The last but not least in our commentaries on Katharine Millars Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community (with a reply by Katharine to follow tomorrow). Ellen Martin is a PhD candidate in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol. Her research is critiquing military power in Britain, with a particular focus on the ways in which the British public diversely perform militarism in their everyday spaces. She is interrogating the discourses employed by military charities to question how these organisations contribute to making war and violence possible. She is also exploring how the British public engages with these discourses, and militarism more broadly, because the ways in which militarism manifests as normal and desirable to British people is central to its operation. With the aim of interrogating and destabilising military power, her research contributes to ongoing conversations in feminist IR and Critical Military Studies. Chris Rossdale is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. They write about social movements, rebellious politics, and militarism and state violence, including in Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion. They are interested in the relationship between political struggle and critical theory, and their current research considers the arms trade within the context of police power and abolition and explores the contested political status of rebellion in the contemporary era.

Support the Troops opens with an anecdote about the small town in Canada where Katharine Millar grew up. In 2001 Canada deployed forces to Afghanistan, and a number of enlisted young men from the town found themselves unexpectedly sent to war. Their families gave out yellow support the troops ribbon magnets for local people to put on their cars. Millar recalls her parents, sceptical of the intervention, navigating the expectations accompanying the ribbon and its awkward invocation. They displayed the ribbon out of some sense of obligation and genuine care for the local boys overseas, while being uncomfortable with its implications,...

By Timur Fomenko | RT | July 27, 2023

Recently, CIA director William Burns said the US was working on rebuilding CIA networks in China. The comments came after the Chinese state had successfully purged the presence of the CIA from its upper echelons in previous years, making it difficult for the all-seeing eye to decipher the intentions of Chinas leadership.

Despite this, any talk of what the CIA does in China is never truly covered by the mainstream media, and those who report on it are often dismissed as fringe or conspiracy theorists. Similarly, Chinas warning of external forces manipulating its politics is also never taken seriously, and moreover any arrest by China on charges of espionage are also dismissed as illegitimate and politically motivated. So is the CIA there, or is it not?

In the realm of confirmed public knowledge, the CIA only truly exists in terms of history. That is, we learn about some of the things it has done from documents declassified years later, but we never get to know what it is doing now. We can read, for example, about how the CIA infiltrated countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan and bribed officials to defect in anticipation of coming invasions, or how it launched coups in countries throughout the world. But the key is, we dont hear about these events at the time they happen, that is relegated to secrecy, and hence all the things the CIA does at the time of happening are framed as efforts for freedom, democracy, etc.

It is no surprise that, despite offhand comments such as this by Burns, it is an unequivocal truth that the mainstream media simply pretends the CIA does not exist, and its actions in the present are never behind any kind of event or development. Those who seek to whistleblow and expose its activities, such as Julian Assange, are hunted down and subjected to brutal punishment. When a new leak revealed that the CIA under Mike Pompeo planned to go as far as even assassinating him, it was widely ignored by the media, excluding the BBC reporting on it in Somali language just for the purposes of plausible deniability.

Given this background, Chinas caution and vigilance towards the CIA is widely dismissed as paranoia and an unsubstantiated excuse for oppression. If China takes action against firms it deems linked to potential espionage, such US consultancies, the mainstream media responds by framing Beijing as unreasonable, closed, insecure...

Kit Klarenberg Taliban members stop women protesting for womens rights in Kabul on October 21, 2021. The Taliban violently cracked down on media coverage of a womens rights protest in Kabul on October 21 morning, beating several journalists. (Photo by BULENT KILIC / AFP) (Photo by BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images) The policy of...

Dr Binoy KampmarkWhile 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...

By Paul Robinson | Canadian Dimension | July 24, 2023

Few people came out of Americas 20-year war in Afghanistan looking good. A rare exception was John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Sopko was the Cassandra of the American war effort, repeatedly revealing unwelcome truths only to be equally repeatedly ignored. In charge of auditing the vast sums of money that the US government spent on economic aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan, SIGARs office issued regular reports detailing waste, incompetence, and corruption on a scale that boggles the mind. Among other things, SIGAR published stories of how the US spent $6 million airlifting nine Italian goats to Afghanistan; spent $486 million buying aircraft for the Afghan airforce which were so dangerous to fly that they were never used and were turned into $32,000 of scrap metal; and spent $150 million building luxury villas to lodge staff of its economic development office. All this was just the tip of a very large iceberg.

The basic lesson of SIGARs many reports was that throwing vast sums of money into poor countries doesnt promote economic development. Instead, it encourages corruption and inefficient economic practices. Formal institutions (laws, governments) depend upon informal ones, such as local customs and social structures, that foreigners do not understand, leading to misguided policies and misdirection of funds. Efforts to impose Western formal institutions on top of these very different informal ones, and then flooding the country with Western advisors and money, ends up being counterproductive. None of this, of course, is particularly revelatory. Critics of foreign aid programs have been saying much the same for years. Still, it is an important message.

Although the United States has left Afghanistan, Sopko is continuing his work. Last week, he published a letter written in response to a request from various US Senators. In this, he discussed how lessons from rebuilding Afghanistan could be applied to Ukraine. All wars come to an end. When that in Ukraine does so, there will no doubt be huge pressure on Western governments to flood that country with development assistance. SIGARs letter provides a dose of caution that is well worth listening to.

SIGAR notes that many of the challenges US agencies faced in Afghanistancoordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programswill be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine. He identifies seven particular lessons. These are: