Many of Oregon’s largest firefighting aircraft are not available because the Department of Defense has sent them to Afghanistan to fight in the 20-year-old war.
Peace seems to have exceedingly, ridiculously, laughably bad timing, this latest time in Afghanistan, says Lee Camp.
This is not a column defending Donald Trump. Across my career, I have said more positive words about the scolex family of intestinal tapeworms than I have said about Donald Trump. (Scolex have been shown to read more.) No, this is a column about context. When The New York Times reports anonymous sources from the intelligence community say
America’s relationship with the Taliban has always been determined by how useful they are at advancing US interests in the region and the Trump administration’s recent efforts to make “peace” with the group are no exception.
President Trump, who is up for re-election this year, has added another “peace” deal to his credentials, a deal that the president, his re-election campaign and his supporters have promoted as proof that Trump is willing and able to resist the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its ceaseless push to keep the U.S. embroiled in “forever
Nearly 20 years later, if you ask a U.S. general or president (any of them) what the goal is in Afghanistan, they’ll feed you a word salad so large it’ll keep you regular for months.
Bombs have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to comprehend them. In just 10 months in 2018—the latest numbers made available—
Since the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan began, fighting has not stopped, destroying the country and leading to the U.S. spending an estimated $2 trillion on the war.
American polling firm Gallup has found that Afghans are the saddest people on earth, finding that nearly nine in ten respondents are “suffering,” in their own words, with zero percent claiming that they are currently “thriving.” When asked to
The debacle in Afghanistan is only one case in a fundamentally flawed U.S. policy with worldwide consequences. New quasi-governments installed by U.S. “regime change” in country after country have proven more corrupt, less legitimate and less able to control their nation’s territory than the ones the U.S. has destroyed.
The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years.
U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad, the top American official in the negotiations, has been quietly overseeing the destruction of Afghanistan for most of his political career — longer than the Taliban has existed as an organization.
National Security Advisor John Bolton’s firing may be the 9/11 anniversary gift the war-weary American public wanted, but the support he received from the establishment demonstrates that the war machine is much greater than one man. Bolton, the neoconservative movement’s standard bearer in the Trump administration, took up a crusade against
