“The country is in a state of slow decline”, says… Jennifer Rowell, advocacy coordinator for CARE in Afghanistan, in the New York Times. The country’s reliance on foreign aid has made the situation dire and as security deteriorates it appears many programs will disappear. Relying on mercenaries to protect civilian work creates a whole range of…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
What the MSM isn’t telling us about the war in Afghanistan
My following book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: A journalist with access to a superpower’s military machine refuses to toe the line. “I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising,” independent American journalist Michael Hastings told… The Huffington Post… in 2010. ”My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m…
Desperation of prostitution in Kabul
Fascinating yet disturbing insight into a hidden world inside Afghanistan (via Channel 4): In a Kabul suburb we have come to a woman’s house. We’ll call her Habiba. She’s playing with her daughter on the carpet, a toddler. There’s a small but modern flatscreen TV in the corner. A house of several bedrooms.… In her headscarf…
Remind me how CIA forces in Afghanistan will help the Afghan people
Sorry what? If true (via Associated Press) this is the kind of insane idea that simply reinforces the belief across the Muslim world that Washington is determined to occupy Afghanistan indefinitely: Top Pentagon officials are considering putting elite special operations troops under CIA control in Afghanistan after 2014, just as they were during last year’s…
Why can’t we just stay in Afghanistan forever?
The last decade has seen an explosion in private security and intelligence companies making a killing in the “war on terror”. And now, with growing anger towards both mercenaries and the Western occupying forces that use them, this suggestion seems both delusional and symptomatic of the rot that imperial thinking guarantees: The chairman of the…
Please, Washington, keep those conflicts bubbling along for our bottom line
The “war on terror” has been a lovely earner for many Western corporations. For them, wars winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan could be bad for business. Here’s Walter Pincus in the Washington Post: The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command on Feb.… 1 approved a $330… million five-month extension on a five-year contract. That contract now…
Finally, in the NYT, acknowledgement that media leading us to war against Iran
Slow down there, eager journalists, hacks, politicians, Zionist lobby and think-tankers. An attack on Iran is clearly the war you’ve been dying for (since Iraq and Afghanistan worked out so well for you). This piece in the New York Times, a paper with a long history of backing America’s imperial wars, offers necessary caution: The…
How vulture capitalism in the “war on terror” really works
I’m on a number of global email lists that discuss privatised security post 9/11. This is from an anonymous retired navy captain: Somebody’s civilian friends or benefactors have always been making money on our wars. The funny twist is how the “military industrial complex” of years gone by has evolved into a “personnel support complex”…
America wants “human terrain” to whitewash occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
Years after 9/11, the US military believed that counter-insurgency meant learning about the countries you were invading and occupying. Sensible decision but nothing could alter the fact that America was conducting a brutal occupation of Muslim lands. Resistance rightly followed. “Human Terrain Systems” were employed – anthropologists, social scientists and others – to be the…
Mining in Afghanistan unlikely to bring stability to the nation
When the war in Afghanistan is truly over – ie. never – mineral exploitation is likely to bring further strife to the country. Western multinationals aiming to make a killing? Alas, yes, writes McClatchy: An Afghan-American company that failed to win a multibillion-dollar contract to develop one of Afghanistan’s most lucrative mines alleges that the…