Gunmen in Pakistan on Monday set ablaze five trucks carrying NATO equipment out of Afghanistan as the international military alliance winds down it combat mission there, officials said. -Agence-France Presse, 3/1/13 There is nothing that better sums up the utter...
Thanking Bradley Manning, From Afghanistan
A few evenings ago, as the sky began to darken here in Kabul, Afghanistan, a small group of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, (APVs), gathered for an informal presentation about WikiLeaks, its chief editor Julian Assange, and its most prominent contributor, Bradley...
Tales in a Kabul Restaurant
Kabul - Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these...
Afghanistan War May End By 2024 … Maybe
Hamid Karzai has let the Pentagon’s cat out of the bag — to the displeasure of the Obama Administration. The Afghan president revealed inside information about President Obama’s war plans after all U.S. “combat troops” completely withdraw in 17 months at the end of...
Unravelling the Propaganda of Impending Civil War in Afghanistan
Western fears of a civil war in Afghanistan are growing ahead of the scheduled pullout of international troops in 2014. However, experts here say the situation on the ground is not comparable to either 1988, when the Soviets withdrew from the country, or the...
Political Decentralization Might Help in Conflict-Ridden Countries
What do Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan have in common? Although it’s true that the United States has conducted recent military interventions in all of them, the more fundamental answer is that they are all artificial countries. That is, they are...
How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan
America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations,...
SOF Troops Still in Wardak as Joint US-Afghan Probe Continues
Two weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) from Wardak province by this date, the issue remains suspended in negotiations between U.S. and Afghan governments. U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel...
Afghanistan, Garden of Empire
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...
The Afghan End Game?
The euphemisms will come fast and furious. Our soldiers will be greeted as "heroes" who, as in Iraq, left with their "heads held high," and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after...