What in God's Green Goodness Are We Up To In Afghanistan?

Like the US give a shit about sacred commitments.

Why wouldn’t Biden say that?

Like the US give a shit about sacred commitments.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, September 3, 2021 3:00 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

If by ‘sacred commitments’ they mean ‘imperial interests’ then yes they absolutely do care about them.

If a thing is true, then the fact that it is in your interest to say it doesn't suddenly make it false.

do you mean china or america or both

another note, we were brutalising afghanistan long before the US got involved and we need to get so much more shit for it from all sides than is currently the case

Has someone written an explainer for why British Tories are madder about the Afghanistan withdrawal than even most U.S. conservatives? https://t.co/S0JqIUq8Ui

— Matt Ford (@fordm) September 2, 2021

silence in UK media coverage of afghanistan is deafening. our “public sphere” can’t even cope with tepid acknowledgments of colonial atrocities (like you occasionally wring out of US liberals) without throwing a fucking tantrum. UK liberals are openly racist bloodthirsty monsters at this point and so many leftists still really want to deny or downplay *our* ongoing imperialism at every turn because…? well I have ideas none of them pretty

Silence? It was front page stuff, and continues to be.

when was UK imperialism front page stuff in the UK except when mass murder is being celebrated

Every time the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was on the front pages?

yeah it was so hard for our pride to be bush's puppet wasn't it, our boys would never do anything wrong though

You saw enough coverage to come to your conclusions, what else do you need from journalism? That it paints everything the way you want it to?

I'd rather not be lied to about WMDs or have British war crimes covered up or see literal fascist incitement screaming from tabloid front pages every time I go shopping but that's just me I'm weird like that

i'm not in the UK but US media coverage of both wars was and remains disgraceful for the most part, from the credulous acceptance of bush's lies about iraq’s WMDs to the current consensus among pundits that leaving afghanistan was a bad idea. just dedicating the front page to something doesn't mean much.

There has been widespread criticism of both wars in mainstream media, and that criticism continues to this day. Of course the media that favours neocons views were pro-war (until it didn't suit them). To call it silence is wild, we have been forced to obsess about those conflicts over almost all others.

I don't know the US press as well but all the biggest UK newspapers are fascist and that is absolutely not an exaggeration so I am biased

these journalist pieces of shit regularly call for and are responsible for serious violence against minorities and vulnerable and anyone who questions the righteousness every horror perpetrated by british troops and cops and slavers and the absolute fucking stain on this planet that is britain

fuck their pals in serious media too they all have so much blood on their hands everyone should be fucking outraged at what these scum have been doing

I sincerely hope one day you can move out of the UK to somewhere better.

I hope one day you find the mental and spiritual wherewithal to move out of your own arsehole you fucking bullshit Canadian troll cunt

I swear ignoring me will do wonders to your wellbeing calzino. Please do so for the both of us.

that isn't really what you want though is it? your whole fucking tedious raison d'etre is about getting maximum attention by posting stuff that wouldn't be out of place in the Washington Post, but with added *nuance*. You are basically the shitest poster on here since Fred

I hope one day you find the mental and spiritual wherewithal to move out of your own arsehole you fucking bullshit Canadian troll cunt

peace and love

No I really want you to ignore me, I might be a shitty poster but I am not a middle aged man insulting someone on a messageboard on Friday night and that is a truly pathetic sight.

I believe Left, depsite our disagreements, comes from a good place and it does seems to me that living in the UK has some very negative effects on their wellbeing.

And yes maybe I have more ‘centrist’ and ‘nuanced’ views on politics and society. Big whoop, there is a world outside your bubble, I am allowed to expresses those views. It’s going to be a very long life if you can’t manage yourself face à diverse understanding of politics, and considering how you are wasting your middle age years insulting people on the web, it seems to already be the case.

can we cool it on the ageism

"but I am not a middle aged man"

ageist as well, someone tell Aimless his most vociferous supporter.

