Dive into the archives.


  • 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…)

  • 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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • 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…)

  • 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…)

  • 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…)

  • 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

    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 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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • 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…)

  • 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. [...]

  • 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…)

Afghanistan

This is the archive for Afghanistan.

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Kris Murdering four Israeli settlers: "savage brutality"; murdering 1400 Gazans: "disproportionate force". This is how the U.S. views the Middle East.

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