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.
George Galloway, the former British Member of Parliament, is a sharp debater and gifted orator with a ready wit. He was in Canada on a 9-city speaking tour from November 16–27. He addressed standing room audiences in cities from coast to coast to coast including Yellowknife in Canada’s frozen north.
“The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State… The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber.
This was evident during the one-day conference when officials from 70 countries converged on Kabul to talk about Afghanistan’s future amid growing concern for intensified violence and the growing strength of the resistance.
One of the common misconceptions about the Taliban is that they were only formed as a movement in 1994...
Informed observers wonder about the timing of the announcement. The US Geological Survey had known about these deposits as early as 2004 although until now this was a closely guarded secret known only to a few in the US...
The Americans are caught, literally, between and a rock and a hard place in Afghanistan. The mountainous country has one of the toughest people on earth that have never allowed foreigners to dominate them.
The following day while driving back from Islamabad to Peshawar, the news on the car radio startled me: in a communist-led military coup, Sardar Daoud and his entire family had been murdered in Afghanistan...
Regardless of US spin, the endgame in Afghanistan has begun. Aware that they cannot defeat the Taliban militarily, the Americans have changed tune...
When Americans are not winning hearts and minds by dropping 1,000-pound bombs on wedding parties or mud-hut dwelling women and children as they did in Farah province on May 4 killing 147 civilians, 93 of them children, they are busy delivering democracy through cruise missiles...
On the political front, it appears the US has resigned itself to the fact that there is nobody capable of replacing Karzai at present.
It was bound to happen; in fact, the US wants it this way. Its gross failures in Afghanistan are not only blamed on others, the war is also deliberately being spread to Pakistan and the Central Asian republics with frightening consequences. The expan
The Taliban’s ascendance in Swat and their brief foray into the town of Buner to the south sent leaders of the self-proclaimed superpower in Washington into panic that surpassed even that displayed by officials in Islamabad. US media reports repeatedly mentioned that Swat is barely 100 kilometres from the Pakistani capital.
This year’s spring has arrived with the Americans singing a new tune about Afghanistan: the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily. While this was obvious for quite some time to most observers familiar with the Afghan scene, the Americans being slow learners needed extra time to grasp this reality. From US PresidentBarack Obama down, most Americans are now singing from the same page.
April marks a grim milestone in Afghanistan’s tortuous history. On April 27, 1978 the country was plunged into crisis following a Marxist-led military coup in which President Sardar Daud and virtually his entire family was killed. An internal uprising followed leading to the Soviet invasion of December 27, 1979.
The Obama administration is off to a sluggish start in foreign policy. The strategic toxins that have been lodged in the organs and tissues of the American body politic throughout the previous decades of successive administrations are pathological and substantial. When it comes to dealing with the Islamic movement and State, American politics are downright malignant and cancerous.
Long before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the Americans had started to mutter darkly that Hamid Karzai was not only ineffective, he presided over a government that was corrupt and harbored drug and warlords in Afghanistan. While not all charges are false, Karzai alone cannot be blamed for all of them; it appears like another desperate attempt to shift blame for America's own disastrous policies.
