A few notes on Afghanistan

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 15, 2022 1:50 pm

Image
An elderly Afghan man at an International Red Cross distribution camp in Mazar-i-Sharif, where food was being provided by the UN World Food Programme. 01/12/2001. Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. (UN Photo/Luke Powell)

‘Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain’
Originally published: Antiwar.com by Kathy Kelly (February 12, 2022 ) - Posted Feb 14, 2022

During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion dollars of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

“Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote.

A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.

Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets.

By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector–including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve–the U.S. government is impacting the general population.

The Congressmembers added,

We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.

For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

“After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email,

it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.

Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/14/thank-y ... ghan-pain/

The savagery of the US ruling class knows no bounds. Remember that when our time comes.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 16, 2022 2:59 pm

Biden’s Multi-Billion Afghan Theft Gets Scant Mention on TV News
JULIE HOLLAR
AP: Ex-Afghan president: Biden order on frozen funds an atrocity
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ABC‘s website had an AP report (2/13/22) on Biden’s misappropriation of Afghan funds—but nothing on its TV news programs.
Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.

While influenced by drought and Taliban policies, the current crisis is primarily driven by the US decisions to freeze the assets of the country’s central bank and maintain economic sanctions, which have destabilized the banking system and sent the economy into a tailspin.

Last Friday, Biden announced his intention to take the $7 billion in frozen funds currently held in US banks and use them as he sees fit, giving half to a humanitarian aid trust fund for Afghans and half to families of 9/11 victims.

Lest anyone imagine this to be generous in any way, note that the $7 billion—most of which originated as international aid, and representing the vast majority of the central bank’s assets—belongs to the Afghan people, not to Biden. And the Afghan people bear zero responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, they are also its victims, because of the subsequent US decision to invade and occupy their country.

Beyond that, giving them back half of the money that is rightfully theirs in the form of “aid”—instead of returning it to the banking system—is not only a band-aid that doesn’t solve the country’s liquidity problem, it’s nearly impossible to do anyway, given the sanctions still in place (Relief Web, 2/12/21).

Biden’s announcement offered a perfect hook for reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and anyone who truly cares about the Afghan people and their rights should be tearing their hair out and screaming at the top of their lungs about this audacious injustice that will surely result in more deaths and hardship. But despite their wailing about the Taliban’s impact on Afghan women’s futures, few in US TV news seem concerned about those same women facing starvation as a result of US policy.

Since Biden’s announcement on February 11, there have been a total of 10 mentions on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC: six the day of the announcement, four the next day, and none by the third day. The broadcast network news shows, which have more viewers than cable news, aired exactly zero reports on the issue. CNN made eight mentions, MSNBC two and Fox one. Six of the ten were brief mentions that noted no criticism of the move.
MSNBC: Biden Proposes Splitting Afghanistan Funds
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Masuda Sultan to Chris Hayes (MSNBC, 2/11/22): “This was a devastating day for Afghans who were hoping to have a sign that their economy would have a chance of surviving.”
Only two shows deemed the story big enough to bring on a guest to discuss it: Jake Tapper‘s CNN show (2/11/22) and Chris Hayes‘ MSNBC show (2/11/22). Hayes devoted the last several minutes of his show to an interview with guest Masuda Sultan of the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Hayes noted that the US “could help [the Afghan] people by simply doing one thing, unfreezing of the billions of dollars of Afghan government assets that are sitting in New York banks,” and Sultan argued that Biden’s move would simply create “a bigger and bigger humanitarian disaster, by not allowing banking to function and not allowing the economy to be back on its feet”:

What Afghans need more than anything, is food, indeed, they need aid, but they also need jobs, they need an economy, they need to be able to import food, they need to be able to pay their teachers, pay their healthcare workers. You know, all of these sort of normal functions that you expect to happen in a country are now crippled.

Tapper, in contrast, invited a family member of a 9/11 victim for her perspective on the decision. (Tapper did ask his guest to respond to “the people who say this is just penalizing this move today, the Afghan people who are suffering greatly, and they shouldn’t be hurt because of what happened on 9/11.”)
Intercept: Biden’s Decision on Frozen Afghanistan Money Is Tantamount to Mass Murder
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Austin Ahlman (Intercept, 2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”
CNN‘s Newsroom (2/11/22) and New Day Saturday (2/12/22) were the only other two shows to even briefly mention any criticisms or questions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the decision.

On Newsroom, reporter Jeremy Diamond noted that “there are questions, though, about whether taking these funds away from the central bank could make it more difficult for Afghanistan to stabilize its currency.”

A serious report would have explained that these aren’t merely questions, they’re certainties, and Biden knows it. As a senior Democratic foreign policy aide told the Intercept‘s Austin Ahlman (2/11/22), Biden

has had warnings from the UN secretary general, the International Rescue Committee and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.

On CNN, Diamond’s colleague Jim Sciutto concluded: “Trying to strike some sort of middle line here between not helping the Taliban, but somehow getting help urgently to the Afghan people.”

It’s the best possible framing a murderous multi-billion-dollar theft could get.

https://fair.org/home/bidens-multi-bill ... n-tv-news/

Doesn't The Hague got something to do with collective punishment of civilian populations?
Never mind...
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 03, 2022 5:54 pm

Taliban bans poppy cultivation in Afghanistan
colonelcassad
April 3, 11:14

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Taliban for a healthy lifestyle.

The government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has issued a decree banning poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
Poppy crops are Afghanistan's main heroin industry. The issuance of this decree, at least at the legislative level, is aimed at dismantling the entire industry.
Another question is how this will be implemented in practice.

However, the Taliban are once again showing that they are willing to reduce heroin production in Afghanistan in exchange for legalization. As in 2001, when heroin production dropped to its lowest point. Soon the US invasion began and the volume of heroin produced reached unprecedented heights. As you can see, after the US left, the option of a real reduction in the production of heroin in Afghanistan again appeared. This is to the question of who really benefited from the increase in drug production in this country.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7536139.html

Google Translator

It occurs to me that a large decrease in the opium poppy available will lead to an increase in demand for fentynal on the production level and more mortality on the consumer level.

People addicted to opiates generally do not have a strong death wish but in capitalism production ultimately dictates demand, the concept of demand driving markets is partial at best and even that largely directed by the propaganda techniques euphemistically known as advertising.
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 07, 2022 1:57 pm

The Empire is Not Done Torturing Afghanistan
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 5, 2022
Pepe Escobar

Image
Photo Credit: The Cradle

Despite its resounding defeat, NATO is not quite done with inflicting misery on the land of the Afghans

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not far away, the Empire of Chaos launched the so-called “War on Terror” against an impoverished cemetery of empires at the crossroads of Central and South Asia.

In the name of national security, the land of the Afghans was bombed until the Pentagon ran out of targets, as their chief Donald Rumsfeld, addicted to “known unknowns,” complained at the time.

