We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Failure to Withdraw: The CIA, the Taliban, and the Strategy of Tension in Afghanistan

Click here to access free transcript of the Corbett Report by James Corbett from his website.

If you simply cannot afford a subscription from Boiling Frogs website in order to access the full 16:20m video report, you can read the transcript of the report at the above link. It provides some rather astonishing insights on developments there.
By any reasonable standard, the US-led NATO-powered invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, now entering its 13th year, has been an unmitigated failure.

The economic costs of the war are easy enough to calculate, although difficult for the average person to comprehend. Even the most conservative estimate of the cost of the Afghanistan war shows that the US government alone has spent $659 billion dollars in the past 13 years of its occupation of the country. The UK government has spent a further 37 billion pounds on the war.

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Of course, NATO does not measure the outcome of its mission by reasonable standards. They have their own entirely different yardstick by which they gauge their operations, and by that standard, the Afghan war has been an unqualified success.