The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must, therefore, learn…
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and passively: “A…
A devastating investigative report was published in the Washington Post on December 9th. Dubbed the “Afghanistan Papers” in a nod to the Vietnam War’s famous “Pentagon Papers,” the report relied on thousands of documents to similarly expose how the US government at the presidential level across three administrations, acting in collaboration with the military brass…
According to Hawa Alam Nuristani, Chairwoman of the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan, the current president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, came first in the country’s presidential election in late September, gaining 50.64% of the vote. Meanwhile the media previously reported that the campaign team of another presidential candidate, the country’s Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, filed…
The Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre died almost 200 years ago, having expressed many opinions, including the observation that “Every country has the government it deserves.” He was an inflexible monarchist who approved of the Spanish Inquisition so his philosophy was not on the lines of Plato, John Locke or Immanuel Kant, and one can…
One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country. I showed the students an article from the front page of the New YorkTimes featuring…