Operation ‘Enduring Captivity’

Civilian targets, also knows as “collateral damage,” was the norm for years. Multitudes had to flee to neighboring nations to find shelter, while tens of thousands were incarcerated for unknown reasons, some even dispatched to an illegal imperial gulag on a tropical island in the Caribbean.

War crimes were duly perpetrated – some of them denounced by an organization led by a sterling journalist who was subsequently subjected to years of psychological torture by the same Empire, obsessed with extraditing him into its own prison dystopia.

All the time, the smug, civilized ‘international community’ – shorthand for the collective west – was virtually deaf, dumb and blind. Afghanistan was occupied by over 40 nations – while repeatedly bombed and droned by the Empire, which suffered no condemnation for its aggression; no package after package of sanctions; no confiscation of hundreds of billions of dollars; no punishment at all.

The first casualty of war

At the peak of its unipolar moment, the Empire could experiment with anything in Afghanistan because impunity was the norm. Two examples spring to mind: Kandahar, Panjwayi district, March 2012: an imperial soldier kills 16 civilians and then burns their bodies. While in Kunduz, April 2018: a graduation ceremony receives a Hellfire missile greeting, with over 30 civilians killed.

The final act of the imperial “non-aggression” against Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that did not hit “multiple suicide bombers” but instead eviscerated a family of 10, including several children. The “imminent threat” in question, identified as an “ISIS facilitator” by US intelligence, was actually an aid worker returning to meet his family. The ‘international community’ duly spewed imperial propaganda for days until serious questions started to be asked.

Questions also keep emerging on the conditions surrounding the Pentagon training of Afghan pilots to fly the Brazilian-built A-29 Super Tucano between 2016 and 2020, which completed over 2,000 missions providing support for imperial strikes. During training at Moody Air Force base in the US, more than half of the Afghan pilots actually went AWOL, and afterward, most were quite uneasy with the pile up of civilian ‘collateral damage.’ Of course the Pentagon has kept no record of Afghan victims.

What was extolled instead by the US Air Force is how the Super Tucanos dropped laser bombs on ‘enemy targets:’ Taliban fighters who “like to hide in towns and places” where civilians live. Miraculously, it was claimed that the “precision” strikes never “hurt the local people.”

That’s not exactly what an Afghan refugee in Britain, sent away by his family when he was only 13, revealed over a month ago, talking about his village in Tagab: “All the time there was fighting over there. The village belongs to the Taliban (…) My family is still there, I do not know if they are alive or died. I don’t have any contact with them.”

Drone diplomacy

One of the first foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration in early 2009 was to turbo-charge a drone war over Afghanistan and the tribal areas in Pakistan. Years later, a few intelligence analysts from other NATO nations started to vent off the record, about CIA impunity: drone strikes would get a green light even if killing scores of civilians was a near certainty – as it happened not only in ‘AfPak’ but also across other war theaters in West Asia and North Africa.

Nevertheless, imperial logic is ironclad. The Taliban were by definition “terra-rists” – in trademark Bush drawl. By extension, villages in Afghan deserts and mountains were aiding and abetting “terra-rists,” so eventual drone victims would never raise a ‘human rights’ issue.

When Afghans – or Palestinians – become collateral damage, that’s irrelevant. When they become war refugees, they are a threat. Yet Ukrainian civilian deaths are meticulously recorded and when they become refugees, they are treated as heroes.

A massive ‘data-driven defeat’

As former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has remarked, Afghanistan was the definitive showcase for technical managerialism, the test bed for “every single innovation in technocratic project management” encompassing Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and military sociology embedded in ‘Human Terrain Teams’ – this experiment helped spawn Empire’s ‘rules-based international order.’

But then, the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul collapsed not with a bang, but a whimper: a spectacular “data-driven defeat.”

Hell hath no fury like Empire scorned. As if all the bombing, droning, years of occupation and serial collateral damage was not misery enough, a resentful Washington topped its performance by effectively stealing $7 billion from the Afghan central bank: that is, funds that belong to roughly 40 million battered Afghan citizens.

Now, exiled Afghans are getting together trying to prevent relatives from 9/11 victims in the US to seize $3.5 billion of these funds to pay off debts allegedly owed by the Taliban – who have absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Unlawful does not even begin to qualify the confiscation of assets from an impoverished nation afflicted by a currency in free fall, high inflation and a terrifying humanitarian crisis, whose only ‘crime’ was to defeat the imperial occupation on the battleground fair and square. By any standards, would that persist, the qualification of international war crime applies. And collateral damage, in this case, will mean the termination of any “credibility” still enjoyed by the “indispensable nation.”

The full amount of foreign reserves should be unequivocally returned to the Afghan Central Bank. Yet everyone knows that’s not going to happen. At best, a limited monthly installment will be released, barely enough to stabilize prices and allow average Afghans to buy essentials such as bread, cooking oil, sugar and fuel.

The west’s own ‘Silk Road’ was dead on arrival

No one remembers today that the US State Department came up with its own New Silk Road idea in July 2011, formally announced by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech in India. Washington’s aim, at least in theory, was to re-link Afghanistan with Central/South Asia, yet privileging security over the economy.

The spin was to “turn enemies into friends and aid into trade.” The reality, however, was to prevent Kabul from falling into the Russia/China sphere of influence – represented by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – after the tentative withdrawal of US troops in 2014 (the Empire ended up formally being expelled only in 2021).

The American Silk Road would eventually allow the go-ahead for projects such as the TAPI natural gas pipeline, the CASA-1000 electricity line, the Sheberghan thermal power facility and a national fiber optic ring in the telecom sector.

There was much talk about “development of human resources;” building infrastructure – railways, roads, dams, economic zones, resource corridors; promotion of good governance; building the capacity of “local stakeholders.”

A zombie of an empire

In the end, the Americans did less than nothing. The Chinese, playing the long game, will be leading Afghanistan’s resurgence, after patiently waiting for the Empire to be expelled.

Afghanistan for its part will be welcomed into the real New Silk Roads: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), complete with financing by the Silk Road Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and interconnecting with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Central Asian BRI corridor, and eventually the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Iran-India-Russia-led International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

Now compare and contrast with imperial minions NATO, whose “new” strategic concept boils down to expanded warmongering against the Global South, and beyond – including the outer galaxies. At least we know that should NATO ever be tempted back into Afghanistan, then another ritual, excruciating humiliation awaits.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/ ... ghanistan/

******************

Afghan refugee: Stuck at US camp in Kosovo 'like prisoners'
By MAY ZHOU in Houston | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-07-07 10:01


A former Afghan intelligence officer and politician who worked closely with the US government before the Taliban takeover of the country says that he and more than 40 other Afghan refugees are stuck at a US military base in Kosovo "like prisoners" nearly a year after being evacuated from Afghanistan.

Muhammad Arif Sarwari told CBS News in a text message that he worked with the CIA during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. He then went on to be a top intelligence official and a politician before evacuating with Americans last August when the US withdrew from the country.

