A few notes on Afghanistan

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 16, 2021 3:01 pm

Image

How about that? Deja vu all over again.

Concerning Biden

The opprobrium being heaped up the Biden regime for supposedly botching the hoped for antiseptic withdrawal from Afghanistan is misplaced. Somebody had to do it, Trump started it(surely one of the few decent things he's done in this life), and the result was inevitable. The speed of it all seems to be the main catalyst for outrage but the rapidity of the Taliban advance can be entirely attributed to the Afghani conscripts who, like the Italian conscripts of WWII saw they had no dog in this fight and acted accordingly. Past couple of years a parade of military figures have appeared in the MSM to assure us that these troops were well trained, armed & motivated. Were they liars or stupid?

There is blame aplenty for Biden though, for his 8 years as second to the war-mongering Obama regime and for his years in the US Senate, where he seldom saw an imperial intervention or military expenditure that he didn't like.

Concerning Quislings and Tories

There are losers in every war, civil war and revolution, 'White' Cossacks fleeing the Russian Revolution, Ukrainian fascists fleeing vengeful Soviets in WWII come to mind. As do the Tories who fled the successful American Revolution. It is not often dwelled upon but about 200,000 Colonists of Tory sympathies fled to Canada and Merry Old England out of a population of 3 million. They fled because they were being oppressed by the victorious revolutionaries. Their property was being destroyed or confiscated, they were physically abused, tarred and feathered, sometimes murdered in revenge. Ain't nobody singing the blues for them.

If the Nazis had won do you think 'Quisling' would be a dirty word? So all the pissing and moaning for the people who threw their lot with the invaders gets no sympathy from me. That the US government owes them safe haven for their treason is true, but it is equally true that the US has very often thrown it's broken tools to the side with no regard to their fate. This ain't no news flash, it is the history of the past century. They had only to look to their neighbors the Kurds, whose serial stupidity in dealing with the US is tragedy and farce.

The fate of Women

How much of a setback for the majority of women in Afghanistan is hard to say. In the cities, to be sure, in the countryside where most live it's hard to say how deeply the idea of women's rights took hold. Probably not much, these changes are measured generationally. And though the enforced patriarchy is unjust and repulsive getting 'droned' at a wedding party or raped and murdered by your erstwhile 'liberators' ain't no picnic either.

In the 70-s the socialist government of Afghanistan had implemented major reforms in women's rights which was the original source of rural unrest. Mebbe Jimmy Carter and that Polish ex-nobleman Zbigniew Brzezinski should have thought of that before they raised a gang of constipated Islamic scholars into a fighting force capable of toppling a government? And this before the Red Army intervened(against it's own analysis) in response to the socialist government's entreaty of the Soviet government, which ignored it's military in the cause of preserving the confidence of the Socialist Bloc.

But who is going to blame the 'sainted' Carter, whose penance of good works could not cover the evil he has done if he lived for a million years?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:58 am

AUGUST 16, 2021 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Reflections on Events in Afghanistan

Image
The Taliban fighters posing for family photo and relaxing in the Presidential Palace, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug 15, 2021

1. Collapse of the Afghan Army
Social media reported that at the Kabul residence of the Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib who post-haste fled to Tajikistan on Saturday with President Ashraf Ghani, three Toyota Landcruiser SUVs were found stacked with American dollar bills.

Mohib was the shadow king of Afghanistan. He controlled the country’s defence budget. In the coming year, he would have handled over $3 billion, which the US has earmarked as assistance for the Afghan armed forces. The Taliban spoiled his party.

The mystery of the Afghan armed forces losing the will to fight is actually no mystery at all. The main reason has been the misappropriation of defence budget. In Ghani’s set-up, Mohib, his trusted flunky, controlled the Defence Ministry — not the Defence Minister — and he obviously did well for himself — and probably Ghani too. Time will tell.

The soldiers seldom received their full pay as officers pocketed the money and that explained the high rate of desertion from enlisted men. Soldiers often flogged their US-supplied weapons in the black market to earn a living.

Simply put, the army lost the will to fight for a decrepit government that lacked legitimacy, was inept and indifferent to people’s needs and grievances — and a leadership it held in contempt.

The contrast with the Afghan army built by the Soviets in the early 1980s couldn’t be sharper. Najibullah held out for three years after the Soviet troop withdrawal and stepped down only when Moscow cut off all assistance — even wheat flour to make bread. The army was disciplined, well-trained and politically indoctrinated, and the officer corps trained in the Soviet military academies commanded respect.

The Battle of Jalalabad (1989) stands out as its finest hour when Pakistan masterminded a siege on the city to capture it as seat for the Mujahideen provisional government, but failed.

Over the past twenty years, the US supposedly trained the Afghan army by NATO standards, 300000 strong, but when the battle was joined in May, it began crumbling under Taliban pressure.

When corruption eats into the vitals of a nation, the state structures decompose and collapse. And when the leadership loses respect of the people, the war is lost.

At the famous Mehdi Hasan show on MSNBC today, Afghan ambassador to Washington Ms. Adela Raz said that Ghani and his cronies simply emptied the Afghan Treasury and left with the loot. The Afghan finance minister Khalid Payenda’s resignation and escape from Kabul on August 11 falls in perspective! The poor man feared the day of reckoning. He didn’t even say where he was heading.

India’s policymakers couldn’t have been unaware that a cabal was ruling Afghanistan but deliberately chose to ignore it. This is incomprehensible. India stuck out its neck as recently as last Monday to set the stage for Ghani’s government to project itself to the international audience from the UN Security Council podium. It ignored a formal request from Pakistan to participate in the UN SC discussion so that Ghani’s people had a field day!

The best hope is that no interest groups existed within the Indian establishment, as happened to the US. The Washington Post has exposed that the Pentagon commanders lied and the ‘forever war’ continued. Evidently, a gravy train was running through Kabul.

Such things happen when the covert agencies of the state stand above law. A nexus formed between Kabul bigwigs like NSA Mohib and decrepit rogue elements within the US military and they thwarted all attempts to end this war. The disconcerting fact is, in India too, a determined lobby advocated the ‘forever war’ against all logic, and Mohib was our man in Kabul, too.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/reflect ... ghanistan/

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

THE INTERNATIONAL ANGLE OF THE NEW RISE OF THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN
16 Aug 2021 , 4:25 pm .


There has been the fall of Kabul at the hands of the Taliban. Ashraf Ghani was deposed, who fled the country and has been proclaimed the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" led by Abdul Ghani Baradar. All this unleashes a halo of uncertainties and possibilities on the international scene that will be woven on these facts without amendment.

For this, let us immediately take a superficial look at some key elements to infer what could happen outside the Afghan nation. But first you have to look inside the country.

AFGHANISTAN IN DEEDS AND IN ITSELF

The irrefutable fact about Afghanistan is that the Taliban, in symbolic, military and political terms, won the war by taking control of the country after the US withdrawal. Whether due to military failure or for reasons not yet openly determined, the Americans have abandoned a war front that lasted 20 years, and which for them proved to be a dead end, a loop.

War is, by default, unfeasible. Both for the results it has generated and for the fact that now the Taliban force has taken control of weapons, equipment, supplies, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, which the Americans inherited (and abandoned) for the Afghan army today defeated. In other words, the Taliban are more powerful than 20 years ago, when the invasion began.

In strictly military terms, a force well armed and trained by the United States, with 300 thousand men, ceded the country in just days and practically without dispute in many cities. This is a string of events that could seem "inexplicable" in military terms, as they are far from many forecasts, including those held by US President Joe Biden himself, who assured on July 8 that the Afghan government would not fall. .

From within Afghanistan, there seems to be recognition of the fact that all-out war is no longer viable, once the invading power has left.

During the last years of entrenchment and nucleated resistance of the Taliban in specific areas. Let's say, of detente against the United States and against the Afghan government forces, the Taliban undertook a political process of adding tribal forces. A process that accelerated since February 2020 with the signing of a Peace Agreement with the United States and the Afghan government, which gave them greater room for maneuver.

Specifically, the Shiite Afghan Hazars who were enemies and persecuted by the Taliban are now integrated tribes. In addition, there is now a "Tajik Taliban" to the north, where skirmishes between the Taliban in the 1990s with ethnic groups on the border with Tajikistan were common in the past.

According to Alastain Crooke for the media Al Mayadeen , "the Taliban today are no longer a simple instrument of Pashtun hegemony; perhaps up to 30% are Tajiks, Uzbeks or Hazara." This assertion suggests that, in fact, tribal composition, with a special rural support base, is a fact in Afghanistan and has largely been the explanation for the new rise of the Taliban.

Unlike the Taliban of the 90s, which consisted of a small Pashtun ideological-identity-ethnic stronghold, which managed to impose itself by force throughout the country, the current situation is largely different. The current Taliban is "inclusive", and the quotes are in their own words. As recently emerged, in an interview with Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban, who spoke directly to the BBC , they declare that their rise to power has intentions of "tolerance, inclusion, national unity, peaceful existence and reconstruction."

There should be no confusion, they have admitted that a clerical and conservative government will come, but they have pointed out that although women and girls will have to use the hijab (one of the Islamic veils), women and girls will continue to have the right to education, work and other individual freedoms that will be determined by the new government.

In comparative terms, the new Taliban government proposes a style of social order founded on religion that we must consider not so different from the one already held by the Sunni clergy over Saudi society. However, everything remains to be seen.

Beyond these details, it is essential to look at the composition of the current social support base for the Taliban as one of the components of its vertiginous rise to power, based on an explicit declaration of the end of the war and its unviable nature. So consistent is this declaration that it is endorsed from the facts, that is, they take power after controlling two-thirds of the country in just weeks, practically without using weapons.

THE INTERNATIONAL ANGLE OF THE NEW TALIBAN RISE

This Monday, August 16, at a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya eloquently declared that "there is no reason to panic," adding that the complex Afghan painting demands detailed observation of the actors and events. In other words, it cries out for prudence, in clear disagreement with the rhetorical scaremongering of Western actors, largely responsible for current events.

The prudence of the Russians is justified by their knowledge of the picture on the ground and by the framework of possibilities that stem from the indisputable facts that the war failed and that the current Taliban are not exactly the same as they were in the 1990s.

According to Alastair Crooke, "The Taliban are engaging in extensive diplomacy with Iran. Tehran, apparently, is no longer apostate (for the Taliban), it is no longer an ideological and theological enemy. The Taliban now seek to integrate Iran into their broader strategic interests, "he says.

"Instead of having tunnel vision limited to the narrow territory of Kandahar, the new young Taliban leaders want to play the strategic 'Great Game'," Crooke notes of the new Taliban leadership. And that claim is patented by facts on several fronts.

On July 28, a delegation from the Taliban led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is the new leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, visited China , where he met with the Foreign Minister of that country, Wang Yi, for two continuous days. of intense conversations. Understand, that according to the lapses of the agenda of Chinese diplomacy, there is much to infer from such a prolonged meeting.

On that occasion, the political spokesman for the Afghans, Naeem Wardak, said in a statement that Baradar arrived in China at the head of a delegation made up of nine members after being officially invited by Beijing. "Points of view were exchanged on both countries' political, economic and security issues, as well as the ongoing situation in Afghanistan and the peace process," Wardak said.

China, according to the version of the Taliban, "affirmed the expansion and continuity of its aid to the Afghan nation" and that it "will not interfere in the affairs of Afghanistan." Beijing also pledged to "help solve problems and bring peace" and rebuild Afghanistan, in clear foresight of the times that have now ended.

China has been developing a very active agenda in recent months, anticipating the objective realities that the Afghan cadre has been generating. Indeed, the Belt and Road Initiative project has a central emphasis on Central Asia and it is inevitable that the Chinese will look to the "land of Afghans" (etymological origin of the name of the country).

Image
China's new silk routes for the 21st century (Photo: El País)

The project's railroad routes and trade corridors, which comprise a major infrastructure development, run through Pakistan, Turmekistan, and Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan.

China had developed intentions with the now deposed government of Afghanistan to further integrate this country into the grand initiative, and it seems that the pragmatism of Chinese diplomacy could give the new Taliban government an opportunity to develop a credible and complementary roadmap. as well as the well-justified possibilities of instability that have been generated by the new Taliban rise.

The meeting in China took for granted several statements: "We hope that the Afghan Taliban will make a clear break with all terrorist organizations, including ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) and fight them resolutely and effectively to remove obstacles, play a role. positive role and create conditions conducive to security and stability, development and cooperation in the region, "said Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, reported the Global Times .

Baradar, for the Afghans, told Wang that "the Afghan Taliban will never allow any force to use Afghan territory to engage in acts harmful to China. The Afghan Taliban believe that Afghanistan should develop friendly relations with neighboring countries and the international community." .

The rise of the Taliban, which involves the reconstruction of a "refuge country" to terrorism, according to what is widely pointed out by the West, of course concerns China considering the record of sources of instability that have arisen in the southwest of that country through skirmishes of the country. Chinese state with members of the Uyghur ethnic group in Xinjiang.

The position of the Chinese is straightforward and probably clearly coincides with the possible vision of the new Afghan leadership. The Chinese foreign minister has said that "the hasty withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan actually marks the failure of US policy on Afghanistan. The Afghan people now have an important opportunity to achieve national stability and development."

The equation assumes that, if the Taliban are outlined in the development of an inclusive government within themselves (which to a certain extent already is) and if they do not lend their territory to promote international instability, they will have the recognition, support and investment of several countries. These possibilities have already been raised by China and Russia, who have played the modulating role after NATO's withdrawal.

On this, days ago Mohammad Suhail Shaheen spoke on behalf of the Taliban to India Today from Doha in Qatar, where he indicated that the policy of his organization was not going to favor any group in the rivalry between India and Pakistan.

For his part, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, referring to the "disaster" generated by the Americans, reaffirmed Pakistan's determination to continue all efforts in support of an inclusive political solution in neighboring Afghanistan.

The vision of the actors in the region is overall. In clear anticipation of the inevitable rise of the Taliban, an important meeting took place that went unnoticed. This occurred in mid-July and was a meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, called "NATO of Asia", in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

This was attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan, Mukhtar Tileuberdi; Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; the Foreign Minister of Tajikistan, Sirojiddin Muhriddin; and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Image
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi with Taliban mission leader Abdul Ghani Baradar on a visit to China (Photo: Global Times)

According to the analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar and in the analysis of this meeting , the approach to the strategic partnership between Russia and China in Afghanistan is "cautiously realistic." The Taliban have had a "real diplomatic boost" based on the recognition of the real dimensions of China and Russia, as well as other relevant complementary actors and supporters of their policies, such as Pakistan and Iran.

According to Escobar, in reference to the "demands" of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to Afghanistan, these start from two key points:

Real negotiations between Afghans towards national reconciliation and a lasting political solution, thus avoiding an all-out civil war. Beijing is ready to "facilitate" the dialogue.
Fight against terrorism, which means, in practice, the remnants of al-Qaeda, ISIS-Khorasan and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Afghanistan should not be a haven for terrorist groups, again. The Taliban, for their part, must promise a complete break with all terrorist components.
The offer in return for the Taliban is economic integration, reconstruction and regional security.

Afghanistan will continue to be a territory that must consolidate its pacification, considering that there are internal factors willing to fight now a war of resistance to the Taliban from within and that, in addition, under the US occupation, a great "opium highway" was consolidated that is composed of by a network of international drug trafficking actors with armed preparation in situ . It is not exempt from risks or from new forms of retaliation by the West and NATO.

But the unassailable reality of the new Taliban rise is nuanced and chained to unfolding events that will undoubtedly reconfigure the balancing and unbalanced factors in Central Asia.

For the international community in this part of the world there is a new force of gravity. Faced with the rise of the Taliban and the objective fact of the failure and unfeasibility of the war in the Afghan country, the most relevant actors in the axis of geographical influence of the conflict necessarily bet on politics as an inexorable destiny, from now on, when it can be done, to which is essential to have to look at Afghanistan with new eyes, like it or not.

The new painting demands a deep insight into the internal Afghan realities and its components.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/el ... afganistan

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 18, 2021 11:57 am

Image

U.S. defeat in Afghanistan—A contrast with the Soviet experience
Posted Aug 16, 2021 by As'ad AbuKhalil

Originally published: Consortium News (May 13, 2021 ) |

This article originally appeared 3 months ago but are republishing it again now because we think it remains the best analysis available online about the present situation in Afghanistan. —Eds.

The decision by President Joe Biden to withdraw “all U.S. troops” from Afghanistan (not really all, but you know how empires fold their occupation tents) was a major decision in the contemporary history of the U.S. empire since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. war in Afghanistan has lasted longer than the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan and yet Western media never regarded U.S. involvement for what it was: an attempt to reshape the Middle East—and beyond—according to U.S. designs. Many of the facts regarding the background of the American intervention rarely make it into U.S. media narratives.

There is a big difference between the U.S. and Soviet experience in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union never invented exile groups and forced them on the native Afghan population to rule over them. In name only of course, as the U.S. military and the foreign service bureaucracy have really ruled the country. Just as in Iraq, the U.S. relied on puppets, with very little popular legitimacy in most cases, to rule in its name.

Image
Supporters of Muqtada As-Sadr’s alliance in Liberation Square, Baghdad celebrating a successful election campaign, May 2018. (Fars News Agency, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Ahmad Chalabi was a key favorite of the Bush administration, and the man the U.S. hoped would lead Iraq into the American orbit and even toward peace with Israel. But in the last Iraqi election before his death he had to align himself with Shiite cleric Muqtada As-Sadr in order to secure a seat for himself in the Iraqi parliament. The man who was key for U.S. intelligence and military (and who received millions of taxpayers’ money to conduct secret operations on behalf of the U.S.) wound up an ally of Iran and its allies in the region.

The Soviets, on the other hand, relied on local popular Afghans who had deep roots in their country and who had already formed popular progressive political parties. Those black-and-white photographs, which show how secular Afghanistan was, are but a testimony to the impact of secular, leftist rule there.

