September 2017 Archives
Thousands more Marines are being deployed to "reinforce advisory activities" (we know what that means; think Vietnam) in Afghanistan
Before he sends up to 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wants to know how many troops are currently on the ground. Whatever that number (how can he not know?), the human toll on Afghan civilians increases daily. Women and children casualties saw a sharp increase in the first six months of 2017, reports Aria Bendix to The Atlantic. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) cites a total of 1,662 civilian deaths between January 1 and June 30, a two percent increase over last year's record high.
President Trump's "new" Afghanistan war strategy does not define what victory would look like, or how his path would be different from the strategy of previous presidents: a mix of conventional military force and diplomatic pressure on Pakistan. "More boots on the ground is serving the long-term global strategy of the U.S. by victimizing and marginalizing the Afghan ordinary people," reads a dispatch from onebillionrising.org. "[U.S.] presence in Afghanistan is not for human rights and liberation, rather to use the geo-strategic position of Afghanistan against its global and regional rivals."
Boundaries of the Kabul Green Zone redrawn to encompass Western embassies, government ministries, and NATO headquarters
The Pentagon's Kabul Security Zone (map) confirms U.S. plans to stay put, long term; the huge public works project is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.
There will be no appeasing Donald Trump or his supporters. "It is useful for Americans to recognize that we are facing something entirely new and different in American history," comments professor Peter Dreier. "Certainly none of us in our lifetimes have confronted an American government led by someone like Trump in terms of his sociopathic, demagogic, impulsive, and vindictive personality (not even Nixon came close). . ."Since 9/11 we have witnessed the rise of a national-security-surveillance state and the expansion of a lockdown mode of existence in a range of institutions that extend from schools and airports to the space of the city itself. The meaning of lockdown in this context has to be understood in broader terms as the use of military solutions to problems for which such approaches are not only unnecessary but further produce authoritarian and anti-democratic policies and practices. Under such circumstances, not only have civil liberties been violated in the name of national security, but the promise of national security has given rise to policies which are punitive, steeped in the logic of revenge, and support the rise of a punishing state whose echoes of authoritarianism are often lost in the moral comas that accompany the country's infatuation with war and the militarization of everyday life." -- Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
UPDATED September 2, 2017"The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor's conscience." -- Robert F. Williams
