I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks. Continue reading
We’re getting a taste of what the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ‘60s would have been like without the not-quite-yet corporate media reporting on the daily events. But over the past half century with just about all the major media gobbled up by corporations, the monied powers and politicians decided very little of their criminal actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be televised. Now some are criticizing the American people for not caring about the death and destruction the US has rained on Afghanistan when it wasn’t being served up as a nightly dinner course by TV. Continue reading
If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter, you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about. Continue reading
Kabul, it’s been noted, was not lost yesterday. It was the inevitable final fall of a calamitous, arrogant, 20-year, trillion-dollar, too-many-deaths imperial misadventure doomed, like too many before it, to failure from its inept start. In Biden’s speech, generally deemed resolute but callous about the mayhem unfolding, he asked a tough, good question – “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war?” – but framed it in a cynical, disingenuous way by adding, “when Afghan troops will not?” The fourth president to oversee yet another senseless war in “the graveyard of empires,” he thus found an easy target for what is the “breathtaking failure” of longtime U.S. foreign policy while blithely ignoring the blood-soaked, hubris-laden history behind it – a “post-imperial Western fantasy” of disastrous military or CIA interventions through Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and then Iran, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, which was never at war with the U.S. and where Donald Rumsfeld, may he have no rest, demanded Bush “punish and get out.” Bush and his imperious ilk spoke of nation-building, “as if nations were made of Legos.” Instead, we got our forever war, where rather than offer schools, clinics, water, job training to a beleaguered population, the U.S. blew up whatever infrastructure they had and spent 86% of a staggering trillion dollars – though some say it’s closer to 2 trillion – on often hapless military initiatives that, thanks to “a complex ecosystem of defense contractors, Washington banditry” and corruption, largely returned to the U.S. economy. Add in corruption by Afghan elites, and ultimately less than 2% of U.S. money actually went to the people who needed it. A final irony: Even as the West frantically fought to stop it, soaring Afghan poppy production fueled the insurgency, spreading from six to 28 provinces: “Opium floated the Taliban back to power.” All topped by a rushed, artless, possibly balance-tipping “deal” giving too much to the Taliban by the idiot Former Guy. Continue reading
If you’re a corporate employee, you know that something unpleasant is afoot when top executives are suddenly issuing statements about how committed they are to their employees, making sure that all of them are treated with dignity and respect. Continue reading
A unique but critical conversation on Israel and Palestine is taking place outside the traditional discourse of Israeli colonialism and the Palestinian quest for liberation. It is an awkward and difficult—but overdue—discussion concerning American Jews’ relation to Israel and their commitment to its Zionist ideology. Continue reading
The scenes of people desperately trying to board planes in Kabul, Afghanistan, hanging from and even falling from landing gear, are reminiscent of past United States exits, most notably from Vietnam. Yet these images should not be surprising nor should they change anyone’s views about the terror that the U.S. brought to that country. The turmoil in present day Afghanistan is the end result of more than 40 years of U.S. involvement and it should not be discussed without an analysis of that history. Continue reading
President Joe Biden plans to hold a Summit of Democracies in December of 2021. This meeting will bring together all the usual cast of characters of “heads of state, civil society, philanthropy, and the private sector” according to a White House statement. Private citizens will be included but most likely those participants will be screened and have a question to pose to the “leaders” that will undoubtedly be carefully scripted. Nothing will come of this as the US will seek to steer the narrative towards America’s creation of the Post World War II order over which it lords and to trumpet its questionable premise that only it alone is capable of leading because, after all, Americans always work in the best interests of global peace and prosperity and, besides, it has the mightiest military with which to back up its words with violent deeds. Continue reading
On August 15, the Taliban arrived in Kabul. The Taliban’s leadership entered the presidential palace, which Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had vacated when he fled into exile abroad hours before. The country’s borders shut down and Kabul’s main international airport lay silent, except for the cries of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. and NATO; they knew that their lives would now be at serious risk. The Taliban’s leadership, meanwhile, tried to reassure the public of a “peaceful transition” by saying in several statements that they would not seek retribution, but would go after corruption and lawlessness. Continue reading
The people of Afghanistan are in a state of fear of the Taliban who now control Afghanistan’s capital, major cities, and countryside—after the U.S. and NATO twenty-year occupation. Here are some of my personal observances during sixteen years in the U.S. diplomatic corps and experiencing the opening and closing of U.S. embassies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and the effects on the civilian populations of the countries involved. Continue reading
