The glorious Taliban mujahideen valiantly behead 17 Afghans at a house party.
I blame the international community. If they weren't pouring blood and treasure into this place at such a brisk pace, the Taliban wouldn't have to undertake operations like this. They're just trying to rid Afghanistan's territory of foreign imperialist parasites.
No doubt, these 17 headless individuals were working for the CIA or Mossad.
Nah. Definitely Mossad.
See, it's all connected.
Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The PropagandistMore >>
This is simply intolerable. It's unclear whether the majority of these attacks by Afghan security forces upon their supposed allies are Taliban plants or disgruntled psychopaths operating on the spur of the moment. But the latest attack, which killed a group of US Special Forces soldiers, is the 24th betrayal since January of this year.
If Afghans are unwilling to help sort out the traitorous insurgents in their midst, and Afghan officers suffer no consequences for such debacles, they can hardly be expected to stand up to the Taliban after international forces bug out. There have to be serious consequences here that don't involve useless cliches from top NATO generals about the importance of learning to trust each other.
An immediate purge in the ranks of any potentially disloyal Afghan soldier would be a start. If they go over to the Taliban as some recruits have actually acknowledged they might do, fine; at least loyal Afghan forces and ISAF soldiers will have the chance to shoot them from the front instead of always looking back over their shoulders. (If this process ends up hobbling Afghan security forces from massive losses of hundreds or even thousands of defectors, that's still...More >>
The weird views of liberal Americans on foreign policy vis a vis Afghanistan have plenty of precedent from past conflicts. Sam Schulman explores the history in We Who Are About to Bug Out Salute You
The intellectual and practical defects of our Afghanistan policy are bizarre and difficult to understand. But our pro-Taliban policy has a more obvious moral defect (you are excused from the discussion here, Professor Walt), which has evinced a nearly unanimous lack of interest on the part of our own media and political elites. It seems like only yesterday that we applauded the emergence of Kabul’s women and girls from the shadow of Taliban rule; it was only yesterday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed never to let that era return. But our normally stalwart and reliable humanitarian community, and our even more predictable feminists, seem completely to have forgotten the fate of Afghanistan and its women as Obama has gradually revealed his intention to negotiate with Taliban officials.
“Tonight, I’d like to tell you how we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan,” Obama said Tuesday. We’re still waiting.
That's the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson on why Americans can't understand what their president can't explain, or maybe it's why Americans can't explain what their president can't understand. In any case, it's about unanswered questions surrounding Barack Obama's surprise media-availability sessions in Afghanistan this week.
This might be at least partly the source of the confusion: "And so 10 years ago the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al-Qaida could never again use this country to launch attacks against us." Thus spake Obama at Baghram. In fact, for the "allies" among the UN_mandated, NATO-led 47-member ISAF military coalition, the whole point has not been to make America safe from al-Qaida. The United States itself has had (or at least once had) rather more Afghanistan-related reasons to involve its soldiers in Afghanistan too. Like building a sovereign and democratic UN member state where there was just a big black hole, for instance. Whatever happened to that, anyway?
Reports of a renewed Taliban offensive in Afghanistan all got it wrong. Almost without fail, pundits have concluded that the mere capability of the Taliban to launch attacks is proof that the war is unwinnable and Afghanistan is lost. If anything, this latest violence underlines the opposite conclusion.
The Taliban can't launch a major offensive to seize territory. Most of the country hates them. They lack widespread indigeous support and without Pakistani and Iranian logistical backing, they would have died away years ago. They are reduced to "attention getting" attacks of opportunity. "Look at us, CNN! We're still around. We're still fighting the jihad! We can still [BOOM BLAM BLAM BLAM] oh crap I'm dying."
The attacks they undertook against embassies and military installations were wholly ineffective. Four civilians and 11 Afghan security personnel are dead in exchange for 36 Taliban casualities. This was hardly Stalingrad or Normandy. It's not even Tet. The embassies are still running just fine. The military bases are still secure.
The critical problem in Afghanistan is not our own capabilities, but the lack of a clearly-stated mission by ourselves and our allies. Instead of talking about why we are in Afghanistan, the entire conversation...More >>
Just yesterday, 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned in an anti-female education attack by Taliban in the region. Not only is this extraordinarily tragic and should rightfully spark outrage, but this also is yet another piece of evidence for those who believe western foreign policy and its meta-values motivates extremists in the region to injure and kill innocent civilians.
This is obviously due to western foreign policy, right? Seeing as how liberal, Western ideas such as gender equality, democracy, and education compels Islamists to poison the drinking water of schoolgirls who desire nothing more than an ability to read. Or perhaps it's because of the West that the Taliban throw acid in the faces of female students wanting to obtain an education. Maybe the propagation of these aforementioned values truly motivates the Taliban to venture out and maim schoolgirls and school teachers.
Right.
Yes, western foreign policy may act as a catalyst for both perceived and very real grievances; however, it's only a temporary one -- not the root cause of the troubles in the region.
Joseph Suh is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist...More >>
This is the second article in a series by Joseph Suh on why he wants to serve in the military. Read the first article, Why I Want to Serve
I left off my first article noting that the United States has been involved in atrocities in its past. However, these should be seen as lessons from history. Although the military industrial complex and other shadowy factors may influence American military involvements, they aren't absolute controllers of US foreign policy today.
Let's take for example, the war in Afghanistan.
Surely, the consequences of this conflict are extraordinarily difficult to deal with but the intent – what the war planners wanted to happen – is a different story.
The US leadership obviously mis-managed the political aspects of the war. They didn't take into account significant aspects of the country, such as how difficult dealing with tribalism and how incompetent the Karzai Administration would be.
Obviously, US national security interests are in play here. From al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Centers in 1993 and 2001 to the 1998 bombings US embassy bombings in Africa, the US should be rightfully worried about terrorists breeding in Afghanistan (and...More >>
Technically, pulling US forces out of villages and putting them on bases isn't "pulling them out of Afghanistan." It just means the USA won't be able to fight a counterinsurgency and if things go south quickly, American forces could end up effectively isolated in their forts -- as the Taliban moves in to the vacated villages. It may essentially mean the same thing as pulling out of Afghanistan.
So... that's great news! I guess all the reports we've been hearing of Afghan troops' complete inability to engage the Taliban on their own, the ineffective training program, the defections... that's all just hyperbole. Well, thank goodness.
Because, if that stuff is true, 2013 may just be the year Karzai gets his throat slit at the same time that the carving up of Afghanistan begins in earnest.More >>
