene, will let it be, subject to stints of interference from special forces, contractors and adventurers.  The intelligence community generationally obsessed with being in Afghanistan will continue to have the president’s ear, and hope to haunt him during the course of his sedated premiership. But not even they could prevent a moment of candour from Biden on Saturday.  “One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.”

    The post A Taste of Panic: The Taliban Continues its Advance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Stop Believing US Military Invasions Have Noble Intentions: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I love how everyone’s just pretending the Afghanistan Papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they’ve been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time.

    ❖

    If the US had a free press and was anything like a democracy, the government wouldn’t be getting away with squandering thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on a twenty-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making assholes obscenely wealthy.

    Thousands of human lives. Trillions of dollars. If western mass media were anything remotely resembling what they purport to be, they would be making sure the public understands how badly their government just fucked them. Instead it’s just “Oh no, those poor Afghan women.”

    ❖

    War apologists talk about “doing nothing” like that’s somehow worse than creating mountains of human corpses for power and profit. “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING about the Taliban! We can’t just do NOTHING!”

    Uhh, yes you can. Please for the love of God do nothing. Doing nothing would be infinitely better than more military interventionism in a nation you’ve already tortured for twenty years for no valid reason.

    People who think US interventionism solves problems just haven’t gone through the mountains upon mountains of evidence that it definitely definitely does not at all. Nobody honestly believes the US needs to invade every nation in the world with illiberal cultural values; they only think that way with Afghanistan due to war propaganda. And women’s lives in Afghanistan have still been shit under the occupation.

    They had twenty years to build a stable nation in Afghanistan. Twenty years. If you believe that’s what they were really trying to do there, or that results would be any different if you gave them twenty more, you’re a fucking moron.

    If you think the US needs to be in Afghanistan so the Taliban doesn’t take over then have some integrity and intellectual honesty and admit you want perpetual occupation. In which case you should be arguing for Afghan annexation so they get votes and congressional representation.

    ❖

    The objection shouldn’t be that there was no “withdrawal plan”, it should be that there was no occupation plan. Nothing was done in those entire twenty years for the long-term benefit of Afghans. The entire plan was “Stay and plunder as much as we can until we feel like leaving.”

    And of course more than this we should be upset that the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan at all, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no legitimate reason.

    ❖

    When all you’ve got is an insanely overfunded military every problem looks like a job for your insanely overfunded military.

    ❖

    I am once again asking you to stop believing US military invasions have noble intentions.

    ❖

    And stop blaming this on the “corrupt Afghan government”. There was no “Afghan government”; there was just whatever random Afghans happened to be willing to align with the occupying force that invaded their country while it was there. All blame rests entirely on that occupying force.

    ❖

    Now would be a great time to un-rehabilitate public opinion of George W Bush.

    ❖

    People who think the US military can be used for good remind me of that scene in Edward Scissorhands where he’s going around the house accidentally slashing things and then trying to fix them but he can’t fix them because he’s got horrible scissor hands that can only slash.

    ❖

    Every time mass military murder fails to achieve good things the proponents of mass military murder show up saying “The problem is we didn’t murder enough people.”

    ❖

    You’ll never see westerners so concerned about humanitarian issues as when there’s a chance some distant part of the world might not be subjected to military occupation by the most murderous power structure on earth.

    ❖

    Oh no, the country is immediately returning to the state it was in before we started using mass military violence to force it to look a bit different for a while. That’s like dressing your kid up as Batman for Halloween and then getting sad the next day because Batman’s gone.

    ❖

    Can’t figure out why Americans keep consenting to a government foreign policy of piracy and mass murder which is killing people by the millions via starvation and military violence. All that theft must be buying them awesome benefits like great healthcare and quality of life. Americans must be the happiest most thriving people in the world.

    ❖

    So many movies depict young men coming home from World War 2 like “Howdy Ma, hey Pop, boy it’s great to be home, now I gotta go see about that girl!” instead of hollowed out husks who’d go on to live out miserable half-lives beating their children and trying to drink away their trauma.