As much as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan received coverage in U.S. media at the time (remember CBS correspondent Dan Rather donning Afghan Hollywood wardrobe and promoting the zealot mujahideen?), and as much as Western and Gulf governments complained and expressed outrage over the so-called excesses of the Soviet army, the American occupation venture in Afghanistan proved to be far more brutal and devastating—but with little media attention to U.S. human rights violations there. The number of civilians who are killed in Afghanistan by the U.S., or by its allies, often exceed the number of civilians killed per year by the Taliban.

Prepping the People for Invasion

Image
Women at university in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The U.S., which cries crocodile tears about the status of women in Afghanistan, backed the jihadists in the 1980s that put an end to this. (Amnesty International UK)

For every invasion, the U.S. prepares a set of propaganda talking points, and those points are dutifully carried in Western media as facts. Those talking points can be altered depending on the situation. The U.S. first invaded Iraq ostensibly to rid the country of WMDs, but when no WMDs were found the U.S. came up with another goal: of establishing democracy in the Middle East. And while the U.S. fought every attempt to democratize Iraq and tried to replace free elections with “caucuses,” it then came up with the goal of stabilizing the country (the country is yet to be stabilized).

In Afghanistan, the U.S. invaded to punish the Taliban for the Sept. 11 attacks although there is still no evidence that the Taliban leadership knew of Osama bin Laden’s plans. When the U.S. requested that the Taliban government surrender bin Laden in the wake of Sept. 11, the Taliban government (which had the diplomatic recognition of only three countries—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE—all key regional allies of the U.S.) seriously considered surrendering him and asked the U.S. to provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt.

But the U.S. refused to negotiate because it was intent on invading the country to teach a lesson and to “kick some ass.” The U.S. wanted a war of revenge and 93 percent of Americans supported that war at the time (the invasion of Iraq was not as massively popular but still an overwhelming majority of Americans supported it). President George W. Bush took the occasion to assert that the U.S. wanted to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome, even though his father said in 1991 that it had been kicked once and for all. It was all a myth anyway as the U.S. never stopped intervening militarily in the affairs of countries and invading since Vietnam, but the Republican Party created that myth to rationalize their calls for more wars and more invasions.

Image
Delta Force GIs disguised as Afghan civilians, while they searched for bin Laden in November 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)

At the time of the Soviet intervention, Afghanistan was divided between reactionary, religious-oriented, obscurantist forces and leftists who wanted a progressive social agenda based on feminism, secularism and social justice. The U.S., of course, sided with the reactionary and religious zealots, which it rushed to organize, finance and arm in the wake of the Soviet military entering the country.


Bin Laden was the direct product of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan as the U.S. was midwife for the birth of an internationalist force of religious fanatics, kooks and zealots. The Soviets faced an array of regional and international forces which the U.S. organized to undermine Moscow’s efforts in Afghanistan and a progressive Afghan regime. With help especially from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and regional jihadists, the U.S. in the 1980s inflicted an internationalized war on the entire region from which the region would not recover, not even today.

The Soviets dealt with their war in Afghanistan rather differently. They did not organize an international force to prop up their allied regime. Furthermore, world communists failed miserably to see the historical significance of the Afghan conflict: they did not know that the defeat of the progressive project in Afghanistan would have severe repercussions on progress throughout the region–if not the world.

They could not see the importance of defeating the reactionary project there; had they organized—just as they had done in the Spanish Civil War—they may have been able to preserve the progressive order in Kabul. It was a missed opportunity for progress worldwide. The U.S.S.R. was not, it turned out, merely defending a progressive regime in Afghanistan, but was defending progressiveness in Muslim lands worldwide.

Image
Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. (Mikhail Evstafiev via Wikimedia Commons)

In contrast, the U.S. and Western powers in general, were promoting reactionary forces in the Islamic world. And those forces were in sync with the reactionary regime of Saudi Arabia, which jumped at the opportunity to collaborate—yet again—with the U.S. in combating Arab and Muslim progressives.

The U.S. did not face in Afghanistan the internationalist array of forces the U.S.S.R. had faced. Washington formed an international coalition of various governments around the world—which, oddly enough, regarded the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and a brutal campaign of pacification that the U.S. had honed in Vietnam—as a just response or revenge for Sept. 11.

Today’s Defeat

The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.

The U.S. leaves Afghanistan defeated while typically blaming a variety of forces that have nothing to do with American deeds in the country. The U.S. legacy is the disruption of village life, the rising toll of civilian casualties and the imposition of a government of thieves, embezzlers, usurpers, World Bank functionaries and a healthy dose of war criminals who were previously cobbled together in the Northern Alliance and its allies in their war against the Taliban.

Just as Iraqi expatriates (like Chalabi and Kanaan Makiyya) assured George W. Bush that native Iraqis would welcome U.S. occupation troops with open arms, a chosen select group of Afghan expatriates assured Bush that Afghans would welcome American occupation forever. But the U.S. failed to understand why locals—anywhere—would resist U.S. colonial rule.

Western media, especially The Washington Post and The New York Times, have been aghast that the Biden administration would withdraw from the country after “only” 20 years of occupation. They asked about the fate of the good Afghans—i.e., those Afghans who worked, translated, spied on behalf of the U.S. military. Various headlines bemoaned the status of women after the American departure: what would Muslim women do without U.S. troops?

But the U.S. military could not sustain the occupation forever and the hope for a stable pacification has eluded the U.S. As it withdraws its forces from Afghanistan, it is certain that the U.S., which never understood the country, is leaving it in a much worse state than when it began its intervention 40 years ago.

https://mronline.org/2021/08/16/u-s-def ... erience-2/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 19, 2021 1:10 pm

What the capitalists are saying:
The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs

<snip>

"If Afghanistan has a few years of calm, allowing the development of its mineral resources, it could become one of the richest countries in the area within a decade," Said Mirzad of the US Geological Survey told Science magazine in 2010. He led the Afghanistan Geological Survey until 1979.
Even more obstacles
That calm never arrived, and most of Afghanistan's mineral wealth has remained in the ground, said Mosin Khan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Middle East and central Asia director at the International Monetary Fund.

<snip>

Khan notes that foreign investment was hard to come by before the Taliban ousted Afghanistan's civilian Western-backed government. Attracting private capital will be even more difficult now, particularly as many global businesses and investors are being held to ever higher environmental, social and governance standards.

"Who's going to invest in Afghanistan when they weren't willing to invest before?" Khan said. "Private investors are not going to take the risk."
US restrictions could also present a challenge. The Taliban has not been officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States. However, the group was placed on a US Treasury Department list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists and a Specially Designated Nationals list.

An opportunity for China?

State-backed projects motivated in part by geopolitics could be a different story. China, the world leader in mining rare earths, said Monday that it has "maintained contact and communication with the Afghan Taliban."

"China, the next-door neighbor, is embarking on a very significant green energy development program," Schoonover said. "Lithium and the rare earths are so far irreplaceable because of their density and physical properties. Those minerals factor into their long-term plans."
Should China step in, Schoonover said there would be concerns about the sustainability of mining projects given China's track record.
"When mining isn't done carefully it can be ecologically devastating, which harms certain segments of the population without a lot of voice," he said.

(more)

https://us.cnn.com/2021/08/18/business/ ... index.html
They can make pious noises about women and the environment but what really bothers is Lost Opportunities and China. And we see who is doing the talking...

Meanwhile some communists have their say:
Partido Comunista de España
Secretaría de Relaciones Internacionales
c/Olimpo 35 (28043) Madrid
Solidarity with Afghanistan
Communist Party of Spain
16 August 2021
Twenty years of war and military occupation in Afghanistan end for the United States
with a strategic disaster and a painful withdrawal that illustrates the US government's
disregard for the lives of thousands of people. The vision of columns of smoke rising
from the US embassy because of the hurried burning of documents, the flights of helicopters to the Kabul airport to evacuate its officials and the cry of children, lost among
the runways within the confusion of the chaotic evacuation, concluded with tragic scenes of US military forces shooting at the crowd trying to flee from the Taliban in the
last planes. Those corpses on the road of the airport represent the last episode of the shame and infamy that the United States leaves in a faint and badly wounded country.
The Afghan cities have fallen in the hands of the Taliban in a rapid sequence, with the
final chapter of the shameful escape of the puppet government leaving behind modern
weapons, helicopters and ammunition and abandoning its own officials. Although Biden
announced an orderly withdrawal which was supposed to finish on 31 August, the US
president has received a severe denial from his own officials at the embassy in Kabul
destroying their archives in these frenzied days of uncertainty and fear. In this journey,
the Pentagon leaves hundreds of thousands of deaths as well as millions of refugees
showing to the world the barbarism of US imperialism.
Billions of dollars have served to feed corruption, crime, drugs, companies of mercenaries, US military forces, intermediaries, warlords, and death merchants. All these years
of military occupation were dominated by blatant corruption, by disdain for life, by the
obsessive ambition to maintain supremacy over Middle East and world hegemony. Such
an effort has resulted in a new defeat which the United States cannot hide.
Although Department of State officials are now trying to tell the lie of a controlled evacuation to the international media in order to avoid the shame and discredit in front of
the world, the facts show the truth and no one should forget the massacres occurred during twenty years of war and US occupation, the bombing on civilian populations, the
murders carried out by drones controlled from Nebraska, the cynicism and the lies accu-
mulated in the offices of the White House, the Pentagon and the US Department of State.
Those Taliban who are now photographed in the presidential palace in Kabul are the
sons of the sinister mujahidin who used to meet with Reagan, they are the descendants
of the mercenaries to whom the United States provided funds and modern weapons to
destroy the best republic Afghanistan has ever had; the one that governed during the
time of friendship with the USSR and that worked to develop the country defending the
rights of women. Those Taliban are the heirs of the murderers to whom Washington called “freedom warriors” and in whom they promoted the jihadism that has slaughtered
the country burying it in backwardness, fanatism and the hatred of the mullahs.
The United States and its NATO allies are responsible for this death shroud. The Spanish governments that, willingly or yielding to North American extortion, sent troops to
collaborate with the infamous imperialist enterprise are also accomplices of the pain and
death committed. From George W. Bush, who started the occupation of Afghanistan
with lies, to Biden, all last US presidents deserve to appear before an International Court
of Justice to be accountable for the crimes committed.
Now that the US occupation and war ends and the country moves towards jihadist fascism, the workers of the world cannot ignore the suffering of Afghanistan. The Communist Party of Spain condemns the military interventions which serve only to strengthen
reactionary nationalist positions, as it is being verified in Afghanistan with the return of
the Taliban and considers that any foreign policy must be governed by the respect for
Human Rights and the sovereignty of all states. Imperialism must be erased from History.
In this tragic hour, the Communist Party of Spain states its solidarity with the Afghan
people who have suffered from decades of oppression and war and asks Pedro Sanchez
government to open its gates to refugees in danger. The Communist Party of Spain wants to extend its solidarity to the Afghan women, to the country’s peasants and workers,
to all those who struggled to fight the war machine of the United States and its allies
and who also fought the terrifying reign of the Mujahideen and later the sinister obscurantism of the Taliban.

