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Category: Afghanistan

  • China Aces Western Hypocrisy

    There’s a new dawn evident: China is not putting up with what it sees as hypocritical Western interference in its sovereign affairs. Sanctions are being met with rapid counter-sanctions, and Chinese officials are vociferously pointing out Western double standards.

    There was a time when the United States and its allies could browbeat others with condemnations. Not any more. China’s colossal global economic power and growing international influence has been a game-changer in the old Western practice of imperialist arrogance.

    The shock came at the Alaska summit earlier this month between US top diplomat Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterparts. Blinken was expecting to lecture China over alleged human rights violations. Then Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s foreign policy chief, took Blinken to task over a range of past and current human rights issues afflicting the United States. Washington was left reeling from the lashes.

    Western habits die hard, though. Following the fiasco in Alaska, the United States, Canada, Britain and the European Union coordinated sanctions on Chinese officials over provocative allegations of genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Australia and New Zealand, which are part of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence network, also supported the raft of sanctions.

    Again China caused shock when it quickly hit back with its own counter-sanctions against each of these Western states. The Americans and their allies were aghast that anyone would have the temerity to stand up to them.

    Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau bemoaned: “China’s sanctions are an attack on transparency and freedom of expression – values at the heart of our democracy.”

    Let’s unpack the contentions a bit. First of all, Western claims about genocide in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang are dubious and smack of political grandstanding in order to give Washington and its allies a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.

    The latest Western sanctions are based on a report by a shady Washington-based think-tank Newlines Institute of Strategic Policy. Its report claiming “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang has the hallmarks of a propaganda screed, not remotely the work of independent scholarly research. Both China and independent journalists at the respected US-based Grayzone have dismissed the claims as fabrication and distortion.

    For the United States and other Western governments to level sanctions against China citing the above “report” is highly provocative. It also betrays the real objective, which is to undermine Beijing. This is a top geopolitical priority for Washington. Under the Biden administration, Washington has relearned the value of “diplomacy” – that is the advantage of corralling allies into a hostile front, rather than Trump’s America First go-it-alone policy.

    Granted, China does have problems with its Xinjiang region. As Australia’s premier think-tank Lowy Institute noted: “Ethnic unrest and terrorism in Xinjiang has been an ongoing concern for Chinese authorities for decades.”

    Due to the two-decade-old US-led war in Afghanistan there has been a serious problem for the Chinese authorities from radicalization of the Uyghur population. Thousands of fighters from Xinjiang have trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan and have taken their “global jihad” to Syria and other Central Asian countries. It is their stated objective to return to Xinjiang and liberate it as a caliphate of East Turkestan separate from China.

    Indeed, the American government has acknowledged previously that several Uyghur militants were detained at its notorious Guantanamo detention center.

    The United States and its NATO and other allies, Australia and New Zealand, have all created the disaster that is Afghanistan. The war has scarred generations of Afghans and radicalized terrorist networks across the Middle East and Central Asia, which are a major concern for China’s security.

    Beijing’s counterinsurgency policies have succeeded in tamping down extremism among its Uyghur people. The population has grown to around 12 million, nearly half the region’s total. This and general economic advances are cited by Beijing as evidence refuting Western claims of “genocide”. China says it runs vocational training centers and not “concentration camps”, as Western governments maintain. Beijing has reportedly agreed to an open visit by United Nations officials to verify conditions.

    Western hypocrisy towards China is astounding. Its claims about China committing genocide and forced labor are projections of its own past and current violations against indigenous people and ethnic minorities. The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia have vile histories stained from colonialist extermination and slavery.

    But specifically with regard to the Uyghur, the Western duplicity is awesome. The mass killing, torture and destruction meted out in Afghanistan by Western troops have fueled the radicalization in China’s Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan. The Americans, British and Australians in particular have huge blood on their hands.

    An official report into unlawful killings by Australian special forces found that dozens of Afghan civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood. When China’s foreign ministry highlighted the killings, the Australian premier Scott Morrison recoiled to decry Beijing’s remarks as “offensive” and “repugnant”. Morrison demanded China issue an apology for daring to point out the war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian troops.

    It is absurd and ironic that Western states which destroyed Afghanistan with war crimes and crimes against humanity have the brass neck to censure China over non-existent crimes in its own region of Xinjiang. And especially regarding China’s internal affairs with its Uyghur people, some of whom have been radicalized by terrorism stemming from Western mass-murder in Afghanistan.

    China is, however, not letting this Western hypocrisy pass. Beijing is hitting back to point out who the real culprits are. Its vast global economic power and increasing trade partnerships with over 100 nations through the Belt and Road Initiative all combine to give China’s words a tour de force that the Western states cannot handle. Hence, they are falling over in shock when China hits back.

    The United States thinks it can line up a coalition of nations against China.

    But Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia – all of whom depend on China’s growth and goodwill – can expect to pay a heavy price for being Uncle Sam’s lapdogs.

    • First published in Sputnik

    Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Read other articles by Finian.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 at 1:13pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China, Europe, Exploitation, Iran, Joe Biden, Militarism, Propagandists, Russia, Sanctions, South China Sea, Syria, The “West”, United Kingdom, US Foreign Policy, US Hegemony, US Military, US Pivot to Asia, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China Aces Western Hypocrisy

    There’s a new dawn evident: China is not putting up with what it sees as hypocritical Western interference in its sovereign affairs. Sanctions are being met with rapid counter-sanctions, and Chinese officials are vociferously pointing out Western double standards.

    There was a time when the United States and its allies could browbeat others with condemnations. Not any more. China’s colossal global economic power and growing international influence has been a game-changer in the old Western practice of imperialist arrogance.

    The shock came at the Alaska summit earlier this month between US top diplomat Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterparts. Blinken was expecting to lecture China over alleged human rights violations. Then Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s foreign policy chief, took Blinken to task over a range of past and current human rights issues afflicting the United States. Washington was left reeling from the lashes.

    Western habits die hard, though. Following the fiasco in Alaska, the United States, Canada, Britain and the European Union coordinated sanctions on Chinese officials over provocative allegations of genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Australia and New Zealand, which are part of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence network, also supported the raft of sanctions.

    Again China caused shock when it quickly hit back with its own counter-sanctions against each of these Western states. The Americans and their allies were aghast that anyone would have the temerity to stand up to them.

    Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau bemoaned: “China’s sanctions are an attack on transparency and freedom of expression – values at the heart of our democracy.”

    Let’s unpack the contentions a bit. First of all, Western claims about genocide in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang are dubious and smack of political grandstanding in order to give Washington and its allies a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.

    The latest Western sanctions are based on a report by a shady Washington-based think-tank Newlines Institute of Strategic Policy. Its report claiming “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang has the hallmarks of a propaganda screed, not remotely the work of independent scholarly research. Both China and independent journalists at the respected US-based Grayzone have dismissed the claims as fabrication and distortion.

    For the United States and other Western governments to level sanctions against China citing the above “report” is highly provocative. It also betrays the real objective, which is to undermine Beijing. This is a top geopolitical priority for Washington. Under the Biden administration, Washington has relearned the value of “diplomacy” – that is the advantage of corralling allies into a hostile front, rather than Trump’s America First go-it-alone policy.

    Granted, China does have problems with its Xinjiang region. As Australia’s premier think-tank Lowy Institute noted: “Ethnic unrest and terrorism in Xinjiang has been an ongoing concern for Chinese authorities for decades.”

    Due to the two-decade-old US-led war in Afghanistan there has been a serious problem for the Chinese authorities from radicalization of the Uyghur population. Thousands of fighters from Xinjiang have trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan and have taken their “global jihad” to Syria and other Central Asian countries. It is their stated objective to return to Xinjiang and liberate it as a caliphate of East Turkestan separate from China.

    Indeed, the American government has acknowledged previously that several Uyghur militants were detained at its notorious Guantanamo detention center.

    The United States and its NATO and other allies, Australia and New Zealand, have all created the disaster that is Afghanistan. The war has scarred generations of Afghans and radicalized terrorist networks across the Middle East and Central Asia, which are a major concern for China’s security.

    Beijing’s counterinsurgency policies have succeeded in tamping down extremism among its Uyghur people. The population has grown to around 12 million, nearly half the region’s total. This and general economic advances are cited by Beijing as evidence refuting Western claims of “genocide”. China says it runs vocational training centers and not “concentration camps”, as Western governments maintain. Beijing has reportedly agreed to an open visit by United Nations officials to verify conditions.

    Western hypocrisy towards China is astounding. Its claims about China committing genocide and forced labor are projections of its own past and current violations against indigenous people and ethnic minorities. The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia have vile histories stained from colonialist extermination and slavery.

    But specifically with regard to the Uyghur, the Western duplicity is awesome. The mass killing, torture and destruction meted out in Afghanistan by Western troops have fueled the radicalization in China’s Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan. The Americans, British and Australians in particular have huge blood on their hands.

    An official report into unlawful killings by Australian special forces found that dozens of Afghan civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood. When China’s foreign ministry highlighted the killings, the Australian premier Scott Morrison recoiled to decry Beijing’s remarks as “offensive” and “repugnant”. Morrison demanded China issue an apology for daring to point out the war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian troops.

    It is absurd and ironic that Western states which destroyed Afghanistan with war crimes and crimes against humanity have the brass neck to censure China over non-existent crimes in its own region of Xinjiang. And especially regarding China’s internal affairs with its Uyghur people, some of whom have been radicalized by terrorism stemming from Western mass-murder in Afghanistan.

    China is, however, not letting this Western hypocrisy pass. Beijing is hitting back to point out who the real culprits are. Its vast global economic power and increasing trade partnerships with over 100 nations through the Belt and Road Initiative all combine to give China’s words a tour de force that the Western states cannot handle. Hence, they are falling over in shock when China hits back.

    The United States thinks it can line up a coalition of nations against China.

    But Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia – all of whom depend on China’s growth and goodwill – can expect to pay a heavy price for being Uncle Sam’s lapdogs.

    • First published in Sputnik

    The post China Aces Western Hypocrisy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 5:44pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Drones, Exploitation, Heroin Addiction, Surveillance, United Kingdom, War on Terror.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America’s Longest War Winds Down

    No bang, no whimper, no victory. Continue reading

    The post America’s Longest War Winds Down appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • US Intelligence Warns Withdrawal Could Lead To Afghanistan Being Controlled By Afghans

    US intelligence agencies have warned the Biden administration that if the United States withdraws its military presence from Afghanistan under current circumstances, the nation would be at severe risk of falling under the control of the people who live there.

    A New York Times article titled “Officials Try to Sway Biden Using Intelligence on Potential for Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan” warns that an intelligence assessment has predicted that if “U.S. troops leave before any deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government, the militant group will take over much of the country.”

    “The intelligence estimate predicted that the Taliban would relatively swiftly expand their control over Afghanistan, suggesting that the Afghan security forces remain fragile despite years of training by the American military and billions of dollars in U.S. funding,” NYT reports.

    The New York Times, which has consistently supported all US wars including the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, informs us the Taliban has been “stalling” to avoid signing a power-sharing deal with the existing government in Afghanistan.

    “The Biden administration is making a final effort before May 1 to show progress in slow-moving negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Doha, Qatar,” NYT reports. “The Taliban, according to American officials, are stalling.”

    And, I mean, why wouldn’t they? As Defense Priorities policy director Ben Friedman puts it, “If this assessment is right, and the Taliban could take most of Afghanistan if US forces left, and they want that, why sign a deal limiting themselves to less? Or why not sign to get the US out and renege? Keeping US forces there is just a delaying tactic.”

    If the most powerful faction in Afghanistan wants power and has the ability to simply take it, they stand nothing to gain by signing a power-sharing agreement with a faction that is incapable of holding power. The New York Times and the US intelligence cartel (if one can even categorize these as separate entities at this point) are trying to spin the ongoing military presence in Afghanistan as a temporary situation awaiting conditions which will be arriving shortly, and that’s simply false. The Taliban will not voluntarily choose to make itself less powerful.

    And, after the Afghanistan Papers exposed the fact that the US war machine has been lying left and right to justify the continuation of the occupation of Afghanistan, you would have to be out of your mind to believe that’s not intentional. The US military is in Afghanistan not to protect women’s rights from control by the illiberal Taliban forces, but because it’s a crucial geostrategic region that the US stands much to gain on the world stage by controlling. This is why the Afghanistan Papers were quickly memory-holed by the mass media as soon as they came out, and why now all we hear about is more made-up reasons why leaving would be disastrous.

    When the US-centralized power alliance babbles about “conditions” which need to be met before there can be a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan, the conditions they are really referring to are a puppet regime in Tehran, in Moscow, and in Beijing. As long as Iran, Russia and China successfully resist absorption into the empire-like blob of US client states, the military presence will remain and narratives will be manufactured to justify it.

    The Taliban is an entirely regional power with entirely regional goals; there is no defense-based argument for using military force to keep them out of power in a nation on the other side of the planet. Arguments that they must be kept out of power by military force to protect Afghan women from their regressive ideology is nonsensical unless you also say the US military must be used to forcibly end all illiberal cultural norms everywhere in the world, which would also be absurd.

    All the US empire and its narrative managers are really saying when they claim the Taliban will take power if the US leaves is that without the US in Afghanistan, the US won’t be controlling Afghanistan anymore. And, like, duh. Of course it won’t. The people who live there will be determining the fate of their own nation, by violence if they so choose. Giving a nation back its sovereignty necessarily means letting them control their own fate, per definition. Using that self-evident fact to argue against the cessation of military force is just admitting you don’t believe other nations should be self-sovereign.

    Saying there might be violence and oppression without an oppressive force of violent thugs controlling things is silly in a couple of different ways. It is a known fact that Australian forces occupying Afghanistan have already committed horrific war crimes there, and if the US government stopped stopped obstructing the International Criminal Court from investigating potential war crimes of American forces it would certainly find a lot there too.

    The US is at this point making the argument, “If we don’t keep killing the Afghans, they might kill each other.” The Taliban has warned that if the United States remains in Afghanistan after the May 1st deadline established in a previous peace deal they will begin attacking occupying forces, so pretending the US empire is maintaining the peace by continuing the occupation is entirely baseless. They’re not there to maintain peace, they’re there to maintain control.

    Should the US military permanently occupy foreign countries to control what happens there? That’s really the argument on the table right now. Ignore all the narrative distortion and focus there.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden Plans To Stay In Afghanistan Past May 1 Deadline

    The Biden administration is planning to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past an agreed-upon May 1 deadline to withdraw, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday to a panel hosted by Foreign Policy.

    “It’s a general feeling that May 1 is too soon, just logistically,” Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) claimed, citing conversations with administration officials. “You cannot pull out ten thousand plus troops in any sort of reasonable way in just six weeks.”

    Under the terms of the Doha Agreement signed with the Taliban in February 2020, the United States is obligated to pull its forces out of Afghanistan by May 1 this year.

    The post Biden Plans To Stay In Afghanistan Past May 1 Deadline appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Taliban MLB Franchise Favored To Win It All

    Let the record show that the almighty American military machine was soundly defeated by an enemy that didn’t like fighting either in the dark or cold. Talk about bad medicine that’s good for a society (somehow still) desperately in need of a decisive case study in the limits of its own power and martial prowess. Enter the tested teachers of the Taliban and Afghanistan (though, ironically, Talib vaguely translates as “student.”.

    Seriously though, when I commanded a sandbagged shit-hole (in 2011-12) just miles from Talib-ground zero in Kandahar province at the very crest of the Obama-surge and U.S. troop counts – we prayed for winters and sunsets.

    The post The Taliban MLB Franchise Favored To Win It All appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Confused in Afghanistan: The Biden Administration’s Latest Trick

    The Biden administration continues to engage in that favourite activity White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki can only describe as “circling back”.  And much circling is taking place in the context of Afghanistan.

    The cupboard of calamities is well stocked, with the US facing an emboldened Taliban keen to hold Washington to its word in withdrawing the last troops by May 1.  In doing so, there is little chance that the US sponsored government in Kabul would survive.  But dithering past the date will also be an open invitation to resume hostilities in earnest.

    As things stand with the Afghanistan Peace Agreement, the Taliban have every reason to chortle.  “There is little sign that this particular peace process,” opines Kate Clark of the Afghan Analysts Network, “has blunted the Taliban’s eagerness, in any way, to pursue war.”  Not only have they been brought into any future power sharing arrangements with Kabul; they are also entertaining a new constitution with a good dose of Islamic policing.  A powerful Islamic Jurisprudence Council with veto powers over laws is contemplated.  All of this comes with the departure of US troops provided the Taliban prevent Al Qaeda and other designated terrorist groups from operating within the country’s borders.

    Cadres of the security establishment in Washington are worried at easing the imperial footprint.  Left with few options, the Biden administration has resorted to delaying tactics, hoping for the creation of an interim power-sharing government that would lead to a more comprehensive peace settlement.

    Policy wonks are not impressed.  Madiha Afzal and Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute take a withering view of the Taliban: they are not to be trusted on any reduction in violence or constructive power sharing.  The only question for them is whether US forces remain, or leave.  As with previous justifications for keeping up the pretence for foolish, bloody and failed interventions, the argument is a familiar hoary old chestnut: to extricate yourself from the nightmare would see the perpetration of a bigger one.  “As difficult as it is to remain in this longest war, the most likely outcome of pulling out of Afghanistan would be very, very ugly, including ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and the ultimate dismemberment of the country.”

    Afzal and O’Hanlon acknowledges the bill to be considerable, though they do so with cool regret: the cost to the US taxpayer could be up to $10 billion annually; 10 to 20 casualties would also be added to the accounts “if the Taliban resumes its previous use of force against US forces.”  Not taking up the burden would encourage the troops of other countries to leave while seeing conflict move to the cities, “which have generally remained under government control throughout the past two decades.”

    With the interim government plan taking shape, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has decided to further baffle allies in Kabul.  In a letter to Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani seen by TOLOnews, Blinken states that, “Although we have not yet completed our review of the way ahead, we have reached an initial conclusion that the best way to advance our shared interests is to do all we can to accelerate peace talks and to bring all parties into compliance with their commitments.”

    To this waffle, Blinken has a suggestion: “pursuing a high-level diplomatic effort with the parties and with regional countries and the United Nations.”  The Foreign Ministers of Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, India and the United States should be convened by the UN. Written proposals to the Taliban and Ghani are also promised “aimed at accelerating discussions on a negotiated settlement and ceasefire.” While they are not meant to “dictate terms to the parties,” the Afghans have every reason to assume the opposite, given that they involve “foundational principles that will guide Afghanistan’s future constitutional and governing arrangements”, “a new inclusive government” and “terms of a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire.”

    Then comes the insertion of Turkey, which would have come as a delight to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, busily shredding the remnants of liberal democracy in his country.  Senior-level meetings of both sides would take place in Turkey “in the coming weeks to finalize a peace agreement.”  Hardly a vote of confidence for supporters of constitutional strength and sobriety, and striking coming from an individual who enjoys berating states such as China for their human rights blemishes.

    The rest of Blinken’s points resemble a counselling session: a revised proposal for a Reduction-in-Violence strategy that will take 90 days; the need for all Afghan leaders to remain united and, in doing so, “build consensus on specific goals and objectives for a negotiation with the Taliban about governance, power-sharing, and essential supporting principles”.  Blinken then falls into that unfortunate habit prevalent in the advertising school of thought in US foreign policy.  Tactics and “public messaging that will demonstrate unity of effort and purpose” should be pursued.  Public relations should do it.

    The tone of the note, with its Quiet American theme, did not impress various Afghan advocates.  Kabul-based lawyer Kawun Kakar found the “prescriptive nature and context of the letter disturbing.”  He acknowledged that the US was “frustrated by the ‘endless war’” and the lengthy talks in Doha but imposing “complicated substantive” and “procedural conditions” and “deadlines do not seem realistic.”  The parties, as things stood, were simply too far apart to guarantee any durable peace, while letting in other major powers into an already messy picture was ill-considered.

    Vice President Amrullah Saleh did little to hide his dissatisfaction.  “They [the Americans] have the right to decide on 2,500 US soldiers and sign deals with the Taliban as they please.  But it is also our right to make decisions about 35 million people of Afghanistan not based on anyone else’s calendar.”

    Biden’s Afghanistan policy risks fouling up even before anything solid is minted. “US forces will stay,” worries Eli Lake, “risking a new round of attacks from the Taliban.  But they will not stay long, depriving the US of its already dwindling leverage to force the Taliban to adhere to the 2020 deal.”  The worst of all worlds.

    The post Confused in Afghanistan: The Biden Administration’s Latest Trick first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghan peace summit includes just one female delegate

    Activist and politician Habiba Sarabi tells Moscow talks ‘51% of people should not be ignored’

    A three-day conference aimed at breathing life into Afghanistan’s stalled peace process has been launched in Moscow, but Afghan human rights activists have raised the alarm that the delegates included just one woman.

    Habiba Sarabi, an activist and politician, was the only female delegate on the 12-member team representing the Afghan government and political leaders at Thursday’s summit in Moscow. The 10-member delegation sent by the Islamist Taliban had none.

    Related: ‘The Taliban took years of my life’: the Afghan women living in the shadow of war

    Related: Afghan TV station ‘can’t hire women’ over security fears after four killed

    Continue reading…

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

  • Biden Should Stop Making Excuses — It’s Time to Leave Afghanistan

    Afghan security official inspect the scene of a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 15, 2021.

    War in Afghanistan. In my mind, after all these years, those two words sound like a rock dropped into a bottomless well.

    Forty years ago, the whimsy of Cold Warriors motivated the United States to turn its imperial gaze upon that long-battered country. The subsequent actions and decisions — from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to the first George Bush — led directly to the attacks of September 11 and the U.S. invasion of that nation. Twenty years later, the U.S. military remains in Afghanistan.

    In Afghanistan, generations have seen foreign armies invade, retreat, invade again, yet never ultimately prevail. The Persians, the Greeks, the Mongols and Murghals, the British, the Soviets, and finally the United States … all have come, and all have gone, except for us, lo these 20 long years.

    What began — this time — with George W. Bush has passed through the hands of Barack Obama and Donald Trump to land on the desk of Joe Biden. The specific circumstances of the moment may differ, but the decision before Biden is age-old: Leave in defeat, or remain and be defeated. What do you get when you sift through ashes? You get ashes.

    The Afghanistan situation at present serves to highlight one of the most galling elements of the now-departed Trump era. Trump campaigned on the idea that he would not repeat U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that he would bring the troops home, and would not start any new wars unless provoked. These were hopeful notes — for those who believed him. That folly was not long-lived, except among those who accept something as true only if Trump says it is.

    Trump did not start any wholly new wars, but the rest of these promises were, of course, flat-out broken. He didn’t bring the troops home, but merely moved them like breathing chess pieces to various points on the map, deranging a number of long-standing alliances in the process.

    Aside from Syria and the Kurds, nowhere was this wrongheaded approach to policy more vividly apparent than Afghanistan. The Trump administration negotiated a May 1 withdrawal date with the Taliban, on the promise that the Taliban would end attacks on U.S. forces and cut ties with al Qaeda. According to observers, the Taliban has failed to live up to those terms.

    Perhaps worse, the kind of military drawdown promised by Trump requires an extensive array of logistics, plus the time to effectively implement them. When President Biden took office, none of those logistics were anywhere near being in place, even as the May 1 deadline was breathing down his neck. As with all things Trump — COVID and vaccines most particularly — there was a whole lot of talk but almost no work put into the effort.

    Biden had a front-row seat to the eight years President Obama failed to extract us from Afghanistan. He is on record as having opposed Obama’s decision to increase U.S. forces there, and today is confronted with a public that has soured deeply on the Forever Wars. Will that be enough to motivate him to finally end this two-decade disaster? “It could happen, but it is tough,” he told ABC News on Tuesday. “The fact is that, that was not a very solidly negotiated deal that (Trump) … worked out.”

    The reasons why it is so “tough,” of course, are chalked up to “national security,” the always-available excuse for those who wish to continue dodging this decision. “We’ve got to be able to assure the world and the American public that Afghanistan will not be a source of planning, plotting to project terrorist attacks around the globe,” Sen. Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently told reporters. “That’s the minimum. I’m not sure we can do that without some presence there.”

    The government’s policy shops unsurprisingly concur. “The Afghan government would probably lose the capability of flying any of its aircraft within a few months and, to be quite blunt, would probably face collapse,” John Sopko, special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction with the US Department of Defense told a House committee on Tuesday.

    Is that it, really? I believe this goes far beyond concerns about national security, and deals far more deeply with the hubris of empire and the colonial mind.

    Afghanistan was an attractive target not just because it is a profit engine for the “defense” industry that drives so much of U.S. military policy, though that is certainly an unblinking truth and motivating factor. There are also the investors into wildly profitable pipelines and mineral rights to consider. Estimates say there could be $3 trillion in natural resources waiting to be plundered, if only the problems with the Taliban could be settled.

    The U.S. has already spent nearly $1 trillion on that war, so maybe if we stay a little longer — undoubtedly killing more people — we can lay that pipe and dig those mines, and maybe make our money back. U.S. capitalism is plunder, and there sits the prize.

    The hubris of empire and colonialism, and the lure of profit. We are the United States: When we come, we seldom leave until we get what we came for. On the rare occasions we have been forced out of somewhere, the world was greeted with images of defeat and humiliation that no modern politician wishes to risk repeating. Presidents from Carter to Biden — with a brief Clintonian interlude while Afghanistan was left to burn from the inside out — have played a politics of merciless intervention in that country. This meddling wrought a terrible price 20 years ago, in Afghanistan and the U.S., and the bleeding has never stopped.

    May 1 will come and go, and like as not U.S. forces will still be in Afghanistan to see their 21st year in that place. Biden has said that even if the May deadline is missed, our troops will not be there for much longer. By my count, he will be the fourth president to say some version of that since 2001.

    It is time to leave.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • State Department hands out 21 International Women of Courage Awards 2021

    At a virtual ceremony on 8 March 2021 (international women’s day) US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken hosted First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden. It was live streamed on www.state.gov. For more on this award and its laureates of previous years, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/A386E593-5BB7-12E8-0528-AAF11BE46695

    This year includes an honorary award for seven women leaders and activists from Afghanistan who were assassinated for their dedication to improving the lives of Afghans:

    Fatema Natasha Khalil, an official with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission who was killed, along with her driver, in June 2020 by an IED in Kabul, on her way to her office.

    General Sharmila Frough, the head of the Gender Unit in the National Directorate of Security (NDS) was one of the longest-serving female NDS officers, having served as chief of the anti-kidnapping division and working undercover combating criminal networks. General Frough was assassinated in an IED explosion targeting her vehicle in March 2020 in Kabul.

    Maryam Noorzad, a midwife who served remote locations in Wardak and Bamyan provinces before working for Médecins Sans Frontières Kabul PD13 hospital. On May 12, 2020, three gunmen attacked the maternity ward of the hospital, but Maryam refused to leave her patient, who was in labor. Maryam, her patient, and the newborn baby were killed in the delivery suite.

    Fatima Rajabi, a 23-year-old police officer originally from Ghazni province and a member of the anti-narcotics division. She was traveling to her home village in Jaghori district in a civilian minibus in July 2020 when the Taliban stopped the vehicle and took her captive. Two weeks later, the Taliban killed her and sent her remains, which had gunshot wounds and signs of torture, to her family.

    Freshta, daughter of Amir Mohamed, a 35-year-old prison guard with the Office of Prison Administration. She was walking from her residence in Kandahar City to a taxi on her way to work when she was murdered by an unknown gunman on October 25, 2020.

    Malalai Maiwand, a reporter at Enikas Radio and TV, was shot and killed, along with her driver, by a gunman on December 10, 2020, in an attack on her vehicle in Jalalabad. Malalai was not the first in her family to be targeted. Five years earlier, her mother, an activist, was also killed by unknown gunmen.

    Freshta Kohistani, a 29-year-old women’s rights and democracy activist, was assassinated by unknown gunmen near her home in Kapsia province on December 24, 2020. Kohistani regularly organized events advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan and used social media as a platform for her messaging.

    The other 2021 awardees are:

    Belarus – Maria Kalesnikava

    Ahead of the August 9, 2020, presidential election, Belarusian women emerged as a dominant political force and driver of societal change in Belarus due in no small part to Maria Kalesnikava. After authorities jailed or exiled the three most popular male opposition candidates, Maria and her partners mounted a historic and sustained challenge to the 26-year rule of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Maria continues to be the face of the opposition inside Belarus, courageously facing imprisonment in the aftermath of the disputed election. Despite her detention, Maria continues to keep the democratic movement alive inside Belarus and serves as a source of inspiration for all those seeking to win freedom for themselves and their countries.

    Burma – Phyoe Phyoe Aung

    An emerging leader who is likely to play a role in shaping the country in the coming years, Phyoe Phyoe Aung is the co-founder of the Wings Institute for Reconciliation, an organization that facilitates exchanges between youth of different ethnic and religious groups. Her work promotes peacebuilding and reconciliation and enables a vital dialogue on federalism and transitional justice. She organized a 2015 protest march from Mandalay to Yangon that was violently suppressed by the Myanmar Police Force as it neared Yangon, and she and her husband were arrested and imprisoned. Phyoe Phyoe was released in April 2016 after 13 months as part of a broad pardon of political prisoners facing court trials. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/05/11/finalists-runners-up-front-line-defenders-award-human-rights-defenders-2016-announcement/#more-7981

    Cameroon – Maximilienne C. Ngo Mbe

    Maximilienne C. Ngo Mbe has demonstrated extraordinary leadership, courage, and perseverance through adversity in promoting human rights in Cameroon and Central Africa. She has been an outspoken voice among civil society actors, often sacrificing her personal safety, in the push for a peaceful solution to the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. She has called for an end to human rights abuses committed by separatists and security forces in the Northwest and Southwest regions and by security forces in the Far North. Maximilienne has also spoken out against the increased constraints placed on civil society, journalists, and political opposition by the Government of Cameroon. Her commitment to promoting human rights has been unwavering despite the intimidation, threats, and assault she has endured.

    China – Wang Yu

    Wang Yu was one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers until her arrest and imprisonment following China’s nationwide persecution of lawyers and rights advocates during the “709 crackdown.” She had taken on multiple politically sensitive cases, representing activists, scholars, Falun Gong practitioners, farmers, and petitioners in cases involving a wide array of issues, including women’s and children’s rights, and the rights to religion, freedom of expression, assembly, and association. She is now under an exit ban and has been harassed, threatened, searched, and physically assaulted by police since she began to take on rights abuse cases in 2011. [see also https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/08/02/another-chinese-human-rights-lawyer-wang-yu-spontaneous-video-confession/]

    Colombia – Mayerlis Angarita

    Mayerlis Angarita has courageously advanced peace and human rights in Colombia, often at great personal risk. Her work has improved the security, livelihoods, and resilience of countless women leaders, conflict victims, and her community. Finding healing in storytelling after her own mother was forcibly disappeared during Colombia’s conflict, she founded the civil society organization “Narrate to Live,” which now serves over 800 women victims of conflict. Additionally, after the most recent attempt on her life, she engaged the highest levels of the Colombian government to advance a comprehensive action plan to prevent violence against women leaders in her community. Her constructive engagement across 27 government entities, civil society, and the international community has been key to the plan’s success and propelled it to become a model for human rights defender protection throughout Colombia.

    Democratic Republic of the Congo – Julienne Lusenge

    Since 1978, Julienne Lusenge has been the leading female activist in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) fighting against gender-based violence (GBV) and the promotion of the rights of women and girls in conflict situations. In 2000, she created Women’s Solidarity for Peace and Integral Development, the DRC’s foremost organization defending the rights of women and girls against impunity for GBV. Julienne’s vocal testimony has contributed to the adoption of international agreements such as UN 1820, which recognizes sexual violence as a weapon of war. Julienne has touched the lives of millions of women across the DRC, harnessing the attention of the international community to acknowledge and act on the extent of sexual violence shattering DRC’s communities.

    Guatemala – Judge Erika Aifan

    Judge Erika Lorena Aifan is a trial judge working in the High-Risk Criminal Court with responsibility for high-impact crimes. She has presided over high-profile corruption and war atrocity cases, leading to defamation and threats of violence against her. Despite these challenges, Judge Aifan persisted as a Guatemalan judge independent of political influence. She has demonstrated determination and fortitude in upholding the rule of law in Guatemala. Despite the strong opposition she has faced throughout her tenure, Judge Aifan has become an icon in Guatemala in the fight against corruption, efforts to increase transparency, and actions to improve independence in the justice sector.

    Iran – Shohreh Bayat

    When Shohreh Bayat boarded her flight on her way to the 2020 Women’s Chess World Championship, she had no idea she might be seeing her native Iran for the last time. Shohreh, the first female Category A international chess arbiter in Asia, was photographed at the Championship without her hijab visible, which is compulsory in Iran. Within 24 hours, the Iranian Chess Federation – which Shohreh had previously led – refused to guarantee Shohreh’s safety if she returned to Iran without first apologizing. Fearing for her safety and unwilling to apologize for the incident, Shohreh made the heart-wrenching decision to seek refuge in the UK, leaving her husband – who lacked a UK visa – in Iran. In that moment, Shohreh chose to be a champion for women’s rights rather than be cowed by the Iranian government’s threats.

    Nepal – Muskan Khatun

    Muskan Khatun has been instrumental in bringing about new legislation criminalizing acid attacks and imposing strong penalties against perpetrators in Nepal. When Muskan was 15, she was critically injured in an acid attack after she rejected a boy’s romantic propositions. With the help of a social worker, Muskan lobbied for stronger legal action against the perpetrators of acid attacks under duress of threats and the strong social stigma associated with acid attack victims. She went before a parliamentary committee, wrote a letter to Nepal’s Prime Minister, and eventually met with him in person, to request a stronger law. Within a year of her attack, Nepal’s President issued an ordinance with harsh penalties for acid attacks and regulations on the sale of acids, a testament to Muskan’s significant advocacy.

    Somalia – Zahra Mohamed Ahmad

    For more than 20 years, Zahra Mohamed Ahmad has been at the forefront of defending human rights in Somalia, especially for its most vulnerable groups. As an accomplished lawyer, Zahra began providing legal aid, for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) survivors, women on remand status, and women in pre-trial detention. Zahra is the founder of and legal advisor for the Somali Women Development Center, an organization that reports on human rights violations and cases of abuse; supports survivors through legal assistance; established Somalia’s first free hotline service to combat SGBV; and operates one-stop centers for SGBV survivors, mobile legal clinics, family care centers, safe spaces for women and girls, and community child protection centers for internally displaced children.

    Spain – Sister Alicia Vacas Moro

    A registered nurse, Sister Alicia Vacas Moro ran a medical clinic in Egypt for eight years, helping 150 low income patients a day treat their maladies. She then moved to the biblical town of Bethany to help an impoverished Bedouin community, especially women and children. She set up training programs for women that provided them with previously unavailable economic opportunities, and established kindergartens in Bedouin camps, providing an educational foundation for children. In an environment shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sister Alicia also assisted traumatized refugees and asylum seekers, a job she continues to perform on a larger scale in her current role as the regional coordinator for the Comboni Sisters in the Middle East. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck northern Italy, she flew to Italy to assist and treat fellow sister nuns, undeterred by extreme danger to herself.

    Sri Lanka – Ranitha Gnanarajah

    Ranitha Gnanarajah, a lawyer, continues to fight for and defend the rights of the marginalized and vulnerable communities in the country, despite threats and challenges by the state. Ranitha has dedicated her career to accountability and justice for victims of enforced disappearances and prisoners detained often for years without charge under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act by providing free legal aid and related services. As an individual personally affected by the conflict and based on her extensive experience working with victims and their families, Ranitha has demonstrated tremendous passion and dedication to justice and accountability, especially for Sri Lanka’s most vulnerable populations.

    Turkey – Canan Gullu

    Canan Gullu has been an activist and organizer for 31 years and is the president of the Turkish Federation of Women’s Associations, an umbrella organization of women’s NGOs; she leads186 branches and 52,500 members. Canan has been a steadfast champion of gender equality, working to promote women’s participation in governance, labor force, and education. In 2007, the Turkish Federation of Women Associations established the first emergency hotline for victims of violence in Turkey, which continues its operations. Over the past two years, Canan launched an education and advocacy campaign focused on failures in the Turkish government’s implementation since 2012 of the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Canan’s activism has been critical to educating the public about the convention and reinforcing the need to combat gender-based violence, which quelled some politicians’ calls for Turkey’s withdrawal.

    Venezuela – Ana Rosario Contreras

    As president of the Caracas Nurses’ Association, Ana Rosario Contreras has been on the front lines in the fight for the rights of healthcare professionals, patients, and labor unions. Contreras’ fierce activism has generated widespread support from the Venezuelan people and is at the center of the civil-political movement pushing for democratic change. In a climate where the government routinely jails, tortures, harasses, threatens, or restricts the movement of its opponents, Contreras defends citizens’ rights at great personal risk. She has advocated for labor rights and has worked tirelessly to ensure that healthcare workers could receive a subsidy through Interim President Juan Guido’s Health Heroes program..

    2021 International Women of Courage Award Recipients Announced

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Khalilzad, In Pakistan, Stresses Need To Accelerate Afghan Peace Process

    Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, told military leaders during a stop in Pakistan that Islamabad continues to have an important role in the Afghan peace process as Washington bids to save the struggling effort to end the long war.

    Khalilzad and General Scott Miller, head of U.S. forces and the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, on March 8 met General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other officials at Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi, a statement by the U.S. Embassy said.

    Khalilzad has visited Afghanistan and Qatar – where Taliban negotiators are based – over the past week as the administration of President Joe Biden seeks to revitalize talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban militants ahead of a potential withdrawal of U.S. troops by May 1.

    The embassy statement said Khalilzad “stressed the need to accelerate progress toward a just and durable peace in Afghanistan.”

    “Ambassador Khalilzad emphasized Pakistan’s continued important role in the peace process, especially to help Afghans achieve a political settlement and comprehensive cease-fire,” it said.

    The Pakistani military said in a statement that “matters of mutual interest, regional security, and ongoing Afghanistan Reconciliation Process were discussed during the meeting.”

    The visit to Pakistan comes amid a flurry of unconfirmed reports that Khalilzad and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken have floated new ideas to get the peace process back on track.

    Blinken set out a series of steps to reinvigorate the process in a letter to President Ashraf Ghani seen by Afghanistan’s TOLOnews. The New York Times also reported on the letter, citing U.S. and Afghan officials.

    Afghan Deputy presidential spokesman Dawa Khan Minhapal confirmed to RFE/RL that Ghani received the letter, but declined to give details about its contents.

    According to the reports, Blinken wrote that Washington had not decided whether to withdraw the remaining 2,500 American troops from Afghanistan by May 1, as outlined in its agreement with the Taliban. A surge in fighting in past months has sparked concerns that a speedy exit may spark greater bloodshed and chaos.

    In the message, Blinken requested Ghani’s “urgent leadership,” The New York Times wrote, signaling that the Biden administration “had lost faith” in the stalled talks being held in Qatar between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

    The Blinken letter called for bringing the two sides together for a UN-organized summit with foreign ministers and envoys from the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, and India “to discuss a unified approach to supporting peace in Afghanistan.”

    Reuters reported on March 8 that a U.S.-drafted peace plan called for the current government in Kabul to be replaced with an interim administration until a new constitution is created and elections held. A joint commission would monitor a cease-fire

    The State Department did not confirm the contents of any proposals. Spokesman Ned Price said it is too early to say how Afghan peace talks were going but that Washington believes progress is possible.

    As an important player in the region and an Afghan neighbor, Pakistan is seen as potentially having a key role in any settlement in Afghanistan.

    With reporting by Reuters and RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Afghanistan Receives First COVID Vaccine Shipment Under COVAX Program

    Afghanistan has received its first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines under the COVAX international vaccine-sharing program, world health and Afghan government officials say.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) said on March 8 that the shipment of 468,000 doses is the start of what is expected to be nearly 3 million doses to eventually be provided for free to Afghanistan.

    “The delivery is part of a first wave of arrivals that will continue in the coming weeks and months,” said the WHO statement, which added that the shipment came from the Astra Zeneca Serum Institute of India in Mumbai.

    In addition to 468,000 vaccine doses, 470,000 syringes and 4,700 safety boxes were also delivered, it said.

    Afghan health officials have said the COVAX program, which is aimed at improving access to the COVID-19 vaccine for developing countries, would provide vaccines to cover 20 percent of the country’s 38 million population.

    COVAX is a joint effort by the WHO and the Gavi alliance, a public-private program that coordinates the project. The program is designed to reduce the vaccine divide between wealthy and poorer countries.

    It seeks to provide 2 billion doses of vaccines for underdeveloped countries by the end of 2021.

    “The arrival of the first COVAX doses today is a major milestone,” Gavi official Ricard Lacort said.

    “Gavi looks forward to continuing our collaboration with the people of Afghanistan and partners to ensure the smooth and equitable distribution of vaccines to those most in need. It is going to be challenging, but if we all maintain momentum and keep working together, we will defeat this pandemic,” he added.

    COVAX organizers said Afghanistan is the first country in the region to receive vaccines under the program.

    Wahid Majroh, Afghanistan’s acting health minister, said the COVAX doses will be provided to health-care workers, Afghan security force members, and journalists.

    “The ministry appreciates the COVAX facility and the international donors for their continued support,” Majroh said in a statement.

    “We must accelerate our efforts to ensure that all eligible Afghans are vaccinated and protected from COVID-19, as it is the most important step to put an end to this pandemic.”

    Afghanistan in late February began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign, initially inoculating security force members, health workers, and journalists as the country battles to fight the coronavirus pandemic amid a sharp rise in extremist violence.

    The war-wracked country last month received 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine from India’s Serum Institute, which is producing the vaccine for mid- and low-income countries.

    Afghanistan is believed to have been hit hard by the pandemic over the past year, but limited testing and a weak health-care sector have restricted its ability to track the virus.

    Officially, the country has recorded just 55,600 confirmed cases and about 2,430 deaths, but a Health Ministry survey in August estimated that up to 10 million people — nearly one-third of the population — might have been infected with the coronavirus.

    Kabul and other urban centers across the country have been rocked by violence in recent weeks amid fraught peace talks between the government and the Taliban.

    Decades of conflict have slowed past vaccine campaigns in Afghanistan, including an anti-polio campaign, with swaths of the country under the control of militants making access difficult for inoculation teams.

    Taliban militants fighting the foreign-backed Afghan government have announced their backing for the vaccination campaign.

    With reporting by dpa

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Is This Who We Are?”: Gitmo is America’s Enduring Shame

    “That’s certainly our goal and our intention.” This was the non-committal answer given by White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, when, on February 12, she was asked by a reporter whether the new Joe Biden Administration intends to shut down the notorious Guantánamo Bay Prison by the end of the president’s first term in office.

    Psaki’s answer may have seemed reassuring, that the untold suffering experienced by hundreds of men in this American gulag – many of whom were surely innocent – would be finally coming to an end. However, considering the history of Guantánamo and the trail of broken promises by the Barack Obama Administration, the new administration’s pledge is hardly encouraging.

    Compare the new language with that of Obama’s impassioned diatribes about humanity, justice and American values, which he utilized whenever he spoke of Guantánamo. “Gitmo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama said at a speech at the National Defense University in May 2013.

    Enamored with his every word, Obama’s audience clapped with enthusiasm. When he delivered that particular speech, Obama was then serving his second term in office. He already had ample opportunity to shut down the prison which operated with no international monitoring and entirely outside the realms of international and US laws.

    Obama is likely to be remembered for his words, not his actions. Not only did he fail to shut down the prison which was erected by his predecessor, George W. Bush, in 2002, but the Guantánamo industry continued to thrive during his terms. For example, in his speech, Obama made  reference to the high cost of “a hundred and fifty million dollars each year to imprison 166 people.” According to the New Yorker, reporting in 2016, Guantánamo’s budget had morphed to “$445 million last year,” when Obama was still in office.

    Yet, as the budget grew by leaps and bounds, the number of Guantánamo prisoners dwindled. Currently, there are only 40 prisoners still residing in that massive edifice of metal, concrete and barbed wire located at the eastern tip of Cuba, built atop a piece of land ‘leased’ by the US in 1903.

    It is easy to conclude that the US government keeps the prison open only to avoid international accountability and, arguably, to extract information by torture, an act that is inconsistent with American laws. But this cannot be it. On the one hand, the entire wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal under international law. Such a fact hardly stopped the US and its allies from savagely invading, humiliating and torturing entire populations with no regard whatsoever to legal or moral arguments.

    On the other hand, Guantánamo is merely one of many American-run prisons and detention centers throughout the world that operate with no manual of rules and according to the most ruthless tactics. The tragedy of Abu Ghraib, a US military detention center in Baghdad, only became famous when direct evidence of the degrading, and incredibly violent conduct that was taking place within its walls was produced and publicized.

    In fact, many American officials and members of Congress at the time used the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 as an opportunity to whitewash and rebrand American crimes elsewhere and to present the misconduct in this Iraqi prison as if an isolated incident involving “a few bad apples”.

    The ‘few bad apples’ argument, made by G. W. Bush was, more or less, the same logic utilized by Obama when he championed the closure of Guantánamo. Indeed, both Presidents insisted that neither Abu Ghraib nor Guantánamo should be made out to represent what America is really all about.

    “Is this who we are?” Obama animatedly and passionately asked, as he made a case in favor of the closure of Guantánamo, speaking as if a human rights advocate, not a Commander-in-Chief who had direct authority to shut down the entire facility. The truth is that the Abu Ghraib tortures were not ‘a few bad apples’ and Guantánamo is, indeed, a microcosm of exactly what the US is, or has become.

    From Bagram, Afghanistan, to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the many ‘floating prisons’ –  news of which was leaked by US media in 2014 – the US government continues to make a mockery of international and humanitarian laws. Many American officials, who genuinely advocate the closure of Guantánamo, refuse to acknowledge that the prison is a symbol of their country’s intransigence and refuse to accept that, like any other country in the world, it is accountable to international law.

    This lack of accountability has exceeded the US government’s insistence to ‘act alone’, as in to launch wars without international mandates. One US Administration after another has also made it clear that, under no circumstances, would they allow accused war criminals to be investigated, let alone stand trial, before the International Criminal Court (ICC). The message here is that even America’s ‘bad apples’ can potentially walk free, regardless of the heinousness of their crimes.

    Just months after the Trump Administration imposed sanctions on ICC judges to punish them for the potential investigations of US crimes in Afghanistan, it freed the convicted criminals who carried out horrific crimes in Iraq. On December 22, Trump pardoned four American mercenaries who belonged to the private military firm, Blackwater. These convicted murderers were involved in the killing of 14 civilians, including two children, in Baghdad in 2007.

    What became known as the ‘Nisour Square massacre’ was another example of whitewashing, as government officials and mainstream media, though expressing outrage at the unlawful killing, insisted that the massacre was an isolated episode. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, were killed as a result of the American invasion seems irrelevant in the country’s skewed logic in its never-ending ‘war on terror’.

    Whether Biden fulfills his promise of shutting down Guantánamo or not, little will change if the US remains committed to its condescending attitude towards international law and to its undeserved view of itself as a country that exists above the universal rights of everyone else.

    That said, Guantánamo, on its own, is a crime against humanity and there can never be any justification to rationalize why hundreds of people are held indefinitely, without trial, without due process, without international observers and without ever seeing their families and loved ones. The explanation often offered by the pro-Guantánamo pundits is that the prison inmates are dangerous men. If that was, indeed, the case, why were these supposed criminals not allowed to see their day in court?

    According to a report by Amnesty International published in May 2020, of the 779 men who were taken to that facility, “only seven have been convicted.” Worse, five of them were convicted “as a result of pre-trial agreements under which they pleaded guilty, in return for the possibility of release from the base.” According to the rights group, such a trial by ‘military commission’ “did not meet fair trial standards”.

    In other words, Guantánamo is – and has always been – a fraudulent operation with no real inclination to holding criminals and terrorists accountable and to preventing further crimes. Instead, Guantánamo is an industry, and a lucrative one. In many ways, it is similar to the American prison military complex, ironically dubbed the ‘criminal justice system.’  Referring to the unjust ‘justice system’, Human Rights Watch derided the US for having “the largest reported prison population in the world”.

    “The (US) criminal justice system – from policing and prosecution, through to punishment – is plagued with injustices like racial disparities, excessively harsh sentencing and drug and immigration policies that improperly emphasize criminalization,” HRW stated on its website.

    The above, too, can be considered an answer to Obama’s rhetorical question, “Is this who we are?”. Yes, Mr. Obama, in fact, this is precisely who you are.

    While offering the world’s most miserable detention conditions to hundreds of potentially innocent men, Guantánamo also offers career opportunities, high military perks and honors, and a seemingly endless budget for a small army to guard only a few shackled, gaunt-looking men in a far-away land.

    So, even if Biden is able to overcome pressure from the military, from the CIA and from Congress to shut Guantánamo down, justice will still be absent, not only because of the numerous lives that are forever shattered but because America still refuses to learn from its mistakes.

    The post “Is This Who We Are?”: Gitmo is America’s Enduring Shame first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Contact: America’s Endless War

    On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Erik Edstrom, combat veteran and former platoon commander, about America’s endless war. Edstrom is a decorated soldier who led combat missions in Afghanistan. His memoir is ‘Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning Of Our Longest War’.

    The post On Contact: America’s Endless War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Withdrawing US Troops From Afghanistan Is Only A Start

    In recent months talk of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan has increased once again. It’s not the first time during the course of the nearly two-decades-long war that we’ve heard this, and at several points since the war began in 2001, some troops have actually been withdrawn. But somehow, almost 20 years in, there still isn’t very much talk about what it will actually take to end US actions that kill civilians. We hear talk about the “forever wars,” of which Afghanistan is of course the longest, but not much about what their first perpetrator, President George W. Bush, named the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT)—and the effect that that’s had.

    The shift in name and definition of war in Afghanistan (and related post-9/11 wars in so many countries) away from GWOT to “forever wars” reflects how the wars have been and continue to be fought.

    The post Withdrawing US Troops From Afghanistan Is Only A Start appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Jailed Belarusian, Iranian Exile, Slain Afghans Among U.S. ‘Women Of Courage’ Honorees

    The U.S. State Department will honor 14 “extraordinary” women from Belarus, Iran, and other countries who have demonstrated leadership, courage, resourcefulness, and a willingness to sacrifice for others.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken will host the annual International Women of Courage (IWOC) awards in a virtual ceremony on March 8 to honor jailed Belarusian opposition figure Maryya Kalesnikava, as well as Shohreh Bayat, an Iranian chess arbiter who went into exile after violating her country’s strict Islamic dress code, the State Department said in a statement on March 4.

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    It said a group of seven other “extraordinary” women leaders and activists from Afghanistan who were assassinated while serving their communities will also receive an honorary award.

    The IWOC award, now in its 15th year, is presented annually to women from around the world who have “demonstrated exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality, and women’s empowerment — often at great personal risk and sacrifice.”

    This year’s recipients include Kalesnikava, a ranking member of the Coordination Council, an opposition group set up after Belarus’s disputed presidential election in August with the stated aim of facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.

    The opposition says the election was rigged and the West has refused to accept the results. Thousands of Belarusians have been jailed during months of crackdowns on the street demonstrations against strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

    Kalesnikava was arrested in September and charged with calling for actions aimed at damaging the country’s national security, conspiracy to seize state power, and organizing extremism.

    Ahead of the presidential election, “Belarusian women emerged as a dominant political force and driver of societal change in Belarus due in no small part to” Kalesnikava, according to the State Department.

    The opposition figure “continues to be the face of the opposition inside Belarus, courageously facing imprisonment, it said, adding that she “serves as a source of inspiration for all those seeking to win freedom for themselves and their countries.”

    The State Department said Bayat will be honored for choosing “to be a champion for women’s rights rather than be cowed by the Iranian government’s threats.”

    Bayat, the first female Category A international chess arbiter in Asia, sought refuge in Britain after she was photographed at the 2020 Women’s Chess World Championship in Shanghai without her head scarf, or hijab, as her country mandates.

    “Within 24 hours, the Iranian Chess Federation — which Shohreh had previously led — refused to guarantee Shohreh’s safety if she returned to Iran without first apologizing,” the State Department said.

    “Fearing for her safety and unwilling to apologize for the incident, Shohreh made the heart-wrenching decision to seek refuge in the U.K., leaving her husband — who lacked a U.K. visa — in Iran.”

    In addition to the individual IWOC awards, Blinken will also present an honorary award to seven Afghan women whose “tragic murders” in 2020 underscored the “alarming trend of increased targeting of women in Afghanistan.”

    The women include Fatema Natasha Khalil, an official with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; General Sharmila Frough, the head of the Gender Unit in the National Directorate of Security; journalist Malalai Maiwand; women’s rights and democracy activist Freshta Kohistani; and midwife Maryam Noorzad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump and Biden’s Secret Bombing Wars

    Credit: The Intercept: U.S.-led coalition airstrike – Mosul, Iraq on November 7, 2016

    On February 25th, President Biden ordered U.S. air forces to drop seven 500-pound bombs on Iraqi forces in Syria, reportedly killing 22 people. The U.S. airstrike has predictably failed to halt rocket attacks on deeply unpopular U.S. bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution to close over a year ago.

    The Western media reported the U.S. airstrike as an isolated and exceptional incident, and there has been significant blowback from the U.S. public, Congress and the world community, condemning the strikes as illegal and a dangerous escalation of yet another Middle East conflict.

    But unbeknownst to many Americans, the US. military and its allies are engaged in bombing and killing people in other countries on a daily basis. The U.S. and its allies have dropped more than 326,000 bombs and missiles on people in other countries since 2001 (see table below), including over 152,000 in Iraq and Syria.

    That’s an average of 46 bombs and missiles per day, day in day out, year in year out, for nearly 20 years. In 2019, the last year for which we have fairly complete records, the average was 42 bombs and missiles per day, including 20 per day in Afghanistan alone.

    So, if those seven 500-pound bombs were the only bombs the U.S. and its allies dropped on February 25th, it would have been an unusually quiet day for U.S. and allied air forces, and for their enemies and victims on the ground, compared to an average day in 2019 or most of the past 20 years. On the other hand, if the unrelenting U.S. air assault on countries across the Greater Middle East finally began to diminish over the past year, this bombing may have been an unusual spike in violence. But which of these was it, and how would we know?

    We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to. From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.

    As with the human casualties and mass destruction that these hundreds of thousands of airstrikes cause, the U.S. and international media only report on a tiny fraction of them. Without regular U.S. Airpower Summaries, comprehensive databases of airstrikes in other war-zones and serious mortality studies in the countries involved, the American public and the world are left almost completely in the dark about the death and destruction our country’s leaders keep wreaking in our name. The disappearance of Airpower Summaries has made it impossible to get a clear picture of the current scale of U.S. airstrikes.

    Here are up-to-date figures on U.S. and allied airstrikes, from 2001 to the present, highlighting the secrecy in which they have abruptly been shrouded for the past year:

    These figures are based on U.S. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project‘s count of Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen; the New America Foundation’s database of foreign airstrikes in Libya; and other published statistics. Figures for 2021 are only through January.

    There are several categories of airstrikes that are not included in this table, meaning that the true numbers of airstrikes are certainly higher. These include:

    –    Helicopter strikes: Military Times published an article in February 2017 titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of airstrikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported airstrikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many actual missiles were fired in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.

    –    AC-130 gunships: The airstrike that destroyed the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015 was not conducted with bombs or missiles, but by a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction, usually manned by U.S. Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it, often until it is completely destroyed. The U.S. has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria.

    –    Strafing runs: U.S. Airpower Summaries for 2004-2007 included a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. A-10s fire 65 depleted uranium shells per second to blanket an area with deadly and indiscriminate fire, but that does not count as a “weapons release” in U.S. Airpower Summaries.

    –   “Counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the world. The United States formed a military coalition with 11 West African countries in 2005, and now has a drone base in Niger, but we have not found a database of U.S. and allied air strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or elsewhere.

    It was clearly no coincidence that Trump stopped publishing Airpower Summaries right after the February 2020 U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, reinforcing the false impression that the war in Afghanistan was over. In fact, U.S. bombing resumed after only an 11-day pause.

    As our table shows, 2018 and 2019 were back-to-back record years for U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan. But how about 2020? Without the official records, we don’t know whether the withdrawal agreement led to a serious reduction in airstrikes or not.

    President Biden has foolishly tried to use airstrikes in Syria as “leverage” with Iran, instead of simply rejoining the Iran nuclear agreement as he promised during the election campaign. Biden is likewise trailing along in Trump’s footsteps by shrouding U.S. airstrikes in the secrecy that Trump used to obscure his failure to “end the endless wars.”

    It is entirely possible that the highly publicized February 25th airstrikes, like Trump’s April 2017 missile strikes on Syria, were a diversion from much heavier, but largely unreported, U.S. bombing already under way elsewhere, in that case the frightful destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s former second city.

    The only way that Biden can reassure the American public that he is not using Trump’s wall of secrecy to continue America’s devastating airwars, notably in Afghanistan, is to end this secrecy now, and resume the publication of complete and accurate U.S. Airpower Summaries.

    President Biden cannot restore the world’s respect for American leadership, or the American public’s support for our foreign policy, by piling more lies, secrets and atrocities on top of those he has inherited. If he keeps trying to do so, he might well find himself following in Trump’s footsteps in yet another way: as the failed, one-term president of a destructive and declining empire.

    The post Trump and Biden’s Secret Bombing Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden, Afghanistan and Forever Wars

    The papers are full of suggestions on what US President Joe Biden should do about his country’s seemingly perennial involvement in Afghanistan.  None are particularly useful, in that they ignore the central premise that a nation state long mauled, molested and savaged should finally be left alone.  Nonsense, say the media and political cognoscenti.  The Guardian claims that he is “trapped and has no good choices”.  The Wall Street Journal opines that he is being “tested in Afghanistan” with his opposition to “forever wars”.  The Washington Post more sensibly suggests that Biden take the loss and “add it to George W. Bush’s record.”

    The Afghanistan imbroglio for US planners raises the usual problems.  Liberals and Conservatives find themselves pillow fighting over similar issues, neither wishing to entirely leave the field.  The imperium demands the same song sheet from choristers, whether they deliver it from the right side of the choir or the left.  The imperial feeling is that the tribes of a country most can barely name should be somehow kept within an orbit of security.  To not do so would imperil allies, the US, and encourage a storm of danger that might cyclonically move towards other pockets of the globe.

    It never occurs to the many dullard commentators that invading countries such as Afghanistan to begin with (throw Iraq into the mix) was itself an upending issue worthy of criminal prosecution, encouraged counter-insurgencies, theocratic aspirants and, for want of a better term, terrorist opportunists.

    The long threaded argument made by the limpet committers has been consistent despite the disasters.  Drum up the chaos scenario.  Treat it as rebarbative.  One example is to strain, drain and draw from reports such as that supplied by the World Bank.  “Conflict is ongoing, and 2019 was the sixth year in a row when civilian casualties in Afghanistan exceeded 10,000.  The displacement crisis persists, driven by intensified government and Taliban operations in the context of political negotiations.”  The report in question goes on to note the increase in IDPs (369,700 in 2018 to 462,803 in 2019) with “505,000 [additional] refugees returned to Afghanistan, mainly from Iran, during 2019.”

    The come remarks such as those from David von Drehle in the Washington Post.  His commentary sits well with Austrian observations about Bosnia-Herzegovina during the latter part of the 19th century.  “Nearly 20 years into the US effort to modernize and liberalize that notoriously difficult land, Taliban forces once more control the countryside, and they appear to be poised for a final spring offensive against the parts of the Afghan cities that remain under government control.”  The savages, in short, refuse to heel.

    Von Drehle, to his credit, at least suggests that the US take leave of the place, admitting that Washington was unreservedly ignorant about the country.  He quotes the words of retired L. General Douglas Lute: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.”  Tellingly, the general admitted that, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

    Fears exist as to how the May 2021 deadline for withdrawing all US military forces looms.  Anthony H. Cordesman is very much teasing his imperial masters in Washington as to what is best.  “Writing off the Afghan government will probably mean some form of Taliban victory.”  This is hardly shocking, but Cordesman prepares the terrain for the hawks.  “This will create increased risks in terms of extremism and terrorism, but it is far from clear that these risks will not be higher than the risks of supporting a failed Afghan government indefinitely into the future and failing to use the same resources in other countries to support partners that are more effective.”  This is the usual gilded rubbish that justifies the gold from a US taxpayer.  But will it continue to stick?

    A few clues can be gathered on future directions, though they remain floated suggestions rather than positions of merit.  The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance waffles and speaks mightily about democracy (how refreshing it would be for him to refer to republicanism) which, in a document on national security, always suggests overstretch and overreach. “They are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward.”  But he also inserts Trumpian lingo.  “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.”

    Afghanistan comes in for special mention, and again, the language of the Trump administration is dragged out for repetition.  “We will work to responsibly end America’s longest war in Afghanistan while ensuring that Afghanistan does not again become a safe haven for terrorists.”  Not much else besides, and certainly no express mention of grasping the nettle and cutting losses.  And there is that troubling use of the word “responsibly”.

    The default position remains the use of force, which the US “will never hesitate to” resort to “when required to defend our vital national interests.  We will ensure our armed forces are equipped to deter our adversaries, defend our people, interests, and allies, and defeat the threats that emerge.”  Again, the stretch is vast and imprecise.

    Given that position, the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 US troops in the country is bound to become a matter of delay, prevarication and consternation.  Quiet American imperialism, at least a dusted down version of it, will stubbornly continue in its sheer, embarrassing futility.  The imperial footprint will be merely recast, if in a smaller form.

    The post Biden, Afghanistan and Forever Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden, Afghanistan and Forever Wars

    The papers are full of suggestions on what US President Joe Biden should do about his country’s seemingly perennial involvement in Afghanistan.  None are particularly useful, in that they ignore the central premise that a nation state long mauled, molested and savaged should finally be left alone.  Nonsense, say the media and political cognoscenti.  The Guardian claims that he is “trapped and has no good choices”.  The Wall Street Journal opines that he is being “tested in Afghanistan” with his opposition to “forever wars”.  The Washington Post more sensibly suggests that Biden take the loss and “add it to George W. Bush’s record.”

    The Afghanistan imbroglio for US planners raises the usual problems.  Liberals and Conservatives find themselves pillow fighting over similar issues, neither wishing to entirely leave the field.  The imperium demands the same song sheet from choristers, whether they deliver it from the right side of the choir or the left.  The imperial feeling is that the tribes of a country most can barely name should be somehow kept within an orbit of security.  To not do so would imperil allies, the US, and encourage a storm of danger that might cyclonically move towards other pockets of the globe.

    It never occurs to the many dullard commentators that invading countries such as Afghanistan to begin with (throw Iraq into the mix) was itself an upending issue worthy of criminal prosecution, encouraged counter-insurgencies, theocratic aspirants and, for want of a better term, terrorist opportunists.

    The long threaded argument made by the limpet committers has been consistent despite the disasters.  Drum up the chaos scenario.  Treat it as rebarbative.  One example is to strain, drain and draw from reports such as that supplied by the World Bank.  “Conflict is ongoing, and 2019 was the sixth year in a row when civilian casualties in Afghanistan exceeded 10,000.  The displacement crisis persists, driven by intensified government and Taliban operations in the context of political negotiations.”  The report in question goes on to note the increase in IDPs (369,700 in 2018 to 462,803 in 2019) with “505,000 [additional] refugees returned to Afghanistan, mainly from Iran, during 2019.”

    The come remarks such as those from David von Drehle in the Washington Post.  His commentary sits well with Austrian observations about Bosnia-Herzegovina during the latter part of the 19th century.  “Nearly 20 years into the US effort to modernize and liberalize that notoriously difficult land, Taliban forces once more control the countryside, and they appear to be poised for a final spring offensive against the parts of the Afghan cities that remain under government control.”  The savages, in short, refuse to heel.

    Von Drehle, to his credit, at least suggests that the US take leave of the place, admitting that Washington was unreservedly ignorant about the country.  He quotes the words of retired L. General Douglas Lute: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.”  Tellingly, the general admitted that, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

    Fears exist as to how the May 2021 deadline for withdrawing all US military forces looms.  Anthony H. Cordesman is very much teasing his imperial masters in Washington as to what is best.  “Writing off the Afghan government will probably mean some form of Taliban victory.”  This is hardly shocking, but Cordesman prepares the terrain for the hawks.  “This will create increased risks in terms of extremism and terrorism, but it is far from clear that these risks will not be higher than the risks of supporting a failed Afghan government indefinitely into the future and failing to use the same resources in other countries to support partners that are more effective.”  This is the usual gilded rubbish that justifies the gold from a US taxpayer.  But will it continue to stick?

    A few clues can be gathered on future directions, though they remain floated suggestions rather than positions of merit.  The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance waffles and speaks mightily about democracy (how refreshing it would be for him to refer to republicanism) which, in a document on national security, always suggests overstretch and overreach. “They are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward.”  But he also inserts Trumpian lingo.  “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.”

    Afghanistan comes in for special mention, and again, the language of the Trump administration is dragged out for repetition.  “We will work to responsibly end America’s longest war in Afghanistan while ensuring that Afghanistan does not again become a safe haven for terrorists.”  Not much else besides, and certainly no express mention of grasping the nettle and cutting losses.  And there is that troubling use of the word “responsibly”.

    The default position remains the use of force, which the US “will never hesitate to” resort to “when required to defend our vital national interests.  We will ensure our armed forces are equipped to deter our adversaries, defend our people, interests, and allies, and defeat the threats that emerge.”  Again, the stretch is vast and imprecise.

    Given that position, the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 US troops in the country is bound to become a matter of delay, prevarication and consternation.  Quiet American imperialism, at least a dusted down version of it, will stubbornly continue in its sheer, embarrassing futility.  The imperial footprint will be merely recast, if in a smaller form.

    This article was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 12:00am and is filed under Afghanistan, Joe Biden, Taliban, US Media, US Military.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Global Demand To 35 Governments: Get Your Troops Out Of Afghanistan

    The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

    These troops range in number from Slovenia’s 6 to the United States’ 2,500. Most countries have fewer that 100. Apart from the United States, only Germany has over 1,000. Only five other countries have more than 300.

    Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Ireland.

    The post A Global Demand To 35 Governments: Get Your Troops Out Of Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘If Our Goal Is to Stop Killing Afghans, We’re Going About It All Wrong’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about ending the Afghan War for the February 12, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin210212Bennis.mp3
    WaPo: An abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan undermines the fragile peace

    Washington Post (11/25/20)

    Janine Jackson: “An Abrupt US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Undermines the Fragile Peace” was the headline on a Washington Post op-ed back in November, from the co-chairs of the Afghanistan Study Group. It fit nicely with the Post’s own editorial view, expressed in September, that “the chance for an Afghan peace will depend on the willingness of the US president to maintain US forces in place until the Taliban shows a genuine will to settle.” A definitive break with Al Qaeda, the Post said, is a precondition.

    In between, in October, the Post reported how the US military is “quietly” working with the Taliban in parts of Afghanistan to try and weaken the Islamic State—but don’t let that confuse you! The point is, a bipartisan panel says the Biden administration should ignore a May 1 deadline set for the withdrawal of 2,500 troops in order to, in the report’s words, “give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result.”

    Let there be no mystery: Elsewhere, the report states the overall objective as  “a negotiated stable peace that meets US interests.” What, truly, are we to make of the claim that the trick to ending the longest ever US war is to do something other than end it?

    Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer, as well as author of numerous titles, including Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

    Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

    JJ:  Maybe let’s start with what the report says is central: “The most important revision is to ensure that a complete withdrawal of US troops is based not on an inflexible timeline, but on all parties fulfilling their commitments.” I feel as though virtually every word in that sentence is more complicated or problematic than presented.

    PB:  Yeah, it’s pretty complicated. You’re absolutely right in what you’re challenging here. What this would do is say that these long-fought, very difficult negotiations that the US carried out with the Taliban—that led to an agreement last February, calling on the US to engage in a certain timetable of troop withdrawals, etc.—shouldn’t be taken seriously.

    That is because our assessment is that the Taliban’s break with Al Qaeda—which is not, of course, any longer based in Afghanistan, and has not been for about 19 years now—that that’s not good enough. We want more; it’s not clear exactly what we want, but we want more. And it implies that somehow keeping US ground troops in Afghanistan is somehow going to help bring about better negotiations between the corrupt and very ineffective Afghan government and the Taliban.

    The Taliban, of course, these days controls more territory in Afghanistan than the government does. And that’s with these decades of US occupation, by different numbers of troops, ranging from about 2,500 or so (what there are now), up to more than 100,000 that had been occupying Afghanistan in the earlier stages of this war.

    So at the end of the day, we come back to the question of: What is this war for? Who benefits? Who benefits from ending it? And what does it even mean to talk about “ending”?

    Because the other key point here, Janine, is that what the Afghan Study Group talked about, and what US policymakers debate—in Congress, in the White House, in the State Department, in the Pentagon—is the question of ground troops. There’s now about 2,500 ground troops, it’s not very many. They should leave, certainly, because they’re not playing a decent role there that’s helping anybody in particular, and it’s time we end this war.

    But we should be very clear that it’s not primarily the ground troops that are causing such death and destruction to people in Afghanistan; that’s coming from US drone strikes and airstrikes. And no one is talking about ending that. That’s what they like to call the “counterterrorism war,” which is very separate from this question of, should we withdraw troops? What about our negotiations with the Taliban? It’s as if those things are completely separate.

    JJ: Ah!

    PB: When, in fact, it turns out that the US and its allies in the Afghan Air Force, which is not much of an air force, it’s a little air force, but it’s mainly US airstrikes and drone strikes—those strikes have killed more and more people in recent years. Last year, the airstrikes and drone strikes killed civilians at a rate 330% higher than 2017. So that now, in the last several years, more civilians are being killed by US air and drone strikes than are being killed by the Taliban. So if our goal in this war is to stop killing Afghans, we’re going about it all wrong.

    JJ: And what an artificial distinction. What a joke played on people who were trying to follow along, to pretend that this troop withdrawal means “the US out of Afghanistan.”

    PB: Indeed.

    JJ: As though it meant a material change in the life of Afghanistan’s people.

    PB: Right.

    WaPo: Afghanistan is Biden’s first big foreign policy headache

    Washington Post (2/4/21)

    JJ: David Ignatius underscored all the report’s points in the Washington Post, and said, basically, the US has to keep forces in Afghanistan because “admitting defeat”—which, let’s not even go into that imagery, but you know—”would mean a likely civil war”…. I’m going to try to say it dryly: “would mean a likely civil war,” would mean “Taliban dominance,” and would lead to an “eventual reestablishing of Al Qaeda safe havens.” Those are the reasons that the US needs to stay. I mean, it just sounds kind of absurdist.

    PB: Well, what’s so interesting here, if you parse them out: The first one about, “it will lead to a civil war.” Well, there is a civil war. It’s precisely what’s underway. It’s just that the US is backing one side in the civil war.

    There was a civil war in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s. In 1996, the Taliban won the civil war. They won it partly militarily—this was after years of brutal bombing, by all sides, of Kabul–and they partly won by convincing a lot of people in Afghanistan that they would end the war. And that was what led people to support them. It wasn’t because of their incredibly harsh interpretations of Islamist restrictions, particularly for women. It was because they said they would end the war, and that’s what people desperately needed in this desperately poor country.

    So the notion that somehow this is not a civil war…. it’s just what the US did was, wipe out that government that had won the earlier civil war, installed its own government, and immediately a new war began between the Taliban and this government backed by the US. That’s still a civil war. It’s an Afghan war.

    The only reason, I think, that Ignatius and others add in this notion of “if we don’t, the Taliban will take over and bring back Al Qaeda,” is grounded in fantasy. The notion that Al Qaeda is somehow not doing whatever they might do because they’re not in Afghanistan, first of all, makes no sense.

    Secondly, they’re not in Afghanistan; their leadership is based in Pakistan. And, you know, the US has its own issues and relationships with Pakistan.

    Phyllis Bennis

    Phyllis Bennis: “There really isn’t any basis to say that continuing this war has any connection to protecting people in this country, to keeping Americans safe. There is no military solution to terrorism.”

    But this notion that somehow, all the Taliban wants to do is bring back the relationship with Al Qaeda is based, as far as I can tell, on nothing. You know, this is not something that helped the Taliban, when they were in charge in Afghanistan. I don’t think they have any intention of trying to repeat that disaster, from their vantage point. So there really isn’t any basis to say that continuing this war has any connection to protecting people in this country, to keeping Americans safe. There is no military solution to terrorism, as we hear over and over again.

    This war in Afghanistan alone, has cost almost $2 trillion. $2 trillion. That’s one of those numbers that is so enormous that it’s almost impossible to understand what it really means. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians have died in this war; 2,400 American soldiers, more than 2,400, have died in this war.

    And for what? The Taliban still controls more territory than before. The US has invested $24 billion in economic development, and Afghans still live in one of the poorest countries in the world. Most Afghans still live in poverty. It has one of the worst levels of maternal mortality and infant mortality in the world. So exactly who do we think is benefiting from the continuation of this war?

    JJ: Well, I wanted to ask you, finally, I feel as though it’s been answered, but I want to pull it out separately. It might seem a long time ago that the invasion of Afghanistan was presented as, after we got through various pretenses, about saving Afghan women from the Taliban, and you’ve touched on it. But I very recently saw a women’s website that said, “Don’t let the US abandon Afghan women.” And I just wonder, given what we know, how do you respond to that?

    PB: Yeah, it’s a very serious question, because women in Afghanistan live very, very tough, difficult, challenging lives, very cruel in many cases, in terms of isolation, lack of decent access to education and healthcare, etc. In the cities, in particular, the two major cities of Kabul and Kandahar, I think that things are better for some women. There has been the creation of a very small middle class, and women have gotten access to education that they did not have before.

    But the vast majority of women in Afghanistan don’t live in the cities. They live in tiny rural towns, little villages, small, isolated villages scattered over a huge country. And for those women, their lives are very constrained, and they were during the Taliban, and they are now. The difference is not very significant.

    So I think, when we look at, “Will any women suffer?”: Yes, I think some will, if there were to be an absolute takeover by the Taliban, but that’s not really what’s on anybody’s agenda, I don’t think. In a number of areas, Taliban commanders have negotiated arrangements with local leaders, particularly local religious leaders, who also want their daughters to get access to education. And they’ve been able to create some schools for girls. So it’s not as bad in the areas of Taliban control as it was when the Taliban was in charge of the whole country, nor is it probably as good as in some small areas of Kabul.

    But what we have to recognize is that the oppression of women in Afghanistan is not limited to the Taliban. The opposition to the Taliban, which the US embraced first back in the 1980s, as an anti-Soviet force, these were Afghans who were not part of the Taliban. They were brought to meet with President Reagan, at the time, in the White House, one of them a guy named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a well-known warlord. He’s credited, if you can use the term, for inventing the use of acid to be thrown in the face of young women and girls who have the audacity to claim they want to go to school. And he’s somebody on the side of the government, the US-backed government. So the notion that somehow there’s this enormous gap between the Taliban and the current government simply isn’t true.

    I’ll end with one story: I spent some time years ago with a young woman who was, at the time, the youngest member of the Afghan parliament. After the installation of the government by the US, there were only a few women in the parliament. She was the youngest and, as a result, she was under enormous pressure. She had to move about with bodyguards; she couldn’t move, in many cases; she had to live in different safe houses; she was under enormous pressure. She was out of the country. At one point, we were both in Europe.

    And I asked her, I said, “What about this whole question of what’s going to happen to women in civil society, particularly women’s organizations, if the US pulled out?”

    And she said, “You know, we women in Afghanistan, and we in civil society, we have three enemies, three opponents in our country: One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as a government, that the US supports. And the third is the US occupation.” She said, “If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two.”

    And I thought that was an extraordinarily pragmatic view. There was no illusion that pulling out US ground troops, or even, in this case, ending the air war, will end the war altogether. It will stop some killings, which is not a bad thing, given that we’ve been killing in Afghanistan for 19 years, almost 20 years. But it’s not going to end the conflict. It’s not going to end the war, only Afghans can do that. What our presence is doing is preventing them from resolving it, in ways that we may not like. But at the end of the day, it’s not our country. And we don’t have the right to tell Afghans or others how they should deal with governing their own countries.

    JJ: Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you so much, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    PB: Thank you, Janine; it’s been a pleasure.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Afghanistan: 65 media workers and rights defenders killed since 2018

    UNAMA/Freshta DuniaThe Pul-e-Kheshti Mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan. (file photo) 15 February 2021Human Rights

    On 15 February 2021 the UN reported that 65 journalists, media professionals and human rights defenders were killed in Afghanistan between 1 January 2018 and 31 January 2021, with 11 losing their lives since the start of peace negotiations last September. 

    “This trend, combined with the absence of claims of responsibility, has generated a climate of fear among the population”, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in a news release, announcing the findings from its latest report. 

    The violence, the Mission said, resulted in contraction of the human rights and media space, with many professionals exercising self-censorship in their work, quitting their jobs, and leaving their homes, communities – and even the country – in hope it will improve their safety.  See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/11/26/afghanistan-human-rights-defenders-targeted-but-fearless/. The Digest of Human Rights Laureates lists some 20 defenders: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest

    “The killings have had the broader impact across society of also diminishing expectations around efforts towards peace”, UNAMA added. 

    The special report Killings of Human Rights Defender and Media Professionals also documented “changing patterns” of attacks.  The most recent wave, that of intentional, premeditated and deliberate targeting of individuals with perpetrators remaining anonymous contrasts to previous years, UNAMA said. In the past, such deaths were mainly as a result of proximity of individuals to attacks by organized armed groups, mainly the Islamic State in the Levant-Khorasan-Province (ISIL-KP), involving the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/06/30/car-bomb-kills-two-human-rights-workers-in-afghanistan/

    The report underscored the role of all actors in preventing such killings and intimidation, promoting accountability and preventing impunity. Investigations into killings must be independent, impartial, prompt, thorough, effective, credible and transparent, it urged, adding that the prosecution of suspected perpetrators should strictly follow due process and fair trial standards.   

    Deborah Lyons, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan and the head of UNAMA, underscored the importance of media professionals and human rights activists. 

    “The voices of human rights defenders and the media are critical for any open and decent society. At a time when dialogue and an end to the conflict through talks and political settlement should be the focus, the voices from human rights and the media need to be heard more than ever before, instead they are being silenced”, she said. 

    “The Afghan people need and deserve a flourishing civic space – a society where people can think, write and voice their views openly, without fear”, Ms. Lyons added  UNAMA reportHuman rights defenders, journalists and media workers killed by incident type

    Recommendations 

    Among its recommendations, the report called on the Government to put in place an adequate preventive framework, including special protective and proactive security measures for rights defenders, journalists and media workers subject to threats or other types of intimidation.  

    It urged the Taliban to adopt, publicize and enforce policies that prohibit the killings of human rights defenders, journalists and media workers, as well as to repeal existing and refrain from new policies that limit civic space. 

    The report also called on the international community to continue to engage with rights defenders, journalists and media workers at risk and increase support to programs that provide security, travel, financial, capacity building and other assistance to them.

    It also called on non-state actors to stop all killings of human rights defenders, journalists and media workers, in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law. 

    Killings of Human Rights Defender and Media Professionals

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Ending the Forever Wars: Phyllis Bennis on Afghanistan, Hyun Lee on Korea

    WSJL Leaving Afghanistan the Right Way

    Wall Street Journal (2/10/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: Media are soberly reporting a congressional panel’s warning against an “abrupt” or “precipitous” withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, because that might lead to “civil war” in the country. If “spinning in the grave” imagery were real, George Orwell will have screwed himself to the Earth’s core by now. The rest of us can try and puzzle out what’s behind the “more war will lead to peace” argument with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

          CounterSpin210212Bennis.mp3
    AP: UN experts: North Korea using cyber attacks to update nukes

    AP (2/9/21)

     

    Also on the show: “North Korea Using Cyber Attacks to Update Nukes” is the latest scary buzzword-packed headline from the region, representative of US media coverage that centers the entire story of Korea on Kim Jong Un’s potential threat to Americans—pushing aside all of the people in North and South Korea who seek an end to the militarized tension they’ve lived under for more than 70 years. We hear from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ; they’re part of the coalition Korea Peace Now! that’s behind a new report called Path to Peace.

          CounterSpin210212Lee.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of George Shultz’s death.

          CounterSpin210212Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Biden Government Running True to Form

    The least surprising news item in the past week was that the United States government under President Biden had decided that American troops would after all, despite Ex- President Trump’s order, remain in Afghanistan. This breaks an agreement that had been reached by the Trump administration and the Taliban that US troops would all be gone by May 20 21.

    It was unclear in the Trump agreement whether the withdrawal of “US Forces” included the United States mercenaries who for at least the past year have outnumbered formal US troops. What Trump’s negotiated agreement meant for the other “allied” forces in Afghanistan remained unclear at the time of the announcement and remains equally unclear today. The mainstream media persist in referring to those troops as NATO forces, but they include Australian troops who are not members of NATO.

    The Australian government has been strangely silent in the light of Trump’s original announcement that US troops would be leaving, and they remain quiet in the light of the new administration’s revision of the Trump plan. It is a safe bet that whatever the Americans finally do will be agreeable to the Australians. There has not been the least hint of an independent Australian position. The actual role of the Australian troops remains a non-topic of discussion in the Australian media.  Even the recent scandal of Australian troops abusing and killing locals was a five-day wonder and has now disappeared from media coverage.

    The ostensible reason for Australian troops remaining in Afghanistan is to “train” the Afghan forces. This was always a singularly unconvincing reason, not least because such “training” has been spectacularly unsuccessful with the high death rate of those troops, their even higher rate of defections, and a singular unwillingness to actually fight being their dominant characteristic.

    The ostensible reasons for the Biden administration’s change of heart about withdrawing US troops was the unsettled nature of the government and their inability to control the countryside which is variously described as overrun with foreign ISIS fighters; not under Afghanistan government control (certainly true); or uncertainty about the political directions of a Taliban government, including protecting the rights of women in the country.

    What never ceases to amaze one is the inability of the western media, and the Australian version are a classic example, to even hint at the real reasons for staying, when the foreigners who occupy Afghanistan are manifestly unwelcome. The protestations of the Afghan “government” that they appreciate the presence of foreign troops on their soil is manifestly self-serving. Their survival rate post liberation could be counted in days.

    The real reasons for the American intention to stay were concealed from the very beginning. United States president Bush justified the invasion on the alleged refusal of the Taliban government that then ruled the country, to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the attacks in New York City and Washington DC on 11 September 2001.

    Even if that was a legitimate reason, and it manifestly was not, the refusal to surrender bin Laden surely disappeared the day he died, which was in December 2001 from natural causes. His obituary was even published in the New York Times. We were later treated to the charade of an American foray into Pakistan to “capture” bin Laden with the body then being buried at sea. The troops responsible for this charade were later all killed in a helicopter crash. The mainstream media remained singularly incurious about the amazing sequence of events.

    The real reasons for the invasion, and the continuing occupation nearly 20 years later, and the reason the Americans and their lackies will stay as long as they can are twofold: drugs and geography.

    One of the real reasons the Taliban government had to be deposed in 2001 was that they had drastically reduced the growing of the poppy in the areas of Afghanistan they actually controlled.

    That poppy production in turn was processed into heroin, for which Afghanistan is once again the major source in the world. It provides the CIA with their greatest “off the books” revenue. They are not going to relinquish that money and the multiple benefits of controlling the world’s largest source of heroin it gives them, without putting up a major fight.

    It is one of the enduring disgraces of the western mainstream media that this factor is almost completely ignored. When the importance of heroin to the world is acknowledged it is almost always totally bereft of any discussion of the CIA’s crucial role. One can read more about the role of heroin in UN reports than one can in the mainstream media.

    The other major reason that the United States is reluctant to leave Afghanistan is its geography. Afghanistan shares borders with seven nations, including China. It has friendly relations with none of the seven, all of whom look to either Russia or China or both as their most important friends. All of those countries belong to one or more of the various organisations set up in recent years to facilitate their development, including the Shanghai Corporation Organisation.

    During the latter months of the Trump administration the appalling Mike Pompeo tried very hard to woo some of those nations to his anti-China crusade. That he failed to make much headway is a matter of record, but that failure does not mean that the Americans have given up on their ambitions for the region. One can expect similar efforts to be made by the Biden administration, whose antipathy to China took very little time to become apparent.

    One can hardly be surprised at the stances being taken by the Biden administration. He, like much of the senior people he has surrounded himself with, are essentially reruns from the Obama years. The old saying goes that one cannot teach an old dog new tricks, and that is becoming more true with each day of the Biden administration.

    The positive point is that while the United States administration looks more and more like a rerun of the Obama years, the world has moved on, and nowhere more so than in the Asian – Europe landmass.

    It is already economically the most dynamic region in the world and that is expected to continue. Fortunately for the world Eurasia is reasserting itself. The big question is: will the Americans recognise that and scale down their ambitions. Frankly, the signs are not promising.

