OMNI
AFGHANISTAN NEWSLETTER #25,
August 22, 2021.
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/08/omni-afghanistan-newsletter-25-august.html
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice
(#8 April 15, 2011; #9 June 10, 2011;
#10 July 3, 2011; #11 July 13, 2011; #12
Sept. 5, 2011; #13 Oct. 2, 2011; #14 Oct. 15, 2011; #15 Feb. 14, 2012 ; #16
April 27, 2012; #17 May 3, 2012; #18 Oct. 20, 2012; #19 Jan. 14, 2013; #20
August 17, 2013; #21, Feb. 4, 2014; #22, Feb. 22, 2015; #23, August 22, 2017;
#24, Dec. 27, 2020)
Contribute
to OMNI: www.omnicenter.org/donate
CONTENTS Afghanistan Newsletter #25,
August 22, 2021
AFGHAN HISTORY
Reza Behnam, Pashtun
Mustafa Ariaie, an Afghan
David Swanson, US Antiwar
DECISION TO INVADE
Tariq Ali, International Consensus
Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies, Opposition
Array, Opposition: Criminal
OCCUPATION
Margaret Kimberley, 40 Years of US in
Afghanistan
RETREAT
Jack Rasmus, Why?
Roger Harris, New Stage
Kathy Kelly, We Must Leave
FUTURE
Rashida Tlaib, Help the Refugees
Ann Wright, Keep US Embassy Open
M.K. Bhadrakumar, Continue Aid
Kathy Kelly, Reparations to the Afghan People
TEXTS
AFGHAN
HISTORY
Aghan
History from Pashtun Perspective and the US War Against Them
M. Reza Behnam . The U.S. in Afghanistan: Graveyard for
Another Empire?
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2020, pp. 40-41,
51
https://www.wrmea.org/afghanistan/pakistan/the-u.s.-in-afghanistan-graveyard-for-another-empire.html
THE UNITED STATES has
been in a state of perpetual war in Afghanistan since Oct. 7, 2001. In the
minds of most Americans, Afghanistan did not exist until 9/11. The American
public is rarely asked to reflect on its elusive, distant and destructive war
in a country they know little or nothing about, but are financing to the tune
of roughly $4 billion a month. The absence of debate, evaluation and a coherent
policy in Afghanistan has contributed to the quagmire the United States finds
itself in today.
Since the U.S. invasion,
Afghanistan has been portrayed as a chaotic country in need of improvement and
order, which only the United States can provide. But more than 18 years of U.S.
occupation has left the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan poor, traumatized and
ecologically damaged. History has shown that imperial powers know little about
the countries they invade, although the repercussions of their interventions
shape the destinies of both.
[Important Afghan History seldom mentioned by US gov. or mainstream
media. --Dick] To
understand why the U.S. military operation was destined to fail, it is
essential to reflect on Afghanistan’s resistance to foreign domination
throughout its history. Afghanistan has been rightly spoken of as the
“graveyard of empires.” At the crossroads of Asia—connecting the Middle East
with Central Asia and India—it was caught in the Anglo-Russian power struggle
of the 19th century, known by historians as the “Great Game” period. The U.S.
is the latest great power to become mired in that graveyard.
Competition for dominance
by the British and Russian empires in the 19th century fostered an abiding
xenophobia and hostility to outside powers, especially among the Pashtuns, who ruled Afghanistan, off and on, for more
than 300 years. Today, they make up over 40 percent of the population; the
Taliban are predominantly Pashtun.
The British imperium left
a legacy of conflict and hostilities that lives on in Central Asian countries
today. Particularly consequential, was the British decision in 1893 to
arbitrarily fix a border between British India and Afghanistan.
The boundary, which came
to be known as the Durand Line,
effectively divided the Pashtun population between Afghanistan and British
India (now Pakistan). The division destroyed tribal structures and Pashtun
demographic superiority in Afghanistan. By establishing the border, Britain
made permanent its control over Afghan territory, gained through three wars,
including the Northwest Territories and Baluchistan; whose loss meant that
landlocked Afghanistan was cut off from its vital access to the Arabian
Sea.
