South Asia

By Michael Scollon of RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi | – ( RFE/RL – Radio Azadi) – Hundreds of school-aged girls in Afghanistan are getting around the Taliban’s efforts to stymie their education by going online, giving them the opportunity to continue to learn everything from computer programming to sculpting to yoga psychotherapy. “It sends a clear […]

Afghanistan

Was the Afghan War a Schell Game? Getting It Right Is Always the Wrong Approach When It Comes to America’s Wars

Nick Turse

( Tomdispatch.com) – I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request. Authors wait their whole lives for I-told-you-so moments like these. But mine passed without accolades, awards, or adulation. Being way ahead of […]

Afghanistan

“Worse than a Crime”: Pentagon Inspector finds Kabul Drone Strike Killing 10 not a Violation of Law (!)

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Paul Handley of AFP reports that the US Air Force Inspector General, Lieutenant General Sami Said, found that a drone strike that mistakenly killed 10 civilian non-combatants, including 7 children, in Afghanistan on August 29 violated no laws, including the law of war. When Napoleon had the royalist Duc d’Enghein […]

Afghanistan

How photos of Afghan suffering shown over and over perpetuate inequality and harm

The Conversation

By Azeta Hatef | – Devastating photos and videos emerged from Afghanistan as the Taliban regained control of the country and U.S. troops prepared to withdraw in August 2021. A video of 19-year-old Zaki Anwari and others falling to their deaths as they clung to the side of a U.S. evacuation airplane circulated in the […]

Afghanistan

America’s Toxic Militarism has left Afghanistan, but Afghan Women are still Living with its Consequences

Ann Jones

By Ann Jones | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I know, I know. It’s the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I’m sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of… well, who knows […]

Afghanistan

How ethnic and religious divides in Afghanistan are contributing to violence against minorities

The Conversation

By Abdulkader Sinno | – Close to a hundred Afghan Shiite Muslims were killed in attacks on mosques in October 2021. One such attack took place on Oct. 15, when a group of suicide bombers detonated explosives at a mosque in Kandahar. Just over a week before that, at least 46 people were killed in […]

Afghanistan

Afghanistan: Taliban Forcibly Evict Minority Shia — Hazaras Targets of Collective Punishment

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch – (New York) – Taliban officials in several provinces across Afghanistan have forcibly displaced residents partly to distribute land to their own supporters, Human Rights Watch said today. Many of these evictions have targeted Hazara Shia communities, as well as people associated with the former government, as a form of collective punishment. […]

Afghanistan

How US-Soviet Cold War Competition led to Fall of the Afghan Left and Collapse of the Country into Fundamentalism

Middle East Monitor

By Luis Edel Abreu Veranes | – From the turbulent 1970s ( Middle East Monitor) – With its geographic centrality on the Asian continent, Afghanistan has historically become a corridor and civilisational interstice between Persian and Hindustani empires and peoples flowing in from the north. Some were Turkic-speaking, who marked and shaped the ethnic synthesis […]

Afghanistan

Celebrating Rep. Barbara Lee, our Cassandra who warned against the Failed 20-Year Wars

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I’d saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a grey suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. […]