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John Pilger: Afghanistan, the great game of smashing countries
In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?” – John Pilger
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As Kabul is retaken, papers look back in Erasure
Corporate media coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s U.S.-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination.
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Imperialism and its discontents
On the night of 14 August 1791, enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the 230th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people.
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Create two, three, many Saigons. That is the watchword: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2021)
On Sunday, 15 August, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces.
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“Revelations of Carter’s Former Advisor : ‘Yes, the CIA entered Afghanistan before the Russians…’” (1998)
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
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Make no mistake, the U.S. military will continue to thrive after Afghanistan
There are too many careers and too much money tied to American power projection. So expect it to shift, not recede from the stage.
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U.S. defeat in Afghanistan—A contrast with the Soviet experience
The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.
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Geopolitics, profit, and poppies: how the CIA turned Afghanistan into a failed narco-state
The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.
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U.S. defeat in Afghanistan—A contrast with the Soviet experience
As`ad AbuKhalil says Western media never regarded the U.S. involvement for what it really was.
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United States withdraws from Afghanistan? Not really
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was criminal. It was criminal because of the immense force used to demolish Afghanistan’s physical infrastructure and to break open its social bonds.
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Almost everything Biden said about ending the Afghanistan War was a lie
While Americans hailed the announcement that the U.S. would withdraw troops from Afghanistan after nearly two decades of war, President Biden left out the most important details about the war and how it will in fact continue.
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In Afghanistan, American Troops patrol the same routes their fathers did
Thousands of U.S. soldiers continue to pace and patrol exactly the same routes as their predecessors did in 2001, fighting a seemingly endless conflict that both the American and Afghan public have long since soured on.
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U.S. sanctions ICC prosecutor for investigating its troops
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the announcement in response to an investigation on U.S. military crimes in Afghanistan.
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Don’t threaten Afghans—it will be counterproductive
The principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs (SCA) in the U.S. State Department, Alice Wells, dropped a bombshell on the Afghan government and the country’s political elites on April 4—and caught the international donors by surprise, too—by linking all aid to Afghanistan to the formation of an inclusive government in Kabul.
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Has America reached its endgame in Afghanistan?
In an extraordinary statement titled “On the Political Impasse in Afghanistan,” Washington has admitted to the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s mission to Kabul on March 23, which was taken up to heal the political rift among Afghan politicians and to urge them to form an inclusive government so as to implement the peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29.
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The prospect of peace in Afghanistan is real—and Pakistan is the key player
The U.S.-Taliban peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29 must be put in proper perspective. Indeed, there can’t be two opinions that the curtain is coming down on what U.S. President Donald Trump called the “endless war” in which America squandered away over a trillion dollars and lost thousands of lives with no victory in sight. Equally, without a doubt, this is the finest hour of Pakistan’s statecraft since the country’s creation in 1947.
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Is the World about to witness the end of the war in Afghanistan?
Neither the Indian political leadership nor the “deep state” seems to grasp that the geopolitics of the South Asian region is transforming with far-reaching consequences.
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Defender and spearheads
Troop movements today promise anything but peace. Every two years military maneuvers encircle Russian borders; every nine months a new brigade of 4500 U.S. soldiers was flown over to “gain experience”. This year it will be a division of 20,000, joined by soldiers from 18 countries, 37,000 in all.
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WaPo’s Afghan papers propagate colonial narrative of noble intentions gone awry
In an earlier article (FAIR.org, 12/18/19) regarding the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19), I discussed how the Post’s exposé also exposed the Post as one of the primary vehicles U.S. officials use to spread their lies, and why it’s impossible for corporate media outlets like the Post to raise more substantive questions about the deceptive nature of U.S. foreign policy.
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How to commit war crimes—and get away with it
U.S. President Donald Trump sacked his Navy secretary on Twitter because he did not follow Trump’s advice and retain Navy Special Warfare Operator Edward Gallagher, despite Gallagher being accused of stabbing to death a wounded fighter, of murdering a schoolgirl and an elderly man, and then of obstructing justice.