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Afghanistan

A Teacher In Kabul

August 30, 2014 Kathy Kelly, www.vcnv.org ,
This is a story of hope, although it begins with a friend of mine suffering fierce beatings in a classroom. Here in Kabul, one of my finest friends is Zekerullah, who has gone back to school in the 8th grade although he is an18-year old young man who has already had to learn far too many of life’s harsh lessons. Corporal punishment is common in Afghan elementary and secondary school classrooms. Many Afghan teachers routinely line up students, whose schoolwork doesn’t satisfy them for beating before the class, using a ruler or a cane on the backs of the students’ hands. Years ago and miles from here, when he was a child in the province of Bamiyan, and before he ran away from school, Zekerullah led a double life, earning income for his family each night as a construction crew laborer, and then attempting to attend school in the daytime. In between these tasks the need to provide his family with fuel would sometimes drive him on six-hour treks up the mountainside, leading a donkey on which to load bags of scrub brush and twigs for the trip back down. His greatest childhood fear, as he told my friend Sherri Maurin in an interview for her film project, was of that donkey taking one disastrous wrong step with its load on the difficult mountainside.

Report: Obama DoD Covered Up War Crimes In Afghanistan

August 13, 2014 Amnesty International, www.amnestyusa.org , ,
The families of thousands of Afghan civilians killed by US/NATO forces in Afghanistan have been left without justice, Amnesty International said in a new report released today. Focusing primarily on air strikes and night raids carried out by US forces, including Special Operations Forces, Left in the Dark finds that even apparent war crimes have gone uninvestigated and unpunished. “Thousands of Afghans have been killed or injured by US forces since the invasion, but the victims and their families have little chance of redress. The US military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” said Richard Bennett, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director. “None of the cases that we looked into – involving more than 140 civilian deaths – were prosecuted by the US military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored.” The report documents in detail the failures of accountability for US military operations in Afghanistan. It calls on the Afghan government to ensure that accountability for unlawful civilian killings is guaranteed in any future bilateral security agreements signed with NATO and the United States.

Afghanistan To Cost More Than Marshall Plan, Watchdog Says

August 1, 2014 Josh Smith, www.stripes.com , , ,
By the time its combat troops depart at the end of 2014, the United States will have appropriated more money trying to fix Afghanistan than it did on the Marshall Plan that helped Europe recover economically after World War II, according to an analysis by a government watchdog. The comparison in the latest quarterly report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction draws attention to the mixed results of U.S. investments in Afghanistan — $104 billion appropriated since 2002 — versus the success of the Marshall Plan, which is credited with helping to spur the economic revival of Western Europe. The Marshall Plan cost about $13.3 billion at the time, but dollars during the 1950s could purchase much more than today’s dollars. Adjusting for inflation and stated in today’s dollars, the Marshall Plan investment would be equal to $103.4 billion, SIGAR concluded. Using the same adjustments, the SIGAR report, calculated that the actual investment in Afghanistan equals more than $109 billion.

Video: Sentencing Hearing For Drone Protester

July 14, 2014 Upstate Drone Action Reports, www.upstatedroneaction.org , , ,
Mary Anne Grady Flores Sentencing Hearing following her conviction on the charge of ‘Contempt’ by a 6 person jury in DeWitt Town Court before Judge David S. Gideon. Mary Anne was charged for walking in the highway in front of the access road leading to the guard shack, taking pictures of protesters who were protesting the piloting of MQ-9 Reaper drones from Hancock Air National Guard Base. These drones fly over Afghanistan where they target and execute people on the ground. Targets often include civilians in their homes and cars going about the business of daily life.

Pity The Children

July 1, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com , , ,
For the United States, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be over soon. We will leave behind, after our defeats, wreckage and death, the contagion of violence and hatred, unending grief, and millions of children who were brutalized and robbed of their childhood. Americans who did not suffer will forget. People maimed physically or psychologically by the violence, especially the Iraqi and Afghan children, will never escape. Time and memory will play their usual tricks. Those who endured war will begin to wonder, years from now, what was real and what was not. And those who did not taste of war’s noxious poison will stop wondering at all. I sat last Thursday afternoon in a small conference room at the University of Massachusetts Boston with three U.S. combat veterans—two from the war in Iraq, one from the war in Vietnam—along with a Somali who grew up amid the vicious fighting in Mogadishu. All are poets or novelists. They were there to attend a two-week writers workshop sponsored by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences. It is their voices and those of their comrades that have to be heeded now, and heeded in the future, if we are to curb our appetite for empire and lust for industrial violence. The truth about war comes out, but always too late. And by the time the drums begin beating, the flags waving and the politicians and press hyperventilating as they shout out their nationalist cant, once again we have forgotten what we learned, as if the debacles of the past had no bearing on the debacles of the future.

