When will Western politicians and their media courtiers speak honestly about the “good” war in Afghanistan? The Guardian’s Jason Burke explains: The parallel with the 80s can be overdone – the fighting remains much more limited in extent and there is no threat to the supply route north. But recently, both American and French military…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Get the foreigners out
In the worldview of a journalist from the Murdoch press in Australia – more than happy to visit the Middle East and blindly publish propaganda from the US military – the world should send more troops to Afghanistan: NATO’S new top commander in Afghanistan says the international coalition is “struggling to win” a strategic victory…
Bombing. Iran. Never. Makes. Sense
The Lowy Interpreter is the blog for one of Australia’s leading think-tanks, the Lowy Institute. Following a post last week that discussed Israel’s supposed fears of Iran’s nuclear facilities – strongly suggesting that an Israeli military strike was not unlikely and even understandable because the Zionist state feared destruction – I wrote a response that…
Surely time to shun official sources
Two different speakers at this week’s Edinburgh International Television Conference revealed the paucity of imagination and guts in so much of the mainstream media’s coverage of the “war on terror”. Al-Jazeera director general Wadah Khanfar: Less and less field work is being done. More official sources are being taken as uncollaborated fact. Less and less…
The friends who help
Jeremy Scahill, The Guardian, July 23: It seems that executives from Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration’s favourite hired guns in Iraq and Afghanistan, are threatening to pack up their M4 assault rifles, CS gas and Little Bird helicopters and go back to the great dismal swamp of North Carolina whence they came. Or at least…
No democracy to see there
Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, June 11: In public, defeat in Afghanistan is unthinkable for western governments. In private, for many it already seems inevitable – at least if the western definition of “victory” remains the vastly overblown goals set since the overthrow of the Taliban, within any timeframe that is likely to be acceptable to…
Quick easy steps to help terrorism
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on the disastrous effects of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies. Democracy Now!, June 10: And now you have huge efforts by al-Qaeda to train European Muslims, to train white European converts to Islam. They’ve set up training camps now with language facilities. That means if you’re a German Muslim,…
The “national suicide” myth
George Bisharat, Los Angeles Times, June 9: Anew buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: “national suicide.” The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have…