The line was used to
finalize Pakistan’s boundaries during the partitioning of India in 1947. Angry
over Britain’s action, the government in Kabul shifted its foreign policy
toward the Soviet Union. Since then,
successive Afghan governments have refused to accept the legitimacy of the
Durand Line, arguing that the Pashtun territories in Pakistan should be part of
Afghanistan. Many Pashtun nationalists, on both the Afghan and Pakistan sides
of the mountainous border, have called for an independent state of
Pashtunistan.
Afghanistan only became
significant to Washington during the Cold War, when the government in Kabul
turned to the USSR for diplomatic and military support. Like the British,
America’s main concern was the Soviet presence. Washington was determined to
keep the Kremlin out of the oil rich Persian Gulf, especially after the overthrow
of its ally, the Shah of Iran, in January 1979.
To counter Soviet
influence, the United States allied with conservative Islamists to undermine
the pro-Soviet government in Kabul. Little thought was given to the long-term
consequences when the CIA plotted, in 1979, to lure the Russians into invading;
to give, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national
security adviser, “the USSR its Vietnam.”
American and Saudi money
and weapons were funneled through Pakistan to support the anti-Soviet resistance. Initially known as the Mujaheddin, the fighters came mainly from the Pashtun tribal area
in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan. Later, others, who were known as the
Afghan Arabs, would join in their fight.
With U.S. and Saudi funding,
Pakistan set up thousands of
fundamentalist Islamic madrassas (religious
schools) for Afghan refugee children on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Many
future Taliban fighters were former madrassa students,
well tutored in the extremist version of political Islam and war.
The Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) created the mayhem in the USSR that
Washington had hoped for, even hastening the demise of the Soviet system. But
it would, with time, also create tumult for the United States. The war left
over one million Afghans dead, over four million injured, five million
refugees, and two million internally displaced, and thousands of radicalized
well-trained fighters. Under the Taliban
regime (1996-2001), Afghanistan became a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and
international terrorism.
Twenty years later,
Washington found itself fighting the same forces it had helped create.
America’s earlier proxy war prepared the ground for al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, 1993;
Khobar Towers, U.S. military housing in Saudi Arabia, 1996; U.S. embassies in
Africa, 1998; USS Cole in Yemen, 2000;
and the World Trade Center and Pentagon, 2001. After 9/11, the United States
invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime.
Taliban leaders, who escaped across the border to Pakistan, have been fighting
a prolonged insurgency against the latest foreign intruder.
Since 9/11, the United
States has spent $6.4 trillion on wars and military actions in the Middle East
and Central Asia fighting its “war on terrorism.” Although the military tries
to keep the figures secret, there are roughly 800 U.S. military bases around
the world in other people’s countries.
As with the prolonged war
itself, little attention was paid to the December
2019 publication by The Washington Post of the “Afghanistan Papers: A
Secret History of the War,” which disclosed the enormous destruction and
cost of a war constructed on Washington’s ignorance of Afghan political culture
and on muddled, counterproductive policies. Also ignored, was the March 2020 decision by the International
Criminal Court to investigate American officials for war crimes committed in
Afghanistan. The ICC announced that it had enough information to prove that
U.S. military and intelligence personnel had committed acts of torture, cruel
treatment, and other acts of violence in 2003, 2004 and later in clandestine
CIA facilities. As concluded by the ICC chief prosecutor, in 2016, “The gravity
of the alleged crimes is increased by the fact that they were reportedly committed
pursuant to plans or policies approved at senior levels of the U.S. government,
following careful and extensive deliberations.”
America’s war and
occupation in Afghanistan have produced very little. Opium production, almost
eliminated under the Taliban regime, has quadrupled. The country has grown more
unstable, government corruption is rampant, most Afghans live in poverty,
refugees number in the millions, land mines abound, infrastructure has crumbled
and the Taliban continues to gain strength. American military power has not
ended terrorism. Instead, terrorism has grown in direct proportion to U.S.
military action following 9/11. Simply, America’s reliance on military power to
“build a nation” in Afghanistan continues to be an abysmal failure.
