Place: Afghanistan
In this conversation with Alternative Viewpoint, Pakistani left activist, academic and journalist Farooq Sulehria examines the
Summary: The people of Afghanistan and Pakistan are trapped in the same vicious circle — victims of their ruling elites, militaries, and clerics who use religion and war for power and profit. It is time both nations’ ordinary people recognize
For the past four years, I have been breathing in a country where the sky is constantly collapsing on women’s heads. As an Afghan girl, I welcome each sunrise not knowing whether I will see sunset on that day. In
The people of Palestine have suffered from multiple oppressions for many years. Their homeland was occupied. They lost many of their youth. Their intellectuals were exiled or killed. Their children experienced war and explosions. Women experienced the loss of their
Sultani discusses women’s struggle in Afghanistan, historically and against the Taliban regime today.
The Taliban’s takeover of power after the United States’ brutal twenty-year imperialist occupation is a catastrophe for women not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world.
How should anti-imperialists relate to the coming to power of the misogynist Taliban regime in Afghanistan?
The defeat of the U.S. and the seizure of power by the Taliban mark a real turning point. This reveals both imperialism and fundamentalism as obstacles to human emancipation.
For the family members of the victims, the 9/11 attacks were a tragedy, but for the Bush administration and the U.S. ruling class, they were a golden opportunity.
The only thing “lite” about American empire turned out to be a dogged unwillingness to accept any culpability in using power to try and remake the world, instead insisting that the exercise of violence could be innocent as long as the right people were doing it.
The Afghan government’s fate is but the most recent in a long list of cases of puppet entities created by a foreign occupation that collapse when that occupation ends.
The U.S.-Afghanistan War, which has lasted almost twenty years, has cost the United States 2,300 soldiers’ lives and two trillion dollars, while more than 100,000 Afghanis have been killed.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) or “Mother of All Bombs” was dropped in Afghanistan at a time of great international tension. Sarin gas had filled Syrian hospitals with civilians, threatening to draw Russia, the United States, and their allies into direct war. U.S. warships retaliated by striking one of Assad’s air bases while Donald Trump shared dessert with China’s President Xi Jinping. Hot on the heels of their meeting, Trump (erroneously) declared that another set of warships were en route to intimidate North Korea and its allies. Alarming rates of Syrian and Iraqi civilian causalities from coalition airstrikes were dominating headlines and before the dust had settled, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S.’s mighty arsenal incinerated an ISIS encampment in eastern Afghanistan.
Writer and labor organizer, Sara Jaffri, and left-wing political worker and the Punjab Deputy General Secretary of the Awami Workers Party, Alia Amirali talk organizing, feminism and class in Pakistan.
"As we reassure our partners that our relationships and engagement in Afghanistan will continue after the military transition in 2014, we should underscore that we have long-term strategic interests in the broader region… As the United States enters a new phase of engagement in Afghanistan, we must lay the foundation for a long-term strategy that sustains our security gains and protects U.S. interests…" —US Senator John Kerry, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December, 2011.
I admire Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group CODE PINK, which has staged anti-war protests and promoted victims’ rights all over the world. Her recently published book, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, focuses specifically on the relatively new phenomenon in military history of weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, the most common of which is the Predator drone. Having conducted a thorough—and dangerous—fact-finding mission to learn how U.S.
Obama’s decision to radically escalate the wars he was ostensibly elected to terminate is a measure of U.S. imperialism's desperation. It’s not just that our erstwhile peace candidate and future Nobel peace laureate is withdrawing exhausted U.S. troops from the frying pan of Iraq only to transfer them into the fire of Afghanistan, although that itself was an act of desperation. Many of these “volunteer” soldiers and reservists, shattered after several devastating tours of duty in Iraq, are being forced to remain in the service years beyond their contracts.
Since George Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 — the unjust, illegal, and unnecessary attack on Afghanistan — there have been constant US and NATO strikes on Afghan civilians, along with constant denials that such strikes have taken place.
