Tag: Afghanistan

History Shows US is as Extremist as the Taliban

The Taliban and the United States of America share an enduring passion for war and mayhem. There is, though, a difference between them—the Taliban mostly kill people of their own country, America’s victims are largely citizens of other countries. Some will likely say the US, unlike the Taliban, goes to war to promote democracy and freedom. What they ignore is […]

Revelations of Carter’s Former Advisor : ‘Yes, the CIA entered Afghanistan before the Russians…’

The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998) Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this […]

Hollywood’s Dangerous Afghan Illusion

From the Archives: A newly discovered document undercuts a key storyline of the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s that it was Charlie Wilson’s War, wrote Robert Parry on April 7, 2013. Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about Afghanistan derives to a dangerous degree from a Hollywood movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, which depicted the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s as a fight pitting […]

Training in Terrorism: Britain’s Afghan Jihad

This is an edited extract from Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam Mark Curtis The war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was to mark the next phase in the development of global Islamic radicalism, building on the Islamic resurgence during the previous decade. Following the Soviet invasion of December 1979, tens of thousands of volunteers from […]

A Saigon moment in the Hindu Kush

The US is on the verge of its own second Vietnam repeated as farce in a haphazard retreat from Afghanistan And it’s all over For the unknown soldier It’s all over For the unknown soldierThe Doors, “The Unknown Soldier” Let’s start with some stunning facts on the Afghan ground. The Taliban are on a roll. Earlier this week their PR […]

Reporting on Trump’s Afghan Escalation Omits Dead Afghan Civilians

As President Donald Trump tries to make the case for staying indefinitely in Afghanistan, the stakes for those actually living there are rarely broached by US corporate media. In dozens of write-ups, recaps and reports on Trump’s “major” Afghan War speech, almost no outlets took time out to note the plight or condition of the people the US is nominally […]

In Afghanistan the Russians Are Now Remembered Fondly

Afghanistan has never recovered. After the last Soviet combat troops left the country in 1989, it bled terribly for years, consumed by a brutal civil war. Its progressive government had to face the monstrous terror of the Western and Saudi backed Mujahedeen, with individuals like Osama bin Laden in command of the jihadi genocide.

The Costs of Violence

Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us — an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.