Today is a day of sadness

Today I have to perform a sad duty; the funeral and commemoration of a much loved family member, the favourite aunt of my husband.
Jessy was a nurse for most of her live. She took care of war veterans of WWII and the Vietnam war in New Zealand.
She died peacefully in a hospital bed surrounded 24 [...]

International troops in Afghanistan

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on [...]

Women’s lives worse than ever

And here is me thinking we were there to help those poor supressed women, Sounds like we succeeded, eh?
By Terri Judd
Monday, 25 February 2008

Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages.
Girls as young as six are being married into a life of [...]

Afghanistan sitting on a gold mine: minister

Of course, thats why the Americans wanted it, duhhh.
KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan is sitting on a wealth of mineral reserves — perhaps the richest in the region — that offer hope for a country mired in poverty after decades of war, the mining minister says.
Significant deposits of copper, iron, gold, oil and gas, and coal [...]

Civil war fear as Afghans ponder arrest of warlord

By Jerome Starkey

AN INVESTIGATION into claims a notorious Afghan warlord led a drunken raid on his neighbour’s home, kidnapped its occupants and slapped the owner’s wife are threatening to split the country’s key power brokers along ethnic lines and plunge its only peaceful region into civil war.
The whisky-swilling warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum was stripped [...]

Taliban defeat will take years: US general

And here was me thinking we beat the buggers in the first month of occupation.
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan (AFP) – It will take “a few years” to defeat the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, the top US general in the country said Tuesday, reiterating US support for the fight.
Major General David Rodriguez, head of the US-led coalition [...]

Top US Lawyer And UNICEF Data Reveal Afghan Genocide

By Dr Gideon Polya08 February, 2008
Countercurrents.org
The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 with the ostensible excuse of the Afghan Government’s “protection” of the asserted Al Qaeda culprits of the 9/11 atrocity that killed 3,000 people. In the light of as many as 6.6 million post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan as of February 2008 [...]

NATO winning battles, losing Afghanistan

We all knew this of course. You cannot win a war as a foreign invader in a country like Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran for that matter. But that doesn’t matter to the Bush Cabal. When the wars end as all wars must end they will have made all the money they wanted to make [...]

NATO Genocide in Afghanistan

By Ali Khan
30/01/08 “ICH” — – Ali Khan argues that the internationally recognized crime of genocide applies to the intentional killings that NATO troops commit on a weekly basis in the poor villages and mute mountains of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban.
Sloganeers, propagandists and politicians often use the word “genocide” in ways that the law [...]

Afghanistan — the next disaster

By Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
After six plus years, the war in Afghanistan drags on. The media occasionally cites casualties, but if it doesn’t involve National Football League veteran Pat Tillman’s execution by his own comrades, Afghanistan gets sparse attention. A few stories feature the growing number of Afghan and Iraq War vets on American [...]

Just who is buying all that Afghan opium?

Recent gyrations in supply of opium from Afghanistan, with no corresponding difference in supply of illicit heroin on our streets, suggest an unknown customer snapping up the bulk of it
By Kevin Potvin
In 1999, Afghan poppy farmers accounted for 75% of global opium production, producing about 4,000 tons. In 2000, the Taliban government, four years consolidating [...]

More than half of Afghanistan ‘under Taliban’

By Kim Sengupta
Published: 22 November 2007

 
More than half of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control and the Nato force in the country needs to be doubled in size to cope with the resurgent group, a report by the Senlis Council think-tank says. A study by the group found that the Taliban, enriched by illicit profits from [...]

From CIA Jails, Inmates Fade Into Obscurity

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 27, 2007; ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA’s overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaeda leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other “ghost prisoners” [...]

Our sentiments exactly.

Afghanistan: Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA

“An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said,” reports the New York Times. “We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic [...]

Is the CIA helping itself to the Afghan heroin harvest?

Nick Possum
Whispers from the Mean Streets
October 22, 2007
No names, no pack drill, like we used to say in the army, but I had a client who wanted me to look into some aspects of the world heroin trade.
I googled a bit, and made a few phone calls and began to have disturbing suspicions.
Since the fall [...]

Private US military contractors move into Helmand

By Kim Sengupta in Kabul
Published: 14 October 2007

 
Large numbers of US private military personnel are expected to arrive in Helmand, the focal point of British involvement in Afghanistan, as part of a new effort to promote reconstruction and development in the war-torn province.
The US has contributed the largest sum to the new aid effort, over $200m. [...]

Afghanistan ‘is going down fast’

THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups.The death of Trooper David Pearce underlines the rising dangers for Australia’s 1000 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them deployed [...]

Kabul rejects US pleas to spray opium poppies

Renewed American efforts to persuade the Afghan government to use crop dusters against poppy production have failed, despite Washington dispatching a top scientist to advocate the safety of spraying herbicides.Charles Helling met representatives of the Afghan ministries of counter-narcotics, health, and rural rehabilitation on Sunday to discuss fears over the side effects of glyphosate, one [...]