19 April 2013 — New Left Project
Nagieb Khaja, a well-known journalist and filmmaker in Denmark, has travelled extensively in Afghanistan since 2004. In 2008 he was kidnapped by the Taliban. His new documentary ’My Afghanistan – life in the forbidden zone’ provides civilians in Helmand province with camera phones, thus giving a voice to those normally ignored by the Western media. Continue reading
12 March 2012 — Veterans Today
Sixteen Dead, Nameless “Lone Gunman,” We Have Heard It All Before
The village is Balandi, outside Kandahar in Afghanistan. Thus far the dead are 16, shot in their homes, not just said to be “women and children” but actually infants murdered in their mother’s arms and set afire.
The US claims the perpetrator to be an unnamed “Army Staff Sergeant who has turned himself in.” There are inconsistencies.
12 March, 2012 — RT
An elderly Afghan man sits next to the covered bodies of people who were killed by coalition forces in Kandahar province, March 11, 2012 (Reuters / Ahmad Nadeem)
Russia is calling for the punishment of those responsible for the for the cold-blooded murder of 17 Afghan civilians, including nine children, and that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) prevents similar acts of violence in the future.
“We hope that the culprits will be punished and that the multinational troops’ command will take effective steps to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents in the future,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, said in a statement on Monday.
A US soldier on Sunday apparently left his base in Kandahar‘s Panjwaii district, southern Afghanistan, and went on a shooting rampage at a nearby village, entering three homes at random and shooting the occupants inside.
According to Western media, the soldier in custody is a staff sergeant from the state of Washington who is married with three children. He had reportedly served three tours in Iraq, and was on his first deployment in Afghanistan. US officials say the soldier turned himself in at his base shortly after the incident.
30 September 2011 — Stop NATO
28 August 2011 — Stop NATO
7 June 2011 — Stop NATO
3 June 2011 — Stop NATO
3 February, 2010 — ericwalberg.com
The plan voiced at the London Afghanistan conference to pay off the Taliban is belied by the plan at the Brussels NATO conference two days earlier to bomb them into submission, notes Eric Walberg
London has been the venue of a three-ring Middle East circus over the past month. There is the ongoing Chilcot inquiry into the (il)legality of British participation in the invasion of Iraq. Two of the five committee members are Jewish — Sir Martin Gilbert a militant Zionist, and Sir Lawrence Freedman the drafter of Blair’s invasion policy. Despite the deck being stacked, witness after witness has testified the invasion was illegal, and former British prime minister Tony Blair was booed after telling the inquiry he has no regrets.
Then there was an impromptu conference on “saving” Yemen, which the five major Yemeni opposition parties denounced as “intended to save the political regime in Yemen.” Yemen is described by a British official as “Afghanistan with a sea”.
Just as farcical was last week’s summit on Afghanistan, called to “move the international effort forward in key areas of security, governance, development, and regional support.” In reality, it was a cosmetic follow-up to the war council held two days earlier at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the NATO Military Committee met, bringing together the chiefs of defence of all 28 member states along with 35 “partners”, wannabes and observers — an astounding 63 nations.
6 November, 2009
“The US does not need a final victory over the Talibs. Despite their widely advertized ferocious conflict, the US and the Talibs manage to coexist quite successfully in Afghanistan…” — Andrei KONUROV, US Objectives in Afghanistan [1]
Come on folks, it’s just good sense, there is no way the Empire can actually win the war in Afghanistan. As I have stated before it’s not about ‘winning’ but occupation. Afghanistan is basically a stepping stone on the way to some place else and leaving an oil pipeline behind with a friendly government in place to protect it. Ah, but the best laid plans of mice and men etc…
28 October, 2009 — Stop NATO
The century’s longest war continues to rage in South Asia with no sign of abating. Instead, the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 has exploded into endless armed hostilities that have spread across the length and breadth of the nation, with U.S. and NATO military forces fighting an intensified counterinsurgency conflict in the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan, now paralleled by equally brutal and even larger-scale combat operations in neighboring Pakistan.
With over 100,000 Western troops and rumors of perhaps a doubling of that number in the works, and with Washington spending billions of dollars in expanding bases to accommodate those reinforcements, the Afghanistan-Pakistan campaign under the direction of U.S. and NATO military commander General Stanley McChrystal and Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke portends yet greater violence, bloodshed and imperiling of regional stability.
The U.S. lost 22 personnel on October 26-27, making this month Washington’s costliest ever in the deadliest year of a war that is now in its ninth calendar year.
The White House and Pentagon have also extended lethal drone missile attacks inside Pakistan, where they are nearly daily occurrences, and will soon deploy Marines to the nation’s capital in a massively revamped U.S. embassy and army trainers to the Iranian border, “the first foreign forces formally stationed in Baluchistan since Pakistan’s independence in 1947.” [1]
Several million civilians have been uprooted and displaced by Western and Pakistani air and ground attacks.
In addition to being the lengthiest and biggest war in the world, the U.S. and NATO Afghan campaign is the first armed conflict in this young millennium with an international dimension. In fact its global scope in some aspects is grander than those of the two world wars of the first half of the last century.
12 October, 2009 — Global Research – Stop NATO
On October 7 the United States’ and NATO’s war in Afghanistan entered its ninth year. The escalating conflict has over the past year become indistinguishable from military operations in neighboring Pakistan where the U.S. and NATO have tripled deadly drone missile attacks and the Pakistani army has launched large-scale offensives that have displaced over 3 million civilians in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, with the province of Baluchistan the next battle zone.
On September 29 the U.S. conducted four drone attacks in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency in twenty four hours and during the past year has fired over 60 missiles into the area causing more than 550 deaths.
Three days later the Pentagon announced 72 more American military deaths in the fifteen-nation Operation Enduring Freedom, Greater Afghan War theater – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay Naval Base), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen – bringing the official total to 774.
The U.S. Department of Defense and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) acknowledge that so far this year 406 foreign soldiers have been killed, the bulk of which, 240, are American.
On the eight anniversary of the beginning of the war, however, an authoritative Russian news source estimated that overall “The United States has…lost 1,500 servicemen, while its allies have lost several hundred.” [1]
American and NATO military deaths this year are the highest since the war commenced and are steadily rising. 2009 has also brought the largest amount of Afghan civilian deaths of the war.
24 September, 2009 — Stop NATO
Over the past week U.S. newspapers and television networks have been abuzz with reports that Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year.
The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.
Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of ‘perhaps as many as 45,000.’
The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America’s obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan’s history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced.
An additional 45,000 troops would bring the U.S. total to 113,000. There are also 35,000 troops from some 50 other nations serving under NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the nation, which would raise combined troop strength under McChrystal’s command to 148,000 if the larger number of rumored increases materializes.
As the former Soviet Union withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan twenty years ago the New York Times reported ‘At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed.’ [1]
Nearly 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would represent the largest foreign military presence ever in the land.
4 September, 2009 — Global Research
On August 21 the chief of the U.S. Marine Corps, General James Conway, arrived in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to begin the training of his host country’s military for deployment to the Afghan war theater under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
“During the meeting the sides discussed a broad spectrum of Georgian-U.S bilateral relations and the situation in Georgia’s occupied territory.”[1] Occupied territory(ies) meant Abkhazia and South Ossetia, now independent nations with Russian troops stationed in both.
Conway met with Georgian Defense Minister Davit (Vasil) Sikharulidze, who on the same day gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he said that the training provided by the U.S. Marine Corps could be employed, in addition to counterinsurgency operations in South Asia, in his country’s “very difficult security environment.”
Associated Press reported that “Asked if he was referring to the possibility of another war with Russia, he said, ‘In general, yes.'”
The Georgian defense chief added, “This experience will be important for the Georgian armed forces itself — for the level of training.”[2]
Sikharulidze was forced to retract his comments within hours of their utterance, and not because they weren’t true but because they were all too accurate. The Pentagon was not eager to have this cat be let out of the bag.
Three days later American military instructors arrived in Georgia on the heels of the visit of Marine Commandant Conway, whose previous campaigns included the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the first assault on Fallujah in that nation in 2004.
11 May, 2009 – MRZine – Monthly Review
‘I also made it clear that the United States will work with our Afghan and international partners to make every effort to avoid civilian casualties as we help the Afghan government combat our common enemy,’ US President Barack Obama promised. He received his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari at the White House on Wednesday, the same day when the police chief of the Farah province, in southern Afghanistan, said the US Air Force’s airstrike on the village of Bala Buluk on Monday, to free the Afghan troops attacked by guerrillas, had resulted in more than a hundred victims, mostly civilians. As usual, investigations were launched by US and Afghan authorities, as well as by UN representatives.
This kind of ‘blunder’ — which the militaries prefer to dress up in a more technical term ‘collateral damage’ — is common in Afghanistan, especially on the part of the US Air Force, known for its ‘robust’ rules of engagement. According to the United Nations, 2,118 civilians were killed by violence in Afghanistan in 2008, the most deadly year for the people of Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 — an increase of almost 40% over 2007. The UN Assistance Mission in Kabul (UNAM) regularly draws up a precise assessment of civilian casualties.
7 April, 2009
NATO jubilee summit is over. The world leaders and prime ministers, who gathered in Strasbourg and Kehl, welcomed Albania and Croatia as new members of the alliance and agreed to establish a NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan within ISAF to oversee higher level training for the Afghan National Army, and training and ring for the Afghan National Police. Apart from this, the allies agreed to resume formal meetings of the NATO-Russia Council despite ‘the remaining differences’. Though Turkey was opposed to it, the participants of the summit managed to maintain visibility of reunion and elect the Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance’s new chief.
The NATO summit took place after the G20 leaders had met in London to discuss measures to fight the global financial crisis which still is far from over. After all jubilee celebrations were completed, the U.S. and the EU started negotiations focusing on economy issues. That is why such remarkable military and political event was held between the two economic forums (probably, not to bother Barack Obama to fly overseas once again).
The New Dark Age 