In February 2020, the
Trump administration signed a conditional peace agreement with Taliban leaders.
However, President Ashraf Ghani and his rival, Chief Executive Officer Abdullah
Abdullah, were left out of the talks; a clear indication that Washington has begun
to move closer to the Taliban. The administration’s threat to withhold up to $2
billion in aid unless Afghan’s leaders put aside their differences and begin
negotiations with the Taliban is further evidence of how expendable they are to
Washington.
Since the peace agreement,
violence has increased throughout the country, with nearly 55 attacks a day.
The attacks on May 12, in two parts of the country, one on a maternity hospital
and the other on a funeral ceremony, are just two examples of the relentless
and continued violence. In a sign that the U.S.-brokered peace is coming apart,
President Ghani ordered his security forces to discontinue operating in a
defensive posture and to begin attacking Taliban insurgents.
Washington’s seemingly
endless war in Afghanistan has become the scrim of American life. Incredibly,
in the throes of a global pandemic, the Trump administration prevented a vote
in the United Nations Security Council on a resolution calling for the
cessation of hostilities around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The economic impact of the
war, financed through debt and fought by an all-volunteer army, has been
largely invisible to most Americans. But the protective shield that has kept
the public from comprehending the destructive effects of an economy built on
war and conflict may be eroding as the country faces its own internal crisis; a
crisis that requires building rather than destroying.
American invincibility has
been shaken and its priorities exposed by the global pandemic. Washington’s
inordinate investment in warfare, rather than the health and welfare of its
citizens, has left Americans feeling wary and defenseless.
|
To Achieve Better We Must Confront the Worst
aUGUST 17, 2021 BY DAVIDSWANSON
“Lies,
Damn Lies, and What We’ve Been Told About Afghanistan”
It’s far from the longest
U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until
they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had
nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a
mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging
along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan
was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a
worse place to be — the rule of law, the state of nature, the refugee crises,
the spread of terrorism, the militarization of governments all worsened. Then
the Taliban took over.
When the U.S. armed the
Afghan military with weapons costing enough to cause panic attacks in U.S.
Senators had the expense been for anything other than murder, and predicted a
happy little civil war, and then the Afghans refused to fight each other, the
President of the United States denounced such reprehensible restraint, blaming
the victims, instead of acknowledging the massive gift of yet more weaponry to
the Taliban, instead of recognizing — after 20 years — anything about what
Afghanistan is like. (Of course he still calls the war a “civil war” as U.S.
voices have done for years and years because unless the U.S. military is
regretfully helping out in a civil war waged by primitive people, it will be
understood to be, you know, waging wars, smack in the middle of what U.S.
academics call The Great Peace.)
The puppet government was
never a government outside of the capital. The people were never loyal to the
Taliban or the invaders, but merely to whichever set of lunatics was nearby
waving guns. First the Taliban collapsed, then the Muppets in Kabul, and for 20
years in between every home and village switched sides as needed, with the U.S.
developing permanent enemies, the Taliban making practical alliances, and
people persistently noticing that they lived where they lived, while the
strange-looking foreigners who killed, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated,
urinated on, and threatened them for “human rights” lived somewhere else.
But millions of them were
made homeless. Children froze to death in refugee camps. Approximately half the
victims of the U.S. war were women. The puppet government passed a law to
legalize spousal rape. Yet the hypocritical screech of “Women’s Rights” was
heard over the agonized moaning of the injured, even as the U.S. government
blissfully armed and supported the brutal militaries of such bastions of
women’s rights as Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Burundi,
Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic
of Congo (Kinshasa), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt,
Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon,
Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Oman, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi
Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda,
United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.
The death, injury, trauma,
homelessness, environmental destruction, governmental corruption, renewed drug
dealing, and general catastrophe were kept quiet by an obsessive focus on the
tiny percentage of deaths that were U.S. troops — but excluding the majority
even of those deaths because they were suicides.