Sarwari said among those stuck at the US military base Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo are people who were in the Defense Ministry of Afghanistan, police officers and regular people who worked with the CIA and the US embassy in Kabul.

"We have absolutely no freedom to leave the area. We only have access to one field, the bathrooms, the dining hall and our tent. Not only are we unable to leave the camp, but we can't speak to most of the visitors," Sarwari told CBS.

Sarwari said that when he and some of the other refugees evacuated on a military plane from Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal last August, he was initially taken to Kuwait and Qatar, and then ended up at Camp Bondsteel.

He was told that if they had to stay there longer than a few weeks, better housing would be provided.

Nine months later, their living situation hasn't changed, their request to enter the US hasn't been granted and they have no information on the status of their application.

Sarwari said he was desperate to leave Camp Bondsteel so he could start earning money to support his family back in Afghanistan and was considering just trying to walk out of the camp.

The US State Department told CBS News that it couldn't comment on individual cases, but that Sarwari's account didn't give a full picture of life at the camp.

It said that the description of the situation at Camp Bondsteel by the refugees is incomplete, and that Afghans at the camp have access to a number of facilities, including a gym, a safe space for women and children, and a playground, as well as medical and psychological services and classes and activities.

CBS said that a US government source familiar with the situation said that more than 600 Afghans have been processed in Kosovo and proceeded to resettle in the United States.

The State Department said that the relatively small number of residents who haven't been approved for resettlement in the US were examples of the system working as it should.

The prolonged waiting and lack of information prompted the refugees to stage a protest in June, said Sarwari. The refugees, including some children, held signs that read: "Human rights violation"; "How long should we suffer"; "We want justice"; "We want freedom."

Sarwari shared photos of the children with CBS News.

Sarwari said he is staying at the camp with his wife and two daughters. The children were given a few classes and some games after more than three months there, but there are no proper schools.

He said that stress has caused a range of medical problems in the camp. "The only trip we've had so far is going in and out of the hospital. One man here had a heart attack, which was severe enough to be sent straight to the US for surgery. The cause was stress. A few of the ladies here had miscarriages — also caused by stress. We've faced multiple other health problems."

Sarwari said he is more than disappointed with the US government. "People here have worked with the US against terrorism and have risked their lives for this cause and are innocent, yet some were titled as ineligible, while other people have unclear futures. The vetting team and Washington has clearly failed, just like how they failed in Afghanistan."

Another refugee at the camp, who also worked with the US in Afghanistan during the war and asked to remain anonymous to protect his family in Afghanistan, said he was denied entry to the US, asked to go to another country and was denied again after another two months of waiting.

"We are living in the camps since day one as inmates and even lower than inmates; inmates have the right to work and the right to find some means of sustaining their families but, why don't we have that right too?" he said in a letter to the State Department dated June 25, 2022.

"Why are we deprived of all the freedoms? We are not allowed to go outside the camps. Why don't we have access to legitimate legal entities and services? Media is not allowed to come inside the campus, and we are not allowed to individually seek solutions for ourselves."

The letter said that three refugees at the base had requested permission from the US to return to Afghanistan, and their requests were granted.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6aebd.html
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 17, 2022 2:33 pm

1 year after Taliban takeover, the US still hasn’t given Afghanistan’s money back
In 2021, the US froze $7 billion in Afghanistan’s reserves after the Taliban seized control, precipitating the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis”

August 15, 2022 by Tanupriya Singh

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A displaced man and his two children walk through an informal settlement. They left their hometown, Lashkargah, due to the conflict. Photo: UNICEF Afghanistan

August 15 marks one year since the Taliban marched into the city of Kabul, cementing its control over Afghanistan after a blitz of attacks which saw major cities and provinces fall in a matter of days. It signaled the end of a two-decade direct military occupation and war led by the US and its NATO allies, which is estimated to have directly killed 243,000 people, including over 70,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As the US and its allies hurriedly evacuated their forces and personnel last year, the world witnessed horrifying scenes in Kabul as fleeing refugees clung to departing airplanes. A year later, millions of people in Afghanistan continue to be trapped in what has been described as the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis”.

The World Food Program (WFP) has estimated that 18.9 million people, nearly half of the country’s population, are acutely food insecure (Integrated Phase Classification Phase 3-Emergency and above). The situation in the Ghor province has been especially dire, with 20,000 people reported to be living in Catastrophic (IPC Phase 5) conditions in March through May.

3.9 million children in the country are acutely malnourished, with another 4.7 million at immediate risk. Over 90% of Afghanistan’s population has experienced insufficient food consumption for 10 consecutive months, with 92% of households struggling to meet food needs. Soaring food and fuel prices have compounded hunger, with a 68% hike in the price of wheat and a shocking 107% increase in the price of diesel since July 2021.

Meanwhile, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has stated that 25 million Afghans are living in poverty, with another 900,000 people at risk of losing their jobs in 2022. A mid-year REACH assessment has revealed that total monthly incomes have declined by 15% since 2021. At the same time, the proportion of households in debt has increased from 73% in 2021 to 82% in 2022.

According to a WFP update in July, Afghans are spending almost the entirety of their remaining income on food, with average expenditure on food rising to 90%. Such figures have been accompanied by reports of families being forced to sell organs, and even their children, in order to survive.

The signs of the impending catastrophe in Afghanistan had already become clear within weeks, if not days, after the Taliban seized power.

Amid the chaos of US withdrawal, the United States government announced that it had frozen $9.5 billion in reserves of Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghan Bank (DAB), $7 billion of which were held in accounts with the New York Federal Reserve and other financial institutions on US soil.

The European Union followed suit, suspending $1.4 billion in development and emergency assistance for healthcare, agriculture and law enforcement sectors in Afghanistan. The move led to the immediate closure of at least 2,000 health facilities which provided care to around 30 million Afghans.

At the time, Afghanistan was in the throes of six simultaneous epidemics—COVID-19, measles, malaria, dengue, polio, and cholera. In the coming months, hospitals reported major shortages of fuel, medicines, oxygen, and health personnel. By February, only five hospitals in the entire country offered COVID-19 treatment, amid a sharp rise in infections.

Afghanistan’s health system is still struggling to function, and the country has once again been hit by multiple serious outbreaks of diseases including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. According to the latest available data from the World Health Organization, over 24,000 cases of Acute Watery Diarrhea (AWD) were recorded between May and August, and over 64,000 cases of measles were recorded between January and August.

There have been 250 confirmed cases and 14 deaths associated with a spread of the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, which has spread across several regions, between January and August. Outbreaks of dengue fever and cholera have also been recorded.

After years of making Afghanistan’s economy and public systems dependent on foreign aid, the West withdrew aid almost overnight—aid which accounted for 45% of the country’s GDP and 75% of public spending.