    ❖

    I still can’t get over how mainstream news stories about empire-targeted countries can be based entirely on reports by think tanks that are openly funded by weapons manufacturers. How is the fact that this is journalistic malpractice not obvious to everyone in the world?

    ❖

    The international symbol for the United States should be the Pentagon. It’s far more representative of what that nation stands for and what it does than some flag or an eagle.

    ❖

    War is the worst thing in the world. It’s the single most insane, destructive and unsustainable thing humans do. People who tell me I shouldn’t focus on it as much are people I just disregard, because they simply don’t grasp the horrific nature of war and the need to condemn it.

    ❖

    Sure they could have just killed Assange. But then the message to journalists would’ve been “We’ll get you if you expose our crimes, but we’ll have to be sneaky about it,” which is less intimidating than “We’ll get you if you expose our crimes, and we’ll do it right in the open.”

    ❖

    Western rightists are being trained to blame western civilization’s rising authoritarianism on “communism” and “Marxism”, and as a result they are reacting to anti-capitalists like myself with increasing shrillness and hysteria while the actual (very capitalist) authoritarians go unopposed.

    ❖

    Just another regular reminder that there will never be peace and economic justice as long as the majority are successfully convinced by establishment propaganda that those things are not in their interest. The propaganda machine must first be discredited and rendered nonfunctioning.

    ❖

    If you’ve got any urge to write articles or make videos or a podcast, just do it. You’re infinitely more qualified to be the media than people who are paid by billionaires to lie, and they’re not asking anyone for permission to speak. If Chris fucking Cuomo gets a voice, then so do you.

    You don’t have to be perfect or professional quality or whatever; hell, give yourself permission to outright suck at first if that’s how it plays out. Give yourself permission to not be perfect and just learn as you go and correct your mistakes as you make them. That’s allowed. Again, no matter how bad you are you’re still infinitely more qualified to report the news and tell the truth than any of the shitstains who are being platformed by multibillion-dollar media outlets right now, and whatever you make will be better than what they make. Just do it.

    Don’t stop if you don’t get a big audience right away, or if you never do. It’s not about that. If you can open even one person’s eyes to one aspect of reality, you are helping humanity to become a more conscious species by that much. That’s what it’s about. That’s what matters. And even if you don’t do that, fleshing out your ideas in some public medium is a great way to help yourself become aware of more things and deepen your own understanding, so you’re still improving humanity by that much. So no matter what happens you can’t lose.

    If we’re ever to turn things around it will be the result of a very large number of us grabbing a rope and tugging. You don’t have to be a megastar, you just have to do your bit. Start from there and see what happens.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to be a truly good person without loosening your relationship with mental narrative. If you’re clinging tight to thoughts and beliefs you’re not able to relate to life as it is, you’re just relating to your own mental stories, so you can’t respond to life wisely.

    Les Miserables’ Inspector Javert is a perfect depiction of what goes wrong when you emphasise narrative over reality, in his case replacing true goodness with moralism, with shoulds and shouldn’ts and rules and laws instead of responding to life as it shows up like Valjean. In contrast to Javert, Valjean is able to recognize that Fantine’s plight was a result of his own negligence even though she shows up as a prostitute in trouble with the law. Because his eyes are open to life as it is, he’s able to exercise true compassion and help her and Cosette.

    People like Valjean are able to see through not just their own mental narratives, but the narratives that are imposed upon them externally by mass-scale propaganda. People like Javert will support every power agenda no matter how depraved, because they believe mental stories.

    ❖

    Ego doesn’t make it out alive. One way or another, it’s a goner. It either dies by being seen through, or it takes us all out with it. The good news is that every single one of us gets to make that choice in every single moment.

    __________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The people who wrecked Afghanistan are arguing over who wrecked Afghanistan

    As a veteran of the war, and a journalist who has reported from the country, the endgame in Afghanistan is a bizarre and rather personal spectacle.

    To see generals and politicians who were involved in the disaster finger-pointing at each other, even as the UK deploys troops to evacuate the last remaining Britons, demeans the tragic human story of that country.

    The news of the rescue mission comes as the Taliban take territory at an alarming rate. The latest major city to fall is Kandahar, the insurgent group’s spiritual home. One report suggests that Kabul could fall within 90 days. Or perhaps even within a month.

    Nearer to home, the same sorts of people – and, in some cases, literally the same people – who oversaw the disaster for decades have picked out US president Joe Biden as the culprit.

    Biden’s decision to pull out, they claim, risks plunging the country into chaos.

    Finger pointing

    I am hardly a fan of Biden, who on matters of war is as imperialistic as a Bush, an Obama, a Trump, Blair or Cameron. But those protesting loudest are just as implicated.

    To name just a few, the finger-pointers include:

    All of them say the decision to pull out (albeit, of a place the west never had any right to occupy) is a terrible one for all concerned.

    General Richards also attacked the UK government. As did members of the Murdoch press, which supported the disastrous wars throughout. Among those levelling blame at the UK government is the Times‘ Tom Newton Dunn:

    But the truth is, it isn’t quite as simple as any of these figures want to suggest. They talk as if the decision that doomed Afghanistan was made in 2021. But the truth is that it is was made in 2001.

    Squandered peace

    As political hip-hop artist Lowkey has correctly pointed out, it never had to be this way. Way back in the beginning, the 20-year conflict could have been avoided. And with it hundreds of thousands of deaths. Including those of several people I knew personally.

    US journalist Spencer Ackerman, whose new book on the wars has just been released, makes a similar point:

    Remember that the Taliban offered terms in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld rejected them. Everything that followed made the Taliban stronger.

    Elsewhere, NATO, which officially oversaw the US-led occupation for most of the 20-year period, announced that leaders would meet Friday to discuss the crisis. And in London, a Cabinet Office Briefing Room (better known as ‘Cobra’) meeting of senior ministers and military figures was announced for 13 August. 

    Unfolding disaster

    Amid the chaos, it seems likely the rescue party of troops will be from the Parachute Regiment. That’s ironic given that the unit’s deployment in 2006 led to years of fighting in Helmand province – the location where most of the UK’s 456 deaths occurred. I remember it well. I deployed with 16 Air Assault Brigade that spring.

    What’s missing among the finger pointing is a little honesty about the events of that period. That deployment was neither necessary nor wise. Before 2006, the Taliban were a spent force. Their leadership had mostly fled to Pakistan – an ally of the UK and US whose intelligence services consistently support the Taliban to this day.

    I have no doubts that that deployment – codenamed Operation Herrick – led us to this point. Our presence there became a lighting rod for an insurgency which previously had not existed. And it set the pattern for the following years, energising locals against our unwanted presence.

    And I am aware today that the reasoning behind the 2006 deployment was deeply hubristic: the British had failed in Iraq in American eyes. This left the British desperate for another theatre in which to prove their usefulness to the US. Helmand, with horrific results, was that opportunity.

    And, as fate would have it, the army brigade which lobbied successfully for a new deployment was my own. Within months what was framed as a peacekeeping-style operation had turned into a brutal counter-insurgency war.

    Blame

    This background, just one of the important details missing from the analysis of people like Richards, Tugendhat and Stewart, is key to understanding how we got here.

    Their arguments for pulling out being a bad idea forget to mention that we never had any right to be there in the first place.

    Their disingenuous appeal to humanitarian ideals ignores the fact that the UK isn’t in the business of morality when it comes to international affairs.

