Will American troops last until 2014 when attacks by Afghan soldiers and policemen on American trainers have escalated alarmingly?
Drone attacks have killed thousands of innocent people in such places as Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Zainab Cheema reviews a book on Drone warfare by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.
It is now clear that the US-NATO combine has lost in Afghanistan. They cannot make any more excuses.
On a visit to a Muslim country in 1990, a young journalist called me in my hotel room. Excited about the end of the Cold War and the peace dividend that was about to break out, he wanted my opinion on the subject.
It is always difficult to reconcile with decline in one’s power and clout. This is as true of individuals in old age as it is of societies and empires in their twilight years.
As the US and its NATO allies head to Chicago (May 20–21) to discuss the future of Afghanistan, several issues have become clear.
After the latest American rampage through three Afghan villages in the Pajway district of Qandahar on March 11, US President Barack Obama issued the following statement: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
It requires no great imagination to figure out that in order to get out of a hole, one must first stop digging. This should be obvious even to the most simple-minded people but American policy-makers, it seems, refuse to learn.
How long this standoff will continue is debatable but what we need to consider is how this situation has deteriorated to a point that the US feels it can attack and kill Pakistanis at will.
Pakistan’s boycott of the December 5 US-sponsored conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany reduced it to little more than a farce. It was like a wedding without the groom. Pakistan boycotted to protest the November 26 US-NATO attack.
Is the US endgame in Afghanistan real? If so, it appears to have entered a crucial phase under the cover of a series of international conferences to facilitate US troop withdrawal from the war-torn country. Some observers, however, believe America is playing a double game trying to give the impression of preparing to leave while working behind the scenes to establish permanent military bases in the country.
ReflectionsThe day Burhanuddin Rabbani was to leave Tehran on September 19 after attending the First International Islamic Awakening Conference (September 17–18), I had briefly chatted with him about prospects for peace in Afghanistan.
Since April 1978, the Afghans have experienced nothing but war. An entire generation has grown up with violence, murder and mayhem. First it was the Russians, followed by various Afghan factions fighting it out among themselves, then came the Taliban and now the Americans and their NATO allies.
Beyond the drum-beating and chest thumping about what a great job the Canadian soldiers did in Afghanistan, the question that needs to be asked is: what exactly did they achieve despite spending $20 billion on a war that is still raging and the Afghans are no better off today, in fact much worse, than they were 10 years ago?
With America’s departure from Afghanistan now almost certain, new alignments are beginning to emerge among regional players aimed at securing the most favorable outcome for each country. Islamic Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are in the forefront of this effort but Russia, China and the Central Asian republics are not far behind either.
Afghanistan’s most powerful warlord, Ahmed Wali Karzai, half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was shot and killed by Sardar Mohammed, a trusted family friend and security commander, at his home in Qandahar on July 12.
For his May 18 speech on the Muslim East, US President Barack Obama gave his latest performance in the production titled (Steadily Weakening) Empire Strikes Back. His flowery words have long since lost their perfume and his grammatically complex sentences, such a heady delight after the linguistically-challenged Bush, now seem to fall as flat as an out-of-tune piano.
As he was wheeled into the operation theatre at a Washington hospital, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, must have prayed the Pakistani surgeon tending to him would successfully stitch his torn aorta to save his life so he could “save” Afghanistan.
A non-descript country like Afghanistan has become the epicenter of global change sending not one but two superpowers into the dustbin of history.
The chest thumping at the NATO Lisbon conference (November 19-20) did not impress the Taliban much. Instead, they were chuckling at how easily the Americans can be duped into believing they are negotiating with the Taliban.
