Kabul – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Afghan Vignette 7: How to Buy Peace in Afghanistan

In the course of what is now called a counterinsurgency campaign by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, we have been told a lot about using aid, latching onto civilian non-governmental organizations (“civil military fusion“), “mixing fighting and food,” building clinics, undertaking development efforts to ensure jobs and “bring progress” to Afghan villagers in order […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Embedded With the Taliban

From CounterPunch, 03 Sept 2009: Ron Jacobs: Embedded With the Taliban Anand Gopal is a reporter based in Kabul who has reported from all parts of Afghanistan (the following are his statements in an interview with Ron Jacobs): I have some well-placed Taliban contacts and I was offered a chance to come out and see […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Afghanistan and the Emergence of the Taliban: Reviewed Works

A previous article on this site quoted sections of 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. The following is a review by M. Jamil Hanifi published in The Middle East Journal, with details of the history of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Demonstration Elections

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, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Glimpses of What the Mainstream Media Might Have Told Us About Afghanistan

Recently a debate broke out across blogs, think tanks, counterinsurgency advocates, and academics, concerning what is apparently the near total absence of any debate, any questioning, any discussion about why the U.S. (and by implication the rest of us in NATO) should remain in Afghanistan, even less so about why Afghanistan should have been invaded […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Afghanistan Scam and the American Path to Failure

Writer and photographer Ann Jones, who served as an aid worker in Afghanistan from 2002 t0 2006, has an article titled, “The Afghan Scam: The Untold Story of Why the U.S. Is Bound to Fail in Afghanistan,” published on 11 January, 2009, by TomDispatch. In that article, related to her book, Kabul in Winter, she […]