http://solidnet.org/.galleries/document ... an-eng.pdf

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

CP of Britain , Britain's Communists condemn 'catastrophe' of imperialist interventions
8/19/21 2:24 PM
Britain, Communist Party of Britain En Europe Communist and workers' parties

'AFGHANISTAN CONFIRMS CHOICE IS EITHER SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM' - CP


The Communist Party holds Britain, the US and other Western powers chiefly responsible for the latest tragedy in Afghanistan as Taliban Islamist forces secure their take-over of the country.

'These events expose the so-called humanitarian case for imperialist intervention as a travesty and vindicate the stance of the anti-war movement in Britain and internationally', Steve Johnson told the party's political committee on Wednesday evening.

He declared that Western imperialism and NATO have long been the problem, not any part of the solution.

'Not just for the last 20 years', Mr Johnson explained, 'but from the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Western powers and their reactionary allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan financed, armed and trained jihadi insurgents in order to bring down the progressive People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan regime and its Soviet backers'.

As a consequence of US, British and French military intervention, he pointed out, countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria had been plunged into catastrophic chaos and slaughter, while sectarian religious fundamentalism had grown massively in strength.

The CP political committee called on the British government to provide generous refuge to people fleeing oppression in Afghanistan and urged the labour and progressive movements to stand in solidarity with women and others who are courageously defending democratic and human rights in defiance of the Taliban.

'These rights have never been the genuine concern of Western governments, whose real interests are in mineral resources, trades routes and military bases', Steve Johnson insisted.

'As the climate emergency and the unfair distribution of Covid vaccines confirm, capitalism means continual conflict, war, disease and environmental degradation', he concluded, 'Rosa Luxemburg's prophetic words that humanity's choice is "Socialism or Barbarism" are more relevant than ever'.

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Brita ... rventions/

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

Marxistindia, CPI(M)-CPI joint statement on Afghanistan situation
8/18/21 1:12 PM
India, Communist Party of India India, Communist Party of India [Marxist] Joint Statement En Asia Communist and workers' parties
marxistindia

August 18, 2021

Press Statement

Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Party of India have issued the following joint statement:

On Afghanistan Situation

The United States has suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Twenty years after the toppling of the then Taliban regime, the Taliban are back in power. The collapse of the Ashraf Ghani led government and the National Army shows the hollowness of the nature of the State set up by the US and it's NATO allies.

The Afghan policy of the Indian government had been blindly following the Americans and this had resulted in its isolation in the region and is hence left with few options.

The earlier Taliban government of the 1990s was marked by an extreme fundamentalist approach, which was disastrous for women, girl children and suppressed ethnic minorities.

It is imperative that the new set-up controlled by the Taliban give due regard to the rights of women and acknowledge the rights of ethnic minorities.

The international community's concern that Afghanistan should not become a haven for terrorist groups like the Islamic State and the Al Qaeda was collectively expressed by the United Nations Security Council in its emergency meeting on Afghanistan on August 16.

India must work closely with major regional powers to see that the Afghan people are able to live in a peaceful and stable environment. Indian government should immediately work towards safe evacuation of all stranded Indian citizens in Afghanistan.

(Issued from CPI(M) Central Committee office)

http://solidnet.org/article/Marxistindi ... situation/
Which side are you on, boys?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:57 pm

HOW AND WHY THE US MILITARY FAILED IN AFGHANISTAN
19 Aug 2021 , 10:06 am .

Image
The United States and NATO suffer the greatest military defeat in recent years and withdraw from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation (Photo: Reuters)

Since last Sunday, August 15, photos and videos have circulated about the capture of Kabul by the Taliban and the desperate withdrawal of diplomatic personnel from the United States and other nations, images that represent a military and symbolic defeat, as well as a sign that imperialism America is in decline.

The fabricated circumstances by which the United States and NATO countries militarily occupied Afghanistan are more than known, as well as the material and human cost in twenty years of invasion and looting.

However, beyond what is at first glance, it is worth wondering, why did the Taliban manage to control the entire Afghan territory without major setbacks as soon as the Americans undertook the withdrawal?

In trying to answer this question, other doubts arise because the triumph of the Taliban is proportional to the failure of the United States and its allies. So what happened in twenty years of occupation?

Although it is not necessary to recall in detail each step of the intervention, it is fair to mention that the circumstances in which the occupation occurs serve as a context for understanding the failure of the West.

BRIEF CONTEXT

Following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the United States and its allies gave themselves a self-license to become the world's police force and launch a campaign to end terrorism on a global level. This would not have been possible if the attack on the Twin Towers had not had the necessary impact so that these decisions were not questioned.

What followed was a US-led coalition that invaded, a month after the attacks, Afghanistan, supposedly the cradle of terrorism, even though the main targets were Saudis and not Afghans. With this same argument he invaded and plundered other nations of the Middle East.

It is worth noting that the Central Asian country since 1996 was controlled by the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that years ago had been financed and trained by the secret services of the United States and Pakistan.

The truth is that the occupation was carried out without major setbacks and the Taliban were apparently expelled from the big cities. A few years later a government compatible with the interests of the United States was installed. What is remarkable about all this is that the invasion was a fact of great impact due to the large mobilization of troops from several countries, as well as bombings and casualties of alleged terrorists. It is also necessary to mention the indiscriminate airstrikes on the civilian population, which left thousands of Afghans dead, including women and children.

Undoubtedly, the West in those early years won important battles, especially the narrative. However, such victories did not have sufficient elastic properties to extend it throughout these 20 years of occupation and the imposition of its law.

The latest events show that military power is not enough to sustain itself for long in another territory and, above all, with other codes. What at one time was seen as easy, managing to remove the Taliban from power became more complex over the years.


FIRST SIGNS OF FAILURE

And the truth is that the Taliban never stopped destabilizing the occupiers and the new government, a siege that was slowly denting the powerful image of the US military. For this reason, a reinforcement of the military contingents was necessary a few years later.

Already in the first decade, the signs of the West's military failure in Afghanistan began to be seen. Why was it slow to make the decision to withdraw or negotiate with the Taliban? Did doing that mean accepting defeat?

"It is impossible to know if any of the main political leaders, including three presidents, would have listened to a uniformed man who advised moderation or an approach to the interventions radically different from the one that was produced," says Douglas Macgregor in a work for The American Conservative .

DENIAL OF DEFEAT?

Macgregor contends that all that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021 no senior officer voiced opposition to the intervention and occupation policies strongly enough to justify their withdrawal.

"None felt compelled to leave the service and bring their opposing opinions to the public forum."

Likewise, it refers that most of the high command of the United States military chose to lie and distort the facts in public while showing progress that did not exist. Reflect that many American lives could have been saved if someone had told the truth.

"There is no way around it. The top civilian and military leaders of the United States (along with their supporting bureaucracies) are fundamentally incapable of developing or implementing an effective military strategy," he says.

FORCED SUPPORT OF THE LIE

Everything seems to indicate that the concealment of reality was due to a denial of decadence. However, this is not just a matter for the military: the White House on several occasions also denied that reality. Until the last moment President Joe Biden underestimated the advance of the Taliban.

The US president said he trusted the Afghan army, stating that it had 300,000 well-armed and American-trained troops. Their confidence was sustained by the number of military men compared to the 75,000 members of the Taliban, so-called herdsmen and barbarians without much knowledge of war tactics. A few days later the "savages" took the capital without much resistance.

