Afghanistan Archives - Page 19 of 66

Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?

31Aug

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Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Author’s note The following article was first published 14 years ago on the 9th of September 2006, in the context of the 2006 commemoration of the tragic event of September 2001. *** “Going after bin Laden” has served to sustain the legend of the “world’s most wanted terrorist”, who “haunts Americans and millions of others around the world.” Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly claimed that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden remain unknown: “It is like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”. In November 2001, US B-52 bombers carpet bombed a network of caves in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his followers were allegedly hiding. These caves were described as “Osama’s...

“I Could Live With That”: How the CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade

29Jul

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Afghanistan, C.I.A, USA

“I Could Live With That”: How the CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Opium poppy. Photo: DEA. “I decided I could live with that.”– Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, on the extreme level of civilian casualties in the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan. The first indelible image of the war in Afghanistan for many Americans was probably that of CBS anchorman Dan Rather, wrapped in the voluminous drapery of a mujahedin fighter, looking like a healthy relative of Lawrence of Arabia (albeit with hair that seemed freshly blow-dried, as some viewers were quick to point out). From his secret mountainside “somewhere in the Hindu Kush,” Rather unloaded on his audience a barrowload of nonsense about the conflict. The Soviets, Rather confided portentously, had put a bounty on his head “of many thousands of dollars.” He went...

28Jul

By SHOAHNo Comments

Afghanistan, Russia, USA

Bounty Tales

by EVE OTTENBERG The corporate press exploded recently with the dubious story that Russia paid the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. soldiers. This volcanic claim came without one quote for attribution. All sources were anonymous. The New York Times broke the story, but the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and CNN quickly followed suit, boasting that they had confirmed this tale. They had not. They simply parroted the same murky, unnamed, security state sources. Meanwhile, the CIA was unenthusiastic and the NSA outright skeptical. With good reason. Even your average, media-befogged citizen can see that the Taliban, fighting the U.S. invasion for two decades, does not need bounties from Russia or anybody else as an incentive to kill U.S. s...

28Jul

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Afghanistan, Russia, USA

Afghanistan: : What is to be Done?

by MELVIN GOODMAN Photograph Source: Jayel Aheram – CC BY 2.0 The mainstream media is asking the wrong questions regarding the possibility of Russian bounties for American soldiers. Over and over, they ponder what did the president know and when did he know it? These were important questions that Senator Howard Baker asked of President Nixon during Watergate, but they are meaningless questions for Donald Trump, given his ignorance and indifference. Trump has mishandled every foreign policy and national security issue for the past three and a half years; why would anyone expect him to get this one right. The fact that he was making a series of calls to President Vladimir Putin regarding a return to the G-7 even as his National Security Council was discus...

25Jul

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Afghanistan, Russia, USA

What Do Russian Analysts Make of the Charge Moscow Offered Taliban Bounties on US Troops?

The history of outside forces helping wage war within Afghanistan—including the U.S. establishment of the mujahideen forces to fight the Russians in the 1980s—is a bloody history indeeed. by: Nikola Mikovic U.S. Soldiers navigate a stream during a security patrol in Chabar, Afghanistan, Dec. 3, 2009. The Soldiers are from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. (Photo: DoD/Tech. Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II, U.S. Air Force) Russian officials deny the New York times claims that Moscow offered bounties to members of the Taliban movement for killing US soldiers, while the Kremlin-friendly analysts believe that the such “fake news” were fabricated in order to weaken the US President Donald Trump, as well as to se...

13Jul

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Afghanistan, C.I.A, Politics, USA

The War That Time Forgot

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Drone targeting footage, Afghanistan. Photo: USAF. I hear it all the time. The most crucial decision of this century was the vote to go to war against Iraq. It’s meant to serve as a political line of demarcation, a sure-fire way to determine which politicians, celebrities and news personalities you can trust. But there’s little question, to my mind at least, that the impulsive decision to invade Afghanistan was the more consequential and enduring tragedy, a political bloodletting that nearly every political leader, left and right, fell for, even putative peaceniks like Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul. This was the true moral test of our time and almost everyone failed, except Barbara Lee. She was the lone voice of conscience in the fall of 2001, a vote of dissent...

Bipartisan Torpedo Against the Agreement for Afghanistan

9Jul

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Afghanistan, USA

Bipartisan Torpedo Against the Agreement for Afghanistan

By Manlio Dinucci Hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, over 2,400 US soldiers killed (plus an unknown number of wounded), about 1,000 billion dollars spent: this is the budget summary of 19 years of US war in Afghanistan, to which the cost for NATO allies (including Italy) and others, who joined the US in the war, is added. Bankruptcy budget for the USA also from a political-military point of view: most of the territory is now controlled by the Taliban or disputed between them and the Governmental Forces supported by NATO. After lengthy negotiations, the Trump administration concluded an agreement with the Taliban last February against this background, which provides for the reduction of the number of US troops in Afghanistan from 8,600 to 4,500 in exchange for a series ...

US-Taliban deal gives upper hand to armed group in talks with Kabul

7Jul

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Afghanistan, USA

US-Taliban deal gives upper hand to armed group in talks with Kabul

Getting the US to negotiate with the Taliban without the Kabul government involved doomed any possibility of success …by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor, …with FARS News Agency, Tehran [ Editor’s Note: Sometimes these overseas interviews get lost in never never land, down the memory hole, or lost for a while until someone finds them and goes, “Oh, we never got this up”. This happens with VT, also. FARS takes the record for me with this one. But unfortunately, the Afghanistan ‘peace’ process continues with more attacks on government forces despite Taliban prisoners having been released. They also had the horrific ISIS attack on the maternity ward, killing mothers, newborns and medical staff. They are some really evil dudes, lowering the bar on what religious extremists can be...

American Taliban: Is Smashing Historic Heritage a Meritorious Act?

5Jul

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Afghanistan, USA

American Taliban: Is Smashing Historic Heritage a Meritorious Act?

KEVIN BARRETT In March 2001, in the mountains northwest of Kabul, the Taliban blew up two colossal statues of Gautama Buddha. The act was almost universally condemned. But the Taliban’s justification of historic vandalism makes at least as much sense as those offered by today’s American Taliban, who are on a nationwide rampage of statue-destruction. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, confused protesters just destroyed two statues honoring causes they presumably support. One honored Hans Christian Heg, “a Norwegian immigrant, activist and abolitionist who led an anti-slave catcher militia helping slaves escape before serving as a Colonel for the Union army in the Civil War. He was killed in the Battle of Chickamauga in north Georgia in 1863.” The other was Miss Forward, an American version...

Afghanistan, Garden of Empire: America’s Multibillion Dollar Opium Harvest

27Jun

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Afghanistan, C.I.A, USA

Afghanistan, Garden of Empire: America’s Multibillion Dollar Opium Harvest

By: Julien Mercille By resolution 42/112 of 7 December 1987, the UN General Assembly decided to observe 26 June as the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking as an expression of its determination to strengthen action and cooperation to achieve the goal of an international society free of drug abuse. The UN General Assembly is committed to developing awareness regarding the Illicit trafficking of narcotics. Excerpted from Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade (Pluto Press, 2013), by Julien Mercille. As Obama proclaims that the US adventure in Afghanistan will draw to a close over the next couple years, we may look at the balance sheet with respect to one of the occupation’s alleged justifications: the fight...