A Reaper drone like the ones the British are using in Afghanistan. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images Nick Hopkins, defence and security correspondent guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 June 2012 13.00 BST The British military is increasingly relying on unmanned drones to wage war against the Taliban, and has fired more than 280 laser-guided Hellfire missiles and bombs at suspected insurgents, new [...]
NATO Summit Highlights Neo-con/neo-liberal Overlap More similar than different, both of America’s recent imperial ideologies have failed. By Paul Rosenberg June 02, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – San Pedro, CA - As the general election phase of the American presidential election gets underway, the recent NATO summit serves as a potent [...]
NATO Summit Highlights Neo-con/neo-liberal Overlap More similar than different, both of America’s recent imperial ideologies have failed. By Paul Rosenberg June 02, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – San Pedro, CA - As the general election phase of the American presidential election gets underway, the recent NATO summit serves as a potent [...]
US-Afghan Pact Won’t End War or Night Raids by Gareth Porter, May 03, 2012 Print This | Share This The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” [.pdf] agreement with Afghanistan and the memorandums of understanding (MOU) accompanying it emphasize transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war. [...]
Nick Turse, Memory Failure at the Pentagon Posted by Nick Turse at 8:50am, April 24, 2012. Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don’t list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang [...]
Dec. 19, 2001 — Marine Lt. Ronald Reed of Virginia waits inside his fighting position on the perimeter of the bombed-out airport in Kandahar. More than eleven years later, an end to the disaster that is the US war in Afghanistan is nowhere in sight. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times) Drip, Drip, Drip: [...]
Still killed and killing in the lost Afghanistan War By Lindsey German Stop the War Coalition Afghans for Peace say end the war now April 20, 2012 – Has anyone told the media that the NATO forces are losing the war in Afghanistan? The capital city, Kabul, supposedly the safest place in the country was faced [...]
Is Peace Getting in the Way of Our War Plans? By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/peace-getting-way-our-war-plans What a bizarre circumstance this is. The irrational Iranians are behaving too reasonably. The unmovable Iranians seem to be compromising too readily. This past weekend, the United States and other major nations finally spoke with Iran. In [...]
Afghan police on patrol after the Taliban‘s co-ordinated assault in Kabul, Nangarhar, Logar and Paktia provinces. Photograph: Pajhwok Afghan News/Demotix/Corbis Afghanistan: an illusion exposed Taliban attacks on Kabul are further proof that the west’s vision for Afghanistan was a fantasy link to article http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/16/afghanistan-western-naivety-kabul-attacks For months after the allied invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, there were no Taliban [...]
David Petraeus, A Threat to CIA Analysis Thursday, 28 April 2011 09:35By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed The news that President Barack Obama has picked Gen. David Petraeus to be CIA director raises troubling questions, including whether the commander most associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tolerate objective [...]
Dilip Hiro, How to Trump a Superpower Posted by Dilip Hiro at 9:03am, April 17, 2012. Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers, yet it’s remarkable how little — beyond a few obvious, sensational events – they [...]
We thank you for your love and your hands and feet, in organizing for the upcoming Chicago protests! Protesting NATO in Chicago will be too Late for Afghanistan by Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers Dear friends of ordinary 99 percent Afghans, In these killing days, we in Afghanistan do not expect the interests of people to triumph [...]
All the present rumblings coming from politicians in Canberra about our great friends the US and what we do about China is at the least stupid and at the worst downright cowardice on a massive parliamentary scale. The real issue is “why can’t we get on with our own neighbours free from [...]
GETTY IMAGES 4 MONTHS AGONEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 02: Members of the New York City chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and dozens of other uniformed veterans known as ‘Veterans of the 99%’ prepare to march from VietnamVeterans Plaza to Zucotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street movement is centered on November 2, 2011 in New York City. The [...]
Costs of a policy of profligacy with foreign lives By HIROAKI SATO NEW YORK — In the early hours of March 11, Sunday, a U.S. soldier went on a rampage in a village in Panjway, southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan. He went from one mud house to another, shot, stabbed, and burned 16 [...]
The war was presented as a ‘good war’. (Zoriah.net) By Ramzy Baroud The Afghans are a proud people with a long and formidable history of resistance to foreign occupation. The fact that they have always prevailed, however, should not distract from the horror they still routinely experience. The latest atrocious episode against Afghans took place [...]
Terror, Trauma and the Endless Afghan War Posted on Mar 14, 2012 By Amy Goodman We may never know what drove a U.S. Army staff sergeant to head out into the Afghan night and allegedly murder at least 16 civilians in their homes, among them nine children and three women. The massacre [...]
War in Afghanistan Is Mutiny by a Different Name The troops are protesting “by any other means” their entrapment in a no-win landscape where Washington politicians keep a war going beyond the limit of sanity. March 13, 2012 | “Any person who…with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other [...]
Afghan villagers during a prayer ceremony for victims of Sunday’s killing of civilians, apparently by a lone US soldier, in Panjwai. Photograph: Allauddin Khan/AP Massacres and civilian deaths are a necessary part of war if you are military leader or imperialist hegemon. By killing in what is made to look like at least unlucky circumstances, [...]
1. During the Cold War, NATO defended Western Europe from Soviet attack. Although military spending during this era was comparably extravagant on both sides, we should remember that, because the Soviet Union controlled a substantially smaller share of the global economy, its annual military budget eventually reached almost 25% of its [...]
The situation in Afghanistan is a nightmare. The surge has not worked. As we escalated the war, the insurgency fought harder and grew in numbers. Western troops are seen as foreign occupiers in the Afghan homeland, and now have murdered 16 civilians, including little children, in the middle of the night in Kandahar [...]
Kandahar ‘killing-spree’ militarism: A call for U.S. and Afghan citizens to question the U.S./Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement By davidswanson - Posted on 13 March 2012 By the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers question the presumption that the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan is necessary for American or Afghan peace. Tragedies [...]
Americans to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan by George Zornick The talk of Washington this morning is a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing strong disapproval of President Obama’s handling of the economy, which appears to be tied to increasing gas prices. His overall favorability has decreased to 46 percent, from 50 percent one month ago, and he’s [...]
Army Suicides Up 80 Percent Since Invasion of Iraq Rates of suicide have increased even more under Obama by John Glaser, March 08, 2012 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum The number of suicides in the U.S. Army rose by 80 percent after the United States launched the war on Iraq, according to [...]
WASHINGTON – 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 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, sources told The Associated Press. The plan is one of several possible scenarios being debated by Pentagon staffers. [...]
Current negotiations are excluding Afghans: Is it time for an Afghan national referendum? http://warisacrime.org/content/current-negotiations-are-excluding-afghans-it-time-afghan-national-referendum By the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers The people of the world are questioning the lazy and fearful presumption that a few human beings are better than the vast majority; why should the 1% unjustly hoard unequal Wealth, Power [...]
Not a Peep About the President’s Praise for War Laura Flanders on January 25, 2012 – 11:54pm ET The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire [...]
Police and cleanup crews remove items from the anti-war protest camp in Parliament Square [Daniel Deme/EPA] Police in the UK have cleared a decade-old protest camp in central London that was first established to oppose the war in Afghanistan in 2001. Two people were arrested during Monday’s raid at the protest site, located in Parliament Square [...]
Why Do We Ignore the Civilians We Kill in US Wars? By John Tirman January 10, 2012 “WP” – January 06, 2012 - As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill [...]
The Forgotten Wages of War By JOHN TIRMAN This is a fairly conservative look at the real cost of war. It proceeds on the assumption that we all need an accurate kill number to properly asses the true damage of ear. However, what is really needed is no killing, no war at all together [...]
Obama Glad He’s Killing Lots of People But Prefers Not to Know Too Much About Who They Are By davidswanson - Posted on 30 December 2011 From The Atlantic: The enormous expansion of drone operations has been a success in the narrowest sense of killing some bad guys. But it has come at [...]
US Refuses Karzai’s Latest Plea to End Deadly Night Raids Despite denials and false statistics from US-NATO, night raids kill thousands of civilians by John Glaser, December 19, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum The U.S. and NATO have refused to put an end to night raids on Afghan homes, despite repeated [...]
With more American troops on the ground, and to avoid the perils of ground transportation, the military is more frequently using cargo planes to deliver supplies. But as WSJ‘s Nathan Hodge reports, the cost is putting a strain on military budgets. OVER EASTERN AFGHANISTAN—Parachuting a barrel of fuel to a remote Afghan base [...]
Casualties in Afghanistan Soar in Last Two Years Most of the American and Afghan killed wounded have occurred after Obama’s surge strategy, with little to show for it by John Glaser, December 03, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum In over a decade of war in Afghanistan, about half of all Americans killed in action [...]