Pascual Serrano, a Spanish journalist, says that the lies were maintained until the last moment. "Since October 7, 2001, when the United States began the invasion of Afghanistan, everything it did there, together with its NATO partners, including Spain, has been a scam," he writes in Mundo Sputnik .

The three-star General Douglas Lute, who served as a White House high command in the war during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that "we lacked a fundamental knowledge of Afghanistan, we did not know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the remotest notion of what we were undertaking, "and then added:" If the American people knew the magnitude of the dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost. Who is to say that was in vain?".

The imperial pride of knowing in the face of a colossal failure may also have delayed the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. In fact, since last Sunday they have made comparisons between the forced withdrawal from Kabul and the flight from Saigon in 1975, symbols of defeat.

"The Taliban are not the North Vietnamese Army. They are not remotely comparable in terms of capabilities. There will be no circumstance where you will see people being lifted from the roof of an embassy in the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable. ", said the American president. A few days later, the images were exactly the same: a helicopter lands on a building dislodging diplomatic personnel in the midst of military and social chaos for the West.

Afghanistan has very different cultural codes from those of the West. If the United States maintained "control" for a long time, it was by the power of arms. This was demonstrated by the fact that once they withdrew, the government in charge was also diluted and found no way to contain the Taliban.

The truth is that the US military never ceased to be seen as an invader that brought death and destabilization to those territories.


Ultimately, the power of the United States and its allies was no longer held even by arms. That is why they finally had to recognize and agree with the Taliban to withdraw. If the 75,000 Taliban managed to defeat the local army and the occupiers, it was because they had the political, social and strategic base to do so.

"Although the Taliban are unpopular to many Afghans, at least they are Afghans and not a government propped up under foreign occupation," writes Joe Lauria , editor of the Consortium News . He also says that during the time of occupation he never bothered to understand that territory.

"Keeping US and NATO forces in the country, at best, would have prolonged an endless stalemate. Joe Biden is being interrogated alive, including by establishment Democrats, about the events unfolding in this country. moment. It may even be a political suicide. But it has been a wise move to finally withdraw, "says Lauria.

WHAT DOES THE UNITED STATES LOSE?

Beyond the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, the decline of US imperialism really lies in the loss of influence in the region. This territory for the United States constituted an axis of destabilization for China, Russia and Iran, so the defeat is above all political.

"It was never about fighting terrorism or turning Afghanistan into a Western-style democratic state that would purge the Taliban, but rather about using this important territory for the purpose of attacking the weak flanks of the emerging powers of Eurasia," the Institute notes. Samuel Robinson.

By withdrawing from Afghan territory, he also loses the possibility of controlling a territory rich in important minerals, as well as the production of opium and heroin, which soared during his occupation.

"It seems that one of the main reasons was the control of the vast untapped mineral wealth of Afghanistan. Why would the United States leave that behind? Perhaps it should not surprise us that in the not too distant future we will see American companies negotiating the digging rights with the Taliban, "says Lauria.

Defeat in the military field and its forced attempt to hide it, as well as the loss of regional influence, are unmistakable signs of the decline of the United States and its allies. And everyone sees it live and direct through our screens.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/co ... afganistan

Google Translator

Already the imperialist apologists are claiming that the Taliban 'commanders' are going to ramp up opium production, when in fact during the previous Taliban regime opium production was outlawed and largely curtailed. When the US and the CIA returned opium product ramped up to never before seen levels. Coincidence does not necessarily imply causality but it does sometimes.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 21, 2021 1:44 pm

Image

In the Tradition of US Puppets: When They Finally Get Kicked Out, They Steal as Much of the Country’s Treasure as They Can
August 19, 2021
By Jeremy Kuzmarov – Aug 17, 2021

True to form, last Sunday the US puppet President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, fled Kabul with four luxury vehicles and a helicopter stuffed so full of cash that a huge pile of it could not fit and had to be left on the tarmac. 46 years earlier, US client Nguyen Van Thieu tried to smuggle $73 million worth of gold bullion out of South Vietnam after its liberation by the communists. These two men symbolize the corruption and greed that lies at the core of the US empire.

The Russian embassy in Kabul reported on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan with four vehicles and a helicopter full of cash as the Taliban took control of Kabul.

The former World Bank academic—who holds a doctorate from New York City’s Columbia University—didn’t say where he was going, but Al Jazeera reported that he had flown to Uzbekistan and it was later confirmed that he went to the United Arab Emirates.

Nikita Ishchenko, a Russian embassy spokesman in Kabul stated that as far as the “collapse of the (outgoing) regime, it is most eloquently characterized by the way Ghani fled Afghanistan.”

Image
A military helicopter carrying Afghan President Ashraf Ghani prepares to land near the parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2, 2021. Photo: Reuters

“Four cars were full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” Ishchenko was quoted as saying.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov earlier expressed hope that Ghani and other fleeing officials would not take all the money from the state budget—which would be difficult to recoup.

Saad Mohseni, who owns one of Afghanistan’s popular television stations said that Ghani would forever “be known as the Benedict Arnold of Afghanistan. People will be spitting on his grave for another 100 years.”[1]

Image
Poster with Ghani’s face outside deserted airport terminal in Kabul. Photo: AP

Nguyen Van Thieu and Smuggled Gold

Ghani’s ignominious departure resembles that of another deposed US client, Nguyen Van Thieu, who according to the New York Times, had tried to smuggle $73 million worth of gold bullions out of South Vietnam in April 1975 after Vietnam had been liberated by the communist forces.

Thieu ended up living out his days in a wealthy suburb of Boston and skiing in the pristine mountains of Vermont.

In 1963, he was one of the Young Turks responsible for the assassination of South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. Subsequently, he emerged as the head of a ruling military tribunal and then after a few rigged elections, president of South Vietnam.

Image
General Nguyen Van Thieu [Source: alphahistory.com]

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Thieu ruled the Republic during its bloodiest years and proved himself a brilliant strategist, not on the battlefield, but in surviving palace intrigues and feuds.
His power-broker, General Dang Van Quang, controlled the South Vietnamese Navy, which harbored an elaborate drug smuggling organization.

Image
General Dang Van Quang [Source: nguyentin.tripod.com]

On the July 15, 1971 edition of NBC Nightly News, the network’s Saigon correspondent Phil Brady quoted extremely reliable sources as saying that General Quang, Thieu’s chief intelligence adviser, was “the biggest [drug] pusher” in South Vietnam.[2]

Ashraf Ghani and the Beirut Club

As Covert Action Magazine previously reported, in the 1970s, Ghani had been part of a group of mostly Pashtuns known as the Beirut club, which had been sent to study at the American University of Beirut after, on a visit to Kabul, Henry Kissinger noticed that Afghan leader Mohammed Daoud Khan was surrounded by Soviet advisers.

From that point on, members of the Beirut club—which included neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004-2005—were groomed for power, and brought into the American orbit.

Image
Beirut Club: From left, Ashraf Ghani, deposed president of Afghanistan; Sher Mohammed Abas Stanekzai, chief Taliban negotiator at recent peace talks; and Zalmay Khalilzad, neoconservative war booster and the Americans’ peace envoy during their student days at the American University, Beirut. [Source: New York Times]

From 2002-2004, Ghani served as Foreign Minister of the Hamid Karzai government where he oversaw the flow of billions of dollars of foreign assistance.
A huge amount of the money was stolen or used to pay bribes to corrupt government officials.

Image
Khalilullah Frozi [Source: The Frontier Post]

Later as President from 2014-2021, Ghani allied with Khalilullah Frozi, who was supposed to be serving a 15-year prison sentence for his role in defrauding Kabul Bank of nearly $1 billion of depositors’ money.[3]
Afghanistan in this period ranked among the 20 countries “having the highest perceived level of corruption” as laid down by the Corruption Perception Index.

Image
Cartoon depicting the state of corruption in the Afghan government. [Source: outlookafghanistan.net]

Symbols of Greed

US government leaders claim over and over again that they are intervening in foreign countries to spread good governance and democracy, though they end up empowering leaders of the caliber of Ghani and Thieu who steal and cheat their fellow countrymen and grow wealthy off their misery.
The reason for this outcome is not that hard to discern if we consider the underlying interests driving US foreign policy.

Both Afghanistan and South Vietnam were viewed by the real drivers of US foreign policy—the Kissingers, Rumsfields, Kagans and Brzezinskis—as chess pieces, that the US strove to control for its own purposes.

In Vietnam, the goal was to project US power in the Asia Pacific and prevent the emergence of a strong socialist nation; and in Afghanistan, it was to project power in the Middle East and Central Asia and tap into the country’s unexploited mineral wealth.

Given these agendas, the only local-based leaders who would ally with the US were unscrupulous opportunists willing to sell-out their own countrymen and women.

The US furthermore created opportunities for corruption through the massive interjection of foreign aid on an otherwise hollow economic base.

Ashraf Ghani and Nguyen Van Thieu were thus both made in America.

They serve as symbols of an empire underlain by violence and greed whose global legitimacy has suffered another major blow.



