Tag Archives : war in Afghanistan

In Council on Foreign Relations, Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor of CFR.org, interviews Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, CFR. Boot sums up the Marjah offensive as US troops ‘trying to take out probably the biggest remaining Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, which has been a safe haven not only [...]

Gabriela Campos, an intern at the Institute for Policy Studies, talks about a compilation of analyses regarding the New Taliban. The book, entitled Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field, is edited by Antonio Giustozzi who is a fellow at the London School of Economics. The book asserts that a stronger Neo-Taliban has definitely emerged, [...]

Let us not kid ourselves. The heart of war is combat. David Price, a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist and author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, writes a counterpunch exclusive on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS). The HTS is a program by the United States Army [...]

Yvonne Ridley, a British Journalist and author of In The Hands of the Taliban, boldly asserts in counterpunch that the huge military offensive codenamed Operation Moshtarak that caused the evacuation of residents in the town of Marjah in Afghanistan is ethnic cleansing. The purported ISAF pacification offensive grandly launched in what is described [...]

US President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize while ‘justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to the “graveyard of empires”.’ Obama’s acceptance speech was used as a rationale to deliver a ‘lengthy defense of the “just war” theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world’s [...]

Afghanistan’s Kunduz province had been earlier evaluated as secure that is why troops were moved to other hotspots. Now, with US and Afghan forces concentrated on the southern regions of Afghanistan, the Taliban have returned to the northern Kunduz province. In fact, ‘the Taliban is now threatening a key route bringing NATO supplies from Central [...]

The Afghan surge can’t defeat terrorist ideology, experts say. According to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, ‘President Obama should have used his speech to declare victory and announce the start of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan instead of an escalation. Even if the surge achieves its immediate mission—at huge cost—the operation [...]

Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan has less to do with military action than ‘turning the war over to the Afghans.’ ‘The challenge lies in leveling the playing field by inserting operatives into the Taliban. Since the Afghan intelligence services are inherently insecure, they can’t carry out such missions. American personnel bring technical intelligence [...]

U.S. President Barack Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan, and consequently in Pakistan, has three core elements: ‘maintain pressure on al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani border and in other regions of the world;’ ‘blunt the Taliban offensive by sending an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, along with an unspecified number of [...]

The new US troop surge has started to move into the homelands of ethnic Pashtuns in eastern and southern Afghanistan. Pashtuns are fierce fighters of invaders. They hate intruders. The Taliban are made up of ethnic Pashtuns. Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan, sending 30k new troops into the country, ‘will result in immediate spike in battles.’ [...]