Afghanistan

BY VIJAY PRASHAD Photograph Source: bluuurgh – Public Domain 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. The Taliban’s Entry in Kabul Is a Defeat for the United States In recent year...

https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2021/8/17/afghanistan_azmat_khan BY: Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Investigative journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported extensively in Afghanistan, says President Joe Biden has not yet addressed the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the Afghan government. In remarks on Monday, Biden “really focused on the decision to end the war” and ignored criticism about chaos at the Kabul airport and the abandonment of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. over the last 20 years. “None of that was really discussed in any detail,” Khan says. She also discusses why the Afghan military fell so quickly to the Taliban, its overreliance on U.S. air power, how civilian casualties weakened support for the U.S.-backed government, and the massive profits the...

French and Afghan nationals line up to board a French military transport plane at the Kabul airport on August 17, 2021, for evacuation from Afghanistan after the Taliban's military takeover of the country. BYJake Johnson, Common Dreams As the Biden administration faces criticism for not doing enough to assist those fleeing Afghanistan, an analysis released Monday showed that the roughly $19 billion the Pentagon budgeted for the U.S. occupation of the country in 2020 alone could cover initial resettlement costs for 1.2 million refugees. Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project estimated that the $18.6 billion the Pentagon allocated for its 2020 operations in Afghanistan — where the Taliban is in the process of retaking power after two decades ...

Broadcast journalist Hoda Kotb speaks to George W. Bush on April 20, 2019. BY: William Rivers Pitt,  Truthout For a time back in the bad old days of Donald Trump, it seemed as if the corporate “news” media had ever so slightly corrected their hard-wired rightward tilt. They were still awful when viewed from a progressive vantage point, and Fox News was going to Fox News no matter what, but as the daily grind of the Trump presidency grew into a roaring existential threat to the country, that media often said what needed saying, providing context, background, fact checks and experts by the score to warn against “normalizing” fascism. Maybe it was only a sense of self-preservation that wrought the change — the news media are, of course, “the enemy of the ...