    And their placing blame on particular governments or leaders skips over the fact that they themselves were happy to be key players in the disaster which is unfolding today.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Sgt Steve Blake RLC.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Belarus repression and the Taliban advance: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A round-up of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Thailand to Mexico

    Continue reading…

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

  • US Sending 3,000 Troops To Afghanistan

    The Pentagon announced Thursday that the US is sending 3,000 US soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan with the ostensible mission of securing US diplomatic facilities in Kabul and organizing the evacuation of American civilians. Britain is sending 600 soldiers for the same purpose. The US deployment of one Army and two Marine infantry battalions has been ordered as the lightning offensive of the Taliban—and the unmitigated rout of the US-backed Afghan security forces—has steadily tightened a noose around the Afghan capital.

    The collapse of security forces loyal to the US puppet regime in Kabul accelerated exponentially on Thursday with the Associated Press reporting the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, in the south.

    The post US Sending 3,000 Troops To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We Need a Political Solution — Not More Troops — in Afghanistan, Journalist Says

    The Taliban claim to have seized 17 provincial capitals across Afghanistan, including Kandahar and Herat, the country’s second- and third-largest cities, as the group continues its sweep through the country. The Taliban now have almost full control of the south, west and north of Afghanistan and are advancing on the capital Kabul, where the United States is preparing to evacuate its embassy in case of a Taliban defeat of the Afghan government. The sudden and dramatic Taliban gains come as the U.S. withdraws its ground troops from Afghanistan after nearly two decades of war, with aid groups warning of a humanitarian crisis unfolding. Since January, nearly 400,000 have been displaced. Over 1,000 civilians have been killed or injured in fighting over the past month. “The Taliban is making very bold moves in their attempt for a military takeover,” says Afghan journalist Lotfullah Najafizada, director of TOLOnews. He warns that a Taliban victory would threaten the tenuous gains for civil society and press freedoms over the past 20 years, saying there needs to be international pressure for a political solution to the fighting. “The cloud of uncertainty is over Afghanistan,” says Najafizada.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has seized at least 17 provincial capitals, including Kandahar and Herat, the country’s second- and third-largest cities. The Taliban now has almost full control of the south, west and north of Afghanistan. Earlier today, the Taliban seized the capital of Logar province, the city of Puli Alam, which is about 50 miles from Kabul. Taliban’s sweeping offensive comes as the United States is pulling out its troops after nearly 20 years in Afghanistan — the longest war in U.S. history. On Thursday, Biden officials announced that the United States is sending 3,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to help evacuate U.S. Embassy staff in Kabul. Britain and Canada are also sending in new troops. State Department spokesperson Ned Price spoke Thursday.

    NED PRICE: This is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not the wholesale withdrawal. What this is is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint. This is a drawdown of civilian Americans, who will, in many cases, be able to perform their important functions elsewhere, whether that’s in the United States or elsewhere in the region. So, the message shouldn’t be — the implications of this shouldn’t be outsized.

    AMY GOODMAN: Aid groups are warning of a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan as tens of thousands flee their homes to escape the Taliban. The United Nations says more than a quarter of a million people have been displaced since the militants began their assault in May. Over 1,000 casualties have been reported in fighting over the past month. On Thursday, Pakistani forces clashed with hundreds of Afghans stranded at the border between the two countries after they fled the Taliban offensive.

    FAIZ REHMAT: [translated] There are sick people here, as well as travelers. The travelers have spent all the money they had. All of it. They’re stranded here, taking refuge under trees or under vehicles. There are too many difficulties here.

    AMY GOODMAN: Aid groups are warning of a humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations, again, says more than a quarter of a million people have been displaced. And again, over 1,000 casualties have been reported in the last month. We talked about Pakistani forces clashing with hundreds of Afghans at the border. On Thursday, after talks in Doha, the United States, China and other nations issued a call for an immediate peace process and an end to the fighting. The Afghan government has reportedly offered a power-sharing proposal with the Taliban. Meanwhile, the United States is threatening to cut off future aid if the Taliban attacks the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

    We go now to Kabul, where we’re joined by Lotfullah Najafizada. He’s the director of TOLOnews, a 24-hour news channel based in Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Thanks so much for joining us. With this latest news of the Taliban capturing Kandahar, following Herat, can you talk about the significance of these latest events, and what’s happening overall in Afghanistan?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: I think these two major cities, including Ghazni, including Lashkar Gah, falling into Taliban hands in just a few hours is a significant, significant loss for the Afghan government. That means the Taliban is making very bold moves in their attempt for a military takeover. I think they’re getting closer to Kabul.

