Afghanistan

Despite Appeals, US Denies Possibility Of Unfreezing Afghan Assets

December 15, 2021 People's Dispatch. Educate! Afghanistan, Human Rights, Taliban, US Sanctions

US White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified on Tuesday, December 14 said that the government has no plan to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets. Psaki was responding to a public call by Afghanistan’s foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi made a day earlier to unfreeze the assets. The US government had announced a freeze of nearly USD 10 billion worth of Afghanistan’s assets days after the Taliban took over power in the country on August 15, claiming the possibility of misuse of the funds. It also severed all diplomatic relations with Afghanistan after the complete withdrawal of its troops on August 30. The Taliban government in Afghanistan, the UN, and several other governments, including China, have demanded that the US release the funds to facilitate necessary public expenditure in Afghanistan.

Murder By Any Other Name

November 7, 2021 Scott Ritter, Consortium News. Educate! Afghanistan, Drones, International Law, Wars and Militarism

On Aug. 29, the United States murdered ten Afghan civilians in a drone strike. The U.S. Air Force Inspector Gen., Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, was appointed on Sept. 21, to lead an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the attack. On Nov. 3, Gen. Said released the unclassified findings of his investigation, declaring that while the incident was “regrettable,” no crimes were committed by the U.S. forces involved. The reality, however, is that the U.S. military engaged in an act of premeditated murder violative of U.S. laws and policies, as well as international law. Everyone involved, from the president on down committed a war crime. Their indictment is spelled out in the details of what occurred before and during the approximately eight hours a U.S. MQ-9 “Reaper” drone tracked Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of Nutrition and Education International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has been operating in Afghanistan since 2003, working to fight malnutrition among women and children who live in high-mortality areas in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan Tackles The Islamic State

October 18, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Counter Punch. Educate! Afghanistan, Islamic State, Terrorism, Uyghurs

On October 8, a terrible blast struck the worshippers attending Friday noon prayers at the Gozar-e-Sayed Abad Mosque in the Khan Abad district of Bandar, the capital of Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities in its northern belt. This is a mosque frequented by Shia Muslims, who were referred to as “our compatriots” by Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid. Forty-six people died immediately in the blast, and local officials said that many more people were injured in the incident. Not long afterward, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), took credit for the attack on its Telegram channel. The suicide bomber was identified as Mohammed al-Uyguri by ISIS-K. The name of the attacker raised red flags across the region.

Washington Demands Acquiescence In Afghanistan

October 17, 2021 Brett Kershaw, Antiwar.com. Educate! Afghanistan, Taliban, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

War and conflict rarely benefit the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, the very nature of war is destructive. In the case of Afghanistan, once the US war and occupation ended, any delusive stability or vitality in the nation’s economy collapsed too.

How Feminists Can Support Afghan Women Living Under The Taliban

October 15, 2021 Medea Benjamin And Ariel Gold, Jacobin. Educate! Afghanistan, Feminism, Taliban, Women's Rights

Since the Taliban took control of Kabul and Afghanistan’s central government on August 15, efforts to support Afghan women have become extremely challenging. According to some prominent US feminists with strong ties to Afghan women, the Taliban “has no legitimacy beyond the brutal force it commands,” and governments, the United Nations, and regional actors should not recognize or work with it. For some, this means isolating the Taliban by continuing to freeze Afghan funds held overseas and suspending any assistance that is coordinated with a government agency. But does that position actually help Afghan women? There’s little question that gains made by Afghan women over the past twenty years, particularly urban women, have been rolled back since the Taliban returned to power.

US And Taliban Delegations Meet In Doha

October 13, 2021 People's Dispatch. Educate! Afghanistan, Diplomacy, Foreign Relations, Taliban

US and Taliban delegations met in Qatar’s capital Doha on October 9-10, the first such meeting since the political developments of August when the latter took over the country. Following the meeting, the US has reportedly agreed to provide “humanitarian assistance” to Afghanistan. However, the foreign ministry in Afghanistan said that such assistance “should not be linked to political issues.” The delegates included officials from the US intelligence and state department. According to State Department spokesperson Ned Price, the agenda included talks for containing extremist groups, easing the evacuation of foreigners from Afghanistan, and allowing access to humanitarian agencies.

The Names You’ll Never Know

September 30, 2021 Nick Turse, Consortium News. Educate! Afghanistan, Civilian Deaths, Human Rights, Wars and Militarism

As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that Aug. 29 airstrike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world. Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.

