After 20 years, occupation has failed Afghanistan – but our struggle for freedom continues
Twenty years after the U.S. launched their invasion and war, the people of my long-suffering country are right back where we started. After trillions of dollars spent, and hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the Taliban flag is once again flying over Afghanistan.
As the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s Parliament back in 2005, my experience reflects the failure of the U.S. and NATO war — a policy that used women’s rights as a pretext for occupation but only managed to empower the most corrupt forces in our society.
I survived several assassination attempts because I spoke out and condemned the presence of warlords and criminals in the Afghan government installed by the U.S. occupation. Then I was kicked out of Parliament entirely and forced to live an underground existence.
We will never forget ... what?
The tsunami of U.S. coverage of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, almost completely through the lens of people killed in the U.S. or in fighting "for" the U.S., needs to be answered with the force of our understanding and commitment. Buried beneath the rubble of America-first jingoism, historians, thinkers and activists contributed much this week. Rather than summarize, we are sharing links to what really got our attention:
Nazia Kazi, the anthropologist who wrote ..., produced a snappy graphic story published on The Nib last week, What We Forget, with Anuj Shrestha.
United Nations on Genocide in the U.S.
Tom Keough, a NYC World Can't Wait supporter, continues to follow the United Nations' position on genocide in this country. Here is his latest piece.
On June 28, 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, published the Commission's report on their one year investigation of the racism and human rights violations by police forces in the United States and some other countries.
No, 'The Longest War' in US History Is Not Over
What the U.S. did to Afghanistan and its people is not a series of mistakes or good intentions gone awry, but crimes. And there's still no end in sight.
Speaking from the White House on August 31, President Joe Biden lied to the people of the U.S. and to the world: "Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history." The U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end—it has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that will be more politically sustainable, one more intractable and more easily exportable.
No More Attacks on Afghanistan
On the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after two suicide bombs were detonated at the gates of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of Afghans trying to flee their country, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke to the world from the White House, “outraged as well as heartbroken.” Many of us listening to the president’s speech, made before the victims could be counted and the rubble cleared, did not find comfort or hope in his words. Instead, our heartbreak and outrage were only amplified as Joe Biden seized the tragedy to call for more war.
Matthew Hoh: Afghanistan and the End of an Unjust War + Teach Truth Days of Action
Refusefascism | August 30, 2021
Sam Goldman interviews Matthew Hoh, former Marine and State Department official who served in and then was the first to resign over the unjust war in Afghanistan all the way back in 2009.
U.S. Leaves After Helping Destroy Afghanistan
Twenty years after bombing its way into Afghanistan with the promise of ending Taliban rule, running al Qaeda out, and defending women's rights there, the U.S. is scrambling to leave. The Afghan government, a creation of US fantasy, has collapsed; the Taliban is back in power. having accumulated most of the weapons the US littered the country with. Losses to the people of Afghanistan are incalculable, and in no way over.
NO ONE who is paying attention should be at all surprised, even though we remain outraged at the murderous US response to 9/11. The imperialist aims of the U.S. blind its leaders so that they are shocked when they don't prevail.
Act now for the Guantánamo prisoners
closeguantanamo.org | July 9, 2021
Reposted from the Close Guantanamo Now! campaign.
In our latest article, Former Military Commissions Prosecutor Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo, we cross-post, with an introduction by our co-founder Andy Worthington, an op-ed recently published in the Washington Post by Omar Ashmawy, a former prosecutor in Guantánamo’s broken military commission trial system.
Ashmawy was involved in the only two cases that have proceeded to trials (six others ended in plea deals), and the broken nature of the commissions can be gauged from the fact that these trials took place 13 years ago, in 2008, and that even the most recent plea deal took place nine years ago, in 2012.
Emergency Campaign to Free Iran's Political Prisoners
Debra Sweet | July 7, 2021
Ariel Dorfman: We should not let the prisoners down
Publish Emergency Appeal in NY Review of Books
You are needed to help raise $15,000 by July 16
June 6: We’ve raised $1,200 and received a generous match from a signer of the Emergency Appeal. It will double your contributions up to $1,000 and bring us to $3,200! Donate Now!
A brutal campaign of arrests, torture and executions is taking place in Iran. The lives and dignity of hundreds of political prisoners are in imminent, mortal danger. This emergency has only intensified with the election of Ebrahim Raisi.
We must rally to their defense and raise $15,000 by July 16 to publish a full-page color ad of our Emergency Appeal -- The Lives of Iran’s Political Prisoners Hang in the Balance—We Must ACT Now -- on the back cover of the August edition of the prestigious New York Review of Books (NYRB) and advertise our campaign in their online editions.
Death of a war criminal, but not of the war
Debra Sweet | July 1, 2021
Donald Rumsfeld was a cunning unapologetic political/military operative in the US government's global machine of aggressive war-making. His death is no loss to humanity.
But it should cause an evaluation of the role he and his partners in war crimes - members of the Bush regime - played in launching the on-going war of terror on people in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan/Pakistan and beyond, and of the on-going efforts to stop these crimes.
A known known
Raymond Nat Turner | 2021
“…there are known knowns. There are things
we know that we know. There are known
unknowns—things we do not know we know…”
—an infamous War Criminal
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