NATO’s twenty year debacle in Afghanistan
The general condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO intervention is that half the population are in humanitarian need and nearly one in two children will face acute malnutrition in 2021 – UN.
afghanistan
The US is withdrawing from Afghanistan – Not really
After the two-decades long war in Afghanistan the US ‘withdrawal’ will leave behind US troops, US contractors and US proxies to maintain its influence. Afghanistan, which has a border with China, is of strategic importance to the US. The US has no concern for the population of Afghanistan.
No new troop assignment to Afghanistan!
In May reports in the British press indicated that the government is planning to increase its troop deployment in Afghanistan from 600 to over 1000. These reports suggested that Prime Minister May will make an announcement at the NATO summit in July.
It is the imperialist powers and their allies who use chemical weapons
By Tom Castle
Propaganda in this country and by the other imperialist powers has sought to portray the use of chemical weapons as a uniquely barbarous act. Nick Clegg speaking in the Commons debate where the government lost in its initial efforts to authorise air strikes claimed they had not been used in a hundred years. More circumspectly, Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed they had not been used in this century.
Both are completely wrong and in trying to create a pretext for attacking Syria attempt to hide the role that the imperialist powers themselves have played in the use of chemical weapons. Chemical weapons are created by industrial processes. The most advanced industrialised countries, until recently solely the imperialist powers, have access to the most sophisticated chemical weapons, either for their own use or for sale to the reliable allies.
Al Qaida is imperialism’s offspring
By Tom Castle
Representative of both French and British imperialism have begun to talk of prolonged military operations in North Africa, lasting a decade or more. Although the US wishes to limit its own commitment of troops to the adventure, the sentiments were echoed by departing Secretary of State Clinton.
Guns, butter and Afghanistan
By Sammy Barker
The relative decline of US imperialism has underpinned the domestic debate about President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan.
In his speech to the Corp of Cadets at West Point on 1 December, Obama said: ‘…as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it allows us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.’
This drew a fierce response from the Wall Street Journal, which supports the surge as a necessary expression of power, not as an unfortunate diversion from its exercise at home: