Voting is now over for this year’s national elections in Afghanistan. To cover the voting, and the run up to the election, I have collected a list of media reports focused on Afghanistan’s 2009 election, along with relevant extracts from most of the items. Please see: Afghanistan Elections 2009 In addition, at different points during… [Read more…]
August 20, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
The concept of “demonstration election” is a useful one for describing the elections staged by the U.S. occupation regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a much longer history of practice in Latin America and the Caribbean. The concept came into usage with the publication in 1984 of Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic,… [Read more…]
August 18, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼ Horror and moral terror are your friends. The genius, the will, and the strength. The total revulsion, the total repulsion, the ability to sacrifice one’s own flesh and blood. These are not monsters. They fight with their hearts. They are filled with love. Moral. Primordial. Without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us. No… [Read more…]
August 18, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
Reading Ahmed Rashid’s TALIBAN: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), a partial copy of which is available here, at least a couple of questions I had were addressed early on in the book. This post is meant to complement an earlier one, “Glimpses of What the Mainstream… [Read more…]
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August 20, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
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