War Is A Racket: Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh Speaks Out

September 29, 2021 Lowkey, Mintpress News. Resistance Report Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

What was the Afghanistan War all about? That is the question on many people’s lips after a devastating 20-year campaign that has killed an estimated 176,000 people and displaced nearly 6 million more. Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by a man who knows the war from both inside and out. Matthew Hoh was at the forefront of the American empire’s campaign in the Middle East, first serving as a captain in the U.S. Marines, then moving to the Department of Defense and the State Department. In 2009, he publicly resigned from his position in the State Department in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, over U.S. policy in the country, which he saw as both illogical and immoral.

20 Years Of Post-9/11 Amnesia

September 16, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! 9/11, Afghanistan, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

The constant demand that we “Never forget!,” the events of September 11, 2001 is rather laughable. Forgetting is difficult after enduring 20 years of war propaganda. News stories about that day are plentiful albeit useless, that is to say they add nothing to our understanding of why the U.S. was attacked and depend upon sentiment, jingoism, and tried and true claims of exceptionalism to maintain fear, hatred, and support for war. The aftermath of September 11 gets surprisingly short shrift but it is just as important as the who, what, when, where, why, and how of that date. It was just three days later that the Senate and House of Representatives voted to begin what are now called the forever wars. On September 14, 2001 California’s congresswoman Barbara Lee cast the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

The Winner In Afghanistan: China

September 16, 2021 Alfred Mccoy, Tom's Dispatch. Educate! Afghanistan, China, US Empire, Wars and Militarism

The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don’t be fooled. It couldn’t be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp. “Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

The Only Way To Effectively Counter Terror Is To End War

September 15, 2021 Kathy Kelly, Waging Nonviolence. Educate! Afghanistan, Taliban, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through the imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

Never Forget: Lessons Of The Post-9/11 Warpath

September 14, 2021 AbMartin, Empire Files. Resistance Report 9/11, Afghanistan, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

As the US Empire tries to leave its 9/11 warpath on Afghanistan & Iraq in the past, Abby Martin reviews the core lessons. "We've witnessed a striking conclusion to the Afghanistan War, where for twenty years the US fought to make the country a neo-colony for bases and resource extraction only to suffer a historic embarrassment. Two trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost couldn't tamp down an insurgency that was bred by the CIA decades prior. As the war will fade into memory for most Americans, the Biden administration and the US government as a whole is already starting to rewrite the true legacy of the occupation. They want you to forget the real lessons of the post-9/11 warpath. Historical amnesia is the doorway to the new wars they want to wage."

US Corporate Media Watch

September 13, 2021 Richard Medhurst And Roberto Sirvent, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Afghanistan, Corporatism, Media, US Imperialism

The idea of achieving women’s emancipation through military occupation is a farce. You cannot have women’s rights, human rights or any rights when you live under the military rule of a foreign occupying power. You are subject to their rule. Even if you want to believe Bush and Blair’s excuses to try and justify this war; saying that they were going after Al Qaeda, well this has nothing to do with that. They didn’t say they were invading Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights – no matter how just or noble that may sound now. So, to try and use women’s rights now to deflect from the horrors they inflicted on Afghanistan, the millions of people they turned into refugees, the scores they killed – many of whom are women– is an attempt to whitewash their crimes and an insult to people’s intelligence.

The United States’ Recent Failures Should Serve As A Warning To Its Allies

September 13, 2021 Charles Xu, Select. Educate! Afghanistan, China, Racism, US Imperialism

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to produce “analysis of the origins of COVID-19” within 90 days. This move followed weeks of speculation surrounding the claim that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory, usually identified as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Having rightly rejected this claim for more than a year as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, centrist and liberal commentators in the West have breathed new life into the “lab leak” hypothesis, taking cues from allegations and claims made by US state leaders and corporate media. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social media giants reversed their censorship of lab-leak disinformation almost overnight, impelled by a tawdry mix of insinuations from unnamed US intelligence sources and vague allegations of impropriety relating to the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic earlier this year.

How Elite US Institutions Created Afghanistan’s Neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani

September 11, 2021 Ben Norton, The Grayzone. Educate! Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, Corruption, US Imperialism

No individual is more emblematic of the corruption, criminality, and moral rot at the heart of the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan than President Ashraf Ghani. As the Taliban took over his country this August, advancing with the momentum of a bowling ball rolling down a steep hill, seizing many major cities without firing a single bullet, Ghani fled in disgrace. The US-backed puppet leader allegedly made his escape with $169 million that he stole from the public coffers. Ghani reportedly crammed the cash into four cars and a helicopter, before flying to the United Arab Emirates, which granted him asylum on supposed “humanitarian” grounds. The president’s corruption had been exposed before. It was known, for instance, that Ghani had brokered shady deals with his brother and US military-linked private companies, letting them tap into Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in mineral reserves.

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