Tag: afghanistan

Bush-Era Neocons Should Shut The Fuck Up About Iraq (And Everything Else)

David Frum and Max Boot, two neoconservatives who helped grease the wheels for the invasion of Iraq, have some thoughts they’d like to share with us as we approach the 20th anniversary of that horrific and unforgivable war. Both of these perspectives can be read in widely esteemed mainstream publications, because everyone who was responsible for inflicting that war upon our species has enjoyed mainstream influence and esteem to this very day.

Both men concede in their own ways that the war was a mistake, while simultaneously cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine that has brought humanity closer to nuclear armageddon than it has been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men mix their Iraq War retrospectives with war apologia, historical revisionism, and outright lies. And both men should shut the fuck up. About everything. Forever.

Frum’s article is posted in The Atlantic, where he is a senior editor, and it is titled “The Iraq War Reconsidered“. Frum is credited with authoring George W Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, which marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of US military expansionism and “humanitarian interventions” in geostrategically valuable nations after 9/11.

In just the second sentence of his article Frum opens with an absolute scorcher of a lie, saying “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads” were discovered in Iraq to suggest that the weapons of mass destruction narrative had been proven at least somewhat true. As The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz explained back in 2015, the only chemical weapons in Iraq were either (A) munitions sealed in bunkers at an Iraqi weapons complex by UN inspectors in the nineties and left there because they were too dangerous to move, and (B) some old munitions that had been lost and forgotten after the Iran-Iraq War. In neither of these cases is it true that Saddam Hussein was hiding any weapons of mass destruction.

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Defense, State Departments Refusing To Cooperate On Examination Of Their Afghanistan Blunders, Auditor Says

The Pentagon and State Department are at war with an official government auditor, refusing to cooperate with a probe of how 20 years of missteps by top Washington brass led to Afghanistan being ceded to the ragtag Taliban despite $90 billion in U.S. funds, a government report revealed Monday.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been one of the most incisive watchdogs in Washington, keeping tabs on a foreign matter that was largely out of the public eye even as U.S. “experts” appeared to make one blunder after another. After numerous embarrassing reports, DOD and State are now refusing to cooperate with SIGAR, stating that it only has the authority to audit Afghanistan reconstruction–which ended when the U.S. pulled out.

In August 2021, President Joe Biden withdrew troops and contractors from the country overnight, without even telling Afghan soldiers on patrol. It left equipment behind, which the Taliban took and used for combat and propaganda, and some of the Afghan forces that the U.S. had trained to fight the Taliban themselves joined “extremist groups,” the report said.

Biden subsequently began allowing former Taliban employees to migrate to the U.S. under a refugee program billed as being for “interpreters,” while Russia and China moved in to Afghanistan to exploit its natural resources.

“We identified eight systemic factors that explain why, after 20 years and nearly $90 billion in U.S. security assistance, the [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] was vulnerable to collapse in the first place,” SIGAR said.

In May 2022, SIGAR provided DOD and State with an interim report, but “DOD and State declined to review that interim draft, denied us access to their staff, and mostly declined to answer requests for information,” SIGAR wrote in its new report.

By this month, a cold war was emerging in the normally-mundane letters exchanging information between them.

“We offered to continue to meet regularly to further discuss the range of issues covered in the draft, but the author did not follow up,” S. Rebecca Zimmerman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, claimed February 16.

SIGAR responded: “DOD’s assertion that the author ‘never followed up’ on its offer to discuss the draft report is simply false. Moreover, DOD’s highlighting of ‘the efforts undertaken by DoD to cooperate with SIGAR’ should be viewed in the context of a history of extensive delays, missed deadlines, and incomplete answers to questions.”

“SIGAR strongly disagrees with DOD’s characterization of their engagement on this report. In fact, DOD only provided limited responses to SIGAR’s request for information (RFI) and missed every deadline for responding to SIGAR’s questions or for providing feedback to vetting drafts of this report,” it continued.

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US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

Ukraine receives the most military aid from the United States: Since the beginning of the war and as of Jan. 15, 2023, $46.6 billion in financial aid for military purposes has flowed to the country now at war with Russia.

When calculating the average annual costs (in 2022 prices) of previous wars in which the United States has been involved in, the true magnitude of the country’s Ukraine aid expenditure can be seen.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, the payments to Ukraine have already exceeded the annual military expenditure of the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. The U.S. military costs in the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the Korean War were significantly higher – according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy as part of its Ukraine Support Tracker.

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Gunmen Assassinate Female Former Afghan Lawmaker

Taliban authorities in Afghanistan said Sunday unknown assailants shot dead a female former lawmaker alongside her bodyguard in her home in the capital, Kabul.

Mursal Nabizada, 32, had been elected as a member of the national parliament before the Islamist Taliban seized power from the internationally backed Afghan government in August 2021 as all U.S.-led NATO troops withdrew.

A Kabul police spokesman, Khalid Zadran, said that a brother of the slain parliamentarian was also injured in the attack, which took place early Sunday.

Zadran said a “serious” investigation into the incident was under way to apprehend and bring the killers to justice.

Nabizada’s relatives called on the Taliban administration to arrest the killers, saying she had no enemies.

“I heard the gunfire and when we went down, they (attackers) had left and my daughter was lying on the ground with blood on the bed alongside my son. The guard was also killed,” local TOLO TV channel quoted Nabizada’s mother as saying.

Nabizada’s assassination marks the first time a politician from the ousted government has been killed since the Taliban takeover in August 2021. She was among the few female politicians and civil society activists who decided against fleeing Afghanistan after the hardline group regained control of the country.

No group immediately claimed responsibility.

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Detailed Report Exposes CIA-Backed ‘Zero Units’ In Afghanistan

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. 

The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

  • At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
  • A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
  • The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
  • The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the C.I.A. often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
  • Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

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ABC News Producer Missing Since FBI Raid, Was Writing Book About Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal

A star reporter for ABC News has been missing since an April 27 FBI raid at his Arlington, Virginia apartment.

Emmy award winner James Gordon Meek – a deep-dive journalist who was also a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee, abruptly quit his job of 9 years and “fell off the face of the earth,” after the raid, one of his colleagues told Rolling Stone.

At the time of the raid, Meek, 52, was co-authoring a now-published book about the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. According to ‘sources familiar with the matter,’ federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid – though one investigative journalist who had worked with him said it would be highly unusual for a reporter to do so.

“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” said his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, in a statement. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

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Ohio GOP House candidate has misrepresented military service

Campaigning for a northwestern Ohio congressional seat, Republican J.R. Majewski presents himself as an Air Force combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, once describing “tough” conditions including a lack of running water that forced him to go more than 40 days without a shower.

Military documents obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request tell a different story.

They indicate Majewski never deployed to Afghanistan but instead completed a six-month stint helping to load planes at an air base in Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally that is a safe distance from the fighting.

Majewski’s account of his time in the military is just one aspect of his biography that is suspect. His post-military career has been defined by exaggerations, conspiracy theories, talk of violent action against the U.S. government and occasional financial duress.

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Marine wounded in Kabul suicide attack claims CIA WARNED them about bomber, watched him for two days and were told not to kill him in horrifying account of the blast that killed 13 US service members and hundreds of Afghans

Marines stationed at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate last year were give a description by the CIA of a suicide bomber two days before an explosion ripped through the chaotic evacuation, according to one of the troops wounded in the blast. 

They spotted him observing their position but were denied permission when they asked to open fire on him.

Thirteen U.S. service personnel and at least 170 Afghans died on August 26, 2021, when the Islamic State bomber detonated his explosives. 

Tristan Hirsch was a U.S. Marine stationed at the gate at the heart of the chaos.

He survived the blast and has since left military life, allowing him the freedom to describe the events leading up to the attack.

He described Taliban executions in the crush of people trying to escape, the presence of a second suicide bomber and claimed Marines had seen the first bomber in the area for two days – but were not allowed to kill him.

‘We knew about him two days prior to the attack,’ Hirsch, 24, told his local newspaper in California, the Chico Enterprise-Record.

‘We knew what he looked like. The CIA let us know; he looked exactly as they’d described him.’

They had been told that a man on a suicide mission, and preparing for heaven, would look different to the tired, hungry hordes who were besieging the airport looking for help to get out. They were on the look out for someone looking freshly showered with a well-trimmed beard. 

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Biden paid Taliban more than $1 billion over last year

In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s report that he ordered a military drone strike that killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan, a report has emerged that Biden has paid, over the last year, about $1 billion to the Taliban.

That would be the extremist Islamist organization that took over Afghanistan when Biden last year abruptly pulled American soldiers out.

Biden left behind hundreds of Americans, thousands of America-supporting nationals who likely would be targeted by assassination squads for their work, as well as some $80 billion in American war machinery.

Now a report from Foreign Desk News explains that Biden has been sending, and plans to send more, money to the Taliban.

A columnist also pointed out that it is unlikely that an al-Qaida operative could have set up shop and be working in Kabul without the Taliban knowing that.

The report said American foreign aid might be going to the “wrong places,” including Afghanistan.

“Annually, the U.S. allocates over $51 billion in economic aid and military assistance. $25 billion comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), while the Department of Defense and Department of State are close behind. Over 20 percent of this aid is divided among four countries: Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Egypt. While well intentioned, corruption, failing infrastructure, or even cultural misunderstandings can mean that U.S. aid causes more harm than good,” the report explained.

Regarding the Taliban, the report explained, “The U.S. has pledged an additional $55 million in aid to Afghanistan. Over the past fiscal year, this totals to over $1 billion to humanitarian, economic, and military assistance aid to Afghanistan. Foreign aid always comes with criticism, but especially so when the recipient is an enemy of the U.S. and a corrupt, extremist and repressive regime.

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After Thousands of Soldiers Died Fighting Them In Afghanistan, The US Now Backs The Taliban

Yes, you read that headline correctly. As we approach the one year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan it seems as though the United States government is once again playing musical chairs with whom it considers friend or foe. At least this appears to be the case due to a recent article published by AntiWar.com, in which a yet to be named spokesman for the US State Department asserted that the US “does not support organized violent opposition to the Taliban” rule in Afghanistan.

First reported by The Foreign Desk, the statement comes as resistance fighters claim victory over Taliban forces in the Baghlan Province as conflict in the region continues.

After a two day skirmish between Taliban fighters and Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front (NRF) which resulted in heavy Taliban losses and the NRF taking control of Baghlan province’s easternmost district of Khost wa Fereng, in northern Afghanistan, the resistance fighters took to social media to celebrate their victory.

Speaking to The Foreign Desk, the State Department spokesperson said ―

“We are monitoring the recent uptick in violence closely and call on all sides to exercise restraint and to engage. This is the only way that Afghanistan can confront its many challenges,”

Continuing on, emphasis our own,

“We want to see the emergence of stable and sustainable political dispensation via peaceful means. We do not support organized violent opposition to the Taliban, and we would discourage other powers from doing so as well,”

Although this position has not yet been publicly acknowledged outside of this interview with The Foreign Desk, as the piece from Anti War notes this is an awkward position for the administration to be in. Considering the last few decades spent vilifying the Taliban as the epitome of evil and the ultimate adversary.

Although also as noted, prior to the 2001 invasion the Bush administration was actually allied with the Taliban, considering them a partner in the war on drugs.

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