    The post The Biden Government Running True to Form first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australian War Crimes in Afghanistan: Decivilizing the Coalition Troops

    The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry – released in late 2020 – serves as a barometer for the level of savagery imbibed by imperialist countries in their unending reign of terror against the Global South. The document is the outcome of a four-year investigation, initiated by the military in 2016 and headed by retired Major General Paul Brereton. Its scope was the period from 2005 to 2016.

    With the help of the report, 39 homicides have been confirmed in 23 separate incidents and 25 soldiers – some of whom are still serving in the Australian Defense Force (ADF) – have been implicated following the testimonies of 350 different witnesses. 36 matters involving 19 individuals have been referred to the federal police. The second squadron of the Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) will be disbanded, and some soldiers will be stripped of medals and awards received since 2006.

    Protocols of Barbarity

    The investigation details various protocols of barbarity followed by Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan. The initiation rites for junior soldiers tasked with “blooding” – the first kill initiated by means of shooting a prisoner – are mentioned.  “This would happen after the target compound had been secured, and local nationals had been secured as ‘persons under control’.”  “Throwdowns” – equipment such as radios or weapons – would then be placed upon the body.  A “cover story” would subsequently be scripted “for purposes of operational reporting to deflect scrutiny.” Incidents are also listed, during which soldiers “inflicted severe pain” on Afghan detainees, and “caused them injury,” indicating the use of torture.

    Dr. Samantha Crompvoets was commissioned by senior military command in 2015 to provide a “snapshot” of Special Forces operations and to probe allegations of war crimes. According to the Brereton report, Crompvoets “said that she was given the impression that there had been a ‘large number of illegal killings’ that had been ‘reverse engineered.’” Afghans would be killed, and then subsequently placed on the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) of targeted militants. The JPEL was a list of individuals who were to be killed or captured, on the basis that they were allegedly high-level Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters and officials.

    In one instance, Crompvoets notes soldiers of the SASR driving along a road and sighting two 14-year-old boys. The soldiers quickly concluded they had come across Taliban sympathizers. The boys were stopped and seized. Their throats were slit. Their bodies were bagged and discarded in a river. Such occurrences were not infrequent; Special Force soldiers would commit such unsanctioned killings as a means to “get a name for themselves”. To take an example, in 2012, an elderly Afghan man, Haji Sadr, was beaten to death by an SAS soldier during a raid on his village, Sarkhoum.

    Apart from the inquiry, other sources have also revealed the absolutely abominable murderousness of Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan. An image published by the Guardian on December 1, 2020, showed an Australian Special Forces soldier drinking beer from the prosthetic leg of a dead Afghan. According to the Guardian, the photo was taken in the “Fat Lady’s Arms,” an unofficial bar set up by Australian special forces at their base in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan province. In another picture, the device is strapped to a soldier’s backpack, and in a third, two soldiers pose with it. The prosthetic leg was reportedly taken from a “suspected Taliban fighter” after he had been killed during an April 2009 Special Air Service Regiment assault in Uruzgan.

    The Imperialist Narrative

    In a characteristically pliant manner, the corporate-liberal media has steadfastly clung to the ruling class’s imperialist outlook and normalized heinous war crimes as an anomaly in an otherwise honorable history of upright behavior by Australian troops in an illegal occupation of a Central Asian country. These outrages were all part of a larger war crime – the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001. The war has swamped the lives of ordinary Afghans with endless violence and insufferable misery. After almost 20 years of imperialist operations, the killings continue. A UN report recorded 3,458 civilian casualties in the first half of 2020, the majority of them caused by coalition troops.

    It is downright possible to claim, as the report does, that the Special Forces atrocities were simply the work of a “small number of patrol commanders, and their protégées” or a “warrior culture” that remained totally unknown above the level of corporals and sergeants. By the report’s own admission, this “culture” began domestically, in military training and indoctrination, not in Afghanistan. “It was in their parent units and sub-units that the cultures and attitudes that enabled misconduct were bred,” the report states. Jack Barry, a former rifleman in the ADF, says that during training exercises in his own country, “I was told by a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer, to not bother taking prisoners or treating enemy wounded and that we should just ‘slot them’ (a colloquial term for shooting them).”

    The Drift towards Savagery

    In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote:

    Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

    The uncovering of Australian atrocities in Afghanistan is an indicator that the extent of brutalization and decivilization brought about by neo-colonial globalization and imperialism is alarmingly high. Practices as dehumanizing as “blooding” can be committed only by those whose ethical recesses have been flooded with necropolitical cravings for inflicting naked violence on the racialized bodies of locals – here considered as worthless than animals. Unless imperialist war-mongering does not stop, the moral economies of the Global North countries will soon implode – opening the floodgates of deep-seated bestiality and xenophobia.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2021 at 7:58am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, Australia Defence Force (ADF), Barbarism, Crimes against Humanity, Imperialism, Media, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Changing World, But the West Remains Locked in a Time Warp

    Western politicians in general, and the American and Australian versions are not exempted, are fond of using phrases such as “the rules-based international order.” What they unfailingly really mean is the Western version of a rules-based order. The classic definition was set out in Wikipedia when it said:

    The rules based international order describes the notion that contemporary international relations are organised around principles of international cooperation through multilateral institutions, like WTO, open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy and leadership by the United States and its allies.

    The key lies in the last part of that quote, “leadership by the United States and its allies.” For the United States any other concept was simply unthinkable. Not only was the United States self- represented as the personification of the “liberal rules-based order”, it fought almost continuous wars between 1945 and the present to ensure that the rest of the world understood and accepted that principle.

    It was never realistic. As Nick Bisley (AIIA 27/7/18) pointed out, the rules-based international order became a rhetorical centrepiece of Australian international policy. The problem for Australia (and the United States) is that the premises underlying the policy are being progressively more challenged as world power relentlessly shifts away from a United States centred approach.

    Bisley suggests that the apogee of the policy was, in fact, 2016 when the phrase was mentioned no less than 48 times in the Australian defence department White Paper of that year. The notion of an international rules-based order has a number of problems which the western media were remarkably reluctant to face.

    Perhaps the foremost problem lies in the assumption that the rules and the associated principles were built on the clear assumption of United States military supremacy. That was always a dubious proposition. It has become increasingly untenable as power in the world shifts.

    The Western powers had become accustomed to having their own way over the previous 200-300 years. Unfortunately for them, they never questioned the basis of that power, nor conceived that the sun would indeed set upon the Empire. This power was reflected in the United Nations Security Council’s permanent membership.

    Until the early 1970s that permanent membership consisted of three Western powers who had been victorious in World War II, plus the Soviet Union and China. The expulsion of the Nationalist regime from China in 1949 was not reflected in the Security Council, where they clung to power for a further 23 years.

    Nowadays the privileged status of France and the United Kingdom as permanent members of the Security Council looks increasingly anachronistic. 75 years after the war ended, Germany and Japan are still excluded from permanent membership. Some would argue that others, such as India and Brazil, should also be considered for permanent membership.

    The retention of the current permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council represents a world that no longer exists. A major part of the problem is that the Western powers are reluctant to acknowledge that the world has changed since 1945, and with those changes there has been a diminution of their political power.

    They may still think in terms of the rules-based international order, but are reluctant to ask some fundamental questions. For example, whose rules are we really talking about? How valid is a system of Western rules when the vast majority of the membership of the United Nations are neither “Western” nor particularly addicted to the West’s system of rules.

    Those nations see the rules-based order as simply a device designed to maintain Western power. Their disquiet or even rejection of this principle is enhanced when they observe the actual actions of those same Western powers. The United States is but one example, but it is a major one. As noted before, the United States has been almost continuously at war somewhere in the world since 1945. None of these wars could be described as in defence of a truly liberal rules-based order. One has only to look at the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to make the point.

    Afghanistan was invaded based on a lie, and when the object of that lie, Osama bin Laden, was long dead, the invading troops failed to leave. There is currently speculation about whether the new United States president, Biden, will honour even Trump’s manifestly flawed commitment to leave.

    A different set of lies was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and again, 18 years later the Americans and their allies like Australia are still there. In Iraq’s case the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution in January 2020 that all foreign troops should leave the country. One year later they are still there.

    The invasion of Syria was a regime change operation. That has failed, but United States troops are still there. The felony is compounded by the systematic theft of Syrian oil. Israel continues to regularly bomb Syrian targets, a felony that compounds the theft of Syrian territory more than 50 years ago. The Australian government does them the courtesy of not mentioning the theft, and is regularly part of a tiny minority of votes for Israel in United Nations General Assembly resolutions. None of this is fit for publication in the Australian mainstream media.

    Looking at this long history of bad international behaviour it is little wonder that the bulk of the world’s nations look askance at notions of the “rules-based international order”. They see it for the hypocrisy that it manifestly is.

    It is a little surprising therefore that an ever growing number of nations look to China as the leader of a different order. China has a number of features that distinguish it from the western view. One of the most important is the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations.

    This article was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 11:08am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Iraq, Israel, Syria, The “West”, US Military, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America Keeps Claiming Governments It Hates Are Paying Bounties On US Troops In Afghanistan

    We’re now getting mass media reports that yet another country the US government doesn’t like has been trying to kill American troops in Afghanistan, with the accusation this time being leveled at China. This brings the total number of governments against which this exact accusation has been made to three: China, Iran, and Russia.

    “The U.S. has evidence that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] attempted to finance attacks on American servicemen by Afghan non-state actors by offering financial incentives or ‘bounties’,” reads a new “scoop” from Axios, quoting anonymous officials who refused to name their sources.

    “The Trump administration is declassifying as-yet uncorroborated intelligence, recently briefed to President Trump, that indicates China offered to pay non-state actors in Afghanistan to attack American soldiers, two senior administration officials tell Axios,” the evidence-free report claims.

    The Axios report is already being circulated into public consciousness by mass media outlets like CNN. It is co-authored by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, whose career lately has been focused on churning out extremely aggressive narrative management about China for a liberal audience, including a ridiculous hit piece on The Grayzone and its coverage of Xinjiang which failed to list a single piece of false or inaccurate reporting by that outlet. This eagerness to help manipulate public perception of America’s number one geopolitical rival has seen Allen-Ebrahimian rewarded with plenty of attention from “sources” who provide her with endless career-amplifying “scoops”.

    A few months ago, it was Iran we were being told is trying to use proxies to kill US troops in Afghanistan.

    “US intelligence agencies assessed that Iran offered bounties to Taliban fighters for targeting American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, identifying payments linked to at least six attacks carried out by the militant group just last year alone, including a suicide bombing at a US air base in December,” CNN reported in August without any evidence.

    Before that it was Russia this same accusation was being leveled at, with mainstream news media shamelessly regurgitating claims by anonymous intelligence operatives and then citing each other to falsely claim they’d “confirmed” one another’s reporting back in June. The story was sent so insanely viral by mass media narrative managers eager to pressure Trump on Russia during an election year that when the top US military commander in Afghanistan said in September that no solid evidence had turned up for this claim it was completely ignored, and to this day the liberal commentariat still babble about “Russian bounties” as though they’re an actual thing that happened.

    Three imperialism-targeted nations, same exact accusation. Pretty soon they’ll be telling us that bounties are being paid on US troops in Afghanistan by China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Hezbollah, WikiLeaks, Jimmy Dore, and the entire staff of World Socialist Website.

    The “Bountygate” narrative was one of the most brazen psyops we’ve seen rammed straight from the US intelligence community into public consciousness with no lube in recent years, and it was so successful that they’re just spraying it all over the place to see if they can replicate its effects on other targeted governments.

    It is not a coincidence that the information landscape is so confusing and bizarre right now. Our psyches are being hammered with more and more aggression by mass-scale psyops designed to manufacture support for increasing aggressions against the governments which have resisted absorption into the US-centralized empire, because as China rises and the US declines we’re moving toward a multipolar world.

    A movement toward a multipolar world should not be a frightening prospect–it’s been the norm throughout the entirety of human civilization minus the last three decades–but after the fall of the Soviet Union the drivers of the US power alliance decided that US global hegemony must be preserved at all cost. Drastic measures will be undertaken to try and retain hegemony, and propaganda campaigns is being rolled out with increasing urgency to grease the wheels for those measures.

    Meanwhile we’ve got nuclear-armed nations brandishing armageddon weapons at each other with increasing urgency and unpredictability because a few imperialists decided the entire planet should be governed from Washington DC. This, to put it gently, is an unsustainable situation.

    _____________________

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