|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Dennis O'Driscoll
$21.12
By Daniel Ellsberg
$20
|
|
|
|
Secretary of Defense (CC BY 2.0)
|
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch —
The official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare.
|
U.S. Embassy Kabul Afghanistan
|
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for an accelerated departure of American forces a day after controversial photos were published showing U.S. soldiers posing with body parts of insurgents.
|
AP/Musadeq Sadeq
|
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has branded the Taliban’s 18-hour siege of Kabul and places across eastern Afghanistan on Sunday an intelligence failure and called for an investigation into NATO security operations.
|
AP / Remy de la Mauviniere
|
By Barry Lando — The horrific chain of seven slayings in Toulouse, France, that has stunned that country could have been lifted directly from a television thriller. In fact, this whole terrible affair has been a nightmare scenario that for decades has haunted authorities in France, Europe and the United States.
|
AP / Rahmat Gul
|
Pointing to “the shaky, erratic and vague standpoint of the Americans” as one key reason for their decision, Taliban leaders in Afghanistan put the kibosh on plans to meet with U.S. envoys, releasing a statement on Thursday explaining the change of plans.
|
|
By Joe Conason — For everyone who originally supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the question today is how what was once a righteous mission can end in anything but ruin.
|
AP / Rafiq Maqbool
|
By Eugene Robinson — It was clear before Sunday’s horrific massacre of civilians that it’s past time for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to end.
|
U.S. Navy / MC2 Brooks B. Patton Jr.
|
By William Pfaff — Stephen Hadley, a former official in ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, said in Munich that Europe must spend more if it wants to be a global player. The Europeans regard the George W. Bush administration record, and now the Obama administration’s, and see the disastrous results of “global playing.”
|
bbc.co.uk
|
Claims made by NATO that Pakistan is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban are tantamount to “old wine in an even older bottle,” according to Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar. However, this particular batch of wine represents thousands of mandatory conversations (read: interrogations) versus Khar’s official denial.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By William Pfaff — The Afghan government’s order a week ago to the United States to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington.
|
Wikimedia Commons/Central Intelligence Agency
|
Members of al-Qaida, the Taliban and militant groups from Afghanistan and Pakistan met up twice late last year in an effort to combine forces against America’s diminished presence in Pakistan—one common target on which they might agree to focus.
|
cnn.com
|
At least 63 people were killed in a series of bomb attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday during ceremonies marking the Shiite holiday of Ashura in three different targeted locations, but the majority of the deaths occurred in Kabul. A Pakistani group claimed responsibility for this sudden and ominous outbreak of sectarian violence.
|
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Angelita Lawrence
|
By William Pfaff — The Gordian knot by which this American project is bound is the simultaneous conflict and collaboration of the United States and nuclear Pakistan.
|
Flickr / isafmedia (CC-BY)
|
Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed in his home Tuesday when a suicide bomber he thought was there to talk peace instead detonated a bomb hidden in his turban.
|
The National Guard
|
In the deadliest day for American troops since the war in Afghanistan began almost 10 years ago, 30 Americans and seven Afghan commandos died Saturday when the Chinook helicopter they were in was shot down by the Taliban.
|
|
Rainer Hachfeld, Cagle Cartoons, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
Posted on Jul 27, 2011
READ MORE 
|
Flickr / isafmedia
|
Less than one week after Hamid Karzai’s half brother was shot to death, Jan Mohammad Khan, a senior adviser to the Afghan president, was killed by gunmen at his home. The Taliban claimed responsibility. (more)
|
Flickr / Defence Images
|
Pakistani lawyer and human rights champion Mirza Shahzad Akbar, who has aided the U.S. government in legal counterterrorism efforts, was banned from traveling to the States to speak at Columbia Law School after suing the CIA about drone strikes that have killed civilians in his country. (more)
|
Flickr / isafmedia
|
In 2005, the U.S.-backed Afghan government instituted a reconciliation program aimed at reintegrating insurgents who aggressively opposed the U.S. invasion of their country. With minimal political support and inadequate funding, that program failed, and many who voluntarily left groups such as the Taliban have received none of the promised benefits.
|
AP / Aqeel Ahmed
|
This bit of news probably will not help the already dicey relationship between Pakistan and the U.S.: Pakistani officials have arrested five people believed to have assisted the CIA in the operation that felled Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last month.
|
AP / Jason Reed
|
By Bill Boyarsky — The White House account of President Barack Obama’s meeting with his Afghanistan team was insultingly vague for anyone wanting to know when—or if—the Afghanistan war will end.
|
White House / Lawrence Jackson
|
In his latest, scathingly critical essay for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens makes it eminently clear that he isn’t buying any of the stories the U.S. and Pakistani governments are selling about their increasingly complicated (and, in Hitchens’ view, hypocritical) relationship ... (more)
|
U.S. Army
|
By Bill Boyarsky — Remember the war, the one in Afghanistan? The recent Memorial Day weekend forced the news media to briefly focus on it. But otherwise the war and its heavy toll have faded from our national consciousness.