“There is no military solution”
the generals and weapons-funded presidents and Congress members chanted for
decades while pushing more militarism. Yet nobody asked what “solution” even
meant. “We’re winning” they lied for decades until everyone announced that
they’d “lost.” Yet nobody asked what “winning” would have been. What was the
goal? What was the purpose?
The rhetoric, official and
amateur, that launched the war was about bombing a nation full of people as
revenge for the crimes of a small number of individuals who had spent some time
in the place. “Hey Mr. Taliban” song lyrics were racist, hateful, and genocidal
celebrations of bombing the homes of people who dressed in pajamas. But this
was pure murderous bullshit. Crimes can and should be prosecuted, not used as
excuses to commit worse crimes. The Taliban was willing to turn Bin Laden over
to a third country to be put on trial, but the U.S. government wanted a war. It
had long-since planned the war. Its motivations included base construction,
weapons placement, pipeline routing, and the launching of a war on Iraq as a
continuation of an easier-to-start war on Afghanistan (a war that Tony Blair
insisted on starting prior to a war on Iraq).
Soon the U.S. president
said that bin Laden didn’t matter at all. Then another U.S. president said that
bin Laden was dead. That didn’t matter either, as anyone paying the slightest
attention had known it wouldn’t. In fact, that same president escalated the war
on Afghanistan three-fold in terms of troop presence but more than that in bombing,
principally because he was largely keeping his predecessor’s deal to scale back
the war on Iraq. One can’t just end a war without backing a different one.
That’s part of why the world’s worried about a war on China right now.
But, then what was the
excuse for the unending war on Afghanistan?
MORE https://davidswanson.org/lies-damn-lies-and-what-weve-been-told-about-afghanistan/
DECISION TO INVADE
Afghanistan: Mirage Of The Good War
By Tariq Ali, New Left
Review. Popular Resistance (8-18-21). Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic
display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001. Support for the war was universal in the chanceries of the
West, even before its aims and parameters had been declared. NATO governments rushed to assert
themselves ‘all for one’. Blair jetted round the world, proselytizing the
‘doctrine of the international community’ and the opportunities for
peace-keeping and nation-building in the Hindu Kush. Putin welcomed the
extension of American bases along Russia’s southern borders. -more-
Not Everyone
Wanted War In Afghanistan
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, FPIF. Popular Resistance (8-18-21). America’s corporate media are ringing with
recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But
very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the
original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first
place. That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no
subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20
years — in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any of the other countries swept up in
America’s post-9/11 wars. -more-
|
|
|
OCCUPATION
By
Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Popular Resistance (8-22-21).
The scenes of people desperately trying to board planes in
Kabul, Afghanistan, hanging from and even falling from landing gear, are reminiscent
of past United States exits, most notably from Vietnam. Yet these images should
not be surprising nor should they change anyone’s views about the terror that
the U.S. brought to that country. The turmoil in present day Afghanistan is the
end result of more than 40 years of U.S. involvement and it should not be
discussed without an analysis of that history. Liberals in this country, even
those who had expressed opposition to the war, now... -more-
RETREAT
FROM AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan And
The US Imperial Project
By Jack Rasmus. On August 16, 2021 President Biden addressed the nation to
explain why the US military is pulling
out of Afghanistan. To a lesser extent, he also tried to explain why the Afghan government and its 300,000
military forces imploded over the past weekend. With the Afghan State’s
quick disappearing act, in a puff of smoke up went as well the more than $1
trillion spent by the US in Afghanistan since 2001. Biden glossed over the real
answer to the first point why the US is now pulling out. The second he never
really answered. The real answer to the first point is simple: the USA as
global hegemon can no longer... -more-
Afghanistan -
Longest US War Continues To A New Stage
By Roger D. Harris, Popular Resistance. (8-18-21). In recent weeks, the Taliban military
rapidly advanced, taking provincial capitals in Afghanistan and then the
capital city of Kabul on August 15. The US-backed former President Ashraf Ghani
fled the country in a helicopter packed with cash, the US embassy took
down the stars-and-stripes, and Western governments evacuated personnel. In the
leadup to the debacle, the
US bombed a country, which has minimal air defenses, in a war
that has cost at least 171,000 to 174,000 lives. Along with Qatar-based
long-range B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers and AC-130 Spectre
gunships... -more-
Kathy
Kelly, “Afghanistan’s Ongoing Grief.” The Catholic Worker (Jan.-Feb. 2021). The US Must Leave Afghanistan. Here’s her conclusion: “Year after year,
president after president, the US continues to pretend the despair and futility
we’ve caused in Afghanistan isn’t our fault.
We don’t hold ourselves accountable.
But the forever wars, illegal and immoral, bankrupt our economy and our
society as well.” [Kathy Kelly, one of
the steadiest, heroic advocates of peace in all the world, appears frequently
in TCW.
–D]
FUTURE
Sign if
you agree: We must welcome Afghan refugees ASAP
Rashida
Tlaib 8-21-21 10:42 AM
Dick,
Right
now, as the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan draws to a close and the Taliban has
surged back to power, hundreds of thousands of Afghan people in grave danger
are trying to evacuate their country.
But our
current limited options for Afghan citizens to relocate to the U.S. mean that
even people who worked with the U.S. military are still stuck in Afghanistan.
They have no time to spare: The Taliban will target them first for retaliation.
Others at risk include human rights defenders and journalists.
We have a
moral obligation to shelter refugees who are trying to flee the consequences of
a devastating war that we brought to their land.
Please
sign now if you agree: The Biden administration must act immediately to save
Afghan lives, before the August 31 deadline of fully withdrawing from the
country.
SIGN NOW
This
crisis comes after the U.S. spent trillions of dollars and 20 years in a brutal
war that killed and traumatized many Afghan civilians on the ground. And let’s
not forget that back in the 1980’s, the U.S. armed the resistance groups that
became the Taliban.
The least
we could do was plan a speedy process to provide sanctuary for any Afghan
people in need. But the Biden administration has utterly failed at that,
despite having had many months to plan for its scheduled withdrawal of U.S.
military forces from Afghanistan.
As Adam
Bates, policy counsel at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said:
“There
was no reason it had to come to this mad scramble in the last hours of the U.S.
presence in Afghanistan. These evacuations could have happened months ago and
should have.”
Thousands
of Afghan people who helped the U.S. military are still stuck in Afghanistan,
in a bureaucratic backlog that’s lasted for years and through multiple
presidential administrations.
And a new
program to expand options for Afghans is insufficient. It still requires people
to relocate to a third country before applying for U.S. refugee status, and
support themselves for at least a year while in the application process. That’s
practically impossible at this point.
Offering
only these two options for Afghans to come to the U.S. is unacceptable. We must
rapidly ramp up our ability to evacuate and welcome any Afghan seeking refuge.
That’s
why we’re calling for swift policy changes to:
• Expedite visa processing for Afghans facing
imminent threats. That includes Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans who worked
for the U.S. government, as well as a new program for people who worked for
U.S. organizations—which must allow processing in the U.S., rather than first
requiring Afghan applicants to relocate to another country.
• Quickly prioritize accepting refugees,
including using humanitarian parole to evacuate Afghans at highest risk and
ensure their speedy entry into the U.S.
• Grant Temporary Protected Status to Afghans
in the U.S.
• Increase humanitarian aid to those who’ve
fled their homes.
Please
sign now to tell the Biden administration: There is no time to lose. The
administration can and must bring Afghans to safety.
In
solidarity,
Rashida
Keep The US
Embassy In Kabul Open
By Ann Wright, Popular Resistance (8-22-21). I was on the small
U.S. Department of State team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in
December 2001 and strongly feel that if the U.S. really cares for the people of
Afghanistan, it should keep the U.S. Embassy open. History reveals that
generally when U.S. military strategies don't work such as in Cuba (1959),
Viet Nam (1975), Nicaragua (1979 and 2018), Iran (1979) and North Korea (1953),
the U.S. closes embassies and wrecks havoc through brutal sanctions on the
economies of the countries to have some sort of soul-soothing revenge for the
politicians that put the U.S. in... -more-
US and Foreign Aid: Should It Continue?
