ConflictWatch Feed Afghanistan

ConflictWatch Afghanistan Feed Archiver

Go Back:30 Days | 7 Days | 2 Days | 1 Day

ConflictWatch Afghanistan Feed Today.

Go Forward:1 Day | 2 Days | 7 Days | 30 Days

ConflictWatch Afghanistan Feed was generated at Central Asia ConflictWatch.

Thursday, 27 July

22:31

Ending military aid to Ukraine would surpass Afghanistan debacle, says former US Ambassador "IndyWatch Feed War"

By Ahmed Adel | July 27, 2023

An eventual refusal by US President Joe Biden to support Ukraine would represent a significant failure that would even surpass the Afghanistan troop withdrawal debacle, according to John Herbst, former US Ambassador to Kiev. His comments were made to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the sluggish pace of Ukraines failed counteroffensive could raise questions about future military aid to the Eastern European country. However, it can be argued that Bidens decision to support Ukraine is the greatest blunder in the US modern geopolitical history.

The newspaper pointed out that due to Washingtons strategy of not straying from the course, Biden made himself vulnerable as he became dependent on the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine, which he falsely framed as a battle between authoritarianism and democracy. The Ukrainian militarys failed counteroffensive has crushed all hopes that the fighting will end this year, at least on Kievs terms.

According to US officials interviewed by the American outlet, a long and indefinite conflict creates risks, especially as a potential stalemate could test the US presidents stated strategy to provide Ukraine with military support to start negotiations, where Kiev will speak from a position of strength.

Halting arms supplies or even accepting a partial victory for Russia would represent a significant failure in U.S. foreign policy, surpassing the scale of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal debacle, according to Herbst.

The newspaper notes that potential Republican candidates with the best chances of being nominated by the party former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were the instigators of Ukraines declining support among the American people.

In addition, another problem faced by the US is the lack of critical weapons. This led to the delivery of cluster munitions to the Ukrainian Army. This hypocritical move demonstrated the desperation of the Ukrainian military when considering Biden made threats if Russia used cluster munitions.

The newspaper also cited an unnamed senior European official saying that Washington does not expect the Ukrainian military to capture embattled Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporozhye, and Crimea fully. This follows up from a previous report that even though Western military officials knew Ukraine did not have all the training or weapons needed to push back Russian forces, they hoped that Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.

It calls to question why the US and its allies continue to pour billions of dollars into Ukraine and maintain sanctions that are now affecting their own economies worse......

06:09

Shameful: Family forced to pay to bring home body of Marine killed after Pentagon policy change "IndyWatch Feed World"

'Egregious injustice' A Republican lawmaker is sounding the alarm after being notified that one of the 13 Gold Star families from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was forced to pay to move the body of their loved one. Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., who is an Army veteran, told Fox News Digital that during a meeting with the families of the "Fallen 13" last week, he was "enraged to learn that the Department of Defense had placed a heavy financial burden" on the family of Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, who were forced to find funding in the thousands to move her body to its final resting place after her 2021 death in Afghanistan. The Gee family secured the funding, which came to "a staggering $60,000," to move their loved one's body after a nonprofit organization stepped in to cover the cost, Mills said.

01:54

US officials to meet Taliban to discuss security and human rights "IndyWatch Feed War"

US officials to meet Taliban to discuss security and human rights

Some experts have said the US needs to engage with the Taliban, including establishing a presence in Kandahar where group's leadership is based

MEE staff Wed, 07/26/2023 - 16:54

Taliban security forces ride horses along the Qargha Lake on the outskirts of Kabul, on 11 May 2023 (AFP)

US officials are set to meet with representatives of the Taliban and "technocratic professionals" from Afghan ministries during a visit to Doha this week, the State Department said on Wednesday, and the discussions will include security, narcotics, and women's rights.

The Biden administrations special representative for Afghanistan, Thomas West, and special envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights, Rina Amiri, will travel on Wednesday for visits to Astana, Kazakhstan, and Doha, Qatar.

US and Taliban representatives signed a peace agreement in February 2020. The Taliban, who waged a two-decade insurgency against the US, took control of the country in August 2021, after the USs withdrawal.

In the agreement, the Taliban-run Islamic emirate government committed to counter terrorism threats, establish an inclusive Islamic government and respect human rights, including allowing women to attend school.

In December, the Taliban banned Afghan women from universities and employment at NGOs. The decision brought widespread condemnation from the international community, including from Muslim countries.

...