    As you describe, the humanitarian crisis is unfolding. There are thousands of Afghans who have come to Kabul from the provinces, and that’s really, really alarming. The cloud of uncertainty is over Afghanistan. The visibility for what’s going to happen past 24 hours isn’t there. I think the Afghan people have never seen something like this in the past 20 years.

    AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the U.S. now sending in 3,000 more troops, sending back to where you are, in Kabul, they say, to help evacuate embassy staff, and then the Canadians and British following suit?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: That’s very clear that they come here to evacuate their staff, their embassy people. I’m not sure if that is helping with the situation.

    I think what we need immediately right now is ceasefire, is an emergency meeting at the U.N. Security Council, is an understanding with regional countries that there has to be a political compromise as soon as possible, in a few days. And that should include compromise on the Afghan government’s side, on the Taliban side, more importantly, who are seeming to be not very welcoming, as well as, of course, pressure put on countries like Pakistan.

    AMY GOODMAN: What does Pakistan exactly have to do with it, your understanding?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: I think Pakistan had a lot of leverage that it could use over the past few years as we were discussing with the Taliban a political solution to the crisis. I think Pakistanis, they claim that they have done enough, but they said that they could — under no circumstances, they can go after the Taliban bases inside Pakistan militarily. So, if you rule out — if you rule out your most important option or leverage, then that means you’re not doing enough. So I think that opportunity is lost.

    But I think what can be done is that for the Afghan government and the Taliban, with mediation of the U.N. and the U.S., to see if they can reach some sort of a reduction in violence or ceasefire immediately. As you said, so many civilian casualties, so many destructions, so many Afghans leaving. That has to be stopped in order to prevent collapse of the country.

    It’s not just Taliban taking over Afghanistan from the Afghan government. I think it’s about unrolling all of the achievements we have made in the past 20 years. With Taliban taking over Kabul, if that happens, we don’t know if media channels are going to be there. All TV stations and radio stations and newspapers have shut down their operation in places the Taliban have taken control, including Kandahar, including Herat, yesterday. So, we know what Taliban’s takeover is bringing with itself to the rest of the country.

    AMY GOODMAN: Have shut down or have been shut down?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: They have been shut down. They have — since yesterday, I think they started seizing their operation, and media staff have not shown up at work.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, in the last weeks, you have the bombing outside the defense minister’s house in Kabul. You have the killing of the spokesperson for the president of Afghanistan, someone you must have been familiar with since you’re a journalist and he’s the spokesperson. How are you preparing in Kabul, as you talk about the shutting down of news organizations? And what do you think is the timeline for Kabul now? The U.S. government was saying one to three months; some are now saying under a month.

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: Well, I hope — I hope that we’re not going to come to that option. I mean, that’s my hope. And I hope that we don’t have to be able — we’re not forced to stop our operation, and journalists should be able to continue their work, not just in Kabul, but in the provinces. So, I can’t really put a time on when Kabul will fall, but I think the possibility is there, especially after the collapse of Kandahar and Herat yesterday.

    AMY GOODMAN: Nearly a quarter of a million people have been internally displaced since May alone. On Wednesday, internally displaced Afghans set up makeshift camps in Kabul, in a Kabul park, after being forced out of their homes by Taliban fighters. This is an Afghan woman who fled, Zar Begum.

    ZAR BEGUM: [translated] Taliban militants forcibly evicted me at gunpoint, killed my sons and forcibly married my daughters-in-law. They forcibly took three or four girls from each house and married them. We had to leave.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the displaced people, and also specifically the plight of women and girls, Lotfullah?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: I think in one of these camps just north of Kabul, we heard that there were — children died because they had no access to powder milk. And in one of the parks which is closer to where I am right now, you see thousands of people living in a very, very miserable condition. I think that can also — I mean, that face of the city, I haven’t seen for many, many years. So, it’s really, really striking to see that the number of IDPs is growing. Let’s not forget that these are people coming from the far provinces. But once Kabul is further surrounded, there is going to be more coming from the districts around Kabul, so the city will definitely become a large hub for internally displaced people.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, you have, on Wednesday, the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saying that Taliban told him that the Taliban will refuse to negotiate as long as Ashraf Ghani remains president, the Taliban saying it wants to be recognized as the legitimate leadership of Afghanistan. Let me go to this clip.

    PRIME MINISTER IMRAN KHAN: The Taliban senior leadership came here, and we tried to persuade them to come to some sort of a political settlement. The only thing that would stop Afghanistan from descending into anarchy is a political settlement. But, unfortunately, the Taliban, when they were here, they felt that they would not — they refused to talk to Ashraf Ghani. Their condition is that as long as Ashraf Ghani is there, we are not going to talk to the Afghan government.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. Lotfullah, the significance of what he’s saying?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: I hope that — I mean, that is really Pakistan’s and Taliban’s statement. If that is just a precondition for talking, that’s not good enough. If that is a precondition for peace, for ceasefire, for guaranteeing a political settlement, then I think the Afghan leadership should seriously think about that. So, I don’t want to defend contamination of President Ashraf Ghani’s term, because the government is really, really becoming very limited, but I think Afghans should ask themselves one question: that if Ghani leaves, what are we going to get in return? A meeting with the Taliban or peace?

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Lotfullah, again, we’ve spoken to you a few times, once after a member of your staff — and you have had a few — have been killed. If you could comment further on how you are preparing right now, living and working in and covering Kabul, Afghanistan, and the whole country at TOLOnews?

    LOTFULLAH NAJAFIZADA: I spend a lot of time talking to my colleagues every day, including today, which is Friday, a day off, on what should we do to continue our work, what are our options, to hear their concerns, concerns of their family members. I think that is a common story of every Afghan right now.

    But what we — I think what we should do is to make sure and try our best to keep press freedom, free media, part of the Afghan society, because this is really, as you said, a very hard-won gain. You know, we have come here with so much prices that we have paid and sacrifices that we have made over the years, including 11 colleagues of mine who have been killed just in the past five years.

    AMY GOODMAN: Lotfullah Najafizada, I thank you so much for being with us, director of TOLOnews, the 24-hour news channel based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Stay safe.

    Coming up, we go to Mexico, where a drug cartel has threatened to murder a prominent news anchor. It hasn’t stopped her from speaking out. We’ll have more. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: “Seneca” by Patti Smith. She’ll be performing at a massive “We Love New York City: Homecoming Concert” with Bruce Springsteen and many others on August 21st in Central Park.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘Nowhere to go’: divorced Afghan women in peril as the Taliban close in

    As horror stories emerge from areas that have fallen to the Islamist militants, women living alone fear they have no route of escape

    There’s an old saying in Afghanistan that encapsulates the country’s views on divorce: “A woman only leaves her father’s house in the white bridal clothes, and she can only return in the white shrouds.”

    In this deeply conservative and patriarchal society, women who defy convention and seek divorce are often disowned by their families and shunned by Afghan society. Left alone, they have to fight for basic rights, such as renting an apartment, which require the involvement or guarantees of male relatives.

    As provinces and cities fall under Taliban control across Afghanistan, women’s voices are already being silenced. For this special series, the Guardian’s Rights and freedom project has partnered with Rukhshana Media, a collective of female journalists across Afghanistan, to bring their stories of how the escalating crisis is affecting the lives of women and girls to a global audience.

