Posts tagged Afghanistan
مہرین کسانه
Some Al Qaeda text up there.
The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars—”more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988,44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand,” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax, Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997).
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism
(via maozedongisnotcool)
Never forget. I humbly recommend that you folks read this; the link redirects you to the downloadable PDF. One of the most important things I’ve read in my life.
The Orientalist enterprise of Western writers has received a great deal of critical attention since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. As Western academics have learned to bring more objectivity and empathy to their study of the Islamicate, a growing number of Muslim academics, novelists and journalists – in their home countries and the diaspora – have started looking at themselves through new Orientalist constructs that serve the interests of Western powers. This native Orientalism was a minor affair during the Cold War but it has grown dramatically since the launching of the West’s so-called global war against terror. This essay examines the manner in which native Orientalists in Pakistan – writing mostly in the English language – have been supporting America’s so-called global war against terror.
Abstract of Native Orientalists in Pakistan.
Currently reading this. Remember when I said Brown Uncle Toms and Sams? This is precisely about that. Excellent so far.
U.S. soldiers don’t listen, they are too arrogant. They get upset due to their casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches.
Some Afghan soldiers in a survey attempting to establish the increasing rates of Afghan soldiers killing Coalition Forces.
(via cardinalblack)
Not surprised.
(Source: The New York Times, via cartographyofmylife)
You were saying something about Afghan women, yes? I can’t hear you anymore.
This is what we call AK47 Swag.
U.S. officials would not say how many detainees have been released under the program, though they said such cases are relatively rare. The program has existed for several years, but officials would not confirm exactly when it was established.
(via firthofforth)
From the article:
The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.
[…]
Unlike at Guantanamo, releasing prisoners from the Parwan detention center, the only American military prison in Afghanistan, does not require congressional approval and can be done clandestinely. And although official negotiations with top insurgent leaders are seen by many as an endgame for the war, which has claimed nearly 2,000 U.S. lives, the strategic release program has a less ambitious goal: to quell violence in concentrated areas where NATO is unable to ensure security, particularly as troops continue to withdraw. The releases are intended to produce tactical gains but are not considered part of a grand bargain with the Taliban.
Counterproductive like always, I’m beginning to think.
(via firthofforth)
Interview and Feature by Fahad Faruqui for Express Tribune
One day, nearly 50 armed men, with the slogan ‘NO FEAR’ emblazoned on their jackets, stormed into his villa, handcuffed him, and took him to a fortress-like prison in Islamabad. During this period of incarceration, he was taken to a house to meet officials from US and UK agencies before being transported back to prison. This happened numerous times.
“They’d ask questions like: Why were you in Afghanistan? Where were you in Afghanistan? Did you meet Osama bin Laden? Do you know anyone from alQaeda?” said Deghayes.
[…]
“This was one thing that infuriated all the inmates,” said Deghayes. “They would take a copy of the Holy Quran, and throw it in a toilet, or on the floor. Sometimes you would come back to your cell and find boot stains or abusive words written inside the Quran.”
Here’s an instance of American “security measures.”
The killing of U.S. troops by their ostensible allies in the Afghan military now make up 20 percent of all the U.S. combat deaths this year. Somehow, though, we never hear that the Afghan soldier who turns his gun on a U.S. soldier has “snapped” – that maybe he has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that maybe he was so enraged because he saw his baby daughter killed in a drone strike the night before and he lost control. No, we only hear that “the Taliban must have infiltrated” the Afghan army or police. PTSD is apparently only for trained soldiers on our side. Except that in a 2009 UN-backed survey, the Afghan government’s own Ministry of Health estimated that 66 percent – a full two-thirds – of the Afghan population, suffers from a variety of mental illnesses, most of them stress-related and including PTSD.
those 2/3 of Afghans – something like 20 million people – face PTSD or other mental disorders with only FORTY-TWO psychiatrists and psychologists in the entire country.
(via theamericanbear)
Oh, but you’re forgetting, naive people. American lives are a lot more important than any other life on Earth. Afghan, Pakistani, Yemeni, Iraqi lives? Pfft, whatever.
(via newshygirl)
Once upon a time, American presidents didn’t consider micro-managing a permanent war state as a central part of their job description, nor did they focus so unrelentingly on the U.S. military and the doings of the national security state. Today, the president’s word is death just about anywhere on the planet and he exercises that power with remarkable frequency. He appears in front of “the troops” increasingly often and his wife has made their wellbeing part of her job description. He has at his command expanded “covert” powers, including his own private armies: a more militarized CIA and growing hordes of special operations forces, 60,000 of them, who essentially make up a “covert” military inside the U.S. military.
Obama: Clark Kent at home, Imperial Superman Abroad.
Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch, calling a spade a spade. Very important and relevant points made. For instance:
Almost unnoted in the U.S., for instance, American drones recently carried out a strike in the Philippines killing 15 and the Air Force has since announced a plan to boost its drones there by 30%. At the same time, in Yemen, as previously in the Pakistani borderlands, the president has just given the CIA and the U.S. Joint Operations Command the authority to launch drone strikes not just against identified “high-value” al-Qaeda “targets,” but against general “patterns of suspicious behavior.” So expect an escalating drone war there not against known individuals, but against groups of suspected evildoers (and as in all such cases, innocent civilians as well).
And:
At home, on issues of domestic importance, Obama is a hamstrung, hogtied president, strikingly checked and balanced. Since the passage of his embattled healthcare bill, he has, in a sense, been in chains, able to accomplish next to nothing of his domestic program. Even when trying to exercise the unilateral powers that have increasingly been invested in presidents, what he can do on his own has proven exceedingly limited, a series of tiny gestures aimed at the largest of problems. And were Mitt Romney to be elected, given congressional realities, this would be unlikely to change in the next four years.
But:
[T]he power of the president as commander-in-chief has never been greater. If Obama is the president of next to nothing on the domestic policy front (but fundraising for his second term), he has the powers previously associated with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad. There, he is the purveyor of life and death. At home, he is a hamstrung weakling, at war he is — to use a term that has largely disappeared since the 1970s — an imperial president.
I wonder if the American public realizes the havoc President Obama is wreaking in the Middle East and South Asia. Amazing how the majority of the US media filters reality to keep one nation completely unaware of what its regime is carrying out in other countries. That, or people just don’t care.
The incident also underscored the increasingly central role that drones now play in American foreign policy. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as “terrorists”, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.
The Rise of the Killer Drones - Rolling Stone.
But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.
[…]
“Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,” says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. “What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?’ A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.”
It’s interesting how conveniently US policy makers and academicians term people fighting against attacks on and occupation of their native lands as “terrorists.” The choice of rhetoric employed in war strategy and analyses constructs the lens with which the majority (in this case: The American public) views the lands and indigenous populations their government(s) attack. A victim is a digit, a native person speaking against the killing of their loved one is a ‘terrorist.’ This article is extremely important if you’re interested in understanding the history and tactics of US aerial military surveillance and defense policy.
The boy, 16, sitting with me in these photos was protesting against deadly US drone strikes. Three days later he was killed – by a US drone.
Jemima Khan writes about her participation in a meeting against US drones where she met the young Tariq who was there to protest drone attacks on civilians in Pakistan.
He was 16 when we met last October, just a year older than my own teenage son, although with his neatly trimmed beard and traditional shalwar kameez he looked more like the grown men alongside him. He was there to join a protest about the plague of American ‘drones’ – the remote-controlled aircraft that have left a bloody trail of death and fury among the innocent villagers who struggle to earn a living in the unforgiving mountainous region.
[…]
Three days later he was dead. Like his cousin, who had died in April 2010 and whose identity card he clutched when we met, he was blown to pieces by a drone strike. The appalling irony of how his young life ended will stay with me for ever.
That’s American security policy for you: Killing young, unarmed civilians in foreign countries to ‘protect’ citizens back at home. Too bad this won’t garner media attention or enough voices against drones. People like Tariq are never seen as human beings since we learned recently that the military slang for a person killed by a drone attack is “bug splat.” So we’re insects or digits, nothing more.
![thedailywhat:
In Case You Missed It of the Day: Here we go again: The Army has launched a criminal investigation into actions of the 82nd Airborne Division after the Los Angeles Times showed officials copies of a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with the mangled corpses of Afghans believed to be suicide bombers. The photos were taken in 2010 and came to light this week; the Times opted to publish two after tangling with the Pentagon, which tried — no surprise here — to prevent their publication.
“The reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as the result of the publication of similar photos,” U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.
That may be true, Panetta, but it seems the photos also have been revealed at the worst possible time. In January, a video appeared online showing four Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. In February, the burning of copies of the Koran at a U.S. base resulted in riots that killed 30 and led to the deaths of six Americans. And in March, a Staff Sgt. Robert Bales went on a shooting rampage in two Afghan villages, killing 17.
[boingboing]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2qhny3Pw51qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
In Case You Missed It of the Day: Here we go again: The Army has launched a criminal investigation into actions of the 82nd Airborne Division after the Los Angeles Times showed officials copies of a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with the mangled corpses of Afghans believed to be suicide bombers. The photos were taken in 2010 and came to light this week; the Times opted to publish two after tangling with the Pentagon, which tried — no surprise here — to prevent their publication.
“The reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as the result of the publication of similar photos,” U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.
