Category: Afghanistan (vintage)

David Rohde and David Sanger have an excellent piece of reporting in today’s NYT, in which they go in some detail into exactly how, from mid-2002 on the Bushites’ decision to invade Iraq distracted resources from the much-needed effort to stabilize Afghanistan.
The NYT also has a pretty good 8-slide graphic display that tracks the degree to which what are described as “terrorist incidents” have risen in Afghanistan through every year since 2002.
The Rohde/Sanger article is titled “How a ‘good war’ in Afghanistan went bad.” Imho, no war is a “good” war. But I’ll let that go for now. (Though it does affect they way one looks at the whole question of “stabilization” in Afghanistan.)
I don’t have time to write anything lengthy here right now, about Afghanistan.
I’ll just note that Rohde and Sanger interviewed a lot of former and current Bush-era US officials connected with the Afghanistan project (though alas, no Afghans), and came up with a fairly damning indictment– from their own words:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration’s policy, saying, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.” Yet she said: “I don’t think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.”
In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington’s record.
“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. “I’m saying the same thing six years later.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the United Nations ambassador, said, “I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly,” adding that “I think more could have been done earlier on these issues.”
And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, “The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn’t have to do nation- building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake.”

Alas, no more time to write here now. Bottom line on the article: the situation– both regarding ongoing mayhem in Afghanistan and regarding past ineptitude in the Bush administration– is just as bad as I thought it was.

Afghanistan’s “Senate”– that is, the Meshrano Jirga upper house in the country’s post-2001 bicameral system– yesterday backed proposals that call for a cessation of military operations against against the Taliban, and invite the Taliban to take that opportunity to enter peace talks.
The Meshrano Jirga also called for a clear timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan.
These proposals came from a peace commission that the MJ had previously established.
The MJ consists of “an unspecified number of local dignitaries and experts appointed by provincial councils, district councils, and the president.” It does not, apparently, have as many powers under the Afghanistan’s January 2004 Constitution as the bigger, elected lower house. The NYT’s reporters say that the lower house is unlikely to back the MJ’s resolution.
However, the US-led project to build a pliant but also locally credible political system in Afghanistan now seems to be in about as much trouble as the parallel effort in Iraq. In Baghdad, also on Tuesday, 144 lawmakers– that is, more than half of the members of the parliament elected in December 2005– signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Writing on Alternet, Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland say,

It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass

Jarrar and Holland note that despite its groundbreaking nature, the news of this legislative petition did not make it into the US MSM. (I tip my hat to Juan Cole for the link there.) The rest of their post there on Alternet is also certainly worth reading.
But I am also intrigued by the Meshrano Jirga’s vote in Kabul. Here in the US, the term “Taliban” is freighted with all kinds of dread, misgiving, and plain outright hatred– though in its original essence it only means “students.” During their years of rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban did do many terrible things to enforce their vision of what puritanical Islamic rule over the country should look like; and the female half of the country suffered particularly badly under their rule.
On the other hand, the Taliban did bring nearly completely to an end both the warlordism that had plagued the country for many years prior to their establishment of their government, and the industrial-scale poppy-growing with which the warlords had financed many of their military operations. During the violence-wracked years of the horrendous contests among the warlords, all Afghans, of both genders, suffered hugely; and millions fled the country to escape that violence and instability.
When the US invaded the country in November 2001, they did so in coalition with many of those same warlords, who today form a potent political force in the highest levels of the “Constitutional” government. If members of the present upper house are now proposing talks with the Taliban, to me that is a measure of the deep dissatisfaction many Afghans must have today with what the US-warlord coalition has delivered to their country. Certainly, the tendency of the US military to go careening round Afghanistan blowing up large numbers of people with little success in discriminating between combatants and noncombatants among those they target has alienated considerable numbers of Afghans from the US military. (Even the US-installed President Hamid Karzai has been obliged to voice public complaints.) It has also strengthened the Taliban’s support in the country.
I believe that we in the international community (and in the US, in particular) need to be much more open than we have been so far to the idea of an intra-Afghan reconciliation process that is broadly inclusive of the Taliban. (Anyway, as in Iraq, the internal reconciliation process in Afghanistan is really none of our darn’ business.) Yes, many of us have continuing concerns about the status and plight of Afghanistan’s women if the Taliban are able to regain too much influence in the country. However, I’d note the following:

