Archive for September, 2021

How the defense industry helped prolong the war in Afghanistan

CACI is a well-known company with a $907 million contract in Afghanistan — it also has undisclosed ties to think tanks opposed to withdrawal. Weapons firms and defense contractors consume over half of the Pentagon’s $740 billion budget and the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan poses a threat for their share-holders and executives. That concern was laid bare […]

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The dangerous rise of a new stab-in-the-back myth

The foreign policy elite are focused on defending their reputations and privileges, not in confronting failure in Afghanistan. When the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany in 1933, they enshrined into their version of history the myth that the German Army had not lost in the Great War but had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly civilian politicians, Jews, […]

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US-China relations at crossroads

The Biden Administration, in dire straits over Afghanistan, is pursuing China for help. There have been two phone calls to Chinese State Councilor and FM Wang Yi from US Secretary of state Antony Blinken since August 16 alone. The taciturn readouts from Washington would have us believe that these conversations related exclusively to Afghan developments. But Beijing insists that they […]

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A Vengeful American Empire Has Been Humiliated in Afghanistan

The Americans, like the British and the Soviets before them, dug their own graveyard in Afghanistan. The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been […]

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Afghanistan: The First Mistake

Establishment journalists and politicians are despairingly asking: Why did we fail in our well-meaning efforts to help the Afghan people? What were our mistakes? But they ignore their first mistake: creating the Taliban. The USA’s attempts to dominate Afghanistan and its resources began 40 years ago when Jimmy Carter in one of his last acts as president approved a CIA […]

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