War on Afghanistan

Hell no this was no accident!

Video, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
Published on



Some thoughts: does anybody really believe this was an accident rather than premeditated? Even on just the evidence in the video the helicopter crew was mighty casual about killing the first group of people, while the attack on civilians attempting to carry off the wounded and dead is a straight warcrime. But put this atrocity in context: two of the people killed were journalists, in a war in which non-embedded journalists often seemed acceptable targets to the US military — the attack on the Al Jazeera office in Kabul, the shooting of that Baghdad hotel many journalists stayed at, various other careless or targeted killings. Each time the military had an excuse, some explenation for their mistakes, but put them all together and it’s clear that if the army doesn’t deliberately sets out to kill uncontrolled journalists, it at the very least doesn’t care if it does so.

Also, also: remember that story back in 2005 about the Al-Jazeera bombing memo? That showed that Bush was talking about bombing the Al-Jazeera offices in Qatar during the attack on Fallujah in 2004. If the US considered that kind of action outside of Iraq, it’s no surprise unfriendly journalists inside Iraq tended to die or disappear… Most of the cases that get attention in the American and European media concern western journalists; but many more Iraqi journalists have been killed as well, either by the Americans or Iraqi internal security.

And of course excuses can and were made in each case: that’s not the point. When there’s a pattern of such killings, during an already illegal and immoral wars, such mistakes are murders. These accidents fit a long standing US army policy of “controlling the information battlefield” by embedding journalists and denying independent reporters access — if a few of the latter are killed on the battlefield, no great loss…

Fuck you, you lying ass warmonger

War on Afghanistan, War on Iran, War on Iraq
Published on 2 Comments on Fuck you, you lying ass warmonger

Obama: a more eloguent, more acceptable Bush:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action.

Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now – and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance – would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

There wasn’t one Afghan amongst the September 11 hijackers (but plenty of Saudi Arabians, plus some Egyptians and Lebanese), nor amongst the planners 9the chief of which was Kuwaiti). But you can bomb nice allied countries like Kuwait, Egypt or Saudi Arabia so poor Afghanistan was duly elected as America’s collective stress ball/punching bag; blowing up a few goatherds and wedding parties would make the country feel better about itself. A quick victory and then on to Iraq. But as per usual the Afghans didn’t take kindly to foreign “liberators” — trading in Taliban asshats hassling you about the length of your beard for foreigners just killing you at a checkpoint for stopping your car too slowly isn’t as great a bargain as you might think it is — and took up arms against them. So now Obama is stuck with a war that despite his protestations is eerily reminiscent of Vietnam (and an earlier generation of US politicians didn’t hesitate to call it that when it was the Russians who were bogged down there) and his coalition of the willing –to coin a phrase– doesn’t seem too keen to me to get involved more.

And why would they? At this point the only reason why “winning the war in Afghanistan” is so important because the US’ collective ego is so massively tangled up in it, just like it is in Iraq and was in Vietnam. America cannot lose another war so needs to bring things to a convenient stopping point and then get the hell out of Afghanistan (modulo some residual force remaining behind for a couple of decades or so, as is the plan in Iraq). Who would want to get more involved in that (apart from the Brits and the Dutch obviously, both striving to be teacher’s pet)?

You might argue Obama had this war forced on him by the decisions of the previous administration. Perhaps, but even before he was elected he had already show himself to be in favour of a increased effort in Afghanistan. The plan was always to de-emphasise Iraq and intensify the war on Afghanistan. And meanwhile demands have already been made for “strong action” against Iran…

Obama is another LBJ, a warmonger at heart only without the corresponding liberal domestic programmes.

Why is Holland supporting this?

Torture, War on Afghanistan
Published on 1 Comment on Why is Holland supporting this?

Seriously. Dutch soldiers are supposedly bringing democracy and freedom to Afghanistan, but the US military still operates black prisons:

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

For all of Obama’s rhetoric, his actions so far have been bitterly disappointing. The closure of Guantanamo stranded on America’s refusal to take up responsibility for the prisoners and no other country (save Palau) was willing to help them out. He has made noises about ending the occupation of Iraq but these have not been matched by deeds so far, while the War on Afghanistan has actually be scaled up.

So why are we still enabling this? What is in it for us to have our troops in Afghanistan reaping the fallout of American warcrimes?

The terrorist threat facing Britain is self inflicted

War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq, War on Terror
Published on

Brown said UK troops were in Afghanistan “as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain”.

Ministers have often claimed that three-quarters of the terrorist plots facing Britain emerge from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Ministers are less willing to discuss how many of those plots facing Britain were hatched before British troops were sent into Afghanistan. Or how many of those plots are motivated by what happens in Aghanistan or Iraq, but were actually thought up in the backstreets of Leeds or Birmingham. The 7/7 bombers did state their motivations clearly, but so far the UK government has refused to face up to it.

The facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same

Anti-war, US politics, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
Published on 1 Comment on The facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same

So says Cindy Sheehan, who hasn’t been fooled enough by Obama’s moderate anti-war stance to not notice the buildup of troops in Afghanistan or the fact that withdrawal from Iraq seems more talk than action. Like she did with Bush, she therefore turned up at Obama’s holiday address to protest. As she explained:

“The reason I am here is because … even though the facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same,” Sheehan told a handful of journalists, against a backdrop of her “Camp Casey” banner.

She told US peace activists to wake up and protest Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and complained that despite the president’s anti-war stance, US troops remained in Iraq.

“We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge.”

“We are here to make the wars unpopular again,” she said.

I’m not sure it’s just Obama’s election that has rocked the (US) antiwar movement to sleep. There also seems to have been a certain amount of normalisation of the war, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and they became part of the background noise to our lives. What’s more, our own more immediate problems as the economy collapsed have seemingly left little interest in Afghanistan or Iraq with either the public or the newsmedia.