Meanwhile, the actions of the US were disastrous and illegal. Seizing nearly the entirety of the DAB’s reserves, which was Afghanistan’s sovereign wealth, pushed the country’s banking system and economy to the verge of collapse. The World Bank, dominated by the US, also revoked the DAB’s credentials, meaning that the bank could no longer interact with the international banking system or financial institutions. The Central Bank was unable to access critical foreign currency reserves.

The value of the Afghani currency against the dollar plunged, inflation rose, there were cash shortages in banks, and millions of teachers, health workers, and other essential workers were unpaid for months. The $7 billion that the US froze in its own territory had accounted for 40% of Afghanistan’s economy and over a year’s supply of essential imports including food and medicines.

The impact of the sanctions and the seizure of funds was severe, with organizations such as the International Rescue Committee warning that the looming humanitarian crisis would kill more people than the 20 years of war.

While the US Treasury Department has issued licenses and guidelines allowing financial institutions to interact with the Afghan government for humanitarian or commercial operations, banks have remained unwilling to process such transactions due to zero-risk policies and overcompliance with sanctions.

In February 2022, the US went one step further, with President Biden issuing an executive order formally seizing the $7 billion and consolidating them into one account. The New York Federal Reserve was then directed to place $3.5 billion in a separate account, with the money to be used “for the benefit of the Afghan people”.

The other $3.5 billion were placed in a frozen account, subject to litigation by victims of the September 11 attacks seeking compensation. Biden’s announcement was met with widespread condemnation, including from families of 9/11 victims.


On July 26, Reuters reported that the US and Taliban officials had exchanged proposals for the potential release of the initial $3.5 billion into a trust fund. While the Taliban was not opposed to a trust fund, it rejected a US proposal for third party control over the fund. It has also rejected a proposal to remove top political appointees from the Central Bank, one of whom is under US sanctions.

It is uncertain if and when an agreement will be reached, especially in the aftermath of the US drone strike in Kabul on July 31, which killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri.

These delays will be detrimental, especially at a time when economic shocks, instead of COVID-19 and conflict, have become the primary driver of the crisis in Afghanistan. The “Mid-Year Whole of Afghanistan Assessment” by REACH found that 60% of households reported experiencing economic shocks in 2022.

The crisis that has been unfurling since August 2021 has also been punctuated by major climate shocks and environmental disasters, leaving millions of people at further risk. Afghanistan is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the world. It has experienced recurrent drought, the worst in three decades, as well as recent bouts of heavy rains and flash floods which have caused significant losses of lives, homes, and agricultural lands.

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A cash distribution in Jalalabad to help conflict-displaced people prepare for winter.
Photo: OCHA/Charlotte Cans

Worsening climate-related events are also a major driver of displacement, compounding the risks faced by an already vulnerable population. According to one estimate, 1.3 million people were internally displaced in Afghanistan in 2021 as a result of conflict and natural disasters. This is in addition to the millions who had already been displaced in the past years.

At the moment, Afghanistan is in the midst of coping with a 5.9 magnitude earthquake which struck parts of the Paktika and Khost provinces on June 22. Over 1,000 people were killed and another 3,000 people were injured. Overall, the UN has estimated that 362,000 people have been affected by the tragedy.

The consequences of the continued illegal seizure of Afghan funds by the US, on top of two decades of imperialist intervention, will be lethal. Joining the UN, human rights organizations, and aid agencies, over 70 economists have written to Biden urging him to unfreeze the money and return to the Afghan people what is rightfully theirs. “The decision to divide these funds in two is arbitrary and unjustified,” they wrote. “And returning anything less than the full amount undermines the recovery of a devastated economy.”

“The Taliban government has done horrific things, including but not limited to its appalling treatment of women and girls, and ethnic minorities. However, it is both morally condemnable and politically and economically reckless to impose collective punishment on an entire people for the actions of a government they did not choose.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/08/15/ ... oney-back/
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 22, 2022 2:32 pm

US Refuses to Unfreeze Afghan Funds
ORINOCO TRIBUNE2 AUGUST 18, 2022

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Taliban fighters reportedly fired into the air to disperse a protest by women demanding "bread, work and freedom" on Saturday in Kabul. Photo: Getty Images/Nava Jamshidi.

Washington has reportedly ruled out releasing any of the $7 billion in the country’s financial assets that it froze after the Taliban takeover

US President Joe Biden’s administration has reportedly opted against releasing $7 billion in Afghan Central Bank assets, deciding to keep the funds frozen due to concern that the currently Taliban-ruled country is again harboring international terrorists.

Washington also has suspended talks with the Taliban after previously seeing progress in the negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing US officials. The decision concerns the war-torn country’s US-based assets, which Biden’s administration froze after last year’s Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

The refusal to release the funds “deals a blow to the hopes of an economic recovery in Afghanistan as millions face starvation” one year into the Taliban’s rule, the WSJ said. Just last week, a group of 70 prominent economists and academics from the US, UK and five other countries issued an open letter calling for Washington to release the assets, citing the “economic and humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in Afghanistan” and the role that America played in “driving” those crises.

“We do not see recapitalization of the Afghan Central Bank as a near-term option,” Thomas West, the US State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan, told the WSJ. “We do not have confidence that that institution has the safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly.”

The presence of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom US forces killed late last month in a drone strike in Kabul, helped seal the fate of the Afghan assets. The fact that the high-level terrorist was apparently comfortable traveling to Afghanistan’s capital heightened Washington’s fears that the Taliban’s return to power has allowed Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to regroup in the country, setting the stage for more overseas attacks.

Needless to say, the Taliban’s sheltering of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri reinforces deep concerns we have regarding diversion of funds to terrorist groups,” West said.

Most of the Afghan Central Bank’s nearly $10 billion in assets were frozen overseas after the Taliban seized control of the country a year ago. The US controls the lion’s share of those funds, about $7 billion, and had been negotiating with the Taliban for the release of about $3.5 billion for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. Biden signed an order in February to earmark the remaining $3.5 billion as a fund for victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

https://orinocotribune.com/us-refuses-t ... nds-media/

So tell me again how the USA is a force of good in the world.......

This 'Al-Queda' 'leader'(ain't they a dime a dozen?) is a convenient excuse to pour suffering on the people of Afghanistan for defiance of the hegemon. If not him then another. Just as Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Nicaragua have all felt the whip, sometimes for decades, of economic oppression and military violence by Imperial Storm Troopers and various savage proxies.

(The world-wide deployment of the proxies does bring to mind the Roman Empire's employment of Germanic barbarians against external and internal enemies of the state.)

*************

White House Finalizes Theft of Afghanistan’s Foreign Reserves
AUGUST 20, 2022

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Joe Biden. Photo: AFP via Getty Images.

On the first anniversary of the Taliban’s victory against the US-trained army, Washington unilaterally decided to keep $7bln of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves

The government of US President Joe Biden has decided not to return Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and suspended talks with Taliban officials over the issue.

“We do not see recapitalization of the Afghan central bank as a near-term option,” US Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West told the Wall Street Journal on 15 August, exactly one year after the Taliban took control of Kabul.