That may be true, Panetta, but it seems the photos also have been revealed at the worst possible time. In January, a video appeared online showing four Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. In February, the burning of copies of the Koran at a U.S. base resulted in riots that killed 30 and led to the deaths of six Americans. And in March, a Staff Sgt. Robert Bales went on a shooting rampage in two Afghan villages, killing 17.
(via sexgenderbody)
The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is ‘bug splat,’ since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.
Michael Hastings, The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret
You know, from the ground, individuals who are killed by drones don’t exactly look like “bug splat.” This drone culture is perverse because warfare is being made to look more and more like a video game and without having to see the disturbing realities of war, we become disconnected from our fellow man, dehumanizing the so-called targets and inviting less calculated violence.
(via mohandasgandhi)
Sick.
(via rcabbasi)
Words cannot explain my hurt and disgust.
(via rcabbasi)
Which country does America rate as the Top U.S Enemy?
Americans most frequently mention Iran when asked to name the country they consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy, and the 32% who do so is up from 25% in 2011. China is second on the list, with significantly fewer Americans mentioning North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq — the countries that round out the top five.
These results are based on Gallup’s annual World Affairs poll, conducted Feb. 2-5, 2012. The contour of responses to this “greatest enemy” question has changed substantially over the seven times Gallup has asked it since 2001. Americans most frequently mentioned Iraq as the United States’ greatest enemy in 2001 — before the U.S. invaded the country and removed Saddam Hussein from power — and in 2005, when it tied North Korea. Iran has topped the list in each of the five surveys since.[x]
Paranoid America is paranoid. In addition to these “phenomenally dangerous” countries, I see Pakistan in the list too ironically above United States. It’s obvious America hates quite a few countries including itself. You know what they say about self-loathing, (extremely) armed personalities.
Now, if the Democratic rank and file haven’t necessarily learned to love the bomb - though many certainly have - they have at least learned to stop worrying about it. Barack Obama may have dramatically expanded the war in Afghanistan, launched twice as many drone strikes in Pakistan as his predecessor and dropped women-and-children killing cluster bombs in Yemen, but peruse a liberal magazine or blog and you’re more likely to find a strongly worded denunciation of Rush Limbaugh than the president. War isn’t over, but one could be forgiven for thinking that it is.
Such an important critical analysis of how many liberal democrats and “peace” activists speak against the idea of war but rarely engage in actively criticizing the Empire that enables the possibility, funding and activation of war.
For one, Maddow, a self-described “national security liberal” who is “all about counterterrorism”, writes more like a politician seeking to flatter her US audience than a teller of tough, uncomfortable truths. While at times briefly alluding to its war-filled past, Maddow repeatedly paints a picture of the US as, at heart, a peaceful nation, one with a government structured by its noble founding founders with a “deliberate peaceable bias”. It is only recently, she maintains - post-World War II, but especially since Ronald Reagan - that war and a gargantuan military-industrial complex have been deemed “normal”.
And:
Though many might perceive it as an anti-war work, Maddow’s overriding concern seems to be not so much the wars themselves - certainly not the non-American victims of them, who are never once mentioned - but the modern, unilateral way in which we go about fighting them. Reagan, for example, invaded Grenada without first seeking approval from Congress and armed and funded right-wing insurgents in Nicaragua despite a congressional prohibition, facts she holds responsible for the creation of all that “‘imperial presidency’ malarkey”.
Plus:
Maddow doesn’t tell her readers any of that. Nor does she advocate a radical break from the system of hierarchical power that allows a few people in Washington - one if you’re a unilateralist, 535 if you’re not - to have the literal power to destroy the world. Rather: “The good news is we don’t need a radical new vision of post-Cold War American power,” she says. “We just need a ‘small c’ conservative return to our constitutional roots, a course correction.”
Just read the damn thing. It takes guts to face the Empire, the big guns that engage in war. Rarely will you find a media personality, political entity or activist questioning the validity of the Empire, of the Super Power. Those who do, have very little control and representation in the spheres where political narratives are established.
With that, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the powers that be trying to destroy what I loved. I learned what the Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done in Lebanon – and what it continues to do in Palestine – with the full backing of the United States. And I learned what America itself was doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to skyrocket across Iraq. Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about the seventeen Afghan Muslims – mostly mothers and their kids – shot to death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses.
I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically supported the most unjust policies against its minorities – practices that were even protected by the law – only to look back later and ask: ’what were we thinking?’ Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during World War II – each was widely accepted by American society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked ’What were we thinking?’ Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him from prison. He even became president. So, everything is subjective - even this whole business of “terrorism” and who is a “terrorist.” It all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be at the moment.
Mr. Mehanna has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for what seems to be yet another violation (by the state) of good ol’ America’s First Amendment: Freedom of speech. Too bad there’s very little for Muslim Americans.