As I write this, the Taliban have assumed full political control—to the extent that such a thing can exist—of Afghanistan. They’ve taken Kabul. They’ve put the US occupation’s puppet president, and many Afghans who served the occupation presence, to flight. They’ve declared the restoration of their “Islamic Emirate.” Continue reading
Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. Continue reading
George W Bush has issued a statement on the situation in Afghanistan, and there are not enough shoes in the world to adequately respond to it. Continue reading
I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on August 11 with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. On August 12, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege. Continue reading
There’s a narrative out there that millennials and the Generation Zs behind them are lazy. Continue reading
I love how everyone’s just pretending the Afghanistan Papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they’ve been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time. Continue reading
Are we about to replay, in Kabul, the 30 April 1975 scene in Saigon as desperate South Vietnamese, who had worked for the Americans, attempted to get aboard US military helicopters that would carry them to safety as the city fell to the North Vietnamese? Continue reading
Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions. Continue reading
Law schools should have courses on the expanding immunities of government and corporate officials from criminal prosecution and punishment. Guest lecturers, speaking from their experience, could be Donald J. Trump, George W. Bush (criminal destruction of Iraq), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the Sackler Family of opioid infamy, and the top officials at Boeing, led by its CEO Dennis Muilenburg, for the 346 homicides in their deadly 737 MAX aircraft. Continue reading
We are killing each other and our ecosystem over an economy made of debt books and imagination. Continue reading
As each day goes by, the Taliban’s forces edge closer to controlling all of Afghanistan. In the first week of August, the Taliban swept through the northern provinces of the country—Jawzjan, Kunduz, and Sar-e Pul—which form an arc alongside the borders of the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The violence has been severe; the pain inflicted upon civilians by the intensity of the fighting has been terrible. Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at least 200 people were killed in the bombings. It shows the weakness of the government in Kabul that its Ministry of Defense’s spokesperson Fawad Aman cheered on the bombing. Continue reading
Tuesday a federal judge was expected to certify Purdue Pharmaceutical’s bankruptcy plan—a $4.5 billion settlement between the company and thousands of state and municipal governments that have sued for damages related to the opioid epidemic. The settlement occurs more than two decades after Purdue began aggressively marketing OxyContin to an unsuspecting public and after more than 500,000 people died in the United States as a result. Continue reading
Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right. Continue reading
In light of the latest IPCC report on climate change, it’s crucial we remember these four steps to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Continue reading
The first time I met Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO who suddenly died this past Thursday, was in early 2008. I had only been president of the Writers Guild of America, East, an AFL-CIO union, for a short time, and he was then the labor federation’s secretary-treasurer. Continue reading
For Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO), sleeping away from the comfort of a bed is an unfortunately familiar feeling. Years ago, Bush had to live out of her car for a time with her two young children, all while working a full-time job. Continue reading
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) just recently responded in the complaint brought by the Russian Federation against Ukraine for the mistreatment of the latter’s citizens based on their ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic self-identification. To quote more directly the topics covered in the complaint: “The case concerns the Russian Government’s allegation of an administrative practice in Ukraine of, among other things, killings, abductions, forced displacement, interference with the right to vote, restrictions on the use of the Russian language and attacks on Russian embassies and consulates. They also complain about the water supply to Crimea at the Northern Crimean Canal being switched off and allege that Ukraine was responsible for the deaths of those on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 because it failed to close its airspace.” Continue reading
Alexander Burns is a leading political affairs analyst for the New York Times. Unfortunately, even he has accepted the ill-defined political labelism swallowed wholesale by his journalistic colleagues. Continue reading
We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core. Continue reading
Even though the number of dying Trump followers increases daily, his coup rolls on. Continue reading
When the Palestinian Olympic delegation of five athletes—adorned in traditional Palestinian attire and carrying the Palestinian flag—crossed into the Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium during the inauguration ceremony on July 23, I was overcome with pride and nostalgia. Continue reading
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Will Americans who were right on Afghanistan still be ignored?
Posted on August 23, 2021 by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies
America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place. Continue reading →