M.K.
Bhadrakumar. “Don’t
threaten Afghans—it will be counterproductive.”
Common
Dreams (11-24-20).Apr 10, 2020. This article was produced in
partnership by Indian Punchline and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent
Media Institute.
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.
In a tweet from the SCA account, Wells wrote in a
threatening tone: “It can’t be business as usual for international donors in
#Afghanistan. International aid requires partnership with an inclusive
government and we all must hold Afghan leaders accountable to agree on a
governing arrangement.”
Prima facie, it is a call
by Washington to the international community to join the recent move, announced on March 23 by Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, to cut back aid to Afghanistan by $1 billion and to reduce the aid by
another billion dollars in 2021 as well as to initiate a review of all
U.S.-aided programs and projects in that country to identify additional
reductions, and to reconsider U.S. pledges on the whole to future donor
conferences for Afghanistan.
The
punishing move on March 23 followed an abortive mission by Pompeo to Kabul on
the same day to persuade Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and former chief
executive Abdullah Abdullah to agree on an inclusive government. Pompeo’s
appeals fell on deaf ears. It now seems that Washington’s threat to cut back
bilateral aid also has been largely ignored by the Afghan elites.
Washington
is ratcheting up the pressure on Kabul by forewarning that it will prevail upon
the international community to join hands with the U.S. by making all aid to
Afghanistan conditional on cooperative behavior by the Afghan political elites.
Will such
hyped-up U.S. threats work? The high probability is that it won’t impress
Afghan elites. As for the international community, Washington may have better
luck. The U.S. has been the driving force behind marshaling international aid
for Afghanistan.
Between 2002 and 2015, the U.S. and other international donors
pumped about $130 billion into that country, but most of the
money came from the U.S. (about $115 billion)—although more than half of it was
spent on security. At the October 5, 2016, Brussels Conference on Afghanistan,
the international donors pledged another $15.2 billion through the period up to 2020.
The
unexpectedly high pledges in Brussels reflected a general recognition at that
point that if the Taliban gained ground and/or if Afghanistan sank into greater
poverty and despair, the region and the world would have a much higher price to
pay. Equally, there was trust in Ghani as someone with a vision for Afghanistan
whom major donors could believe in, despite the rampant corruption and
political infighting, and the bloody conflict ending a huge number of Afghan
lives.
Importantly,
the U.S. was backing Ghani to the hilt. But four years down the line, the
situation around Afghanistan has changed phenomenally. Despite all the money
spent, the security situation worsened, and the Taliban is now resurgent.
Afghanistan remains a basket case—one of the poorest countries on earth—with 80
percent of its budget financed by aid. The world community has come to accept
that there is no alternative but to reconcile with the Taliban through
negotiations and power-sharing.
Clearly,
the earlier optimism, even if somewhat contrived, has been replaced by donor
fatigue, and questions are being asked about where the money will end up. MORE https://mronline.org/2020/04/10/dont-threaten-afghans-it-will-be-counterproductive/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dont-threaten-afghans-it-will-be-counterproductive&utm_source=MR+Email+List&utm_campaign=36f4fb214c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_MRONLINE_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4f879628ac-36f4fb214c-295821469&mc_cid=36f4fb214c&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
REPARATIONS
By Kathy Kelly on Aug 02, 2021 04:21 pm. CovertAction Magazine.
In mid-July, 100 Afghan families from
Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara
ethnic minority, fled to Kabul. They feared Taliban militants would attack them
in Bamiyan.
Over the past decade, I have gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing
Talib fighters in the 1990s, just after learning that […]
The
post Reckoning and Reparations: U.S.
Government Owes Afghan Civilians for Past 20 Years of War and Brutal
Impoverishment appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
CONTENTS #24: The Last Four of 19 Years of US invasion and
occupation, 2017-20. https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2020/12/omni-afghanistan-newsletter-24.html
END AFGHANISTAN NEWSLETTER #25
No comments:
Post a Comment