U.S. imperialism’s star-crossed 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing 20-year occupation was doomed from the very start. Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning director Matthew Heineman’s new 96-minute non-fiction film Retrograde documents the denouement of a deceitful debacle. His film, shot on the ground often amidst intense combat, zooms in on...
Over the past few months, U.S. lawmakers, the Afghan government, and the international community have called on Washington to stop strangling the Afghan economy as its people continue to suffer from a U.S.-created humanitarian crisis. On December 22nd, the Biden administration effectively rejected those calls, opting instead for half-measures...
American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division at Bagram Air Base in 2013.
Special Forces, Pentagon Contractors and Intelligence Operatives Will Remain On Wednesday April 14th, President Joe Biden announced that he would end the U.S.’s longest war and withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Over 6,000 NATO troops will also be withdrawn by...
And Sadly, This Ghastly Boast Came True On September 13, 2001, Cofer Black, the head of CIA counter-terrorism, had a conversation with President George W. Bush in which he boasted: “When we are through with them , they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Sadly, Black’s boast essentially came to...
On February 21, 2010, 25 Afghan civilians, including four women and a child, were killed when Boeing helicopters fired Hellfire missiles made by Lockheed Martin on a convoy of SUVs traveling in the Uruzgan province in the center of Afghanistan on their way to Kabul. The helicopter pilots received intelligence...
As the Afghanistan Armageddon unravels, this humiliating, devastating defeat for U.S. and its allies’ imperialism and the 20th anniversary of 9/11, plus the June 29 death of war monger extraordinaire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are wakeup calls. They offer those in the U.S. the chance to reflect upon, reconsider and rethink Washington’s disastrous, interventionist foreign policy.
By every measure, the Afghan War has been a failure for America. But it has been a $5 trillion success for American corporations like Lockheed Martin, DynCorp, General Dynamics, Black & Veatch, Halliburton and the oil companies which shipped half-a-million gallons of fuel a day...
Unmasking media’s Incomplete Narrative: The true cause of the Afghan War lies beyond what you've heard in the media. It is rooted in a gas pipeline that the Taliban obstructed in 1998. The media’s portrayal of the conflict suggests that 9/11 was the sole catalyst, while consistently hiding a...
On September 11, 2001—a day that will live in infamy in U.S. history—hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City and one side of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which experienced destruction. President George W. Bush’s administration started a war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001,...
In mid-July, 100 Afghan families from Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, fled to Kabul. They feared Taliban militants would attack them in Bamiyan. Over the past decade, I have gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing Talib fighters in...