Dude who's hounding a poster, calling him 'cunt' and calling out his nationality is going to give decency lessons. Leave me alone, move on, I have been asking you for months now.

yeah but you are still a cunt

loving these vibes

xps quasi-response to VHS -

there are much worse places to live than britain from a material resources point of view (which is fucked up and inexcusable and needs to be changed urgently) but there are useable things that could be made to do things to sabotage parts of this international death machine and maybe save something i don't know

i don't come from a good place whatsoever by the way. my dead grandfathers were a british captain and possible spy in india, and a fucking nazi in fucking russia whose reappearance after stalingrad is some kind of horrific anti-miracle, instead of dying in the war along with everything they stood for they both got to live and their kids made me and always told me how great they were

so guilt and self-loathing has always been baked into whatever politics i would end up developing, and if it's productive i am using it

By saying 'coming from a good place' I meant that I believe you don't mean any ill and I respect the dedication to your values and ideology. I'm sorry your family background is causing you this amount of self-loathing and guilt.

I also lived in the UK and in France at two separate occasions in my late teens/early twenties and I came to the conclusion that Western Europe as a society is very good at sapping joy out of one's life, for reasons not too far from you generally describe.

csb

How does Western Europe differ from North America in this respect?

different cast of rich white brats?

I probably derailed the thread enough so if there is another thread about the differences between EU and NA (i’m sure there is) I’ll be glad to discuss that elsewhere.

xps I know what you meant but it's not really relevant and neither is my neurosis which I don't want to fix rn sorry I started

I have little hope for europe in general which is currently going through genocide from its border regimes (cops, militias, camps, etc) among other things seems happy to continue to help facilitate the mass murder of millions or hundreds of millions of refugees in the coming years or decades, the situation is already beyond dire and hardly anyone around me seems to give more than a rhetorical shit at best because this culture is fucking evil. stopping this from happening more than it already has is the most important thing ever right now

of course so many people are doing amazing work but they're stretched so thin & having to make awful decisions they should never have been forced to make because fuck europe

Tough night on ilx.

I really dislike how this -- otherwise generally informative piece in a trainspotter historian sorta way -- talks of Kabul as a disaster.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/04/afghanistan-britain-worst-failure-since-suez-uk-foreign-policy

The withdrawal is generally fine. It's the refugee situation that is fucked.

Tough night on ilx.

lol. it really was!

just a bit of jovial horseplay at last orders time!

fuck you, you worthless motherfucker!! I says to the barkeep

Let me take you to the place
Where membership's a smiling face
Brush shoulders with the arseholes
Where wankers take you by the hand
And welcome you to a wonderful ilx thread
And they spit in your face and call you a melt-cunt

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

In this week's @NewYorker I write about the Afghan women who wanted US troops to leave https://t.co/nQGzqKPFZu

— Anand Gopal (@Anand_Gopal_) September 6, 2021

pretty sure I’m taliban after reading that

Here's the Times-published op-ed from the general whose atrocities are detailed near the end
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/opinion/afghanistan-taliban-army.html

This was a good light-ish critique of that piece

Some of this is a bit too novelistic in presentation to inspire complete confidence imho, but the core claim that the occupation of Afghanistan was a parade of crimes and horrors is very clearly going to be completely correct. https://t.co/ziiyZCv9Tp

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) September 7, 2021

NYT: The drone strike that the military said took out a potential ISIS car bomber right before we departed Afghanistan likely hit a a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group who was bringing people to and from work. https://t.co/eh5C18FTAg

— Sam Stein (@samstein) September 10, 2021

ah! nevertheless

BREAKING: Gen. McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, to announce no ISIS-K fighters killed in U.S. drone strike in Kabul Aug 29. 10 civilians killed, including 7 children in Toyota. No disciplinary action expected, officials say. US military stands by intel leading to strike.

— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) September 17, 2021