Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
20, 2003
New Saddlebags, Same
Donkeys
Return
to Afghanistan
By ANNE BRODSKY
As the Bush administration moves from one global
"hot spot" to another, news of Afghanistan, the administration's
first professed military success story, is largely eclipsed by
reports of these new ventures. July's cogent and sobering 101
page Human Rights Watch report, Killing You Is A Very Easy
Thing For Us, describing abuses to peace, security and human
rights in Southeastern Afghanistan, seems to have been a mere
blip on our radar screen.
The State Department's updated travel
advisory for Afghanistan, also released in July, was largely
ignored despite its clear statement that peace, stability and
security are non-existent in the country we claim to have liberated.
Reports from regional press of increased Taliban and Al Qaeda
activities and deaths in Afghanistan are just barely mentioned
in U.S. media, even as humanitarian aid organizations have had
to cease work in some of the neediest parts of Afghanistan.
Of the 87 billion dollars that President
Bush just requested from Congress, only 800 million is allocated
to Afghan reconstruction. This, even with the yet unfulfilled
summer pledge of one billion dollars, is nothing compared to
the need, the amount spent to bomb it, and the amount currently
being spent in Iraq.
In an eerie repeat of the late 1980s
/ early 1990s, when the first Gulf War followed on the heels
of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and marked the West's
shift of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq and elsewhere, our
attention has again largely swung from Afghanistan to Iraq, Iran,
North Korea & Liberia. Like impatient TV viewers, we are
a nation channel surfing through foreign policy, not pausing
to see one program to its end before we start another.
Having recently returned from a month
in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, where millions of Afghan refugees
still fear returning to their homeland, it is clear to me that
our program of U.S. foreign policy there is not turning out well.
Everything I saw mirrors the Human Right Watch report: crime
is on the rise and criminal warlords are terrorizing people countrywide;
voices in favor of freedom, democracy and human rights, such
as RAWA and nascent democratic political parties, are being kept
underground through threats, arrest, and violence;  harassment, intimidation,
kidnapping, and rape make many girls and women fearful to leave
their homes, thus rendering them unable to take advantage of
the ostensible freedom to attend work or school; governmental
office workers and teachers haven't been paid for months; rebuilding
is first and foremost benefiting warlords, elites, foreign firms
and NGOs; the newly drafted constitution has yet to be released
to the public thus making the promised public comment period
a fraud; and armed factional fighting between warlords continues
to undermine security as well as any hope for free and fair elections.
The handover of ISAF command to NATO will change little if,
despite the repeated requests of Afghans themselves, US resistance
continues to keep the 5000 person force insufficiently small
and limited to Kabul alone.
It is true that there are thousands of
potential and real "hot spots" across the world and
information available 24/7. Many of us limit this data overload
by attending only to issues whose cause or effect we can trace
directly to our lives. Leaving aside the blatant egocentricity
of this form of filtering, there is an inherent fallacy in thinking
that Afghanistan doesn't matter to our lives -- a fallacy fostered
by the 7000 miles of geographic distance and the appealing myth
of "successful liberation".
But Afghanistan's ongoing crisis and
its future consequences are inextricably linked to the US. Even
if we are too far away or too ill informed to see this clearly,
the people of Afghanistan know it too well. That's why every
Afghan I talked with asked: "Why has the US, which was
able to remove the Taliban from power in a month, and which is
still clearly pulling the all strings in Afghanistan today, returned
to power the same criminal fundamentalists and warlords who destroyed
and terrorized the country to such an extent the last time they
ruled that the Taliban were initially welcomed as liberators?
Why doesn't the US understand that this is the recipe for another
September 11? Why won't the US learn from its past mistakes?"
There is a Persian saying that many Afghans
apply to the current situation: "The saddlebags are new,
but the donkeys remain the same." Afghans I spoke with
see the US as holding the reigns of the same old warlord's donkeys
while those new saddle bags fill with opium, weapons and human
rights abuses. It is not just the Afghan people that need to
fear those donkeys and their loads. As September 11th showed
us, we are all part of this global village and the provisions
of those donkeys will impact our lives too. It is not too late
for the US to turn those donkeys around, hand their reigns to
an expanded peace keeping force and truly democratic Afghans
and ensure that the Taliban's defeat results in real liberation,
peace and democracy. But to do so we need to convince the U.S.
administration and U.S. citizens to stop channel surfing, listen
to the Afghan people themselves, and commit to following through
on this program until it does indeed have a successful ending.
Anne E. Brodsky is the author of With
All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women
of Afghanistan. (Routledge, 2003) and Associate
Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at University of
Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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