Wednesday, 26 July

23:42

MSNBC leftist calls for post 9/11 style crackdown to prevent Americans becoming too patriotic "IndyWatch Feed World"

"A lot of Americans are up for grabs." A talking head on MSNBC has called for a post 9/11 style government crackdown as a means of winning "a battle for hearts and minds" of Americans who might turn against the leftist mindset and become overly patriotic. Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Righteous Media compared the "threat" of such a scenario to the "number one threat" after 9/11, effectively suggesting conservatives and Trump supporters are akin to terrorists.

21:55

The War Crimes That Assange and WikiLeaks Exposed "IndyWatch Feed Economics"

The War Crimes That Assange and WikiLeaks Exposed

In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with documents containing evidence of U.S. war crimes. They included the Iraq War Logs, which were 400,000 field reports describing 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad. They contained the Afghan War Diary, 90,000 reports of more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they also included the Guantnamo Files 779 secret reports with evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantnamo Bay for years, and 800 men and boys had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Manning also furnished WikiLeaks with the notorious 2007 Collateral Murder Video, which shows a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter targeting and killing 11 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.

This is the first time a publisher has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. In December 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pas and Der Spiegel signed a joint open letter calling on the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. Publishing is not a crime, the letter says. This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine Americas First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

[If the media had made this argument years ago and stayed on it before the government set the official narrative in stone, Assange would be a free man giving us more truth in place of government lies. But the media totally failed in its responsibility to protect the 1st Amendment.]

https://truthout.org/articles/julian-assange-is-dangerously-close-to-extradition-for-revealing-us-war-crimes/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=75553d1810-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-75553d1810-650280965&mc_cid=75553d1810&mc_eid=5071cc8f81

20:31

The International in Support the Troops "IndyWatch Feed War"

The second commentary in our ongoing symposium on Katharine Millars Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Pinar Bilgin is a professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. She is the author of The International in Security, Security in the International (Routledge, 2016) and Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 2^nd ed. (Routledge, 2019). www.pinarbilgin.me

Support has emerged as the new service following a moment of disconnect with the troops in the UK and the US, we learn from Kate Millars book, Support the Troops. How about other parts of the world that apparently experienced no such disconnect? Support the Troops makes no claim to explain what happens outside the US and UK cases. But I wonder if, by missing aspects of the international, were missing a part of the condition of possibility of all this? In what follows, I will consider the international that has allowed for support to emerge as the new service in some parts of the world, even as others continue to serve and support in some other parts of the world.

Millar acknowledges that StT discoursesalmost uniformlyfail to engage with the international in that Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan civilians killed by the wars are rarely mentioned (175). But then, inter-state wars do not exhaust the international. The author also considers the colonial background. These states the US, UK, and others with pervasive support the troops practices, notably Canada and Australiaare also unified by their status as colonial states, she notes (177). Indeed, following Tarak Barkawis argument in Soldiers of Empire, colonial military relations have shaped post-colonial military relations. Yet again, post-/colonial relations do not exhaust the international.

The international in Support the Troops can also be located in post-World War II relations between Europe and non-Europe. When I write Europe, I refer to Western Europe and North America as the geographies that are put at the centre by those who are carriers of this particular w...

10:15

Authoritarian Sadism in U.S. Foreign Policy "IndyWatch Feed War"

Freudian depth-psychology remains an under-utilized tool in interpreting motivation and personality of recent American leaders who have chosen to deploy massively destructive military force on large civilian populations in places like Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. A president may deny (or repress) his own destructive hostility, projecting it onto the other. Splitting-and-projection readily enables a clear definition of an enemy nation, whose population as a whole may have to endure collateral damage. As psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has elucidated, in extreme situations (such as the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks), both leaders and followers may regress to such splitting mechanisms: we are all-good, blamelessand they, as one war president claimed, maliciously hate our freedom. Such group-regression, Volkan noted, occurs when the citizenry of a nation abandon mature, inductive rationality and succumb to such dangerously over-simplified, defensive emotional states.¹

Here I am focusing on the urge for, and exercise of, power-over as a manifestation of compensatory narcissism (a term I prefer, in this essay, to Volkans reparative narcissism). As to sadism, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm perceptively described the dominance-submission psychology of the authoritarian personality: the world is composed of people with power and those without it. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, and humiliate him.² Those individuals who single-mindedly attain such power-over may then successfully compensate for the childhood trauma of feeling insecure, under-valued or humiliated.³ Concurrently, the unconscious desire for revenge may be satisfied through displacement...