Harry's Place

If you want reassurance that Richard Seymour and his fellow SWPers will never come close to achieving power in anything resembling a democracy, read his latest post at Lenin’s Tomb venting his contempt-verging-on-hatred for, um, British soldiers serving in Afghanistan and their wives.
The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and [...]

Here’s a report from National Public Radio about the Afghan girls taking classes in English and computer technology at the Afghan-Canadian Community Center in Kandahar.
Their hunger to learn– to make up for the years under the Taliban when schooling was forbidden to girls– is palpable. It certainly puts me and my relative laziness in [...]

Cross-Post by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi from the American Spectator
As U.S. military operations in Afghanistan drag on, a strengthening relationship between Pakistan and China has emerged as tensions between the former and the United States continue to grow.
Of particular interest are the trilateral meeting just held between Chinese, Saudi and Pakistani intelligence officials in Islamabad and a [...]

Via Terry Glavin comes the news that the Occupy protest movement that began at Wall Street in New York has now reached as far as Kabul, Afghanistan.

Terry quotes from one of the Afghan protesters who makes it clear that– notwithstanding the simple-minded “antiwar” Left– it is possible simultaneously to:
a) Be grateful to the countries and [...]

What stood out for me most from Peter Tatchell’s recent article was his final assertion that ‘anti-imperialism cannot be allowed to trump human rights’.   (Though I should note that although I tend to agree with Norm on such issues, I don’t think all those with deep reservations about the war are knee jerk anti-imperialists, or [...]

Terry Glavin says:
During the Cold War, while the Soviets were pumping out Third World revolutionaries from Patrice Lamumba University in Moscow and the CIA was graduating uniformed gangsters from Chile, Argentina and Guatemala out of its School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, the advance guard of a third imperial legion was emerging from [...]

Cross-posted from Terry Glavin
Conniptions of umbrage have broken out across the Khomeinist punditocracy after a too-candid live television interview slipped onto Iran’s national airwaves from Tehran, and on one of regime’s most-watched propaganda stations no less. Fury followed the brave Afghan journalist Fazolrahman Oria’s appearance, after the news program’s producer had somehow mistaken Oria for [...]

Lt. Daniel Clack of 1st Batallion The Rifles was killed in Afghanistan on Friday, August 12 2011. He was leading his patrol into a nearby village, to meet with local elders, when an Improvised Explosive Device killed him and injured five others.
Dan was in my year at school. We were friends, but not close [...]

Canadian journalist Terry Glavin– whose blog posts and articles remind us how the “anti-imperialist” and anti-Israel Left betrays genuine leftist principles and why a (dare I say it?) decent Left is worth fighting for– has written a book about the struggle for freedom in Afghanistan, to be published in October.
You can read about it [...]

A good piece in the Telegraph this morning asking if we will ever get out of Afghanistan. It comes after Hamid Karzai revealed publicly for the first time on Saturday that the US and the NATO-led coalition have been actively negotiating with the Taliban.
There have been reports of Taliban talks before, of course, but these [...]