Afghanistan

Taliban Badri fighters stand guard as Afghans wait at the main entrance gate of Kabul airport in Kabul on August 28, 2021. BYJawied Nawabi, Truthout Witnessing young and middle-aged Afghans running toward a fleeing United States Air Force plane conjures up the notion that supposedly the Afghans don’t want to bid farewell to their U.S. “friend.” The perception this gives to many Americans watching this on television is one of pity and derision, a narrative repeated by policymakers and media personalities alike: We spent billions and lost thousands of servicepeople for a country that just “can’t get it together.” For Afghans, this should be an awakening from the notion that their “friend” the United States — or the so-called “international community” — who came to rescue the...

A woman prays as she boards a bus at a processing center for refugees evacuated from Afghanistan at the Dulles Expo Center on August 24, 2021 in Chantilly, Virginia.on August 24, 2021 in Chantilly, Virginia. According to the U.S. State Department, between Sunday morning and Monday morning, 10,400 people were evacuated from Kabul on military flights and approximately 5,900 more people were evacuated on 61 coalition aircraft.(Photo by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images) Media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex. JULIE HOLLAR by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) Just as US corporate news media "discovered" Afghan women's rights only when the US ...

The United States was involved in Afghanistan long before 9/11, fomenting Islamist revolt and paving the way for its own defeat. ZOLTÁN GROSSMAN by The Progressive Media coverage of the Taliban takeover of Kabul would lead most Americans to believe that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began after 9/11, with the invasion launched to topple the previous Taliban government. But Afghanistan has been at war continuously for forty-two years, and the Pentagon has been involved every step of the way, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.  Afghan women and girls had rights until 1992, when the U.S.-backed mujahedin defeated the communists, and that was four years before the first Taliban takeover. Far from standing in the way of an Islamist takeover, a ...

"Veterans know the cost of war, so it should come as no surprise that they strongly back President Biden's decision to end the war in Afghanistan." JAKE JOHNSON Survey results released Tuesday show that nearly two-thirds of U.S. veterans support the ongoing withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, a finding that came as President Joe Biden reportedly decided to stick with the August 31 exit deadline. "Veterans strongly believe President Biden is right—it is time to go." According to a poll (pdf) commissioned by the advocacy group VoteVets, 63% of U.S. veterans believe that "it is time for America to bring troops home from Afghanistan and end the war." Just 24%, by contrast, think the U.S. should "continue the war in Afghanistan and send m...

"Despite the pressure from the hawks, Biden actually appears to be ending this war." JAKE JOHNSON President Joe Biden reportedly intends to stick with his self-imposed August 31 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, rejecting calls for an extension from hawkish GOP lawmakers, members of his own party, and European allies. During a Tuesday call, according to the Wall Street Journal, Biden told the leaders of G7 nations that the U.S. is on track to meet the withdrawal deadline and that the Pentagon is developing contingency plans in the case of any delay. The U.S. president's decision to stand by the August 31 deadline provoked immediate howls of outrage from pro-war Republican lawmakers, who accused Bi...

BY PATRICK COCKBURN Photograph Source: Michael Evans – Public Domain In 2001 the Taliban blew up the giant 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, central Afghanistan to show their defiance of the world and their contempt for all religious beliefs aside from their own fanatical version of Sunni Islam. Another motive was to demonstrate the Taliban’s power over the Shia minority in Afghanistan, mostly members of the 4 million-strong Hazara ethnic group, in whose heartlands the statues had stood before their destruction. Last week the Taliban blew up another statue in Bamiyan, this time of a martyred Hazara leader whom they had murdered in 1995, shortly before they captured Kabul for the first time. His name was Abdul Ali Mazari and he died when he and...

BY PAUL STREET Photograph Source: Sgt. Isaiah Campbell – Public Domain The humiliating defeat of the American Empire in Afghanistan – replete with “near identical images” of frantic evacuation helicopters atop a US Embassy as in Saigon in 1975 – poses a dilemma for left anti-imperialists. We must always welcome and applaud setbacks suffered by the empire, which oppresses the world with its giant global network of bases and troops and its relentless exploitation and pollution of the world natural and human resources. We do not wish “Death to America,” which is inhabited by hundreds of millions of ordinary and oppressed people who have never been consulted on US foreign policy, but we wish Death on the American Empire, which fuels and reinforces massive inequality and oppression a...

BY PATRICK COCKBURN Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan is looking unstoppable as they capture the big provincial cities of Kandahar, Herat and Ghazni without meeting effective resistance from Afghan government forces. Afghan soldiers and security forces are fleeing, surrendering or changing sides as they see no point in dying for a lost cause. The speed of the Taliban success has caught the world by surprise – as no doubt it was intended to do. There has been no “decent interval” between the US departure and the Taliban attack, as there was in South Vietnam between the final US withdrawal in 1972 and the defeat of the South Vietnamese government by the North Vietnamese army in 1975. ...

BY MICHAEL HUDSON President Biden put a popular flag-waving wrapping on America’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan in his 4 PM speech on Monday. It was as if all this was following Biden’s own intentions, not a demonstration of the totally incompetent assurances by the CIA and State Department as recently as last Friday that the Taliban was over a month away from being able to enter Kabul. Instead of saying that the massive public support for the Taliban replacing the United States showed the incompetent hubris of U.S. intelligence agencies – which itself would have justified Biden’s agreement to complete the withdrawal with all haste – he doubled down on his defense of the Deep State and its mythology. The effect was to show how drastic his own misconceptions are, and how he ...