Longest War In US History Not Long Enough For Clinton?

June 14, 2014 Rebecca Shabad, www.thehill.com , , ,
Hillary Clinton on Thursday said she would be open to keeping U.S. military forces in Afghanistan past 2016, President Obama's deadline for withdrawal. At an event at the Council on Foreign Relations, the think tank’s president Richard Haass asked Clinton whether she would be open to keeping a residual force after 2016. “I would. It depends upon conditions on the ground,” said Clinton, who is considered the Democratic front-runner for president in 2016 and is touring the country to promote her new book, Hard Choices. If the next elected president of Afghanistan “were to come up with a well thought-through plan of what is needed, I believe that would be very seriously considered,” Clinton added. “The leadership in Afghanistan is watching.” Clinton’s comments come just a few weeks after Obama announced his new timeline for leaving Afghanistan. A majority of U.S. forces will pull out by the end of the year, with a force of 9,800 remaining at the start of 2015.

The Afghan Guantanamo Continues Despite WIthdrawal

June 2, 2014 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com , ,
President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials. On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans. These are the last detainees the US holds in the Afghanistan war. It relinquished hundreds of Afghan detainees, and almost all of the detention facility, to Afghan control last year. Sometimes called, in military parlance, “Enduring Security Threats”, the non-Afghans have posed a dilemma for the Department of Defense for years, as officials pondered what to do about them ahead of a pullout that had been anticipated for December 2014.

Afghan Asylum Seekers In Turkey Sew Lips Together In Protest

May 14, 2014 Alice Speri, www.news.vice.com , , ,
Afghan refugees in Turkey have been protesting outside the UN refugee agency in Ankara for 26 days — denouncing discriminations against them and accusing the agency of taking too long to process their asylum requests, leaving them stuck in Turkey in "unbelievably difficult" conditions. Dozens of Afghans have been sitting outside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) headquarters day and night in a makeshift camp that is home also to about 40 children, according to local reports. As their cries for a fairer screening process and better conditions in Turkey went unheard, about 12 of them went on a hunger strike and sew their lips in protest. 'Why don’t you do anything for us?' "Afghan refugees and asylum seekers have come to the streets of Ankara to convey their demands which are based on the fundamental rights of asylum seekers to the UNHCR’s deaf ears," the group said in a statement. "The refugees' rights are violated by UNHCR incompetence and Afghan refugees are deprived of their fundamental rights."

As War In Afghanistan Ends, Guantanamo Bay Stays Open

April 23, 2014 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com , ,
Typically, when a war ends, so does the combatants’ authority to detain the other side’s fighters. But as the conclusion of the US war in Afghanistan approaches, the inmate population of Guantánamo Bay is likely to be an exception – and, for the Obama administration, the latest complication to its attempt to close the infamous wartime detention complex. In December, when President Barack Obama and his Nato allies formally end their combat role in Afghanistan, US officials indicate there is unlikely to be a corresponding release of detainees at Guantánamo who were captured during the country's longest conflict. The question has been the subject of recent internal debate in the Obama administration, which is wrapped up in the broader question of future detention policy. Already human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees say they anticipate filing a new wave of lawsuits challenging the basis for a wartime detention after the war ends – the next phase in more than a decade of attempts to litigate the end of indefinite detention.

Plant Trees Not Bombs In Afghanistan

April 2, 2014 Afghan Peace Volunteers, www.ourjourneytosmile.com , ,
Dear friends, on the 28th of March, 2014, at about 4 p.m., the Afghan Peace Volunteers heard a loud explosion nearby. For the rest of the evening and night, they anxiously waited for the sound of rocket fire and firing to stop. It was reported that a 10 year old girl, and the four assailants, were killed. We had been thinking about an appropriate response to the violence perpetrated by the Taliban, other militia, the Afghan government, and the U.S./NATO coalition of 50 countries. So, on the 31st of March 2014, in building alternatives and saying ‘no’ to all violence and all forms of war-making, a few of us went to an area near the place which was attacked, and there, we planted some trees.

