End Times Militarism
Counterpunch, May 26, 2025, by Daniel Falcone [source]. Quotes Zunes on Trump’s dangerous militarism, despite isolationist rhetoric
Category: Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Joe Biden’s Tragic Failure to Learn from the Past
The Progressive January 18, 2025: On Biden’s foreign policy legacy, comparing his support for a far right Middle Eastern government engaging in massive war crimes with Reagan’s support for far right Central American governments engaged in massive war crimes… [source]
WORT: 9/11 Anniversary
September 9, 2021: Recording is no longer available. [Find best related links.]
WMNF: US and Afghanistan
2 September 2021: Recording is no longer available. [Find best related links.]
Interview: KPFA Talkies and Sunday Show, US and Afghanistan
KPFA and Pacifica Radio affiliates, August 31, 2021 A bomb kills Marines and Afghans trying to flee the Taliban—and the bomber was NOT Taliban. Lessons from the past, analysis of the present, and a peer into the future with Stephen…
Tazeen Hasan: Afghanistan
August 20, 2021 [Recording is no longer available] Find best Afghanistan links and TazeenHasan.net
CGTN Asia Today: Afghanistan
August 19, 2021 [Recording is no longer available] Find best Afghanistan related links
Interview, Media Sanctuary: U.S. and Afghanistan
MediaSanctuary.org, August 18, 2021 Prof. Stephen Zunes Shares Analysis of Afghanistan War, Withdrawal and History.
Radio: U.S. and Afghanistan
Radio Islam International, 17 August 2021: “U.S. Government Still Trying to Come to Terms with How Quickly Taliban Took Over Afghanistan.”
US Policy Toward Afghanistan Was a Recipe for Collapse From the Start
We must not allow the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan to be used to rewrite history and teach the wrong lessons.
Radio: US and Afghanistan
Pacifica Radio Flashpoints, 16 August 2021:US and Afghanistan: Leaving is never easy…
Maintaining U.S. presence in Afghanistan would bolster Taliban: expert says
On October 12 Washington and Kabul agreed on a draft deal that would keep some U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, but only if political and tribal leaders in Afghanistan agree to a U.S. demand that U.S. troops not be subject to Afghan
The Killing of Bin Laden and the Threat of Al Qaeda
The killing of Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama bin Laden is not likely to have a profound impact one way or the other in the struggle against the terrorist organization and its allied groupings. On the one hand, Al-Qaeda may face a potential leadership void and internal divisions. On the other hand, the organization has decentralized in the ten years since the United States and allied forces drove them from their sanctuaries in Afghanistan and terrorist cells operate independently from bin Laden’s leadership and a whole new generation of terrorists subscribing to the apocalyptic and genocidal ideology has sprung up as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Interview: The Afghanistan Mess (audio)
Courage to Resist
“Middle East scholar Dr. Stephen Zunes talks about how U.S. imperial hubris helped create, and continues to deepen and intensify the deadly chaos in Afghanistan. “The war not only was raised some moral and legal questions, but it has not resolved the situation, it has made matters worse. The problem is that there has been a gross oversight on the military side of the equation. The really important issues have been overlooked.”
The U.S. and Afghan Tragedy
One of the first difficult foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration will be what the United States should do about Afghanistan. Escalating the war, as National Security Advisor Jim Jones has been encouraging, will likely make matters worse. At the same time, simply abandoning the country — as the United States did after the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Communist government soon after the Soviet withdrawal 20 years ago — would lead to another set of serious problems….
Holbrooke: Insensitive Choice for a Sensitive Region
Obama’s choice for special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, arguably the most critical area of U.S. foreign policy, is a man with perhaps the most sordid history of any of the largely disappointing set of foreign policy and national security appointments….
Pakistan’s Dictatorships and the United States
Foreign Policy In Focus/IPS, December 12, 2007 [source] In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would support democratic movements around the world and work to end tyranny. Furthermore, he pledged to those struggling…
Operation Enduring Freedom: A Retrospective
It has become a given, even among many progressive critics of Bush administration policy, that while the U.S. war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, unnecessary, poorly executed, and contrary to America’s national security interests, the war on Afghanistan?which was launched five years ago last week?was a legal, moral, and a necessary response to protect American national security in the aftermath of 9/11. Virtually every member of Congress who has gone on record opposing the Iraq War supported the Afghanistan War. Similarly, a number of soldiers who have resisted serving in Iraq on moral grounds have expressed their willingness to serve in Afghanistan….
Afghanistan: Five Years Later
On the fifth anniversary of the launch of the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the offensive, much of the countryside is in the hands of warlords and opium magnates, U.S. casualties are mounting, and many, if not most, Afghans are actually worse off now than they were before the U.S. invasion….