(1) The improvements that the post-Taliban era has brought to in women’s status has not been nearly as deep or as widely distributed as some people imagine or claim. Most of the country remains extremely conservative/restrictive on women’s issues. And
(2) There certainly are other models around the world of politically successful Islamist movements that have actively pursued affirming policies towards female inclusion in all aspects of the public sphere including in education, the workplace, religious life, and even politics. See, for example, my reporting about the Hamas women, here and here. It would actually be great if we could see some signs that the Afghan Talibs– who grew up in a society that had far less social and economic development than the Palestinians– could take a few lessons from their Palestinian co-believers’ success in promoting and supporting the advancement of women’s skills, even within a strictly Islamist social and political context…

Anyway, I guess the main point of this post is to note that as of now, even the US-installed satrapies in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be chafing under the yoke of the Bushists’ continuing ineptitude and their continuing reliance on blind military force long after it has become evident to everyone else– including a majority of folks here in the US homeland– that a blind reliance on brute force and ignorance really can’t bring good things to anybody in the world.

The news pages of the US MSM have gone completely AWOL on coverage of the rapidly unravelling strategic situation in Afghanistan. (A situation whose strategic importance I started to discuss here, on Friday.)
Today’s NYT magazine did carry an excellent piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the resurgence of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. It contained a lot of good material that she had gathered during a reporting trip back in summer, and definitely has a lot of helpful detail about the ambiguous (at best) policy toward the Taliban pursued by Pakistan’s infamous ISI intel service. So yes, it does provide some really useful background to the “news” events that have been occurring in Afghanistan over the past week…
But where is the coverage in the big US media of these momentous news events?
Almost nowhere, it seems… Most likely, because there are very few US service people left in Afghanistan any more. They have all been sucked up into the big “flood the zone” deployment in Iraq. And meanwhile, the Canadians, Brits, and other non-US members of NATO have been left holding the bag in Afghanistan.
Which probably also explains why the MSM in those countries has been covering the Afghan story much more than the US MSM.
Following up on the outspoken comments made by Chief of the British Defense Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt ten days ago, his predecessor Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge reportedly told a meeting of European experts last Tuesday that the British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.
Here is how Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont described Inge’s remarks in a piece in today’s Observer:

‘I don’t believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we’ve lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we’re not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,’ he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.
Inge added that Whitehall had surrendered its ability to think strategically and that despite the immense pressures on the army, defence received neither the research nor funding it required.
‘I sense that Whitehall has lost the knack of putting together inter-departmental thinking about strategy. It talks about how we’re going to do in Afghanistan, it doesn’t really talk about strategy.’

Well, if Whitehall has stopped thinking strategically about how to plan and balance the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can be almost certain that Washington DC hasn’t been doing any better at the task.
What I still don’t understand, though, is why people in the big US media are so asleep on this story?

So there is Donald Rumsfeld, nearly six years into the Bush administration, and he has still managed to evade all the attempts to even start to hold him accountable for the violence he has played a big role in unleashing around the world during his tenure…
And here is Donald Rumsfeld, on the op-ed page of the WaPo today, telling us that in Afghanistan, over the five years since the US-led invasion, “the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one.”
I could spend some time refuting some of the rosy claims he makes about Afghanistan in this article. His claim, for example, that “Almost 600 schools have been built, and now more than 5 million children attend school, a 500 percent increase from 2001.” But how about this October 2 report from the UN’s IRIN news service that tells us that:

Currently, due to fear of attacks, the doors of some 330 mixed schools have been closed in Kandahar, Zabul and Helmand provinces alone, according to Saifal Maluk, head of education in Helmand province.
And it’s not just the south where primary education is suffering. “More than 200,000 students are shut out of schools across the country because of school closures due to fear of attacks,” Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Sadiq Fatman told IRIN from Kabul.

