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Showing posts with the label afghanistan

Britain: Grant Shapps and Britain’s ‘Imperial Delusions”

“Any supposed peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, always more talked about than experienced by voters in the UK, was now over, Shapps argued. We are not in a ‘post-war world’ but a ‘pre-war world’, the defence secretary told his listeners.”  “In a phrase worthy of Dr Strangelove, he said that we cannot assume that ‘the strategy of mutually assured destruction that stopped wars in the past will stop them in the future’. “The majority of its [Britain’s] citizens have had more sense than to approve the imperial follies of the post-Cold War hot wars.”  I am not sure about that. Rees must provide evidence. John Rees is from the Socialist Workers Party. Publishing on the Middle East Eye means Rees and MEE have to replace the term imperialist with ‘imperial’ and neocolonial power with ‘post-colonial power’ .

One of the Liberal Delusions

Against amnesia “Consider the rhetoric in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The swagger and liberal triumphalism. The arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. The world is flat. Market-driven globalisation is inevitable. No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other. Economic liberalisation will lead to political liberalisation. The kaleidoscope has been shaken and now is the time to reorder the world.” Note though that when writing about the ‘Iraq war’, Jason Cowley is ‘Western centric’. He is more concerned with his compatriots killed in an ‘unjust’ war .

Britain: Locked Away Evidenced of SAS Executions in Afghanistan

SAS soldiers claimed to have executed handcuffed detainees in Afghanistan Related Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice] How a British raid went wrong Source: thetimes.co.uk

For a Century, American Way of War Has Meant Killing Civilians

Indiscriminate airstrikes have been a U.S. hallmark from the “banana wars” to the forever wars. Related Legacy of Violence My Lai 1968 Source: britannica.com

‘America Needs to Break Its Addiction to Global Intervention’

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative critical of American ‘foreign policy’/imperialism. Note the absence of the political economic factors of the US involvement in supporting Ukraine. In fact, not a single economic factor is mentioned, which – even when the reader doesn’t believe in “democracy vs. autocracy” or “rules of internal order” rhetoric as Bacevich correctly highlights – is left wondering about the reasons of American involvement in the war.  Furthermore, he is treating the involvement as exclusively directed against Russia, excluding the main threat for Washington’s imperialist hegemony – China . “ In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary,” Bacevich states. It is a narrow way of looking at the global geopolitics. There is no reference either to the domestic social factors in the US in influencing the state’s decisions in going to war. Quoting a critic of Bacevich, there has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constitu

Afghanistan, Hollywood and Representation

“It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience.” State terrorism is represented as a victim or a hero.  Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.” “Most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues ab

Harry the Goody

Killed only 25. What a mediocrity! A medieval prince would have killed a much higher number of ‘baddies’. Wasted tax payers money by the MoD. The British Army had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well” "We'd been given a meta-narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims ," he writes. With his tour in Iraq prematurely over, Harry turned to the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol, particularly Southern Comfort and sambuca, to deal "with unsorted anger, and guilt about not being at war - not leading my lads". Harry recalls telling his commander that unless he was sent back to a conflict area, he would "have to quit the army". Harry recalls wanting to use an almost one-tonne bomb on his first attempted air strike on a suspected Taliban position, which even his American counterparts saw as too much, something he jokingly thought as "very un-American".

Conversation on Knowledge Production on Afghanistan and the Left

“ There are too many whose idea of ‘critical’ is limited to saying some development was problematic but some was quite good, if only there had been more of that ‘good’ development. The most stunning imperial formation was that the War in Afghanistan was unquestionable–whether as an act of revenge and/or care (for Afghan women). The friend/enemy distinction has been marked on to women’s bodies playing out in a fundamentalist logic of either supporting education or not supporting education, supporting the Taliban or condemning them. The Kite Runner  made everyone feel they knew Afghanistan. Like white people who watched the TV serial  The Wire  that came out about the same time as the beginning of the US war and occupation of Afghanistan.  Suddenly white liberals felt they knew the deep struggles of racialized people in Baltimore, and elsewhere, because they watched  The Wire , and liked the character Omar. The critique was only of the withdrawal, not of the war, as if to believe that th

Is There Any Honour in War?

“Despite  being funded  in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).” This is a liberal nationalist view of a former American military professor and Air Force officer. All his emphasis on ‘lies’ by the military and the propaganda of war without mentioning what he calls the ‘truth’ is keeps the reader wondering, bewildered perhaps. Not a single mention of the political economy of war , especially of the nature and functioning of American capital. You just get the impression that a few liars at the top cause wars as if politicians, strategists of empire, ruling classes, advisors, etc think and work outside a socio-political frame work of power structure and power relations domestically and internationally. There is a mention of ‘honour’ and the hu

Highlighting Ugly Truths

A good summary. “There is no contradiction between standing with the people of Ukraine and against Russia’s heinous invasion and being honest about the hypocrisy, war crimes, and militarism of the U.S. and NATO. We have an undeniable moral responsibility to prioritize holding our own government accountable for its crimes because they are being done in our names and with our tax dollars. That does not mean we should be silent in the face of the crimes of Russia or other nations, but we do bear a specific responsibility for the acts of war committed by our own nations.” On hypocrisy: “ How many of the people with Ukrainian flag avatars on their Twitter profiles have spent days or weeks pleading for the world to stand up for ordinary Yemenis living under the hell of American bombs and Saudi warplanes? The same question applies in the case of the Palestinians who live under an  apartheid state  imposed by Israel and backed up by a sustained campaign of annihilation  supported  and  encoura

Afghanistan: Humanitarian Catastrophe

“The UN has forecast that Afghanistan’s gross domestic product will contract 20 per cent within a year following the Taliban’s takeover of the country, representing one of the worst economic meltdowns in history. Such a contraction took five years of civil war in Syria to achieve, and was expected to worsen to 30 per cent next year. The UNDP said aid accounted for as much as 80 per cent of budget expenditure. The UNDP estimates that the loss of female employment could cost up to $1bn, or 5 per cent, of GDP, and slash productivity.” Source: the Financial  Times

Afghanistan: Isis-K vs. Taliban

A déjà-vu? Many Afghans, and some foreign analysts, believe Isis-K is being supported by foreign forces, such as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI wants leverage to persuade the Taliban to co-operate in suppressing Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a jihadist insurgency that has targeted the Pakistan government. Others suspect US intelligence agencies, anti-Taliban warlords and even former members of the Afghan army of collaborating with Isis-K. “We know there are intelligence agencies and networks supporting Isis-K to challenge and create problems for the Taliban government,” Haqpal said. In India, government and intelligence officials have suggested that inter-Taliban rivalry — between the Haqqani network and a powerful Kandahar faction led by Mullah Baradar, the deputy prime minister — is stoking the violence. “There is clear factionalism in the Taliban,” an Indian intelligence source said. “It is possible that one faction is supporting the Isis-K to wipe out the dominance o

Brown University’s Account of the ‘War on Terror’

“ The Costs of War Project is analytically conservative. Unlike several nongovernmental surveys over the years, it does not conduct epidemiological studies to determine the true lethality of the war – such as deaths from war-shattered public health systems, lack of access to clean water, war-prompted displacement, and other indirect but real consequences of conflict. Instead, the project only counts  direct  death. The authors acknowledge the shortcomings of this approach.” Over 900,000 People Dead, a ‘Vast Undercount,’ and $8 Trillion Looted 

Afghanistan, the World, Mass Poverty