Notes

1- Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Nossiter, “’He’s a Coward’: Ghani’s Exit Infuriates His Countrymen,” The New York Times, August 17, 2021, A8. ↑

2- Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 2nd ed. (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 229. ↑

3- Ghani referred to his Vice-President Rashid Dostum as a “known killer.” ↑





Featured image: Ashraf Ghani and Nguyen Van Thieu, two US puppets who cheated their own countrymen and grew rich off the misery of their own people.

(CovertAction Magazine)

https://orinocotribune.com/in-the-tradi ... -they-can/

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

CP of Pakistan, On situation on Afghanistan and appeal to the communists and workers Parties
8/19/21 1:44 PM
Pakistan, Communist Party of Pakistan En Asia Communist and workers' parties
The story of Taliban occupation of Afghanistan and 1st part of the US imperialist another great game is slowly unfolding.The Afghans and the world is waking up to the new reality every day.


There are more questions than answers.How is it possible Taliban could occupy the whole Afghanistan in 11days while they were fighting 20 years against the US and NATO forces with no real gains? One thing is clear that Doha agreement was to construct the scene of the events and Taliban was handed over the power by US to play a role in the region for the US interests.They will be proxy of US imperialism and the conflict zone and the great game battle field will be extending now not only to the neighbouring Pakistan,Iran and Central Asian countries but Afghanistan and Taliban will be used to protect US interests in the region creating a defence line against China and Russia.


The Taliban rise will be sparking a new wave of fundamentalist ideology and the progressive, democratic forces of the region will be targeted again.


The Afghans citizen rights, human rights, the rights of women and children will be again under the hammer of Talibans so called Islamic laws.


The communist Party of Pakistan is watching these events very carefully and we have already appealed to the progressive forces and parties in Pakistan to unite so a strong and fighting force can be formed.


The Communist Party of Pakistan is also appealing to all fraternal communists and workers parties in the world to pressurise their respective governments to not recognise the Taliban regime until a free election is held in Afghanistan and a Democratic government is elected in Afghanistan ensuring the basic human and civic rights for all Afghans specially the rights of Women and children are respected.

International department.

Communist Party of Pakistan
Central Secretariat: D-168, Naseem Nagar Phase-III, Hyderabad, Sindh.
Phone: +92-22-2670231, Fax: +92-22-2670231, Mob: +92-333-2714014, +92-300-3065723,
E-Mail: cppk1948@gmail.com Web: www.cpp.org.pk

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Pakis ... s-Parties/

An interesting 'take' from the CPP, time will tell. Perhaps Joe Biden could explain that to his detractors...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 22, 2021 2:09 pm

Image
Malina Suliman (Afghanistan), Girl in the Ice Box, 2013.

Create two, three, many Saigons. That is the watchword: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2021)
Posted Aug 20, 2021 by Vijay Prashad

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (August 19, 2021 )

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On Sunday, 15 August, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces. Former President Hamid Karzai announced that he had formed a coordination council with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the National Reconciliation Committee, and jihadi leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Karzai called on the Taliban to be prudent as they entered Kabul’s presidential palace and took charge of the state.

Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Hekmatyar have asked for the formation of a national government. This will suit the Taliban, since it would allow them to claim to be an Afghan government rather than a Taliban government. But it is the Taliban and their leader Mullah Baradar that will effectively be in charge of the country, with Karzai-Abdullah Abdullah-Hekmatyar as the window dressing designed to placate opportunistic outside powers.

The entry of the Taliban into Kabul is a major defeat for the United States. A few months after the U.S. initiated its war against the Taliban in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that ‘the Taliban regime is coming to an end’. Twenty years later, the reverse is now evident. But this defeat of the United States–after spending $2.261 trillion and causing at least 241,000 deaths–is cold comfort for the people of Afghanistan, who will now have to contend with the harsh reality of Taliban rule. Since its formation in Pakistan in 1994, nothing progressive can be found in the words and deeds of the Taliban over the course of its nearly thirty-year history. Nor can anything progressive be found in the twenty-year war that the United States prosecuted against the Afghan people.

Image
Shamsia Hassani (Afghanistan), Kabus (‘Nightmare’), 2021.

On 16 April 1967, the Cuban magazine Tricontinental published an article by Che Guevara called ‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams: That is Our Watchword’. Guevara argued that the pressure on the Vietnamese people needed to be relieved by guerrilla struggles elsewhere. Eight years later, the United States fled from Vietnam as U.S. officials and their Vietnamese allies boarded helicopters from the roof of the CIA building in Saigon.

The U.S. loss in Vietnam came during a series of defeats for imperialism: Portugal was defeated the year before in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique; workers and students ejected Thailand’s dictatorship, opening up a three-year process that culminated in the student upsurge in 1976; the communists took power in Afghanistan during the Saur Revolution in April 1978; the Iranian people opened up a yearlong process against the U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, that led to the revolution of January 1979; the socialist New Jewel Movement conducted a revolution on the small island state of Grenada; in June 1979, the Sandinistas moved in on Managua (Nicaragua) and overthrew the U.S.-backed regime of Anastasio Somoza. These were among the many Saigons, the many defeats of imperialism, and the many victories–one way or the other–of national liberation.

Each of these advances came with a different political tradition and a different tempo. The most powerful mass revolt was in Iran, although it did not result in a socialist dynamic but in a clerical democracy. Each of these faced the wrath of the United States and its allies, who would not allow these experiments–most of them socialist in nature–to germinate. A military dictatorship was encouraged in Thailand in 1976, proxy wars were set in motion in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and Iraq was paid to invade Iran in September 1980. The United States government attempted by any and every means to deny sovereignty to these countries and to return them to full-scale subordination.

Chaos followed. It came alongside two axes: the debt crisis and proxy wars. After the non-aligned countries passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) resolution in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, they found themselves squeezed by the Western-dominated financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department. These institutions drove the non-aligned states into a deep debt crisis; Mexico defaulted on its debt in 1982 and inaugurated the ongoing Third World Debt Crisis. In addition, after the victory of the national liberation forces in the 1970s, a new series of proxy wars and regime change operations were initiated to destabilise the politics of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for two generations.

Image
M. Mahdi Hamed (Afghanistan), Kabus (‘Nightmare’), 2015.

We have not yet emerged out of the destruction caused by the Western policy of the 1970s.

The Western callousness towards Afghanistan defines the nature of the counter-revolution and of liberal interventionism. U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to put immense resources behind the worst elements in Afghan politics and work with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to destroy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), which lasted from 1978 to 1992 (renamed the Republic of Afghanistan in 1987).

Years after the fall of the Republic of Afghanistan, I met with Anahita Ratebzad, who was a minister in the first DRA government, to ask her about those early years. ‘We faced severe challenges from both within the country–from those who had a reactionary social view–and from without the country–from our adversaries in the United States and Pakistan’, she said. ‘Months after we came to office in 1978, we knew that our enemies had come together to undermine us and to prevent the arrival of democracy and socialism in Afghanistan’. Ratebzad was joined by other important female leaders such as Sultana Umayd, Suraya, Ruhafza Kamyar, Firouza, Dilara Mark, Professor R. S. Siddiqui, Fawjiyah Shahsawari, Dr. Aziza, Shirin Afzal, and Alamat Tolqun–names long forgotten.

It was Ratebzad who wrote in Kabul New Times (1978) that ‘Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country… Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention’. The hope of 1978 is now lost.

Pessimism must not be laid at the feet of the Taliban alone, but also of those–such as the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Pakistan–who funded and supported the Taliban-like theocratic fascists. In the dust of the U.S. war that began in 2001, women like Anahita Ratebzad were pushed under the rug; it suited the U.S. to see the Afghan women as incapable of helping themselves, and therefore to need U.S. aerial bombardment and U.S. extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo. It also suited the U.S. to deny its active links to the worst theocrats and misogynists (people such as Hekmatyar, who are no different from the Taliban).

Image

The U.S. funded the mujahideen, undermined the DRA, drew in the reluctant Soviet intervention across the Amu Darya, and then increased the pressure on both the Soviets and the DRA by making the counter-revolutionary Afghan forces and the Pakistani military dictatorship pawns in a struggle against the USSR. The Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of the DRA led to an even worse scenario with a bloody civil war, out of which the Taliban emerged. The U.S. war against the Taliban ran for twenty years but–despite the superior military technology of the United States–led to the U.S. defeat.

Imagine if the U.S. had not backed the mujahideen and if the Afghans had been allowed to entertain the possibility of a socialist future. This would have been a struggle with its own zigs and zags, but it would certainly have resulted in something better than what we have now: the return of the Taliban, the flogging of women in public, and the enforcement of the worst social codes. Imagine that.

The defeat of U.S. power does not necessarily come these days with the possibility of the exertion of sovereignty and the advancement of a socialist agenda. Rather, it comes through chaos and suffering. Haiti, like Afghanistan, is part of the detritus of U.S. interventionism, tormented by two U.S. coups, an occupation of its political and economic life, and now by another earthquake. The loss in Afghanistan also reminds us of the U.S. defeat in Iraq (2011); these two countries faced ferocious U.S. military power but would not be subordinated.

All of this elucidates both the wrath of the U.S. war machine, capable of demolishing countries, but also the weakness of U.S. power, unable of fashioning the world in its image. Afghanistan and Iraq built up state projects over hundreds of years. The U.S. destroyed their states in an afternoon.