Who Are the Dudes and the Vipers, and Why Are They Bombing the Afghans? U.S. Air Force continues bombing Afghanistan, civilian toll remains unknown. December 1, 2011 | Photo Credit: USAF/DoD/Asha Kin LIKE THIS ARTICLE ? Join our mailing list: Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email. Last month, [...]
The Senate and the Afghanistan War By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/senate-and-afghanistan-war The Senate just voted against the Afghanistan war. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. THE GOOD The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted by voice vote to pass an amendment that concludes thus: “Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that— 1) [...]
Death on the Durand Line PAUL PILLAR |More Paul R. Pillar | November 27, 2011 The incident on Saturday in which NATO airstrikes killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers at border outposts was an accident waiting to happen. In fact, similar accidents had already happened along the Afghan-Pakistani border, although with smaller death tolls. This most [...]
Protesters in Karachi burn an effigy representing America. Photograph: Rehan Khan/EPA Pakistan has had enough The assumption that it has no choice but to obey America may turn out to be a dire strategic error reddit this Comments (372) Simon Tisdall guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 November 2011 20.35 GMT Article history Readers of Dawn newspaper, commenting online, were [...]
The funeral of the 24 Pakistani soldiers. The war of words between the US and Pakistan reveals a low level of trust. Photograph: Arshad Arbab/EPA Pakistan and US wage a war of words over Afghan border post deaths Islamabad and Washington trade claim and counter-claim over deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers in Nato air strike [...]
Would Obama Declare 3 Days of Peace to Pay for Food for Starving Afghans? By Ralph Lopez - Posted on 26 November 2011 The most little-understood fact of war, in my opinion, is the sheer, mind-boggling, nearly incomprehensible magnitude of the money which is spent on a daily basis to keep the occupation and boom-and-zoom operations going. Former General [...]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan – When people read a news website, they don’t usually imagine that it is being run by a major producer of fighter jets and smart bombs. But when the Pentagon has its own vision of America‘s foreign policy, and the funds to promote it, it can put a $23 billion defense contractor in [...]
Illustration by Henning Wagenbreth By ALEXANDER STAR Published: November 18, 2011 RECOMMEND TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL PRINT REPRINTS SHARE Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the United States military has [...]
US Generals Vow to Resist Speeding Afghan Drawdown Claim Any Cuts Would Be for ‘Political Gain’ by Jason Ditz, November 20, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum Reports say that a number of top US generals have made it clear in “private conversations” that they [...]
Uzbekistan and Obama’s Indictable Commitment to Tyranny John Glaser, October 26, 2011 Print This | Share This | Comment | Antiwar Forum It’s amazing to see the roundabout justifications in the media regarding the Obama administration’s increasingly close relationship with Uzbekistan and its monstrous dictator Islam Karimov. As I’ve written previously, the Uzbek government is one [...]
3 Things That Must Happen for Us To Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy Transforming the United States into something closer to a democracy requires: 1) knowledge of how we are getting screwed; 2) pragmatic tactics, strategies, and solutions; and 3) the “energy to do battle.” The majority of Americans oppose the corporatocracy (rule by giant [...]
US Deaths in Afghanistan: Obama Doubles Entire Bush-Era Total Figures Show Overwhelming Increase in Military Casualties by Jason Ditz, October 17, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum A grim new milestone was reached in the US occupation of Afghanistan this week, as the death toll in less than three years under President Obama has [...]
Why Did the United States Invade Afghanistan? by Tim Kelly, October 12, 2012 The tenth anniversary of the U.S. led war in Afghanistan came and went with very little attention from the mainstream media. U.S. policymakers are nevertheless confronted with many questions regarding that conflict, such as its affordability, the effectiveness of various strategies, and [...]
We stand in solidarity with Afghanistan and its proud people. (Zoriah.net) By Ramzy Baroud On July 1 2002, US planes bombed an Afghan wedding in the small village of Deh Rawud. Located to the north of Kandahar, the village seemed fortified by the region’s many mountains. For a few hours its people thought they were [...]
Ten years ago, the U.S. launched a war against Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. This past weekend, activists from Occupy DC, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Peace Action, and many more came together to remember that day. We also remembered the first mobilization of our then-new anti-war movement, a New York [...]
So-Called Changes in Afghan War Strategy Denote More of the Same A shift from country-wide military occupation to targeted special ops strategy could justify another decade of war in Afghanistan by John Glaser, October 08, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum Even as the Obama administration promises to end the Afghan war in 2014, [...]