“We do not have confidence that that institution has the safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly,” the US official added.

The decision is allegedly related to the US drone strike that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul last month.

“Needless to say, the Taliban’s sheltering of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri reinforces deep concerns we have regarding diversion of funds to terrorist groups,” West told the Journal.

Following the botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan last year, Washington froze $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves. Officials then decided to earmark half of the funds to pay the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Another $2 billion of Afghanistan’s funds have been frozen by other countries.

“It is both morally condemnable and politically and economically reckless to impose collective punishment on an entire people for the actions of a government they did not choose,” reads a letter drafted by 70 economists and experts which was delivered to the White House last week.

The loss of its foreign reserves has pushed Afghanistan into an acute humanitarian crisis, as the central bank lacks the resources to combat high inflation and help a populace on the brink of starvation.

A report by the Save the Children NGO shows that 97 percent of Afghan families are struggling to provide enough food for their children, while almost 80 percent of children say they are going to bed hungry.

Other NGOs are also sounding the alarm, with both Doctors without Borders (MSF) and Action Against Hunger (AAH) denouncing the spiraling crisis.

“The international sanctions are having a terrible effect on the Afghan population,” Samy Guessabi, regional director of AAH, told France24. “The only way out of this crisis is to allow the economy to get going again – and the only way for that to happen is to allow foreign investment to flow into Afghanistan.”

Last month, lawmakers in Washington voted to bar Afghanistan from receiving any US humanitarian relief, as part of a bill that also approved an unprecedented $839 billion budget for the US military.

Besides stealing Afghanistan’s reserves, Washington has also washed its hands of the several war crimes committed by US troops during the disastrous pull-out last year.

https://orinocotribune.com/white-house- ... -reserves/

The theft of these funds, the gold of Venezuela from London banks, and the disappearance of a huge quantity of gold from Libya which had been earmarked for launching a Pan-African currency in defiance of dollar hegemony makes it clear that 'primitive accumulation' is alive and well and the West cannot be trusted any further than you can throw a piano.
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 24, 2022 1:52 pm

The U.S. Legacy in Afghanistan: War Crimes and Imperialist Double Standards
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 24 Aug 2022

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One year ago the U.S. was ousted from Afghanistan after making war on that country for 20 years. But the U.S. killed civilians as it left and stole Afghanistan's assets. It seems there is no end to the war of terror.

The mid-point of August is an important moment in history for Afghanistan and the world. It marks the anniversary of the Taliban’s ouster of large portions of the U.S. military from Afghanistan, putting a formal end to a two-decade occupation. U.S. forces left Afghanistan just as murderously as they came in. Joe Biden’s administration oversaw numerous war crimes during its haphazard “withdrawal” on August 15th 2021. This included a drone strike that killed ten civilians and at least seven children.

The cost of the twenty-year total siege of Afghanistan is well documented. According to Brown University’s Cost of War project , at least forty-six thousand civilians were murdered by U.S. occupation forces, along with another fifty-three thousand opposition fighters. Another 60,000 were killed in Pakistan. These are likely significant underestimations as the U.S. military has never been a reliable source for data on its murderous incursions abroad. Furthermore, the Cost of War was unable to account for those premature deaths that occurred as a result of destroyed infrastructure and a lack of access to food, medical care, and quality sewage systems.

Of course, U.S. imperialism doesn’t end wars. It merely shifts the method of war to better satisfy the contradiction between its hegemonic interests and realities outside of its control. U.S. Special Operations, intelligence, and private contractor (for-profit mercenary) personnel remain in Afghanistan. These covert forces have a history of meddling in the Afghanistan dating back to the 1979 proxy war against the Soviet Union. Their presence was asserted this August Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike earlier this month.

A staple of imperialist warfare is the cruel and unusual punishment of any form of resistance to U.S. domination. Such punishment takes on many forms. A particularly popular method of collective punishment for U.S. imperialism is sanctions. In Afghanistan, this has not only meant an economic blockade but also the outright theft of its foreign reserve currency assets to the amount of $9.5 billion . Joe Biden’s administration celebrated the one-year anniversary of the U.S. “withdrawal” from Afghanistan by publicly stating that these funds, half of which have already been donated to American families deemed victims of 9/11, will never be returned to Afghanistan for fear that they won’t be “managed responsibly.”

This imperialist doublespeak has enormous consequences for Afghanistan and the rest of the world. According to the NGO Save the Children , 80 percent of children in Afghanistan suffer from chronic hunger and 97 percent of families are without adequate access to food. In the first three months of 2022, 13,000 newborn babies died in Afghanistan due to medical complications from hunger and a collapsed healthcare system. U.S. sanctions and outright theft have thus created one of the gravest humanitarian crises in the world. And the blame for the crisis falls squarely at the feet of Joe Biden.

The U.S. legacy in Afghanistan remains war and war criminality. In truth, one could name any of the dozens of countries that the U.S. finds “adversarial” in place of Afghanistan and conclude the same. The U.S. enforces economic sanctions on more than 30 nations around the world . Tens of thousands have died prematurely in Venezuela, Iran, the DPRK, and Syria in the last five years alone due to economic strangulation. While rarely viewed as such, sanctions are an act of war and their deadly consequences make them a war crime of the highest order.

It is important to note that massive imperialist double-standards plague the U.S.’s legacy in Afghanistan. The U.S. claims itself to be a protector of “human rights” and “democracy” yet has sentenced thousands of children in Afghanistan to die. The U.S. foreign policy establishment routinely makes the most egregious claims of human rights abuses against Russia and China while verifiably committing the most heinous crimes against humanity. These double-standards are not a random occurrence. They are a byproduct of an empire in decline that possesses a suicidal geopolitical end game.

Afghanistan is not only one of the most resource-rich countries in the world but is also located squarely on China and the former Soviet Union’s border. The U.S.’s aim to “contain” (i.e., eventually overthrow) Russia and China makes control of Afghanistan that much more important. With nothing to offer but war and austerity, the United States cannot compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative or even Russia’s economic and military assistance. That means Afghanistan must remain in chaos. War is all that is left in the U.S.’s arsenal to prevent Afghanistan and the rest of the region from partnering with China and Russia on an independent development path.

The U.S. spent $2.3 trillion to wage war on Afghanistan. And it will spend trillions more to maintain its empire at the expense of workers and oppressed people. Afghanistan and the world deserve better. As the last four decades have shown, the people of Afghanistan will continue to resist U.S. imperialism’s war crimes and double-standards. But the success of their resistance, and indeed all resistance to empire, depends on what kind of breathing room that those residing in the belly of the imperialist beast can open up by weakening and paralyzing their government’s ability to wage war abroad.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/us-le ... -standards
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 06, 2022 2:18 pm

NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans
BRYCE GREENE

NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans

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NPR ran several stories on Afghanistan to mark the anniversary of the August 2021 US withdrawal, even sending host Steve Inskeep to the country to produce a series of pieces. His visit happened to coincide with Biden’s claimed assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri; Inskeep says that he and his team were staying in close proximity to the Al Qaeda leader.