… Well, I could take on several of Rumsfeld’s claims in a similar way. But what really riveted me about his article was some of the language he used up near the top of it.
Especially the way he described the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, here: “from halfway around the world — with but a few weeks’ notice — coalition forces were charged with securing a landlocked, mountainous country…”
“Charged”. That makes it sound like they had some kind of official mandate for the invasion, doesn’t it? But in fact, the national armed forces that participated in the “coalition” had mandates only from their own governments. The UN Security Council did not come onto the scene with a resolution that explicitly authorized any outside military intervention in Afghanistan until December 20, 2001. That was Resolution 1386, that authorized the establishment of an international force to “assist” the “Afghan Interim Authority” that had by then been installed in Kabul by the US forces…
“Securing.” Now that is an interesting use of the word. To “secure” something can perhaps in military terms mean to “grab hold of it”– which was more or less what the US-led forces did to Afghanistan in October 2001. But most people would probably think that “securing” would also involve making a place secure. And that, the US-led invasion of the country has clearly failed to do.
Here is Bronwen Roberts of AFP, reporting yesterday:

Widely agreed to have learnt more sophisticated tactics that reflect the methods of international terrorists, the fundamentalists are leading a revived insurgency.
Nearly 100 foreign soldiers have been killed this year in their attacks on the 40,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan, and around 170 civilians have died in more than 90 suicide attacks blamed on Taliban…
Meanwhile opium production in Afghanistan, the world’s biggest producer, jumped by nearly 50 percent this year on the previous year.
Officials have said some of the proceeds may be going towards funding the Taliban.
Outspoken parliamentarian Ramazan Bashardost is particularly critical of the developments of the past five years.
“There is freedom for the people … but in the economy, politics and military it is a disaster,” he told AFP.
“In Afghanistan there is now less security today than one year ago, there are a lot of people without jobs.”

Roberts also notes that, despite the many, extremely costly military operations the US and its allies have undertaken in and around Afghanistan, both Osama bin Laden– whose “harboring” by the Taliban had been the reason the Bushites invaded the country in the first place– and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, are still at large. (Funny that Rumsfeld makes no mention of that in his piece, don’t you think?)
I frankly admit that I don’t know enough about Afghanistan to be able to judge with confidence whether the situation of the country’s people is, on balance, better today than it was when the Taliban were in power, or not. One thing that seems clear is that it was pretty bad then, and it is pretty bad now, as well. And clearly, a large proportion of the country’s 30 million people are currently quite unable to feel “secure.”
I opposed the US invasion when it was still being prepared (though perhaps, in retrospect, not forcefully enough.) In the weeks after September 11, 2001, I argued that smart, coordinated, international police action was the best way to capture Osama Bin Laden and enough of his key lieutenants to incapacitate Al-Qaeda’s global networks.
But the Bushites were determined to wage war– and to wage it, as we soon enough learned, not just against Afghanistan but also against Iraq.
And now, the US-led forces are tied down badly, and bleeding, in both countries. But the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq– especially, I think, Iraq– are bleeding far, far worse than any of the invading countries.
We US citizens need to become a lot clearer than we have been thus far about the degree of harm and suffering that our government’s actions have inflicted on other peoples around the world. We need, desperately, to find new, non-violent paradigms for how our government can set about resolving the concerns and conflicts it will inevitably have with other governments– and we need to start to advocate strongly for, and follow, those nonviolent paradigms, rather than allowing our government to continue along the path of militarism and domination.
We need to bring our troops home from Iraq, and from Afghanistan, and to require our government that it work respectfully with the other nations of the world to find new models for addressing the security challenges that will remain in those two countries, as well as in far too many other (long-neglected) countries around the world. At least, if we start slashing our government’s spending on the military there should be a lot of money– from our own national budget, as well as from the budgets of other nations that currently try to compete or to “catch up with” ours in this regard– available to start redirecting toward new and effective models of UN peacekeeping, toward righting global economic imbalances, and to meeting the general global challenge of under-development and inequality.
But I think this whole effort has to start with recognizing the degree of harm our government’s militarism has already inflicted on the world.
One good way to come out against this will, of course, present itself when we go to the vote November 7. I have no illusions that most Democratic politicians have more of a “pro-peace” outlook than most Republicans. But at least if we can mobilize our fellow-citizens successfully against this lot now in power, and their policies, then after that we can carry on by urging the Democrats toward a better relationship with the rest of the world…
And in the meantime, we’ll have to carry on putting up with Rumsfeld. But oh, wouldn’t it be great if we had a Congress that would truly try to hold him accountable?

Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a “Tajik intifada”… That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and killed a number of passers-by, was near to the headquarters of former Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Qasem Fahim, a leader of Afghanistan’s Tajik community; and the young people in the neighborhood then comgregated around the convoy to protest– and the American soldiers then fired into the crowd…
The ethnic-Tajik dimension to what happened hasn’t been mentioned in any of the western media reports that I can find except for this one in Newsday by Moises Saman and James Rupert.
They write:

Various witnesses told of organized crowds of teenaged boys waving pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a guerrilla commander killed in 2001 who is the hero of ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan. They voiced suspicion that Panjshiri political activists stoked the rioting to strike at President Hamid Karzai, who in the past 18 months has sidelined several top Panjshiri political figures. The country’s highest ethnic Tajik official, parliament speaker Yunus Qanooni, appealed for calm.

Evidently a lot of different (though overlapping) conflictual things are going on in Afghanistan these days. If the Kabul riots have a strong ethnic-Tajik dimension to them, that makes them noticeably distinct from anything to do with pro-Taliban activism. Though both these strands of the story indicate the deep and still-unrolling failure of the rebuild-Afghanistan project, as I noted here yesterday.
Tajiks make up around 27% of the national population and speak a language called Dari that is close to Persian.
Regarding the growth of Taliban activities– and as a follow-up to the Ahmed Rashid piece I quoted from extensively here yesterday– Rashid has a new piece up on the BBC website.
He writes:

Nearly 400 Afghans have been killed in an unprecedented offensive by the Taleban, in a bid to pre-empt a major deployment by some 6,000 Nato troops this summer in southern Afghanistan.
From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Taleban commander Mullah Dadullah now claims to have 12,000 men under arms and control of 20 districts in the former Taleban heartland in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. There is also a strong Taleban-al-Qaeda presence in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.
Why – five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces – is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
… Neither Nato, nor the American forces they are replacing, have offered an honest assessment of their successes and failures during the past five years.

He then runs through an important “checklist” of the failures of the policies pursued by the US, Nato, the UN, and the Afghan government in the south of the country. It starts (as certainly always seems important to note) with this:

Washington’s refusal to take state building in Afghanistan seriously after 2001 and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq, created a major international distraction which the Taleban took advantage of…

Anyway, it’s a good and searing piece of analysis there. (Many of the comments from readers beneath it are also worth reading.)

The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians’ First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens… Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment… (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying “all is fine and normal” with the general situation… But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)
It is far too early to tell how these events in Kabul will play out. The BBC is reporting that,

At least seven were killed in the shooting and the riots which followed.
About 2,000 people demonstrated in the city centre, with some moving on to attack buildings in the diplomatic quarter.
For over two hours there were bursts of gunfire as hundreds of protesters rampaged through Kabul, burning cars and attacking police checkpoints.
Police and the army – including tanks – moved in to restore law and order and the curfew from 2200 local time (1730 GMT) to 0400 (2330 GMT) was imposed…

But this is Kabul, remember– Afghanistan’s national capital. This is the one place in the country that was supposed to be quite secure for the US-led rebuilding project, even though there has been all kinds of tumult in other Afghan regions. Including in the south, where the Taliban have reportedly been regrouping in battle-groups of as large as 300 men…
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a very serious piece in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph. He writes:

The last thing Tony Blair and President George W. Bush need, at a moment of multiple crises for both of them, is a revamped Taliban taking control of southern Afghanistan – but that is now not impossible to imagine.
Bush and Blair have only themselves to blame, as they fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and allowed the Taliban and al-Qa’eda to fester in Central Asia during the five years that followed 9/11.
Yesterday’s widespread riots in Kabul are indicative of how disillusioned many Afghans feel about the failure of the West to help rebuild their country.
Nato is now stuck with the consequences…
Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.
“Nato will not fail in Afghanistan … the family of nations will expect nothing less than success,” General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, told a recent seminar in Madrid.
Gen Jones is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.
“What is the point of deploying troops who don’t fight,” ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats – they now number a staggering 71 – “Nato’s operational cancer”.
Nato’s weaknesses are what worry President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. The Taliban and al-Qa’eda know this and more. They have closely followed the testy debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to Afghanistan. They count on inflicting a few bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals, and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate.
The Taliban are also testing American resolve. Nato’s deployment is part of Washington’s agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.
The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.
Despite Bush and Blair claiming to be successfully micromanaging the war on terror, the war is expanding and the region faces increasing chaos…
Al-Qa’eda, now under the operational leadership of the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa’eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.
Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency.
In Central Asia, the Western alliance is floundering. America lost its major military base in Central Asia after Uzbekistan kicked American forces out last year. Emboldened, tiny Kyrgyzstan is now demanding that Washington pay it 100 times more for the base it provides for American forces. Russia and China are working on making sure that America and Nato surrender all their remaining toeholds in Central Asia.
All this is a result of America, Britain and others taking their eye off the ball and circumventing the indisputable truth of 9/11: that the centre of global jihadism and the threat it poses the world still lies in this region, not in Iraq…

Rashid concludes by writing:

The Western alliance can still win in Afghanistan and root out terrorism, but only by means of a serious, aggressive and sustained commitment by its member countries. So far at least, that commitment is still not apparent.

