Afghanistan

We, the undersigned concerned individuals, scholars, policy-makers, activists, and organisations reject the government of Pakistan’s deportation plans and stand in solidarity with Afghans in Pakistan – and elsewhere.
In 2021, Malalai Joya, under threat from the re-imposed Taliban regime, was forced to leave Afghanistan and live in exile. In this wide-ranging interview, she discusses the background to the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the shape of resistance today.
The US withdrawal of 2021 was a military victory for the Taliban. For at least two years leading up to it, the Afghan government forces were losing more people dead and wounded each month than they were recruiting. So those forces shrank.
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No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes
By Anand Gopal
Picador, New York, 2014

Reviewed by Chris Slee

This book, published seven years before the Taliban took control of Kabul for a second time in 2021, helps explain their victory.

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By Valentine M. Moghadam

July 21, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Against the Current — Afghanistan has been in a state of chaos since at least the Taliban resurgence in 2006 and the entry of the Islamic State group (Daesh) more recently. Assaults have been made not just on Afghan police units and U.S. military targets but also on prisons, schools, funerals and maternity wards across the country. In early 2017, the UN estimated that some 18,000 civilians had been killed since 2015 alone.

Taliban gunmen attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul in January 2018. Daesh attacked offices and staff members of international NGOs. Women and men who have worked with those offices have been targeted with threatening “night letters” and some with assassination.

 
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By William I. Robinson

May 14, 2017 Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The recent U.S. attack on Syria and mega-bombing of Afghanistan come at a time when the Donald Trump regime is facing a mounting scandal over alleged Russian involvement in its 2016 electoral campaign, historically low approval ratings for an incoming presidency, and a growing mass grassroots resistance movement. U.S. rulers have often launched military adventures abroad to deflect attention from political crises and problems of legitimacy at home.