    I left my family with only the clothes I was wearing. I got into a taxi to Kabul and never looked back

    Related: ‘I worry my daughters will never know peace’: women flee the Taliban – again

    ​Now more than ever, Afghan women need a platform to speak for themselves. As the Taliban’s return haunts Afghanistan, the survival of Rukhshana Media depends on ​readers’ help.​ To continue reporting​ ​over ​the next crucial year, ​it is trying to raise $20,000.​ If you can help, go to ​this crowdfunding page.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Biden Must Call Off the B-52s Bombing Afghan Cities

    American flag is lowered as U.S. soldiers leave Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, May 2, 2021. Photo: Afghan Ministry of Defense Press Office.

    Nine provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen to the Taliban in six days – Zaranj, Sheberghan, Sar-e-Pul, Kunduz, Taloqan, Aybak, Farah, Pul-e-Khumri and Faizabad – while fighting continues in four more – Lashkargah, Kandahar, Herat & Mazar-i-Sharif. U.S. military officials now believe Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, could fall in one to three months.

    It is horrific to watch the death, destruction and mass displacement of thousands of terrified Afghans and the triumph of the misogynist Taliban that ruled the nation 20 years ago. But the fall of the centralized, corrupt government propped up by the Western powers was inevitable, whether this year, next year or ten years from now.

    President Biden has reacted to America’s snowballing humiliation in the graveyard of empires by once again dispatching U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to Doha to urge the government and the Taliban to seek a political solution, while at the same time dispatching B-52 bombers to attack at least two provincial capitals.

    In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province, the U.S. bombing has already reportedly destroyed a high school and a health clinic. Another B-52 bombed Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province and the home of the infamous warlord and accused war criminal Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is now the military commander of the U.S.-backed government’s armed forces.

    Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that U.S. Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are also still operating in Afghanistan.

    The rapid disintegration of the Afghan forces that the U.S. and its Western allies have recruited, armed and trained for 20 years at a cost of about $90 billion should come as no surprise. On paper, the Afghan National Army has 180,000 troops, but in reality most are unemployed Afghans desperate to earn some money to support their families but not eager to fight their fellow Afghans. The Afghan Army is also notorious for its corruption and mismanagement.

    The army and the even more beleaguered and vulnerable police forces that man isolated outposts and checkpoints around the country are plagued by high casualties, rapid turnover and desertion. Most troops feel no loyalty to the corrupt U.S.-backed government and routinely abandon their posts, either to join the Taliban or just to go home.

    When the BBC asked General Khoshal Sadat, the national police chief, about the impact of high casualties on police recruitment in February 2020, he cynically replied, “When you look at recruitment, I always think about the Afghan families and how many children they have. The good thing is there is never a shortage of fighting-age males who will be able to join the force.”

    But a police recruit at a checkpoint questioned the very purpose of the war, telling the BBC’s Nanna Muus Steffensen, “We Muslims are all brothers. We don’t have a problem with each other.” In that case, she asked him, why were they fighting? He hesitated, laughed nervously and shook his head in resignation. “You know why. I know why,” he said. “It’s not really our fight.”

    Since 2007, the jewel of U.S. and Western military training missions in Afghanistan has been the Afghan Commando Corps or special operations forces, who comprise only 7% of Afghan National Army troops but reportedly do 70 to 80% of the fighting. But the Commandos have struggled to reach their target of recruiting, arming and training 30,000 troops, and poor recruitment from Pashtuns, the largest and traditionally dominant ethnic group, has been a critical weakness, especially from the Pashtun heartland in the South.

    The Commandos and the professional officer corps of the Afghan National Army are dominated by ethnic Tajiks, effectively the successors to the Northern Alliance that the U.S. supported against the Taliban 20 years ago. As of 2017, the Commandos numbered only 16,000 to 21,000, and it is not clear how many of these Western-trained troops now serve as the last line of defense between the U.S.-backed puppet government and total defeat.