Image
Latif Eshraq (Afghanistan), Farkhunda, 2017.

Afghanistan’s last left-wing president, Mohammed Najibullah, had tried to build a National Reconciliation Policy in the 1980s. In 1995, he wrote to his family, ‘Afghanistan has multiple governments now, each created by different regional powers. Even Kabul is divided into little kingdoms … unless and until all the actors [regional and global powers] agree to sit at one table, leave their differences aside to reach a genuine consensus on non-interference in Afghanistan and abide to their agreement, the conflict will go on’. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, they captured President Najibullah and killed him outside the UN compound. His daughter, Heela, told me a few days before the Taliban took Kabul about her hopes that her father’s policy would now be adopted.

Karzai’s plea is along this grain. It is unlikely to be genuinely adopted by the Taliban.

What will moderate the Taliban? Perhaps pressure from its neighbours–including China–who have interests at stake in a stable Afghanistan. In late July, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with the Taliban’s Baradar in Tianjin. They agreed that U.S. policy had failed. But the Chinese urged Baradar to be pragmatic: to no longer support terrorism and to integrate Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative. At present, this is the only hope, but even this is a fragile thread.

Image
Hamed Hassanzada (Afghanistan), Genocide, 2012.

In July 2020, former minister of the DRA government and poet Sulaiman Layeq died from wounds he had suffered from a Taliban bombing in Kabul the previous year. Layeq’s poem ‘Eternal Passions’ (1959) describes the longing for that different world he and so many others had worked to build, a project that was obliterated by the U.S. interventions:

the sound of love
overflowed from the hearts
volcanic, drunken

years passed
yet still these desires
like winds upon the snows
or like waves upon waters
cries of women, wailers

Image
Mahwish Chishty (Pakistan), Reaper, 2015.

The Afghans are largely glad to see the back of the U.S. occupation, to be one more Saigon in a long sequence. But this is not a victory for humanity. It will not be easy for Afghanistan to emerge out of these nightmare decades, but the desire to do so can still be heard.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://mronline.org/2021/08/20/create- ... watchword/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 24, 2021 2:05 pm

To Instigate Against Taliban CNN Claims Contradiction Where None Is Evident
The 'western' media are pushing for a continued war on Afghanistan or, if that is not possible, for putting devastating sanctions onto its people.

To diminish Afghanistan potential is part of the continuing hostility. The evacuation of Afghanistan's 'western' affiliated professional elite should be seen in that light.

There is no evidence that more than a handful of the people now being lifted out of Kabul are under threat. To justify their evacuation requires to publish horror stories about the Taliban.

CNN comes up with this one:

Taliban issue death sentence for brother of Afghan translator who helped US troops, according to letters obtained by CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/23/poli ... index.html

The Taliban have sentenced the brother of an Afghan translator to death, according to letters obtained by CNN, accusing him of helping the US and providing security to his brother, who served as an interpreter to American troops.
...
The letters are just one example of how the Taliban are directly threatening Afghans who worked with the US or are family members of those who have, leaving them scrambling to flee the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover.
...
"You have been accused of helping the Americans," the Taliban wrote in the first of three letters to the Afghan man, adding, "You are also accused of providing security to your brother, who has been an interpreter."
The first letter from the Taliban, which is hand written, orders the man to appear for a hearing.

The second handwritten letter is a notice of his failure to appear for the hearing.

In the third letter, which is typed, the Taliban notify the man that because he rejected previous warnings to stop "your servitude to the invading crusaders" and ignored a subpoena to appear for a hearing, he was "guilty in absentia" and will be sentenced to death. The Taliban delivered the letters within the last three months to the interpreter's brother, according to the former service member who worked with the interpreter.
...
"These court decisions are final and you will not have the right to object," the third letter reads. "You chose this path for yourself and your death is eminent [sic], God willing."

The letters contradict assurances Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid made at a press conference last week, as the group tries to project a more moderate image to the world.

"Nobody will be harmed in Afghanistan," Mujahid said. "Of course, there is a huge difference between us now and 20 years ago."

How please do letters written "within the last three month" contradict a public amnesty guarantee "made at a press conference last week"?

Have the letters arrive after the amnesty was announced? Has the man be arrested or killed? CNN does not claim that. Where then is the contradiction?

Three month ago the Taliban were still fighting the biggest military alliance of the world led by a superpower. In course of that fight they would of course go after those who collaborated with their enemies. But that war is now over. The Taliban won. They have no longer any reason to go after people they could rather use in their country. They explicitly said so:

I would like to assure all the compatriots, whether they were translators, whether they were with military activities or whether they were civilians, all of them have been important. Nobody is going to be treated with revenge. Both youth who have talents, who have grown up here, who are from this country, we don’t want them to leave. These are our assets, we would like them to stay here, to serve.
In a current interview another Taliban spokesperson repeats that guarantee and points out that those who are now seeking to emigrate from Afghanistan are doing so for purely economic reasons.

We should take the Taliban by their words. That puts them under pressure to stick to them. To accuse them of breaking their own promises without providing evidence for that makes it only more likely that they, at some point, will start doing so.

Posted by b on August 23, 2021 at 14:11 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/t ... .html#more

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

Media Rediscover Afghan Women Only When US Leaves
JULIE HOLLAR
Time: Lifting the Veil
Image
In a December 3, 2001, cover story, Time asked about Afghan women: “How much better will their lives be now?” Spoiler: not very much better.
Just as US corporate news media “discovered” Afghan women’s rights only when the US was angling for invasion, their since-forgotten interest returned with a vengeance as US troops exited the country.

After September 11, 2001, the public was subjected to widespread US news coverage of burqa-clad Afghan women in need of US liberation, and celebratory reports after the invasion. Time magazine (11/26/01), for instance, declared that “the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage” was occurring, as “female faces, shy and bright, emerged from the dark cellars” to stomp on their old veils. In a piece by Nancy Gibbs headlined “Blood and Joy,” the magazine told readers this was “a holiday gift, a reminder of reasons the war was worth fighting beyond those of basic self-defense” (FAIR.org, 4/9/21).

The media interest was highly opportunistic. Between January 2000 and September 11, 2001, there were 15 US newspaper articles and 33 broadcast TV reports about women’s rights in Afghanistan. In the 16 weeks between September 12 and January 1, 2002, those numbers skyrocketed to 93 and 628, before plummeting once again (Media, Culture & Society, 9/1/05).

Suddenly remembering women

Now, as the US finally is withdrawing its last troops, many corporate media commentators put women and girls at the center of the analysis, as when Wolf Blitzer (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21), after referring to “the horror awaiting women and girls in Afghanistan,” reported:

President Biden saying he stands, and I’m quoting him now, squarely, squarely behind this decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, despite the shocking scene of chaos and desperation as the country fell in a matter of only a few hours under Taliban control, and the group’s extremist ideology has tremendous and extremely disturbing implications for everyone in Afghanistan, but especially the women and girls.

This type of framing teed up hawkish guests, who proliferate on TV guest lists, to use women as a political football to oppose withdrawal. Blitzer guest Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R.-Illinois), for instance, argued:

Look at the freedom that is being deprived from the Afghan people as the Taliban move into Afghan, or moving into parts of Afghanistan now, and you know how much freedom they had. Look at the number of women that are out there making careers, that are thought leaders, that are academics, that never would have happened under the Taliban leadership…. The devastation you are seeing today is why that small footprint of 2,500 US troops was so important.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) gladly gave Jake Tapper (CNN Newsroom, 8/16/21) her take on the situation after CNN aired a report on the situation for women:

As you mentioned, for women and younger girls, this is also very devastating for them. The humiliation that they will endure at the hands of the Taliban all around this is just a horrible, horrible mar on the United States under President Joe Biden.

‘America rescued them’
WSJ: The Nightmare Resumes for Afghan Women
Image
Charity Wallace claimed in the Wall Street Journal (8/17/21) that Afghan “women and girls…made enormous progress over the past 20 years.”
Such analysis depends on the assumption that the US invasion and occupation “saved” Afghan women. In the Wall Street Journal (8/17/21), an op-ed by former George W. Bush staffer Charity Wallace ran under the headline : “The Nightmare Resumes for Afghan Women: America Rescued Them 20 Years Ago. How Can We Abandon Them to the Taliban Again?”

Two days later, a news article in the Journal (8/19/21) about the fate of women in Afghanistan explained: “Following the 2001 invasion, US and allied forces invested heavily to promote gender equality.”

The Associated Press (8/14/21), in a piece headlined, “Longest War: Were America’s Decades in Afghanistan Worth It?,” noted at the end that “some Afghans—asked that question before the Taliban’s stunning sweep last week—respond that it’s more than time for Americans to let Afghans handle their own affairs.” It continued, “But one 21-year-old woman, Shogufa, says American troops’ two decades on the ground meant all the difference for her.” After describing Shogufa’s experience for five paragraphs, the piece concludes with her “message to Americans”:

“Thank you for everything you have done in Afghanistan,” she said, in good but imperfect English. “The other thing was to request that they stay with us.”
Atlantic: Wthe Week the Left Stopped Caring About Human Rights
Image
Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan (8/19/21): “The United States military made it possible for those women to experience a measure of freedom. Without us, that’s over.”
Perhaps the most indignant media piece about Afghan women came from Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (8/19/21), “The Week the Left Stopped Caring About Human Rights.” Flanagan argued:

Leave American troops idle long enough, and before you know it, they’re building schools and protecting women. We found an actual patriarchy in Afghanistan, and with nothing else to do, we started smashing it down. Contra the Nation, it’s hard to believe that Afghan women “won” gains in human rights, considering how quickly those gains are sure now to be revoked. The United States military made it possible for those women to experience a measure of freedom. Without us, that’s over.

