Afghan President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will allow the United States to keep nine military bases in the country after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops at the end of next year. For months, U.S. and Afghan leaders have been holding secret talks about the future of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Karzai made the remarks in a speech at Kabul University Thursday.

President Hamid Karzai: “They want nine bases all over Afghanistan, including Kabul, Bagram, Mazar, Jalalabad, Gardez, Kandahar, Helmand, Shindand and Herat, and we agreed to give them these bases. Our conditions are that the U.S. should guarantee to bring security in our country and support Afghanistan’s forces, as well as build up our economic infrastructure.”

In a statement, the U.S. embassy in Kabul said the United States is not seeking permanent military bases in Afghanistan, but instead hopes to use Afghan facilities.

Source.

At least 30 members of an Afghan wedding party were killed and many more wounded when a U.S. plane bombed a village in the central province of Uruzgan today, Afghan officials and residents said

People in Boston today got a very unfortunate and undeserved brush with what citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan experience on a day-to-day basis since US occupation. Violence of any sort is deplorable, whether it be initiated by individuals or governments.

Today I learned most indigenous American tribes originally located in Georgia now exist on reservations in Oklahoma. As such, I’m starting a petition to relocate all white people in Georgia to the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan. I hear it’s lovely there.

• Pakistan is now an enemy of the United States.

• We don’t know why we are here, what we are fighting for, or how to know if we are winning.

• The strategy is to fight, talk, and build. But we’re withdrawing the fighters, the Taliban won’t talk, and the builders are corrupt.

• Karzai’s family is especially corrupt.

• We want President Karzai gone but we don’t have a Pushtun successor handy.

• But the problem isn’t corruption, it is which corrupt people are getting the dollars. We have to help corruption be more fair.

• Another thing we’ll never stop here is the drug traffic, so the counternarcotics mission is probably a waste of time and resources that just alienates a swath of Afghans.

• Making this a NATO mission hurt, not helped. Most NATO countries are just going through the motions in Afghanistan as the price necessary to keep the US in Europe

• Yes, the exit deadline is killing us.

• Even if you got a deal with the Taliban, it wouldn’t end the fighting.

• The Taliban may be willing to fight forever. We are not.

• Yes, we are funding the Taliban, but hey, there’s no way to stop it, because the truck companies bringing goods from Pakistan and up the highway across Afghanistan have to pay off the Taliban. So yeah, your tax dollars are helping Mullah Omar and his buddies. Welcome to the neighborhood.

• Even non-Taliban Afghans don’t much like us.

• Afghans didn’t get the memo about all our successes, so they are positioning themselves for the post-American civil war .

• And they’re not the only ones getting ready. The future of Afghanistan is probably evolving up north now as the Indians, Russians and Pakistanis jockey with old Northern Alliance types. Interestingly, we’re paying more and getting less than any other player.

• Speaking of positioning for the post-American civil war, why would the Pakistanis sell out their best proxy shock troops now?

• The ANA and ANP could break the day after we leave the country.

• We are ignoring the advisory effort and fighting the “big war” with American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. And the U.S. military won’t act any differently until and work with the Afghan forces seriously until when American politicians significantly draw down U.S. forces in country-when it may be too damn late.

• The situation American faces in Afghanistan is similar to the one it faced in Vietnam during the Nixon presidency: A desire a leave and turn over the war to our local allies, combined with the realization that our allies may still lose, and the loss will be viewed as a U.S. defeat anyway.

Afghanistan is the Vietnam of our generation, except the majority of citizens don’t care because they’re not being drafted to fight it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need my friends dying for nothing while my tax dollars kill innocent people.

Source.

The US has lost millions of taxpayer dollars on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. Read that sentence again and really let it sink it. Our government. Has “lost”. Millions (plural). Of dollars they confiscated from us through taxes. On reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. 

A “significant portion” of $400,000,000, lost.

If the current administration’s budget is approved, the total amountof dollars allocated for reconstruction projects in Afghanistan will surpass 100 BILLION. To put that into perspective, the total in reconstruction “aid to Germany in the aftermath of World War II amounted to less than $35bn in 2011 dollars”. 

$100,000,000,000. Imagine if we’d invested that domestically. I’m not advocating that as policy, merely suggesting an alternative way to spend the money the government stole from us. Even if it was just the “significant portion” of the 400 million that was “lost”, imagine what we could have used the for domestically. 

If some group of thugs took 40% of your paycheck and blew it on all kinds of crazy shit you saw no direct benefit from, meanwhile telling you it was all in your best interest, and then come back later on to tell you they lost a shit ton of your money as well, how long would you put up with that before you stopped letting them take your money? 

Why do we allow the government to do it?

Source

Remember when people in the US cared about the deaths of non-combatants? The death of 30 US non-combatants during the Cherry Valley massacre led to calls for reprisals, which ultimately led to the Sullivan Expedition, in which George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to slash and burn the Iroquois out of Western New York, razing over 40 villages (a very conservative estimate puts 100 individuals in each village, 2/3 of which would be non-combatant women, children, and elderly men), forcing those they did not kill to fend for themselves in the coming winter and either freeze or starve to death. 

30 US non-combatants dead and we razed 40 villages (~2,700 non-combatants killed). Extrapolate that to the War on Terror (Iraq, Afghanistan, Drone murders) - from 2004-2009 there were 66,000+ civilian deaths in Iraq alone (Wikileaks official war logs). How many American villages would the families of slain Iraqi civilians have to raze to have their own vengeance? And that’s only a portion of the time we’ve been in Iraq, and that’s only a portion of the War on Terror.

In the car, on the way to work, listening to NPR. Since 2004, the 300+ US drone strikes on the Afghan/Pakistan border killed 70% “militants” (people that say no to US imperialism and allegedly have taken up arms). In other words, 30% of drone assassination victims were non-militants (people who may or may not say no to US imperialism and have not taken up arms). 30% innocent men, women, and children. How do you think the friends and families of the murdered innocent feel? Lives ruined by missiles fired from remote controlled US assassination machines. Is this a war on terror or a war of terror? If for every “militant” we kill, we inspire others to hate everything the US stands for and thus create more enemies to US imperialism, imagine how many more we create by murdering innocents and writing it off as collateral damage. Hey, remember that 16 year old US citizen our government drones assassinated in Yemen last fall? Yeah, that happened, too.

Fuck war. Fuck capitalism. Fuck states. Fuck religion. Fuck money. I hope the world explodes.

[[The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

It alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.

Pakistan has strenuously denied any links with the Taliban on previous occasions.

“We have long been concerned about ties between elements of the ISI and some extremist networks,” said US Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby, adding that the US Defence Department had not seen the report.

Villagers often prefer the Taliban to “corrupt” Afghan authorities, the report alleges]]

If your reaction after reading this was “let’s bomb Pakistan”, you’re what’s wrong with America.

We supported and trained the Taliban when they fought the Soviets. Now we’re trying to fight them, despite the fact that the popular sovereignty of the Afghan people  has been established by their backing of the Taliban.

We’re flying drones over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and numerous other countries, raining missiles and murdering indiscriminately, all in the name of US national security, all in the name of killing the evil doers, the terrorists. We are the evil doers. We are the terrorists. We are our own threat to US national security.

Read CNN Article Here

“A girl who was tortured for months after refusing prostitution lies on a hospital bed in Kabul on December 31, 2011. Sahar Gul, 15, was brutally tortured, beaten, and locked in a toilet by her husband’s family for months after she refused to become a prostitute, officials said. She was in critical condition when she was rescued from a house in northern Baghlan province, and doctors said her recovery could take weeks.” (Omar Sobhani/Reuters) 

How the fuck can humans do this? I hope the world explodes.