    The Taliban’s speedy and simultaneous occupation of large amounts of territory all over the country appears to be a deliberate strategy to overwhelm and outflank the government’s small number of well-trained, well-armed troops. The Taliban have had more success winning the loyalty of minorities in the North and West than government forces have had recruiting Pashtuns from the South, and the government’s small number of well-trained troops cannot be everywhere at once.

    But what of the United States? Its deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are a brutal response by a failing, flailing imperial power to a historic, humiliating defeat.

    The United States does not flinch from committing mass murder against its enemies. Just look at the U.S.-led destruction of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. How many Americans even know about the officially-sanctioned massacre of civilians that Iraqi forces committed when the U.S.-led coalition finally took control of Mosul in 2017, after President Trump said it should “take out the families” of Islamic State fighters?

    Twenty years after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld committed a full range of war crimes, from torture and the deliberate killing of civilians to the “supreme international crime” of aggression, Biden is clearly no more concerned than they were with criminal accountability or the judgment of history. But even from the most pragmatic and callous point of view, what can continued aerial bombardment of Afghan cities accomplish, besides a final but futile climax to the 20-year-long U.S. slaughter of Afghans by over 80,000 American bombs and missiles?

    The intellectually and strategically bankrupt U.S. military and CIA bureaucracy has a history of congratulating itself for fleeting, superficial victories. It quickly declared victory in Afghanistan in 2001 and set out to duplicate its imagined conquest in Iraq. Then the short-lived success of their 2011 regime change operation in Libya encouraged the United States and its allies to turn Al Qaeda loose in Syria, spawning a decade of intractable violence and chaos and the rise of the Islamic State.

    In the same manner, Biden’s unaccountable and corrupt national security advisors seem to be urging him to use the same weapons that obliterated the Islamic State’s urban bases in Iraq and Syria to attack Taliban-held cities in Afghanistan.

    But Afghanistan is not Iraq or Syria. Only 26% of Afghans live in cities, compared with 71% in Iraq and 54% in Syria, and the Taliban’s base is not in the cities but in the rural areas where the other three quarters of Afghans live. Despite support from Pakistan over the years, the Taliban are not an invading force like Islamic State in Iraq but an Afghan nationalist movement that has fought for 20 years to expel foreign invasion and occupation forces from their country.

    In many areas, Afghan government forces have not fled from the Taliban, as the Iraqi Army did from the Islamic State, but joined them. On August 9th, the Taliban occupied Aybak, the sixth provincial capital to fall, after a local warlord and his 250 fighters agreed to join forces with the Taliban and the governor of Samangan province handed the city over to them.

    That very same day, the Afghan government’s chief negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, returned to Doha for further peace talks with the Taliban. His American allies must make it clear to him and his government, and to the Taliban, that the United States will fully support every effort to achieve a more peaceful political transition.

    But the United States must not keep bombing and killing Afghans to provide cover for the U.S.-backed puppet government to avoid difficult but necessary compromises at the negotiating table to bring peace to the incredibly long-suffering, war-weary people of Afghanistan. Bombing Taliban-occupied cities and the people who live in them is a savage and criminal policy that President Biden must renounce.

    The defeat of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan now seems to be unfolding even faster than the collapse of South Vietnam between 1973 and 1975 The public takeaway from the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia was the “Vietnam syndrome,” an aversion to overseas military interventions that lasted for decades.

    As we approach the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we should reflect on how the Bush administration exploited the U.S. public’s thirst for revenge to unleash this bloody, tragic and utterly futile 20-year war.

    The lesson of America’s experience in Afghanistan should be a new “Afghanistan syndrome,” a public aversion to war that prevents future U.S. military attacks and invasions, rejects attempts to socially engineer the governments of other nations and leads to a new and active American commitment to peace, diplomacy and disarmament.

    The post Biden Must Call Off the B-52s Bombing Afghan Cities first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.