Afghanistan

Democracy

We Love to Talk of Terror

The frightful and bloody hours of Friday night and Saturday morning in Munich and Kabul – despite the 3,000 miles that separate the two cities – provided a highly instructive lesson in the semantics of horror and hypocrisy. I despair of that generic old hate-word, “terror”. It long ago became the punctuation mark and signature tune of every facile politician, policeman, journalist and think tank crank in the world.

Nuclear Weapons/War

Combat Robots: On the Surface and Underwater

There is the widespread belief that unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, are used as an alternative air reconnaissance and for strikes against distant targets. The United States used them in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and other countries

International

Terrorism: A Matrix of Lies and Deceit

So how is your war on “terrorism” going? I’m not doing too well at it since I have no idea who the enemy is. Like the American black comedian, Dick Gregory, who, on hearing that President Johnson had declared a war on poverty, ran out onto the street with a hand grenade to throw it at some poor people, I have no idea who the real enemy is, who to throw a grenade at

Middle East

Mapping Allegations of an American War Crime

Three years ago, 10 men were detained in Nerkh, a volatile district in central Afghanistan, and subsequently disappeared. According to dozens of eyewitnesses—mostly civilians and Afghan government officials—they were all arrested between November 2012 and January 2013 by the same US Army Special Forces unit, ODA 3124. On April 6, 2013, about a week after the American unit was forced out of the district by local protests, Afghan officials began finding bodies buried outside the Special Forces’ former base. Relatives identified the bodies as belonging to the missing men.