Afghanistan Archives - Page 5 of 66

20 Years: The words that shaped the war in Afghanistan

16Feb

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, USA

20 Years: The words that shaped the war in Afghanistan

Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem,Sr As part of the Twenty Years project, a journalistic and artistic initiative with Afghans in Australia and around the world to assess the legacy of the US-led war in Afghanistan, we commissioned young, female, Afghan-Australian artists to make a short film on these themes. This is their statement: The fall of Kabul in 2021 was the result of the Taliban forcibly taking power while the international community, who once branded their occupation of Afghanistan as “liberation”, isolated the very people they claimed to be saving.Swept up by the 24-hour news cycle, Australia rode the wave of distraction to distance itself from its own history of war crimes and failures in Afghanistan.Failing to act as the watchdogs on democracy, mainstream media aid...

8Feb

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, USA, Vietnam

A Very Long War

BY ANDREW BACEVICH Cam Ranh Bay in 1969. Photograph Source: Sknowlton2 – CC BY-SA 4.0 In the long and storied history of the United States Army, many young officers have served in many war zones. Few, I suspect, were as sublimely ignorant as I was in the summer of 1970 upon my arrival at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam. Granted, during the years of schooling that preceded my deployment there, I had amassed all sorts of facts, some of them at least marginally relevant to the matter at hand. Yet despite the earnest efforts of some excellent teachers, I had managed to avoid acquiring anything that could be dignified with the term education. Now, however haltingly, that began to change. A year later, when my tour of duty ended, I carried home from Vietnam the barest ...

Are Western Wealthy Countries Determined to Starve the People of Afghanistan?

23Jan

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, Europe, USA

Are Western Wealthy Countries Determined to Starve the People of Afghanistan?

BY VIJAY PRASHAD Photograph Source: Gustavo Montes de Oca – CC BY 2.0 On January 11, 2022, the United Nations (UN) Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths appealed to the international community to help raise $4.4 billion for Afghanistan in humanitarian aid, calling this effort, “the largest ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian assistance.” This amount is required “in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there,” said the UN. If this appeal is not met, Griffiths said, then “next year [2023] we’ll be asking for $10 billion.” The figure of $10 billion is significant. A few days after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in mid-August 2021, the U.S. government announced the seizure of $9.5 billion in Afghan assets...

From Aerial Strikes to Starvation, Afghanistan’s People Bear the Brunt of the West’s Failed Taliban Tactics

23Jan

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, USA

From Aerial Strikes to Starvation, Afghanistan’s People Bear the Brunt of the West’s Failed Taliban Tactics

BY PATRICK COCKBURN Photograph Source: Todd Huffman – CC BY 2.0 On 26 August last year a former engineering student named Abdul Rahman al-Logari, wearing a vest containing 25lb of explosives, was about to be searched by American soldiers guarding Kabul airport. At the last moment, this Isis suicide bomber detonated his device, killing 13 American soldiers and between 170 and 200 Afghans who were desperately trying to get a flight out of the country. Three days later the US fired its last missile in its 20-year-war in Afghanistan at what it said was a car near the airport into which it believed Isis members had loaded a bomb. Both these stories turned out to be incorrect. Credible evidence soon emerged that, while the Isis bomber had killed the American tr...

The Chaotic Evacuation From Afghanistan Has Distracted From the UK’s Deeper Failures During the War

27Dec

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, United Kingdom

The Chaotic Evacuation From Afghanistan Has Distracted From the UK’s Deeper Failures During the War

BY PATRICK COCKBURN l Photograph Source: Specialist David Marck, Jr – Public Domain They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slainIn sight of help denied from day to day:But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,Are they too strong and wise to put away?Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?When the storm is ended shall we findHow softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to powerBy the favour and contrivance of their kind?Their lives cannot repay us – their death could not undo –The shame that they have laid upon our race.But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,Shall we leave it unabated in its place?– from ‘Mesopotamia’, by Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling’s savage denunciation of the British politicians and off...

Taking Responsibility for the Deaths of Others

27Nov

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, Human Rights, USA

Taking Responsibility for the Deaths of Others

WALTER L. HIXSON A view of the damage at the Zemari Ahmadi family house after a drone strike one day before the final U.S. evacuation flights from Kabul, on Sept. 18, 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Zemari Ahmadi and nine members of his family, including seven children, were reported killed in the airstrike on Aug. 29, 2021. (PHOTO BY BILAL GULER/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES) Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2021, pp. 26-27 History’s Shadows By Walter L. Hixson FOR SEVERAL DAYS the American public memorialized the 13 U.S. soldiers killed at the Kabul airport in the Aug. 26 attack, which punctuated the ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was well and proper that we mourned the deaths of these service men and women, who were car...

China’s Belt and Road chugging along in Central Asia

21Nov

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, China, Pakistan & Kashmir, Uzbekistan

China’s Belt and Road chugging along in Central Asia

Greater regional connectivity is seen as crucial to long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan. By: MK BHADRAKUMAR The information war is so intense nowadays that unsung melodies are often more alluring than the sung ones. The lines from English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous ode To a Skylark come to mind: “In the broad day-light / Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight …” Two events in the past couple of weeks indicated growing optimism about Afghanistan’s future. Both developments signify that the scaffolding for improved regional connectivity, economic development and governance is coming up, largely unreported. Certainly, the three-day visit to Islamabad in early November by Uzbek National Security Adviser Lieutenant-General Vikt...

Why is the US Hyping Up the Threat of ISIS in Afghanistan?

19Nov

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan

Why is the US Hyping Up the Threat of ISIS in Afghanistan?

By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook To justify its interventionist actions in the Middle East, the United States, following the now cliched example, actively uses its alleged commitment to fighting against terrorism, focusing on countering such well-known terrorist formations as Al Qaeda and ISIS. The same goes for the actions of the USA in Afghanistan. However, Washington didn’t take any accountability before the rest of the world about the results of this fight against terrorists in Afghanistan during its 20 years of abysmal military intervention. At the same time, the Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov and foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova mentioned several times that Russia has sufficient facts backing the claims about...

Why the World’s Eyes are on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

31Oct

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan

Why the World’s Eyes are on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

The Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan has greatly impacted regional relations. Understand why tensions have been rising between Afghanistan and its northern neighbor Tajikistan. B: Vijay Prashad Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon remotely addresses the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in a prerecorded message on September 23. Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul. Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference. Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troo...

PSL statement: U.S.-backed Afghan government surrenders to the Taliban

29Oct

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Afghanistan, USA

PSL statement: U.S.-backed Afghan government surrenders to the Taliban

Party for Socialism and Liberation Download PDF flyer https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1106626762&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true Photo: U.S. helicopter evacuating Kabul The unopposed entrance of Taliban forces into Kabul marks the bitter conclusion of a 20-year long military adventure by U.S. imperialism that senselessly inflicted death and suffering on an enormous scale. The fact that the U.S.-backed Afghan government surrendered without a fight is the clearest indication that it was nothing more than an extension of U.S. imperialist power. The stark reality showed itself: either the U.S. imperialist occupation that ...