With the anniversary and assassination providing a renewed focus on Afghanistan, NPR could have used this opportunity to call attention to the US policy of starving Afghanistan by restricting its international trade activity and seizing its central banking reserves. Instead, it briefly mentioned the catastrophe only one time, devoting a mere 30 seconds to it over two weeks. The reserve theft was mentioned once as well, and for less than 10 seconds.

Over the course of the series, between August 5 and August 19, 2022, NPR‘s two flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, aired 18 Afghanistan segments, amounting to some 114 minutes of coverage:

*We Visited a Taliban Leader’s Compound to Examine His Vision for Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 11 minutes)

*Ackerman’s ‘Fifth Act’ Focuses on the Final Week of US Involvement in Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 7 minutes)

*Kabul’s Fall to the Taliban, One Year Later (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)

*Hamid Karzai Stays On in Afghanistan—Hoping for the Best, but Unable to Leave (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)

*Inside a TV News Station Determined to Report Facts in the Taliban’s Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 7 minutes)

*In Afghanistan, Why Are Some Women Permitted to Work While Others Are Not? (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 6 minutes)

*A US Marine’s View at the Kabul Airport When the Taliban Took Over (All Things Considered, 8/10/22; 8 minutes)

*A Marine Who Helped Lead Afghanistan Evacuations Reflects on Those Left Behind (All Things Considered, 8/11/22; 8 minutes)

*What Remains of the American University of Afghanistan? (Morning Edition, 8/11/22; 4 minutes)

*After Decades of War, an Afghan Village Mourns Its Losses (All Things Considered, 8/12/22; 4 minutes)

*Remembering the Day the Taliban Took Control of Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/14/22; 5 minutes)

*Biden’s Approval Ratings Haven’t Recovered Since the US Withdrawal in Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)

*After a Year of Taliban Rule, Many Afghans Are Struggling to Survive (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 5 minutes)

*What did Afghans Gain—and Lose—in a Region That Supported the Taliban? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 7 minutes)

*A Year After the Taliban Seized Power, What Is Life Like in Afghanistan Now? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)

*An Afghan Opposition Leader Builds on His Father’s Efforts to Oust the Taliban (Morning Edition, 8/17/22; 7 minutes)

*A Year Later, Former Afghanistan Education Minister Reflects on Her Country (All Things Considered, 8/18/22; 8 minutes)

*Canada Is Criticized for Not Getting More Endangered Afghans Into the Country (Morning Edition, 8/19/22; 3 minutes)

NPR focused almost no attention on the hunger crisis and the US role in exacerbating it. The series instead focused on a question that’s important, but far less relevant to NPR‘s US audience: “Who is included in the New Afghanistan?”

FAIR (8/9/22) has already criticized the initial piece (8/5/22) for the historical framing NPR used to contextualize the current situation in Afghanistan. Host Steve Inskeep misleadingly said that the Taliban refused to turn over Al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and this “led to the US attack.” In reality, the Taliban repeatedly offered to put Bin Laden on trial or give him up to a third country both before and after the attacks.

‘Tantamount to mass murder’
Afghanistan is currently enduring misery under the onslaught of drought, famine and economic collapse: 95% of Afghans don’t have enough to eat, while acute hunger has spread to half the population, an increase of 65% since last July. Conditions are so dire that some are being forced to boil grass to sustain themselves.

Throughout NPR’s series, which centers mostly on the “inclusivity” question, the dire toll on Afghan civilians was an afterthought. None of the above stats were mentioned on air, and there was little attempt to connect the Afghan plight to deliberate US policy.
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Intercept (2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”
The omission is glaring, given the enormity of the Afghan crisis and the direct role the US plays in making it worse. The Intercept has covered the toll of sanctions over the years, even calling Biden’s policy “tantamount to mass murder” (2/11/22). This disaster is actually recognized by some of the establishment press. Even the New York Times editorial board (1/19/22) issued a plea to “let innocent Afghans have their money.” But this central fact fails to occupy central attention.

These events were set in motion almost immediately after the US withdrawal. Before its collapse, the US-backed Afghan government relied on foreign aid for most of its annual budget. After the overthrow, those funds were no longer available, since the US refused to deal with the Taliban.

While numerous human rights organizations called for an increased flow of aid, and warned of an impending humanitarian crisis, US policymakers decided to exacerbate the situation by freezing the Afghan’s central bank reserves, hamstringing the Afghan banking system, and thus the economy. $9 billion of reserves were inaccessible to the Taliban, an amount that equates to half of the entire economy’s GDP. As a result, the new government was unable to fund critical governmental infrastructure, including salaries for nurses and teachers.

At the US behest, the IMF froze about a half billion dollars in funds designated to help poor countries during the pandemic. Relatives living outside the country have been able to send far less money, as the traditional banking avenues have collapsed—leaving MoneyGram and Western Union as some of the only viable alternatives. Both services had temporarily halted services upon the Afghan government collapse. Since the Taliban is designated as an enemy of the US, many companies still avoid doing business in Afghanistan, further compounding the collapse.

Shortly after the withdrawal, the media often recognized these increasingly horrid conditions, but either decoupled them from US policy, or framed the oncoming crisis as “leverage” for the West to reshape the Afghan government. The “hunger crisis,” wrote the Associated Press (9/1/21), “give[s] Western nations leverage as they push the group to fulfill a pledge to allow free travel, form an inclusive government and guarantee women’s rights.” Others took a similar line (New York Times, 9/1/21; Wall Street Journal, 8/23/21).

The economy has since fallen into a tailspin. The humanitarian aid the US still sends to Afghanistan does little to stop the economic free fall. By March, aid agencies were warning of “total collapse” if the economy wasn’t resuscitated, a prospect that has only grown more likely over the last few months.

‘A new US-backed free Afghanistan’
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Morning Edition‘s profile (8/8/22) of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai omits details found in a Washington Post report (12/9/19)—such as that he “won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes,” and that “the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years.”
The only mention of the reserve theft was during Inskeep’s interview with former Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Morning Edition, 8/8/22). The interview started off with another instance of mythologizing history, similar to the previous misframing of the origins of the war (FAIR.org, 8/9/22). Inskeep told his audience that “Karzai once personified a new, US-backed free Afghanistan,” marveling at how his name remained on the international airport.

Inskeep’s lauding description of Karzai leaves out the massive, US-financed, heroin-fueled reign of corruption that was endemic to US occupation. Karzai himself stood at the center of it all, financed by CIA cash and retaining power through an openly stolen election that saw nearly a quarter of all votes cast later declared fraudulent. Such facts were well-documented, even by establishment press (notably the Washington Post—12/9/19—in the fourth part of its Afghanistan Papers series).

Inskeep was certainly aware of this endemic malfeasance, because he later acknowledged that the Afghan government was “discredited by corruption.” He didn’t let this tarnish the image he presented of Karzai, however.

