ISSN 2562-9948
Speaking of cowards and animals, not to mention “terrorists,” NATO has just delivered a mighty blow to its much vaunted claims to be “protecting civilians” and winning “hearts and minds,” by burning alive as many as 90 of these hearts and minds in an air strike that took place within the past 12 hours. Faced […]
Read More…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 […]
Read More…Major Martin O’Donnell is a spokesman for NATO, a “media operations officer” in Afghanistan, who posted the following item on his Twitter page: “Once again they’ve killed children, women, innocent #Afghans. They are not human. They are animal,” said police chief http://tiny.cc/58DCV They are not his words, as it states, and they come from a […]
Read More…[The first in our series of very short posts featuring various imperial ironies.] There is never enough adventure in some foreign war zones. Not like in Iraq, shit, those guys were hard core. I mean, what are the chances of getting your ass blown off in a good old fashioned firefight in Afghanistan? None. The […]
Read More…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 […]
Read More…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…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…▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼ 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…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…This post was previously published as a comment by M. Jamil Hanifi, Open Anthropology’s new blogger. While we work out bugs with Jamil’s access, I am republishing his comment as a post. It first appeared in connection with the article, “In Afghanistan It’s Now All About the Little Girls“. M. Jamil Hanifi 15 August 2009 […]
Read More…“Tactics or Strategy?“ is an article by Francis J. “Bing” West (referred to me by a correspondent in Twitter — apologies for not noting the name for the appropriate thanks). In that piece, West makes a series of critical points that deserve wider, and focused, attention. The first point he makes is that there is […]
Read More…Reading like a classic scene replayed from the vast literature on colonial history, this gem: In the southern province of Helmand, U.S. Marines have been trying to secure the strategic town of Dahaneh to cut Taliban supply lines and enable the government to open a polling station there. After two days of fighting, Marines helped […]
Read More…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 […]
Read More…Women and Children First Here is U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, writing on his Twitter page: helped open a school in the Panjshir Valley yesterday. built by Greg Mortenson. smiles on those young faces said it all! power of education (15 July 2009) And then some more tweets about […]
Read More…The following article has been submitted for reproduction on this blog by the author. The author is thanked for making this work openly accessible and for contributing to this project’s strong concern for the continued war of occupation of Afghanistan. Engineering Division, Instability, and Regime Change with Naheed, Neda, and Allah M. JAMIL HANIFI American […]
Read More…