As Neil Sedaka once crooned “breaking up is hard to do”, especially when you’re a superpower who needs the help of an unstable and corrupt government to have any chance of defeating an insurgency. It looks like the USA is just beginning to figure out w…
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RedBedHead: Afghanistan: USA Busted Trying To "Cut & Run"
Remember all that macho b.s. that G W Bush (and Stephen Harper) said about not “cutting and running” in Afghanistan? We were gonna fight to the end – for truth, justice and the American Way. And remember how Harper and his cronies took the piss out of …
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: The secret to Western success in Afghanistan: NATO must train the Taliban!
Completely untrained Afghan Mujahideen troops, the same people who later became the Taliban, stand atop a Soviet helicopter they downed in 1979. Below, Leonid Brezhnev.
I’ve got it! The way to move toward peace and progress in Afghanistan, that is….
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Canadian media’s narrative of the Afghan war suspiciously like a fairy tale
The Intercontinental Hotel, Kabul, as it’s supposed to look: About as real as Canadian reporting on Afghanistan. Below: Helicopters hovering, above the Intercontinental, as shot by Reuters News Service; in another hasty Western exit, not so long ago …
Continue readingRedBedHead: The Disaster That Is Afghanistan
This week’s slaying of Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a warlord/mobster with extensive power in Southern Afghanistan is a reminder that NATO and the Americans haven’t got the situation in Afghanistan under control. Not …
Continue readingPetraeus’s imaginary Taliban
In Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, his protagonist Chichikov seeks to purchase serfs who have died but are still registered against their owners as taxable assets. By relieving the owners of the tax burden, Chichikov obtains ownership of the dead ser…
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Is the Taliban ‘on its knees’? Not very likely
Nobody here but us poppy farmers! Really! Below: Mao Zedong and a visitor not dissimilar in many ways from certain recent Canadian politicians.Mao Zedong, a guy who may have known a thing or two about guerrilla warfare, famously observed: “The guerri…
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Having a majority means never having to say you’re sorry – even about the ‘Taliban Jack’ slur
Above: Afghan fighters against the British occupation in the late 19th Century. Not much has changed but the rifles. Below: Peter MacKay, Jack Layton.We’re still waiting for that apology to Opposition Leader Jack Layton from the Harper Conservatives….
Continue readingU.S. follows lead of Taliban Jack
Googling the history of our Afghanistan adventure the other day, I encountered a snide Vancouver Sun article written in 2008 mocking “Taliban Jack” for his position on the war, sarcastically summarizing his views as, “Bring in the UN, facilitate disc…
Continue readingWorld Headlines Review: Afghanistan: War, Power and Illusion
Canadian LAVs, Afghanistan, by isafmedia This week, Project Censored has released its annual list of top 25 censored news stories in a volume entitled Censored 2011: The Top Censored Stories of 2009-2010. An astounding article published by The Nation on November 11, 2009; How the US funds the Taliban, resurfaces
Continue readingA. Picazo: Child Soldiers: The Other Taliban and Al-Qaeda Militants
“A poignant reality of contemporary conflicts is that increasingly children are being used as cheap and readily available weapons of war. From Colombia to Sri Lanka, from Sierra Leone to Uganda, thousands of children have been used in armed conflict situations. In Afghanistan, our forces are seeing the increasing use
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