What Is the Future of Afghanistan?

 

Afghanistan’s “Color Revolution”? Narcotics and the Opium Trade By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 19, 2021 America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been the object of extensive negotiations between Washington and the Taliban. An earlier deal was signed in Doha in late February 2020 during the Trump administration. Read more...

Six Questions We Need to Ask About Afghanistan By Kit Knightly, August 19, 2021 Afghanistan has “fallen”, that’s the line. The Taliban forces have taken the opportunity of US/NATO withdrawal and swept across the entire country, taking every major city within a week and with barely a shot fired. Read more...

Did the NY Fed Confiscate $1.3 Billion in Afghan Gold: Striking Revelations from Afghanistan’s Central Bank Chief By Zero Hedge, August 19, 2021 Digging deeper, the DAB’s June statement stated that the bank owned investments worth $6.1 billion. While the latest report did not provide details of those investments, a breakdown in the year-end report showed that the majority of those investments were in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds and bills… Read more...

How Russia-China Are Stage-managing the Taliban By Pepe Escobar, August 19, 2021 For the record, they also stated that the Taliban took all of Afghanistan in only 11 days: that’s pretty accurate. They stressed “very good relations with Pakistan, Russia and China.” Read more...

Six Things You Need to Know About Afghanistan and the Taliban By Marc Vandepitte, August 18, 2021 The most prominent figure to emerge during that period is Osama bin Laden. In 1988, he founded Al Qaeda, a fundamentalist and ruthless terrorist group. Through the intelligence service of Pakistan [in liaison with the CIA], he could count on a lot of support from the US. Read more...

20 Years Ago, Prior to 9/11: US Preparations for the Invasion of Afghanistan By Shane Quinn, August 06, 2021 Due to America’s declining oil and natural gas stocks, the top priority for president Bush was to increase US influence over rich fossil fuel sources, constructing pipelines, refineries and other such infrastructure. Read more...

Afghanistan: A New Pivot in the Greater Middle East? By Peter Koenig and GEOFOR, August 06, 2021 The withdrawal was decided long before Biden took office. Pressure for disengaging from the US longest war – about 20 years – from Congress and the public has been building up steadily, but ever increasingly since Obama’s promise early on in his second term to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Read more...

The War in Afghanistan: The Real ‘Crime of the Century’ Behind the Opioid Crisis By Max Parry, August 04, 2021 Corporate media would have us believe it is simply fortuitous that during the exact time opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. began to increase in the early 2000s, the so-called War on Terror began with the conquest and plundering of a country abroad that has since become the world’s epicenter for opium production. Read more...

Graveyard of Empires By Eric Margolis, July 21, 2021 For the past two decades, the Afghan nationalist mujahidin have faced the full might of the US empire: waves of B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers; fleets of killer drones, constant air strikes from US airbases in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Gulf; 300,000 US-financed Afghan mercenary troops; up to 120,000 US and NATO troops and other US-paid mercenaries; the brutal Communist-run Afghan secret police, regular government police, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek militias, hit squads sent by the US and Britain, plus famine and disease. Use of torture by western forces was rampant. Read more...

The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 08, 2021 The US opioid crisis broadly defined bears a relationship to the export of heroin out of Afghanistan. There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users). Read more...