Flanagan pointed to Afghan activist Malala Yousafzai, whom she accused “critics of the war” of forgetting, saying Yousafzai “appealed to the president to take ‘a bold step’ to stave off disaster.”

Next to last in women’s rights
Such coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.
NYT: Malala: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters.
Image
It’s hard to read an essay (New York Times, 8/17/21) that addresses “the countries that have used Afghans as pawns in their wars of ideology and greed” and says that the Afghan people “have been trapped for generations in proxy wars of global and regional powers” as a call for unending military occupation.
Contra Flanagan’s insinuation, Yousafzai didn’t ask Biden to continue the occupation. In an op-ed for the New York Times (8/17/21) that most clearly laid out her appeal, she asked for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for refugees fleeing the country. In fact, her take on the US occupation’s role in women’s rights (BBC, 8/17/21) is much more critical than most voices in the US corporate media: “There had been very little interest in focusing on the humanitarian aid and the humanitarian work.”

As human rights expert Phyllis Bennis told FAIR’s radio program CounterSpin (2/17/21), Malalai Joya, a young member of parliament, told her in the midst of the 2009 troop surge that women in Afghanistan have three enemies: the Taliban, warlords supported by the US and the US occupation. “She said, ‘If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two.’”

Things did get better for some women, mostly in the big cities, where new opportunities in education, work and political representation became possible with the Taliban removed from power. But as Shreya Chattopadhyay pointed out in the Nation (8/9/21), the US commitment to women was little more than window dressing on its war, devoting roughly 1,000 times more funding to military expenses than to women’s rights.

Passive consumers of US corporate news media might be surprised to learn that Afghanistan, in its 19th year under US occupation, ranked second-to-last in the world on women’s well-being and empowerment, according to the Women, Peace and Security Index (2019).

As the Index notes, Afghan women still suffer from discriminatory laws at a level roughly on par with Iraq, and an extraordinarily low 12.2% of women reported feeling safe walking alone at night in their community, more than 4 points lower than in any other country. And just one in three girls goes to school.

Wrong kind of ‘help’
In 2015, a 27-year-old Afghan woman named Farkhunda Malikzada was killed by an angry mob of men in Kabul after being falsely accused of burning a Quran; US-backed Afghan security forces watched silently (Guardian, 3/28/15). The shocking story spread around the world, but the only US TV network to mention it on air was PBS (7/2/15), which offered a brief report more than three months after the murder, when an Afghan appeals court overturned the death sentences given to some of the men involved.

FAIR turned up no evidence of Caitlin Flanagan ever writing about Malikzada, either—or about the plight of any Afghan woman before last week.

According to a Nexis search, TV news shows aired more segments that mentioned women’s rights in the same sentence as Afghanistan in the last seven days (42) than in the previous seven years (37).

The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.

For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.

Research assistance: Elias Khoury

https://fair.org/home/media-rediscover- ... us-leaves/

***********************************
Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden: How four presidents created today's Afghanistan mess
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/23/politics ... index.html
.
Wherein the origin of the Taliban. how they came to power, the culpability of Carter and Reagan in this is completely ignored. How the Taliban were receiving aid from the CIA well before the Soviet intervention(and no, when a government request military aid it is not an 'invasion') and once the Soviets retreated in disgrace nobody gave a fuck about the place or the women.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 26, 2021 1:34 pm

Image

John Pilger: Afghanistan, the great game of smashing countries
Posted Aug 26, 2021 by John Pilger

Originally published: MintPress News (August 24, 2021 ) |

A s a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:
Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.
For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:
We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.
In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:
Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.
Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,
We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….
In1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,
upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.
The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.
The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.
On Afghanistan, he added this:
We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.
Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:
The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…
Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.
Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?
When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

https://mronline.org/2021/08/26/john-pi ... countries/#
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 11:54 am

FROM ALLIES TO COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Carola Chavez

26 Aug 2021 , 4:11 pm .

Image
Afghan villagers collect their belongings after military clashes in Kunduz province, Afghanistan, on November 4, 2016 (Photo: Najim Rahim / CP

Twenty years ago all the news told us how terrible it was to be a woman in Afghanistan. Then I learned about the burqa, that cage suit that the evil Taliban imposed on women there. Burka, burka, burka burka, the word most pronounced by all means, almost more than the word Taliban. These women must be saved!

Another of the things with which the mass manipulation media shook us at that time was the destruction of cultural heritage of humanity at the hands of the savage Taliban. I remember seeing dozens of times the video of the destruction of two Buddhas carved in the living rock, ancient, gigantic, sitting on the foot of an Afghan mountain and watching history come and go until the Taliban mined them with explosives and made them explode, mutilating them, decapitating them, just as they did with people who crossed them. We must save the cultural heritage of humanity!

The Taliban were terrifying. Savages who attacked civilization. Terrorists who toppled the Twin Towers and who hide Bin Laden in the Afghan mountains. They have to be bombed!

All of us bombarded with propaganda first, yes. Such was the confusion produced by the media that there were so many, so many people in this western hemisphere, the civilized one, ours; that she felt relieved, her fear appeased by the terrible explosions, no longer of the Taliban blowing up millennial statues, but of NATO bombs blowing up Afghans, all malucos, all suspects ... until we saw the first child blown up.

Short Circuit: The Saviors were not saving everything beautifully, as they saved the world in the Hollywood movies that we swallow so many times. Private Ryan, so cute, so beautiful, tore a girl's burqa, not to free her but to gang-rape her, in broad daylight, on a Kabul street. Tom and Jimmy photographed everything while they waited for their turn to rape and be photographed.

Soldiers taking photos with corpses as if they were trophies. We saw mountains of little children turned into a lump of meat. We learned, they explained to us on the news, that they were not children, they were collateral damage. It is that the Maluku Taliban hid in a school, or in a hospital and well, they have to be killed by bombs ...

The gruesome daily account of the war faded from the news. The burqa was no longer talked about. Already Mullah Omar escaped on a donkey. Osama Bin Laden too, but it doesn't matter because it turns out that it was Saddam Hussein, look at what things, the maluco that toppled the Twin Towers and sponsors terrorism. What fear, what fear, they are coming for us! ... Bombshells!

We have seen the construction of wars live and direct, just as we have seen the violence, the destruction, the trail of chronic suffering that they leave behind. We have seen public opinion "soften" with fear. We have seen the world accept the hell of others in exchange for a terrifying threat that never existed is ended.

We have seen how societies callus and desensitize themselves. We have seen that fear from before does not scare, but the lie no longer matters, the world is how it is and cannot be changed. Overall, those wars go far. That they always go far away, where people don't look like us.


But they don't go far. For more than twenty years its cannons have been pointing at us with more and more self-confidence and insistence. It happens that Venezuela is on the map of wars that the gringas drew decades ago. It happens that some Venezuelans seem not to see it, even when we are an "unusual and extraordinary threat," even when we are "sponsors of terrorism," even when we are "human rights violators" and "a narco-state that threatens the stability of the region." according to the main sower of wars on the planet. They don't see it!

Venezuelans who chewed the entire catalog of war propaganda and swallowed it, becoming a blind instrument of their own destruction. Enter through Cúcuta, please. They could not, but hope was still reborn every time the White House assured them that all options were on the table. Amen, Amen Amen!

For twenty years we have peacefully extinguished the same war that Afghanistan could not extinguish. The same war that destroyed Iraq, Libya and destroys Syria. Twenty years seeing the hell that would touch us if we doubt, if we falter, if we fail.

Then the recent images of the one in Kabul, its runway full of desperate people trying to hang onto planes that took off without them. A crowd different from the Afghans that the usual media showed us. Their clothes were not the same. Their hairstyles too. There were no shaggy beards, no faded burqas. "Allies" the gringos used to say to them before throwing them out, turning them into collateral damage as well.

And from the Kabul airport I thought of the allies who went to La Carlota airport a couple of years ago with their American flags tied to our flag to receive the American invasion that was not. I remember his frustration and his defeat. I remember his renewed anger and then the long silence that was extinguished with the return to a life full of beautiful photos.

Since then something seems to have changed. Having suffered the undeniable effects of the blockade, feeling the fetid breath of war puffing so close, perhaps that truly dreadful fear made those who wanted us invaded to start loving each other and loving our country a little more.

Hopefully that's it. Hopefully they understood that the United States is not anyone's allies, that it does not save anyone, not even its own. And if they have not understood, there they. We will continue to defend peace so that none of them have to "save themselves" by hanging from the landing gear of a gringo war plane that is leaving and does not want to take it.

We will win!

https://misionverdad.com/opinion/de-ali ... olaterales

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply