Dive into the archives.
- What the US Media Chooses to Ignore
The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These [...]
- Washington’s Record
My captors harbored many delusions about Westerners. But I also saw how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being [...]
- I Believe It
Reports that Italian intelligence officers had been paying Taliban fighters not to attack their troops – and that France’s ignorance of this tactic left it unaware of the true security risk in the Sarobi district of Afghanistan when it took over last summer – were dismissed as “rubbish” by Italy’s defence minister. But the allegation [...]
- The Big Question
So are British troops in Afghanistan there to defend the UK from al-Qa’ida attack, as Gordon Brown says? No, we are there because the priority of British foreign policy is to stick close to the Americans. The Americans are still trying to work out why they are there, but President Obama is also citing the [...]
- The Nobel Peace Prize in Action
President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials. (full article…)
- Couldn’t Have Said It Better
Issam al-Khazraji, a day labourer in Baghdad, said: “He doesn’t deserve this prize. All these problems — Iraq, Afghanistan — have not been solved…The man of ‘change’ hasn’t changed anything yet.” (full article…)
- Afghanistan, Eight Years On
Invading Afghanistan was a clear war crime, despite the tendency to term it the “good war” by so-called antiwar voices in the West. Instead of treating the 9/11 attacks as a unique crime and cooperating with the international community to arrest Bin-Laden and his acolytes, Bush launched his Global War on Terror and invaded Afghanistan [...]
- This is “Change”
His successor in the White House is now sending different signals. US President Barack Obama began his career as an opponent of the Iraq war, but now, after moving to the White House, he too is making use of the superpower’s military might. Obama is increasing US troop numbers in Afghanistan while, in neighboring Pakistan, [...]
- Obama’s Bombs
Afghan tribal elders said Thursday that eight people, at least five of them civilians, were killed in an airstrike in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday. An American military spokeswoman, Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, confirmed the airstrike, in the Nad Ali district of the troubled province of Helmand, but declined to estimate the number of casualties before a [...]
- Salman Rushdie’s Sage Assessment (Writing in 2002)
Western critics of America’s Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be wrong at every step: no, US forces weren’t humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn’t massacre people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like [...]
- Scale Back
President Barack Obama is considering VP Joe Biden’s idea to scale back the troop presence in Afghanistan. (full article…)
- This is “Change”
In a troubling legal brief filed last week, the Obama administration followed the disreputable example of the Bush White House by opposing judicial review of military detentions, even for a discrete segment of prisoners: the 30 or so non-Afghan Bagram prisoners who were seized outside Afghanistan, far from any recognizable battlefield, and who have been [...]
- Another Danish Soldier Dies
Et angreb på en dansk patrulje i Afghanistan har kostet en dansk soldat livet. (full article…)
- Does Anyone Ask What the Afghans Want?
Coupled with this was a requirement for new tactics, like training more Nato troops in local languages so they would be “seen as guests of the Afghan people and their government, not an occupying army”. (full article…)
- Demoralized
On Friday, seven former CIA directors urged President Obama to end the inquiry, arguing that it would inhibit intelligence operations in the future and demoralize agency employees who believed they had been cleared by previous investigators. (full article…)
- The Value of an Afghan Life
The two were immediately taken into custody and for four days whisked from hideout to hideout, in an effort to avoid detection. However, coalition forces were monitoring their cell-phone conversations and a helicopter-borne rescue operation was soon mounted by British commandos. The commandos stormed the hideout and Munadi, dressed in Afghan clothes, came out shouting [...]
- Joke of the Day
“Any comparison of Israel’s fight on terror with recent conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. immediately shows that Israel holds itself to the highest ethical standard.” (full article…)
- Obama’s War
The top US commander today signalled for the first time that Washington will almost certainly deploy more troops to Afghanistan later this year. (more…)
- Ask Yourself
Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort and planning had gone toward “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, an underemployment rate of 16.8 percent, and a record 25.5 percent teen unemployment rate, with [...]
- How 9/11 Should Be Remembered
After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in our gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been [...]
- Obama’s War
The prosecutor of the international criminal court is collecting information on alleged war crimes committed by Nato and the Taliban in Afghanistan. (more…)
- Too Drunk or Too Hungover
US General Stanley McChrystal, head of the International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), decided to bar boozing after launching an investigation into the bombing in northern Afghanistan. Staff at the Kabul headquarters were ‘either drunk or too hungover’ to answer his questions. (more…)
- An “Imperial” Presence
Pakistanis are reacting to what many here see as an “imperial” American presence, echoing Iraq and Afghanistan, with Washington dictating to the Pakistani military and the government. Polls show that Pakistanis regard the U.S., formally a close ally and the country’s biggest donor, as a hostile power. (more…)
- This is “Change”
“Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again,” Obama said. “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”(more…)
- Why Should It Be Different in Central Asia?
So I put the cruelest of questions to Alex Frank, currently in an infantry officer training course, after hearing him argue that counterinsurgency could be made to work in Afghanistan. McNamara thought that about Indochina, I said. Why should it be different in Central Asia? (more…)
- Obama’s War
On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. (more…)
- American Lies
The version of the official military investigation into the disastrous May 4 airstrike in Farah province made public last week by the Central Command was carefully edited to save the U.S. command in Afghanistan the embarrassment of having to admit that earlier claims blaming the massive civilian deaths on the “Taliban” were fraudulent. (more…)
- Paying for Targets
The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is “no guarantee” that the people being targeted are officials of al-Qaeda or allied organizations, he said. (more…)
- Israel is Fourth Most Dangerous Country
According to a new study by the Institute for Economics & Peace, Israel came 141st out of the 144 countries analyzed—placing it safer than only Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. (more…)
- 12 Years Old
“An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12-years-old when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said on Tuesday.” (more…)
- American Colonialism Rears Its Head
Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, has been holding discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about becoming a senior adviser to his government, U.S. officials said. (more…)
- Toture, American Style
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness [...]
- This is “Change”
The president is seeking to overturn a deal made last month between the Pentagon and the American Civil Liberties Union to make public the pictures from Abu Ghraib and other prisons after a court ruled they should be released. Obama instructed the White House legal office to argue in court against the immediate release of [...]
- Obama’s War
An investigation appointed by President Hamid Karzai concluded on Monday that 140 civilians, including children, were killed in the US air strikes in Afghanistan last week, a police chief said. (more…)
- Obama’s War
Missiles fired by a suspected US drone have flattened a house and killed at least eight people in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, officials say. (more…)
- Obama’s War
For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. (more…)
- Obama’s Other War
University students have rallied in the Afghan capital, Kabul, angered by the deaths of more than 125 villagers in a US air raid. (more…)
- Obama’s Bombs
A misdirected US air strike has killed as many as 120 Afghans, including dozens of women and children. The attack is the deadliest such bombing involving civilian casualties so far in the eight years since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Families in two villages in Farah province in western Afghanistan were digging for bodies in [...]
- This is “Change”
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington, DC was overshadowed by a controversy over another US airstrike gone astray in Farah Province south of Herat, which left at least 30 civilians dead, (and some say over 100). Angry villagers from Bala Baluk brought truckloads of bodies, most of them women and children, to Farah’s provincial [...]
- American Crusades
In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”. “The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people [...]
- Obama’s Rhetorical “Change”
Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. Yep, we killed them. Yep, they were women and kids. Nope, they had, as far as we know, nothing to do with terrorism. Yep, it was our fault and we’ll pony up for our mistake. This new tactic is a [...]
- This is “Change”
Western forces in Afghanistan acknowledged on Thursday they had killed six civilians in an air strike, just days after apologising for a similar incident that killed five. (more…)
- The American Way
Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (more…)
- Cheap Laughs
“I’ve come to the region nine or ten times,” Admiral Mullen told the clerics. Mr. Holbrooke jumped in. “And each time, things have gotten worse.” Admiral Mullen, Mr. Holbroooke, and all the clerics laughed. (more…)
- Obama’s Bombs
Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not [...]
- Noam Chomsky: “Exterminate All the Brutes”
On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned [...]
- Juan Cole on Obama’s Domino Theory
[Obama's] latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the “Taliban” is mostly [...]
- When Puppets Don’t Deliver
History tells us that Washington is quite willing to look the other way when it comes to corruption as long as the crooks under their control do its bidding. Indeed, the very presence of US forces and money is part of the dynamic which encourages such corruption. Apparently, Mr. Karzai is no longer considered to [...]