It’s subtle erasures and omissions like this that define the process of rewriting history. When something as clear and well-documented as Karzai’s blatant corruption can be so easily swept under the rug, it’s obvious that the goal isn’t to give context to the audience. Instead, we’re listening to mythmaking and historical revision in real time.

A willful omission

On air, Inskeep referenced Karzai’s call for the US to change its policy. Inskeep said: “He wants the US to return Afghan central bank funds, which it froze to keep the money away from the Taliban.” Karzai reiterated: “Americans should return Afghanistan’s reserves. The $7 billion. That does not belong to any government. They belong to the Afghan people.”
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NPR (8/8/22) quoted from this Human Rights Watch report—but its message that “international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people” does not seem to have sunk in.
Neither Inskeep nor Karzai stated or implied a causal relationship between the US actions and the hunger crisis; in fact, the hunger crisis wasn’t mentioned at all in the segment as it aired. In an online article based on the segment, NPR (8/8/22) wrote just two sentences:

Western aid has largely dried up, and the US froze some $7 billion of funds from Afghanistan’s central bank to keep it out of the Taliban’s hands. The economy has collapsed, and unemployment and food insecurity are widespread.

Here, the crisis is mentioned, but the causality is obscured. However, it’s clear that NPR is aware of the connection. The piece linked directly to a Human Rights Watch report (8/4/22) whose first sentence reads:

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis cannot be effectively addressed unless the United States and other governments ease restrictions on the country’s banking sector to facilitate legitimate economic activity and humanitarian aid.

Later in the article, HRW Asia advocacy director John Sifton said that “Afghanistan’s intensifying hunger and health crisis is urgent and at its root a banking crisis”:

Regardless of the Taliban’s status or credibility with outside governments, international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people.

So NPR is aware of the US role in exacerbating the crisis, but decided that its listeners didn’t need to hear about it.

Covering malice with ‘apathy’
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NPR Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid.
The only actual discussion in the series of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan came on Morning Edition (8/15/22), and only consisted of 30 seconds, when Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid said this:

Well, Leila, it’s been a year of hunger. Sanctions that were meant to punish Taliban leaders have battered the economy. They’ve plunged Afghanistan into a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 90% of Afghans don’t eat enough food. There’s not enough aid to go around. And you can see it on the streets. People are gaunt. Men, women and children plead for money. But the UN’s appeal to deal with this crisis is underfunded. And I’m reminded of something that a Human Rights Watch researcher said in a statement a few days ago. She said the Afghan people are living in a human rights nightmare; they are victims of both Taliban cruelty and international apathy.

Here NPR acknowledged that US sanctions “battered the economy,” and that they are responsible for “humanitarian catastrophe,” but claimed that they were “meant to punish Taliban leaders,” rather than the people of Afghanistan. Later Hadid cited a Human Rights Watch researcher attributing the suffering in part to “international apathy.”

This wording significantly downplays the deliberateness of the US economic war. There is no doubt that given the ample warnings about the oncoming catastrophe and hunger crisis, the US was aware that sanctions and freezing assets would only wreak havoc on the population. No serious journalist should take the US government at its word that its intentions were benevolent, especially when the evidence points in the opposite direction.

The rest of the series looked at the sensational days of the US military withdrawal, the stripping of rights from women under Taliban rule, and even how Afghanistan affects Biden’s approval ratings. NPR hosts continued to ask, “Who is included in the Taliban’s Afghanistan?” deploying the contemporary liberal ideal of inclusivity to criticize the Taliban. But when 95% of the population isn’t getting enough food, is “inclusivity” really the proper framework to analyze a country facing a historic famine deliberately exacerbated by the US?

Hadid’s mention of the crisis, along with Inskeep and Karzai’s mention of the central bank reserves, amount to less than 40 seconds over two weeks, in 18 segments that amount to over 100 minutes of coverage of Afghanistan.

A disoriented case
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NPR (8/29/22) ran with this bizarrely glass-half-full headline: “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.”
The Wednesday after the two-week nonstop coverage, August 24, NPR’s Morning Edition (8/24/22) ran a segment headlined “Frozen Afghan Bank Reserves Contribute to the Country’s Economic Collapse.” Here Inskeep acknowledged that “the absence of the money has contributed to Afghanistan’s economic collapse.” He then replayed the snippet from Karzai about the need to return Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.

But even in that segment, the hunger crisis was only loosely connected to the US sanctions against the Afghan people.

Inskeep interviewed Shah Mehrabi, a member of Afghanistan’s central bank board under the US-backed government. Mehrabi, who has been living near Washington, DC, since the Afghan government collapse, in part endorsed Washington’s sanctions regime, saying that the US concerns about Taliban misuse of the funds were “legitimate.” In fact, Inskeep strangely noted that Mehrabi was “less upset about [the US freezing Afghan assets] than you might think.”

Mehrabi did note, somewhat indirectly, that US sanctions were contributing to Afghanistan’s crises:

Isolation from international financial system will have to be ceased in one way or another to address the issue of poverty and mass starvation that this country is experiencing and will continue to experience, especially in the winter, harsh months that lies ahead and in front of us.

This brief mention, at the tail end of this six-minute piece, did little to raise important questions of US policy to the NPR audiences. A more coherent formulation of the problem would be that the US doesn’t want the Taliban to have the $7 billion, and is willing to starve the Afghan people for it. That can be gleaned from the piece, but only in a piecemeal fashion.

If we include the segment with the Afghanistan series, and if we (quite generously) say the whole segment is talking about the starving Afghans, then that means that NPR spent just seven minutes on the economic collapse and hunger crisis over three weeks, 19 segments and 120 minutes. Still shameful for one of the most pressing humanitarian catastrophes on Earth today.

On Monday, NPR (8/29/22) published an online text version of the August 24 segment under the confoundingly optimistic title, “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.” The title choice is odd, given that Mehrabi explicitly stated that the bank’s current balances are “not adequate to be able to perform the necessary function of the central bank.”

If NPR cared about the Afghan people, its coverage would be aimed at informing listeners about how their country’s policies are dramatically hurting Afghans. US citizens may have differing opinions about these disastrous policies, but the facts need to be adequately discussed in the media. Instead, NPR’s coverage divorced the misery of Afghans from anything having to do with its audience, directing attention to the flaws in the Taliban rather than a violent US policy of deliberately starving the Afghan people.

https://fair.org/home/npr-devotes-almos ... g-afghans/
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 28, 2022 3:53 pm

Wheat and fuel for Afghanistan
September 28, 10:43

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The Taliban reported that an agreement had been reached with Russia on the supply of goods to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As part of the agreement, Afghanistan will annually buy from Russia:

1. 2,000,000 tons of wheat
2. 1,000,000 tons of gasoline
3. 1,000,000 tons of diesel fuel
4. 500,000 tons of LNG

Afghanistan will also receive a discount relative to current world prices.
Russia in the conditions of the Cold War with the West receives an additional market. The Taliban get the opportunity to buy the necessary goods at prices below world prices.

Expectations and reality.

2021. The Taliban will attack Russian interests in Central Asia
2022. The Taliban buys wheat and gasoline from Russia

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7888298.html

Google Translator

Meanwhile the "Shining City on the Hill" steals 4 billion dollars from these poor people out of spite and an object lesson to those who would defy the Empire. Makes me proud to be an Amerikan....
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:22 pm

Reflections on Events in Afghanistan
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 1, 2022
M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

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At least 100 children were killed in a terrorist attack at a school in Kabul, Afghanistan, September 30, 2022

41. US brings culture wars to Afghanistan

The time has come to pick up threads from my blog of January 27 titled The West co-opts the Taliban. Indeed, the wheel has come full circle since the three-day conclave in Oslo on January 23-25 between a core group of Western diplomats with Taliban officials failed to work out a reasonable modus vivendi. The pendulum has since swung to the other extreme.

Afghanistan has once again become the cockpit of big power rivalries due to developments intrinsic to Afghan situation, a regime change in Pakistan and the shifts in regional politics in Central Asia due to the fallouts from the collective West’s proxy war with Russia in Europe.

To recapitulate, Russia and China brilliantly undercut the US’ attempt in Oslo to co-opt the Taliban government as its partner. The terms of partnership were not acceptable to the Taliban, especially the leeway that the US and British intelligence sought to stage covert operations from Afghan soil.

Russia and China created space for Taliban to negotiate with the US by simply offering them the prospect of a beneficial relationship. The US’s core objective was to use Afghanistan as a staging post for its containment strategies against Russia, China and Iran.

Since then, the US estimates that with Russia bogged down in Ukraine and China remaining extra-cautious in consorting with Moscow, a window of opportunity is available for it to proactively work toward promoting regime changes in Central Asia and wrest the region from the Russian orbit.

Attempts were made in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but the regimes in those countries were vigilant. The failed attempts once again drew attention to the importance of Afghanistan as a high ground in the geopolitics of the Central Asian region. Hence the need to regain control over Kabul.

This is a truly collective effort by the Western intelligence, with the US, UK, France and Germany in the lead role. Unsurprisingly, the West’s focus has shifted to the northern regions of Afghanistan bordering the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia.

With a pro-Western regime in power in Pakistan, the US gets a free hand to work with the non-Taliban groups. The Western powers assess that the so-called National Resistance Front (NRF) led by the Panjshiri leader Ahmed Massoud provides a congenial platform for advancing their regional agenda.

Apart from the Massoud clan’s decades-old links with the French intelligence, Ahmed Massoud himself was trained in Sandhurst. The Panjshiris are irreconcilably opposed to Pashtun rule and also have ethnic affinities with Tajikistan.

Enter Emmanuel Macron. France has a score to settle with the Kremlin ever since Russia’s Wagner Group summarily replaced the French Legion as the provider of security to the Francophone countries in the Sahel region, which were historically France’s playpen. Macron intends to retaliate in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

In this shadow play, Macron sees as quasi-ally the president of Tajikistan Imomali Rahmon. Now, Rahmon’s inscrutable mind is never easy to fathom and is rather complicated in this case, as Tajik-Russian equations are also involved, but he does seem to prioritise that there is a lot of money that the West is prepared to spend to foster the NRF and Massoud, and this western venture is for sure going to be for the long haul.

Rahmon’s trump card is that Tajikistan is the gateway to Panjshir and it can provide a transit corridor for the flow of Western money, men and materials to boost the NRF’s capability to wage an armed struggle and emerge quickly as a credible political entity regionally.

Dushanbe hosted the so-called Herat Security Dialogue earlier this week to facilitate a meet-up between the NRF (Massoud) and sundry other disgruntled Afghan politicians hostile toward Taliban rule and domiciled in the West, with the US and European intelligence officials mentoring the event.

Clearly, the venture aims to broad-base the NRF by bringing on board all anti-Taliban elements. Interestingly, a sideshow at Dushanbe was that the Afghans networked with hand-picked invitees from regional states as well, including Russia and Iran, largely self-styled “liberals” who are willing to subserve the West’s agenda.

In a nutshell, the venture aims to build up another Afghan resistance movement to oust the Taliban from power. The ground is being prepared for a new civil war where the West hopes to emerge victorious eventually but without having to put “boots on the ground.”

However, this incoming civil war is going to be very unlike all previous ones in Afghan history. For, this is being projected as a culture war — a struggle for dominance between groups within the Afghan society arising from their different beliefs or practices — although quintessentially it could be regraded as yet another grab for political power with foreign help.

It bears similarity with the culture wars playing out in America during the past two decades and more between the liberal secular society and a conservative opposition that rooted its worldview in divine scripture. Today, in America it is playing out in vicious fights over abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and the like.

The culture war in Afghanistan too will inevitably expand from issues of religion and family culture to take over politics almost totally, creating a dangerous sense of winner-take-all conflict over the future of the country, as is happening in America.

The paradox here is that the proposed insurrection by Panjshiris is taking place in the name of Democracy, whereas, democracy at its core is an agreement that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead we’ll talk through those differences howsoever long it may take. Massoud’s NRF, on the contrary, is wedded to violence to overthrow the Taliban government which has been in power for only a little over a year.

During this past year, Taliban coped with an extraordinary situation and the glass is half-full, objectively speaking. Yes, there are things happening out there that do not conform to the western norms of liberal democracy. Nonetheless, the rule of law exists — except that Islamic law is the guiding principle. Indeed, the belief that religious expression can contribute to democracy has a long history even in western countries, as does the belief that any religion is a good thing.

Fundamentally, there is a dangerous misconception here since politics at its core is nothing but an artifact of culture. And culture underwrites politics in all countries, including America or France. To be sure, the Taliban will see the incoming civil war promoted by the West as an existential threat to their way of life, to the things they hold sacred. That is to say, the Taliban’s resistance to the NRF will be rooted in fear of extinction. They will fight to death for a way of life.

Why is the West doing this to Afghanistan after having destroyed that country’s social fabric through the past two decades perpetrating such horrific war crimes? At the very least, first return that country’s money in western banks and allow the Afghan nation a decent respite to lick its war wounds, before inciting another civil war. At the present juncture, without doubt, it is the humanitarian crisis that ought to be the number one priority for the international community.

Abdul Latif Pedram, a rare progressive-minded Afghan politician known for his integrity, wrote in a tweet, “I was invited to the security meeting of Herat (at Dushanbe), but I did not participate in the meeting due to the presence of corrupt people.”

Indeed, it is an insult to the Afghan people that the westerners continue to treat them like mute cattle. Pedram added that the invitees to the Dushanbe meeting were all associated with the corrupt regime that the Taliban replaced, and are bankrupt in ideas to improve the tragic situation in his country.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/12/ ... ghanistan/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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