I am not so sure that this is still possible. (Anyway, rebuilding Afghanistan is supposed to be UN commitment, and not just one that is dominated by the “Western alliance.”)
Rashid is glaringly correct, however, to note that the effort to rebuild Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban was dealt a body blow by Bush’s reckless decision to invade Iraq.
The poor, poor Afghans! This is the second time in recent history that the US, having won a significant military victory inside their country, then proceeded to majorly short-change the project of post-conflict reconstruction, thereby allowing it to sink back into warlordism, esclating social-political chaos, and all the miseries attendant on that situation.
The first time that happened was after the US-supported “mujahideen” forced the Soviets to withdraw their army from the country in February 1989… But after that, Bush I, and then Clinton, promptly forgot about Afghanistan and allowed the warlords (who had been Washington’s allies in the earlier anti-Soviet campaign– along with Usama Bin You-know-who) to wreak their havoc on the country’s people…
Then, in November 2001, the US won a second significant military victory in Afghanistan when it toppled the Taliban regime there (with the help of many of those same warlords). And once again, in the aftermath of the military victory, Washington took its eyes off the ball, this time swiveling them toward Baghdad.
What is the problem of the US policymaking class? When will they ever learn that a military victory is worth nothing on its own, unless the “victory” that it allows can be nailed down solidly through a smart and committed policy of social-political reconstruction for as long as it takes, afterwards?
(Actually, they did know that once–back in 1945. But somehow the lessons seemed to get forgotten after that.)
This time, the stakes for Washington, and the world, are enormous. Afghanistan seems to be turning into a powder-keg. The US position in Iraq is a draining and futile quagmire. And in both places, the collapse of US power that seems to be approaching faster each day will have much wider regional repurcussions… (Pakistan, for instance, will not easily escape from the tumult that reigns along its ungoverned borderlands with Afghanistan.)
Those of us US citizens who oppose war and violence need to be very calm as we point out that:

(1) As the Dalai Lama says, violence always begets violence. The fact that the US has invested so hugely in massive machines of violence for so long, and has used them so broadly in the past five years, has unleashed huge cascades of violence around the world. Some of this violence comes back to hit Americans. But most of it has affected the poorest and most desperate people in the communities involved. We should all be ashamed.
(2) But better than standing around being ashamed, it is time for our country to cease its reliance on violence and to find ways to redirect all that spending, training, and hardware that until now has been poured into the military, and
(3) Meanwhile, nonviolent ways certainly always exist whereby the world’s conflicts and the any threats to the lives and wellbeing of the US citizenry can be addressed and resolved: We need to return to using and strengthening those nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms.

Meantime, let’s all just hope and pray that the people(s) of Afghanistan can find a way to de-escalate the violence that now plagues so many of their communities. If the US military cannot be part of a project that is effective at rebuilding Afghanistan, then it should be withdrawn from the country. There, as in Iraq, the argument that the US military presence is needed in order to “keep the peace” now seems very hollow indeed.

Afghanistan was where Osama Bin Laden had his headquarters. The Bushies’ first “response” to 9/11 was to take over the country with raw military force, tossing out the Taleban regime that had been so hospitable to OBL.
So you might think that today, four years after 9/11 and nearly four years after the collapse of the Taleban regime, Afghanistan might be well on the road to a return to normalcy, with a pro-US government well ensconced there?
Yes, you might think that– if the whole project of “remaking” Afghanistan along more democratic lines had not been left to the Bush administration… Which, um, decided for the heck of it to launch another nasty little war along the way there.
As it happens, Afghanistan has a parliamentary election on September 18. And in the lead-up to it there have been a lot of (in-)security incidents of some seriousness.
As usual, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting has been doing a good job on the ground there. Kabul-based reported Wahidullah Amani filed this report yesterday:

Continue reading “Lest we forget, Afghanistan”