While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent.  Since then, Washington has led the charge in handicapping those who, with a fraction of the resources, defeated a superpower and prevailed in two decades of conflict.

In a fit of wounded pride, the United States has, in turn, sought to strangulate and asphyxiate the Taliban regime, citing human rights and security concerns.  The Talibans Interim Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, makes the not unreasonable point that the ongoing crisis is the imposition of sanctions and banking restrictions by the United States.

In May this year, Idaho Republican Senator Jim Risch, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led 18 of his righteous colleagues in introducing the Taliban Sanctions Act, promising more chastising.  Ostensibly, the Act seeks to impose sanctions with respect to terrorism, human rights abuses, and narcotics trafficking committed by the Taliban and others in Afghanistan.

The brief for prosecuting an even more aggressive stance against the Taliban never ceases to bulk, be it to arrest the mistreatment of women and their inexorable marginalisation, or the claim that the country is now essentially a bandit state which is both a danger to itself and its neighbours.  Over a year into Taliban rule, breakdown of the state, bankruptcy of financial institutions, economic collapse and diplomatic isolation have pushed Afghan society to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe, writes a former senior advisor to Afghanistans Foreign Minister, Arian Sharifi, currently an academic at Princeton Universitys School of International Affairs.

Sharifi goes on to analyse the Taliban in what resembles a portrait of the ramshackle government he served.  The Taliban today is deeply divided, making it unable to pursue a unified course of action.  They also ruled a country with more than 20 terrorist groups with a long-standing presence in Afghanistan.

In typical good taste, Sharifi delicately ignores his role in having advised a corrupt government whose strings were firstly pulled, then abandoned, by Washington and its allies.  His poisonous pen fails to acknowledge the attempt by his own past sponsors to systematically contribute to that very failure, bankruptcy and ruin.  He can, however, take some hope in recent reports suggesting that Afghanistan will again become a playground for what British imperialists dubbed in the 19^th century the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian competition for influence...

Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 1112 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqu released after the first days proceedings claimed that NATO is a defensive alliance, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a defensive alliance.

Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition being Finland, which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members Portugal remained under a fascist dictatorship at the...

Leo Hohmann leohohmann.com July 19, 2023

Patrick Wood, the renowned author of several books about the global technocracy movement, says technocrats are, if nothing else, shameless hypocrites. We see this play out on a daily basis.

We reported yesterday on Kamala Harris boasting about how the government investing in electric vehicles would make for a cleaner environment for our children, the same children she says mothers should be able to abort, for any reason or no reason at all, at any stage of pregnancy. But even her electric vehicle claim rings hollow if you know how electric vehicles and EV batteries are produced.

They promise (the UN, WEF and countless globalist NGOs) to save the worlds children and yet actual policies do just the opposite, Wood writes. Children are the most vulnerable group on earth because they are not able to defend themselves. Thus, they are trafficked, sexually exploited, injected, and marginalized.

The two most common ways children are exploited are for sex and for labor.

In Africa, they are forced to work as slaves in harsh mining operations, such as cobalt mines. They toil in similarly barbaric conditions mining lithium in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Department of Labor has a report listing the goods produced globally by child labor as of 2022.

The short article below focuses on Africas cobalt mines.

By Lucy Wyatt, The Conservative Woman

COBALT is essential to modern technology. All sorts of electronic devices rely on it, along with other elements such as lithium. Solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs) wouldnt function without them. While the environmental degradation associated with both lithium and cobalt extraction is well established, the issues around cobalt are even more poignant because of the manner in which it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A new book, Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives, published in January, details the human suffering, especially of children, directly involved in the mining. Written by a Nottingham University professor, Siddartha Kara, from first-hand...