Posted by seumasach on April 9, 2010
“as of now, the US’s entire future strategy in Central Asia is up in the air.”
M.K.Bhadrakumar
10th April, 2010
BEIJING – This is not how color revolutions are supposed to turn out. In the Ukraine, the “Orange” revolution of 2004 has had a slow painful death. In Georgia, the “Rose” revolution of 2003 seems to be in the throes of what increasingly appears to be a terminal illness.
Posted in New Cold War | Tagged: Afghanistan, End of empire, kyrgyzstan | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on April 5, 2010
5th April, 2010
Afghan President Hamid karzai says there will be no military operation in the southern province of Kandahar unless the Afghan people support it.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, End of empire | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on April 3, 2010
Gareth Porter
2nd April, 2010
General Stanley McChrystal has recently acquired the image of a master strategist of the population-sensitive counterinsurgency, reducing civilian casualties from air strikes and insisting that troops avoid firing when civilians might be hit during the recent offensive in Helmand Province. One recent press story even referred to a “McChrystal Doctrine” that focuses on “winning over civilians rather than killing insurgents”.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, End of empire, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on March 30, 2010
M K Bhadrakumar
39th March,2010
Great moments in diplomatic timing are hard to distinguish when the practitioners are inscrutable entities. Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visits to China and Iran within the week rang alarm bells in Washington which were heard in the Oval Office of the White House.
Posted in Multipolar world | Tagged: Afghanistan, Chinese soft power, Iran, Multipolar world | 1 Comment »
Posted by seumasach on March 13, 2010
As befits the oligarchical mindset, US/UK seek to weaken central power, and therefore sovereignty, in Afghanistan thereby maintaining it as a base for operations to destabilise Russia and China; “the great game for the containment of Russia, China and Iran is about to commence in earnest”.
M K Bhadrakumar
13th March, 2010
The flurry of diplomatic activity in Kabul during the past week heralded the opening shots of a titanic power struggle, the outcome of which will largely determine the contours of an Afghan settlement.
In what is shaping up as a multi-layered power struggle, the principal protagonists are the United States and Britain, Pakistan, Iran and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Multipolar world, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on March 9, 2010
Gareth Porter
10th March, 2010
WASHINGTON – For weeks, the United States public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan war against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marjah was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centers in Helmand.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on March 5, 2010
“Second, unlike in the 1990s, the US’s influence is much diminished today, but its diplomats work as if they operate in a unipolar world. The plain truth is that regional powers like India, Iran or even Pakistan are far from convinced about the US’s AfPak policy. And they can be expected to do their utmost to safeguard their interests, no matter what the US diplomats prescribe as good enough.”
M.K.Bhadrakumar
6th March, 2010
Be it a baseball struck in a neighborhood sandlot game or in high-wire diplomacy, an elementary principle of physics holds good – what goes up must come down. In a way, the sheer dynamics of the nosedive of the United States’ AfPak diplomacy in the four weeks since the London conference on Afghanistan on January 28 can be attributed to gravitational pulls.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Multipolar world, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 25, 2010
Eric Walberg
25th February, 2010
Apart for Abu Ghraib, Fallujah is perhaps the Iraq war’s defining moment. The hatred and resentment of the occupied people found a catalyst in the four Blackwater mercenaries, who were killed and strung up, and no doubt deserved their fate, certainly as symbols of a cynical, illegal invasion. The US soldiers — who are just as mercenary, being a professional army invading a country sans provocation — came and “destroyed the village to save it.”
Posted in Afghanistan, Disband NATO! | Tagged: Afghanistan, Obama agenda, Russian diplomacy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 17, 2010
Jason Ditz
16th February, 2010
Usually when militaries change their official story about killing civilians it is designed to explain away innocent deaths as an accident. Today, however, NATO took the exact opposite approach with Sunday’s Marjah killings, revising their story to insist the killings were not an equipment error, but were part of a deliberate US targeting of a house full of civilians.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Afghanistan civilian deaths | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 12, 2010
The ascendancy of malleable Islamist forces also has its uses for the US’s containment strategy towards China (and Russia). Islamists lend themselves as a foreign policy instrument. The rise of Islamism in Afghanistan cannot but radicalize hot spots such as the North Caucasus, Kashmir and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China.
M.K.Bhadrakumar
13th February, 2010
The Nobel Peace Prize has a tradition. In the entire period from 1901 to 2009, it has never been awarded twice to any of its 97 individual recipients.
United States President Barack Obama is thus unlikely to win a second Nobel. Yet, in an historical perspective, Afghanistan promises to become the first country in which Islamists will have been ushered into power on the wave of America’s newfound smart power.
That too may only be the beginning. “Of course Afghanistan is not an island. There is no solution just within its borders,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a security conference in Munich last weekend.
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010
Gareth Porter
4th February, 2010
On the surface, it would seem unlikely that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who presides over a politically feeble government and is highly dependent on the United States military presence and economic assistance, would defy the United States on the issue of peace negotiations with the leadership of the Taliban insurgency.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Afghanistan London Conference, End of empire, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 