As Commander in Chief wanna be Sarah Palin might put it: How’s that surge thingy workin out for ya, Mr. President? Not so good, as The Wall Street Journal reports this week: Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year’s fighting season, countering the Obama administration’s optimistic assessments of military progress …
A new poll conducted by ICOS among young men of fighting age in two of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces shows that 92% of them never heard of 9/11. Democracy Now sums it up: Attacks In other news from Afghanistan, a new public opinion poll of young Afghan men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces has been released by the International Council …
On the ninth anniversary of 9/11 (the day that America became unhinged and ushered in a lucrative national security state), we remember the innocent victims and the heroes who lost their lives trying to save them and others. Seven thousand miles away, a hundred thousand American troops and another hundred thousand plus private contractors and NATO troops are supposedly fighting …
Hostile occupation is like a coiled spring– the greater the force applied, the greater the force generated when the spring is finally sprung. For instance, triple the amount of occupation forces in Afghanistan, as President Obama has done and voila!– a proportional number of new resistance forces are added to the equation. That’s just the nature of the beast. People …
US taxpayers funding the killing of its own troops [Note: The arguments of my previous eight Afutilestan diaries explaining why the continuing and escalating presence of US troops in Afghanistan is doomed to fail are incorporated herein.] So what’s new since my last quagmire update? Last night the House approved another $30 billion in military spending in Afghanistan, on top …
Rep. Alan Grayson introducing his War Is Making You Poor Act on the House floor As we look back to honor the fallen on Memorial Day, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on. Afghanistan, in its ninth year, is already the longest war in US History and Iraq, at seven years, is not far behind. On May 21, …
Geography is destiny, Napoleon is reported to have said. I began to appreciate that political truism early on, thanks to marathon games of Risk I played as a kid. According to Wikipedia, Risk was originally released in France in 1957, as La Conquête du Monde—The Conquest of the World. It was likely modeled on the period of history that historians …