On Afghan New Year, Wishes For Border-Free World

March 22, 2014 Hakim Young, www.popularresistance.org ,
Salam from Afghanistan, where the Afghan New Year ( Nao Roz / New Day ) is on the 21st of March. Alas, peace is far away. We ask for your friendship and time in making a Skype or telephone connection with our Afghan family, the Afghan Peace Volunteers, on Nao Roz or in the next few weeks, to talk about their wishes for the new year, their joy in flying kites, and their hope to build a world free of human borders. Like people all over the world, the Afghan Peace Volunteers are so tired of war. We are therefore determined to build relationships to abolish war. This winter, we built those relationships through service to fellow Afghans, through the duvet project and the street kids program. We also believe that another immediate way for people to be a strong 99% is to get to know one another through arranging Skype or telephone connections across all borders.

Veterans Take the Stand in NYC Free Speech Trial

March 12, 2014 Ellen Davidson, www.popularresistance.org , ,
“Unjust laws need to be broken so they will be removed,” is the explanation U.S. Army veteran Ellen Barfield gave for refusing to leave New York City’s Vietnam Veterans Plaza after the 10 pm closing time last October. She was testifying in her own defense March 11 during the second day of a trial of five veterans arrested at the plaza on Oct. 7, 2013. The defendants were arrested with 14 others (whose charges were later dismissed) as they read the names of the war dead from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam and laid flowers at the base of the memorial. The five had flex-cuffed themselves together and lay on the ground, and were charged with resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, disorderly conduct, failure to obey a park sign, trespassing, and failure to obey a lawful order.

NATO Drones Kill Afghan Soliders

March 8, 2014 Staff america.aljazeera.com ,
A NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday accidentally killed five Afghan soldiers, government officials said. The deaths are likely to worsen already fraught relations between the U.S.-led NATO coalition and President Hamid Karzai, who has often seized on botched airstrikes to launch bitter criticism of the international military effort in Afghanistan. "At 3:30 a.m. this morning, due to a NATO airstrike in Charkh district, Logar province, five service members of the Afghan national army were martyred and eight others were wounded," Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said on his Twitter account. Khalilullah Kamal, the Charkh district governor, told the news agency Agence France-Presse he had visited the site of the attack, which he said was from a U.S. drone.

G-20 Protester’s Amazing Statement To Court Before Sentencing

February 14, 2014 Joel Bitar, www.supportjoel.com , , , , , ,
It is only really possible to understand the events that took place in Toronto in the context of the global movement against neoliberalism and the corporatization of the planet. It is my belief that this movement is best explained as an individual and collective response to various forms of domination and exploitation. My politics are inseparable from my own life experiences, which I would like to briefly speak about now. When I was in college trying to get rich and focusing on my own personal comforts seemed right when everyone else was chasing the same thing. However, two events occurred during this time that fundamentally changed the way I now see the world. The first event was the global financial crisis of 2008. The second event took place in December, 2008, when Israel launched an invasion into the Gaza Strip. This led me to see more and more about the world that I could not unsee, including how the continued exploitation of the environment is connected to the same economic interests mentioned above. Financial crises, war and environmental degradation share a common thread. They are born of the prevailing economic system, which is only interested in maximizing profit and increasing growth. This system is predicated on maintaining vast levels of inequality, where a small number of people have incredible amounts of wealth while the masses are locked in poverty.

Labor Group Calls For End To Occupation Of Afghanistan

February 9, 2014 Labor Fight Back, www.popularresistance.org ,
In communities all over the United States people are hearing from their sons and daughters who are deployed to the Afghan war zone: they don’t understand why they are there. The Afghan people don’t want them there. They can’t trust that the Afghan troops—who are supposed to be their allies—won’t turn on them in a firefight. These young men and women, who went into the Armed Forces because they had no other job opportunities, often volunteered for duty in Afghanistan because of the premium pay they would earn for combat service. That little bit of extra cash is nothing compared to what these young people have sacrificed, even those who have come home with no physical wounds.
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