|
guardian.co.uk
|
On Friday, a pair of suicide bombings killed more than 80 Frontier Corps trainees who were celebrating at a graduation party in Shabqadar in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks as a form of retaliation for the death of Osama bin Laden ... (more)
|
AP / Al-Jazeera
|
By Robert Scheer — When bin Laden turned against us, he morphed into a figure of evil incarnate, and now three decades after we first decided to use him and other imported Muslim zealots for our Cold War purposes, we feel cleansed by his death of any responsibility for his carnage.
|
|
By Barry Lando — The jubilation of Americans and Western leaders at the death of Osama bin Laden, though understandable, misses the point. In many ways, the figure gunned down in Pakistan was already irrelevant—more a symbol of past dangers than a real threat for the future.
|
|
Mike Keefe, Cagle Cartoons, The Denver Post —
Posted on Apr 30, 2011
READ MORE
|
|
Bob Englehart, Cagle Cartoons, The Hartford Courant —
Posted on Mar 18, 2011
READ MORE
|
|
Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons —
|
Flickr / Department of State
|
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has some choice words for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, warning of increasing military pressure as the U.S. prepares to resume heavy fighting. “They cannot defeat us,” Clinton said as the war in Central Asia is catapulted into its 10th year.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
In apparent response to a Pakistani military action that killed some 40 rebels, a suicide bomber in Pakistan has killed at least 43 people in an attack on a mass of people receiving aid in the northwest town of Khar.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
Attacks on two Afghan military bases killed at least 13 members of the country’s security forces. One of the attacks, blamed on the Taliban, was against a training center on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.
|
|
President Obama took to the podium Thursday to declare that “we are on track to achieve our goals” in Afghanistan, although the war there “continues to be a difficult endeavor.” This assessment wouldn’t have anything to do with two big setbacks ...
|
|
Laura Flanders points out that Interpol’s pursuit of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over sexual assault allegations is yet another example of women’s bodies serving ulterior political motives. Where is Interpol, Flanders asks, for the sexually assaulted women of the U.S. military or those in Haitian refugee camps?
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
Some records are made to be broken, from the 100-meter dash to Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. But who would covet breaking the nine-year, 50-day Soviet record for its military campaign in Afghanistan? And the winner is … the USA.
|
|
By William Pfaff — To adapt to secular use a phrase from medieval mysticism, “the cloud of unknowing” deepens as the war-waging countries of North America and Western Europe approach their NATO “summit.”
|
Flickr / openDemocracy (CC-BY-SA)
|
Hamid Karzai is acting up. The Afghan president, who rankled top U.S. brass earlier this year with hints at split loyalties, has again come out with some fightin’ words against the American war effort in his country.
|
Flickr / kimberlyfaye
|
In an odd flipping of the political script, the Taliban has called on the U.S. Congress to dispatch a “fact-finding mission” to Afghanistan to probe what it calls the lies and propaganda used by the Pentagon and U.S. generals to extend and justify the war.
|
AP / Mohammad Iqbal
|
Two bomb attacks on mosques left more than 60 people dead and scores injured in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the most lethal attack, in which a 17-year-old suicide bomber struck a Sunni mosque during Friday prayers.
|
AP / Rodrigo Abd
|
By Robert Scheer — It’s over for the U.S. in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean the death and destruction are about to stop. Quagmires don’t just go away. However, the signs are everywhere that the American course in that nation is doomed.
|
Wikimedia Commons / The White House
|
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s administration had been secretly accepting millions of dollars in cash from the Iranian government. Sketchy! And on Monday, Karzai owned up to his part in the clandestine funding program ... (continued)
|
AP / Carolyn Kaster, pool
|
Nothing is certain on this front yet, but the U.S. is reportedly considering opening up some channels of communication to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and between the Taliban and the Afghan government, in the interest of long-term peace goals.
|
|
Patrick Chappatte, Cagle Cartoons, The International Herald Tribune —
Posted on Oct 11, 2010
READ MORE
|
|
Here’s a sobering reminder, from the vigilant filmmakers at Brave New Films, about exactly what has been lost (thousands of Afghan civilians, more than 1,200 U.S. soldiers, over $1 trillion) in the last decade of the war in Afghanistan. Ten years—and at least someone is counting.
|
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Bradley Lail
|
The Afghan government claims to have had contact with the Taliban, though the insurgent group denies this. The White House signaled its support, but said such contact, which the Washington Post reports is at the “secret, high-level talks” stage, “has to be done by the Afghans.”
|
AP / Shah Khalid
|
In an incident that could lead to even more tension between the U.S. and Pakistan, NATO has confirmed that one of its aircraft engaged in an attack across the Pakistani border, purportedly to fire on suspected militants.
|
Wikimedia Commons / CIA
|
Although there’s no official confirmation from the U.S., Pakistani officials said Tuesday that a senior al-Qaida operative, Sheikh Fateh, was killed Saturday by an American drone attack in north Waziristan, according to the BBC.
|
AP / Gemunu Amarasinghe
|
On Monday, just two days after the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, reports that the polling process was corrupted by incidents of voting fraud had sparked an investigation, according to the Los Angeles Times.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Say ‘Hi-Ho!’ as They Strip-Search You
Newsletter 
Become a Fan
Follow Us
Subscribe
