Renee Parsons - Afghanistan and the Roman Empire

As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stepped off the plane in Afghanistan recently, he accurately summed up the evils of war. Arriving to calm Afghani reaction to the massacre of sixteen civilians in their homes by a U.S. soldier, Panetta said that "war is hell." The Secretary went on to predict that these "incidents are going to take place. This is not the first and probably won't be the last."

In other words, as U.S. military tentacles wrap themselves around the world just as the Roman Empire spread its military dominance from Baghdad to Britain, Panetta was serving notice on the American public that the violence and pattern of disturbing behavior on the part of American troops is less than an aberration but represents an endless war culture that may be expected to continue.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/war-is-hell_b_1369344.html

Glenn Greenwald - Afghanistan and American imperialism

US army staff sergeant Robert Bales is accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, and then burning some of the bodies. The massacre took place in two villages in the southern rural district of Panjwai. Though this horrific crime targeted Afghans on Afghan soil, Afghanistan will play no role in investigating the crime or bringing the perpetrator (or perpetrators) to justice. That is because the US almost immediately whisked the accused out of Afghanistan and brought him to an American army base in Fort Leavensworth, Kansas.

The rapid exclusion of Afghans from the process of trying the accused shooter has, predictably and understandably, exacerbated the growing anti-American anger in that country. It is hard to imagine any nation on the planet reacting any other way to being denied the ability to try suspects over crimes that take place on its soil. A Taliban commander quickly gave voice to that nationalistic fury, announcing: "We want this soldier to be prosecuted in Afghanistan. The Afghans should prosecute him."

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/19/afghanistan-american-imperialism-glenn-greenwald

Karen J. Greenberg - The Unstoppable Legacy of the War on Terror

By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era.  One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaeda so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter.  You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties. 

Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged.  Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175517/

Chris Hedges - Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against his convoy, it would not have made the news. Units do not stick around to count their “collateral damage.” But the Afghans know. They hate us for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murder_is_not_an_anomoly_in_war_20120319/

Scott Horton - The Drone Secrecy Farce

Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech at Northwestern, publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Timesresponded with renewed demands for the release of the Department of Justice memorandum (or “OLC Memo”), written by Martin Lederman and David Barron, that provides the legal framework for targeted killings. The Obama Administration came to power promising to end secret Justice Department memos like the ones that approved torture and warrantless surveillance. It also published most of the controversial Bush-era memos, which makes it look particularly disingenuous when withholding its own controversial legal opinions.

Why is it doing so? When pressed, government figures cite the same reason, always off-the-record: drone operations on and over Yemeni territory depend to some degree on the approval of Yemen’s dictator, who has insisted that they be kept secret. Indeed, according to an understanding the United States has reached with Yemen, the latter’s government will generally claim internally that U.S. drone strikes were carried out by Yemen’s own air force.

Read More:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/03/hbc-90008485

Cameron, Obama Agree: Continue War on Afghanistan

While corporate media have framed the recent massacre of Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier as presenting problems with the war strategy and as a PR problem, President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed today their joint view that the war on Afghanistan must go on.

CNN reports that

Both Obama and Cameron referred to the difficulties of recent days, a clear reference to the civilian killings in Kandahar province that brought threats of retaliation from the Taliban and a demand for justice from President Hamid Karzai's government.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/14-7

Eugene Robinson - End the Afghan mission now

It was clear before Sunday’s horrific massacre of civilians that it’s past time for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to end. Now the only question should be how quickly we can get our troops onto transport planes to fly them home.

What are we accomplishing, aside from enraging the Afghan population we’re allegedly trying to protect? How are we supposed to convince them that a civilian massacre carried out by a U.S. soldier is somehow preferable to a civilian massacre carried out by theTaliban? How does it make any of us safer to have the United States military known forburning Korans and killing innocent Muslim children in their beds?

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bring-home-the-troops-now-from-afghanistan/2012/03/12/gIQAkVqs7R_story.html

Marwan Bishara - Decisions, Not Excuses in Afghanistan

I am sort of glad President Obama didn't apologise for the recent US soldier killing spree in Afghanistan, leaving it to his "inferiors" to do the embarrassing bidding. On Sunday, a US soldier murdered 16 civilians in Afghanistan's Kandahar province.

Obama's failure to apologise was not for the same reasons as Newt Gingrich, who reckons the US president shouldn't apologise - rather Afghans should be making apologies for getting in the way of occupying their country, or for getting killed by US troops!

Obama's campaign advisers have their own reasons for not wanting him to apologise: namely, forthcoming US screw-ups overseas will require too many apologies for an incumbent president, especially one who didn't "serve" his country.

After all, it has been only days since Obama apologised for the presumed "accidental burning" of Qurans by US soldiers in what appears to Afghans as an anti-Islamic ritual.

Read More:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201231273433382365.html

Tom Engelhardt - Tomgram: Engelhardt, War as the President's Private Preserve

When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock.  There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice.  The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.”

Those ads came to mind recently when President Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were remarkably radical.  Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked Americans -- but just about nobody noticed.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175514/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_as_the_president%27s_private_preserve/

US Soldiers Open Fire on Afghan Civilians in Rogue Attack

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including nine children, were shot dead in what witnesses described as a nighttime massacre on Sunday near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan, and one U.S. soldier was in custody.

While U.S. officials rushed to draw a line between the rogue shooting and the ongoing efforts of a U.S. force of around 90,000, the incident is sure to further inflame Afghan anger triggered when U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base.

U.S. officials said an American staff sergeant from a unit based in Washington state was in custody after the attack on villagers in three houses. Multiple civilians were also wounded, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition said

President Barack Obama called his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai promising to establish the facts quickly and "to hold fully accountable anyone responsible."

Read More:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/11/us-afghanistan-civilians-idUSBRE82A02V20120311