- When Puppets Need Supervision
The US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the Guardian has learned. (more…)
- We Americans
“We Americans,” he said in reference to this far-off war. Then he quickly caught himself and added, almost sheepishly, “and NATO.” (more…)
- Obama’s Quagmire
Why, in fact, were such simple projects never implemented? The answer proved to be surprising, and it helps, in part, to explain the dismal fate of the Bush administration’s version of Afghan “reconstruction.” Virtually none of the $5.4 billion in taxpayer money that USAID has disbursed in this country since late 2001 has been invested [...]
- When Puppets Don’t Deliver
“Karzai is not delivering. If we are going to support his government, it has to be run properly to ensure the levels of corruption decrease, not increase. The levels of corruption are frightening.” (more…)
- Obama Wants More
Thousands of tribesmen on Saturday attended the funeral prayers of the victims of Friday’s drone attacks in the North and South Waziristan Agencies. They condemned the killings and asked US President Barack Obama to spend the money on the welfare of the tribal people instead of killing them with sophisticated weapons. . . They claimed [...]
- Carrying Bush’s Legacy
Many of Obama’s initiatives in his first few days in office — preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo — were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with “President Bush” substituted for [...]
- Carrying Bush’s Legacy
The airstrikes were authorised under a covert programme approved by Obama, according to a senior US official. It was a dramatic signal in the president’s first week of office that there will be no respite in the hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. (more…)
- Bombing Pakistan
The first taste of the Obama’s administration’s prosecution of the “War on Terror”. Unilateral bombardment of Pakistan. Now that’s keeping your “eye on the ball”.
- Angry Arab on Obama
Well, it took two longs days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in US Middle East policy. For some reasons, many Arabs and many American leftists I know (you know yourselves) have wanted to believe so bad that Obama will deviate from the Zionist path of US foreign policy. I knew that it [...]
- Obama Wants More
A deadly United States military raid on a house near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan became a new source of tension on Thursday, with the Americans calling it a successful counterterrorism strike and the Afghans saying it left three innocent civilians dead and two wounded, including a 4-year-old boy bitten by an attack dog. (more…)
-
The Soviets had nearly 400,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers at their disposal – more than twice what the US and NATO have here – and yet they still failed, he notes. (more…)
- Matthias Gebauer: Touring Guantánamo
The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time. One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an [...]
- Torture, American Style
We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. [...]
- Chris Hedges: Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity’
Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. [...]
- The Cost of Freedom
U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday. (more…)
- Chillin’ With My Homie
“I met with [Afghan] President Karzai, who is determined to help the young democracy survive,” Bush said. “And so he said, why don’t you hang around for a while? (more…)
- Another Success for the Bush Doctrine
The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country. (more…)
- Rumsfeld’s Legacy
A US Senate committee has accused the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of being directly responsible for the abusive interrogations of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. (more…)
-
Afghan police and wounded 13 early Wednesday in a case of mistaken identity by both sides after the police fired on the Americans during an operation against an insurgent commander, officials said. (more…)
- Paul Craig Roberts: If Only US Law Applied to the US Government
The U.S. government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the U.S. government. It is now well documented and known all over the world that the U.S. government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the U.S. government has had people kidnaped and “renditioned,” [...]
- Jeremy Scahill: Obama’s Kettle of Hawks
Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton’s network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be [...]
- Noam Chomsky: What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World
Well, let’s begin with the elections. The word that the rolls off of everyone’s tongue is historic. Historic election. And I agree with it. It was an historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were [...]
- Jeremy Scahill: This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites & Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House
U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best [...]
- Tom Engelhardt: Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart
On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since [...]
- Noam Chomsky: The U.S. Has Essentially a One-Party System
Der Spiegal: Professor Noam Chomsky, cathedrals of capitalism have collapsed, the conservative government is spending its final weeks in office with nationalization plans. How does that make you feel? Noam Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would [...]
- Alan Bock: No Matter Who Wins, Expect More Wars
If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama came close to questioning the "bipartisan" consensus on U.S. foreign [...]
- Tariq Ali: Bush’s War Widens Dangerously
The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Sen. Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, tried [...]
- The Forgotten Abuse of John Walker Lindh
A letter recently appeared in the Washington Post that got me thinking about John Walker Lindh again. You remember him… The so-called “American Taliban” sentenced to 20 years in prison for “aiding the Taliban”. In reality, Lindh was more likely likely an unwitting victim of an emotionally fragile post-9/11 United States as well as a [...]
- John Pilger: Stealing Diego Garcia
There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history’s [...]
