Taliban’s Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along

It has already been called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history.” Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, doing something the US military never could, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

Alan Macleod
By Alan Macleod
Taliban Fentanyl Feature photo

The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past

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Lee Camp: You Won’t Believe Who Got The Richest From The Afghanistan War

The US has withdrawn from the war in Afghanistan, but the war profiteers are still raking in big bucks through the revolving door that is the military industrial complex.

Lee Camp
By Lee Camp
Lee Camp: You Won't Believe Who Got The Richest From The Afghanistan War

The war in Afghanistan, one of the longest conflicts in U.S. history, was marked by extensive waste, fraud, and corruption, resulting in trillions of dollars being spent by American taxpayers. The war was ostensibly launched to eliminate the threat posed by the Taliban and to find and capture Osama bin Laden, the purported mastermind behind the

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Two Decades and $90 Billion US Dollars Later: Dissecting The Afghan Military’s Total Collapse

Kit Klarnberg reveals the industrial-scale corruption which allowed billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to flow into Afghanistan without supervision and for weaponry and aid to be misused, stolen or illegally sold off by Afghans, U.S. personnel and Pentagon contractors alike.

Kit Klarenberg
By Kit Klarenberg
Afghanistan SIGAR Report Feature photo

In February, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published an extensive investigation into the spectacular collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF), which the U.S. spent two decades and $90 billion building. In common with previous SIGAR reports, it offers a remarkably uncompromising,

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Biden’s $7 Billion Afghan Heist

The president’s order diverting frozen funds to American families of 9/11 victims will only make the humanitarian and economic crises in Afghanistan worse.

Medea Benjamin
Cheryl Benard
Masuda Sultan
By Medea Benjamin
And Cheryl Benard
And Masuda Sultan
Biden Afghanistan Feature photo

With his Executive Order redefining Afghanistan’s Fiscal Reserve as a slush fund to be disbursed on his whim and with the stroke of his pen, President Biden has taken what may well be the final step in an experiment gone amok. The U.S. first attempted to make Afghanistan into a Western democracy, instead installed a kleptocracy, made Afghans endure

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Biden’s “Diplomacy Is Back” Falls Flat as 2021 Middle East Policy a Miserable Flop

By no means has voting blue meant a change for the better; in fact, the only real difference between Biden and Trump in terms of foreign policy is that instead of mean tweets, more respectful language is used to give the new president the veneer of respectability.

Robert Inlakesh
By Robert Inlakesh
Joe Biden Middle East Feature photo

Despite President Joe Biden having claimed earlier this year that “diplomacy is back” and that he would end the war in Yemen, revive the Iran Nuclear Deal and settle several other issues, in reality his Middle East foreign policy has been just as detrimental to the region as was that of his predecessor. “This war has to end…we’re ending all

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How Feminists Can Support Afghan Women Living Under the Taliban

When the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, it froze billions of dollars in Afghan assets, grinding many of the country’s most essential operations to a halt and spreading misery. The US government must release those funds.

Medea Benjamin
Ariel Gold
By Medea Benjamin
And Ariel Gold

WASHINGTON (Jacobin) — Since the Taliban took control of Kabul and the central government on August 15, efforts to support Afghan women have become extremely challenging. According to some prominent U.S. feminists with strong ties to Afghan women, the Taliban “has no legitimacy beyond the brutal force it commands,” and governments, the United

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