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Malalai Joya in Australia

The presence of Australian troops is only beneficial for the bunch of warlords and criminals ruling Afghanistan. The Afghan people face dire conditions as the US and their allies have massacred innocent women, children and men – and are continuing so. Since 2001, tens of thousands civilians have been killed by the blind bombardments of the US and their allies, which includes Australia as well. […] Therefore, the Australian people need to demand that their government stop supporting such a treacherous regime and instead support the democratic forces of Afghanistan who are struggling under extreme conditions to bring peace, independence, democracy, freedom, and women’s rights. Furthermore, they should ask the Australian government to withdraw its troops because their presence is only making the situation worse.

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Written by Editorial team on 15-08-2011, No comments

Death of bin Laden

So Osama bin Laden has been killed. Ok. Now what?

In the short term, an orgy of ghoulish US nationalism, as the media drools over the bloodied corpse,  a body that, we're told, the US now has in its possession, to be (no doubt) lovingly displayed at some future date.

Bin Laden was a mass murderer and no friend of the Left. Still, what does it say about our era that that the decade's biggest news story centres not on a new scientific discovery nor a medical breakthrough nor the extension of healthcare nor the provision of public housing but rather on the celebrations attendant upon a public enemy being gunned to death?

Will the wars come to an end? Of course not. Bin Laden never played any role in Iraq nor in the Afghan insurgency. As for the new quagmire in Libya, well, that's a pretty good example of how the the killing can continue without any reference to al-Qaeda whatsoever -- Gaddafi is to that war what bin Laden was to the other two. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 2-05-2011, 7 user comments

The legacy of humanitarian imperialism

Overland editor Jeff Sparrow is making waves this week: writing to the Prime Minister and crashing internets; arguing, with teammate Adam Bandt, for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan; speaking on the BBC, on RRR, at Melbourne's WikiLeaks demo.

He’s also penned one of the lead essays in Overland 201, which traces the history and discourse of the war in Afghanistan, and dissects liberal imperialist arguments supporting the war.

‘The banality of goodism’ begins like so: ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 10-12-2010, No comments

After the elections

On 2 November, the United States of America went to the polling booths for their midterms. Five days later, Burma had its first election since 1990. In Afghanistan, citizens are still waiting for the results of an election they held two months ago.

And as I write, Victorians are marching off to our own cardboard constructs to post paper and elect the next state government. Billions of ballots, ink-stained fingers, ticks in boxes. Uncountable words in print, hours and days of self-congratulatory screen and airtime.

Voting Melbourne, 2007 ... read more

Written by Ruby J Murray on 27-11-2010, 2 user comments

The greatest irony of Western policy

After the US mid-term elections, President Barack Obama is severely weakened by the rise of the Republicans. His unwillingness or inability to pursue true justice and peace in the Middle East will only be worsened.

Indeed, GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has already announced that he sees his job as protecting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from any pressure from the Democrats. A former Israeli Defence Minister is also buoyed by the result.

Obama has made countless avoidable mistakes in his attempts at success in the Middle East. Iraq remains mired in violence with Tehran gaining the upper hand after recent elections. Afghanistan is worsening by the day, explained by Afghan human rights activist and politician Malalai Joya in Sydney last week. There is growing unrest in the Egyptian client state and repression in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The chance of confrontation with Iran increases. ... read more

Written by Antony Loewenstein on 24-11-2010, 3 user comments

Malalai Joya, Tanya Plibersek, Labor, etc

Tuesday evening, Malalai Joya gave a talk at UTS. She’s a small woman, and her English is a bit unsteady. Her manner was generally not as fiery as her language. What she said, however, radiated the defiance that makes her such an inspiring person. Whether denouncing the ‘mafia puppet government’ of Karzai, or the fundamentalist warlords, Joya was uncompromising in her rejection of Islamist fundamentalists, and of Western imperialism.

During question time, a passionate Iranian woman took the chance to give a long speech-question, before speaking even longer in Persian. When Joya responded to her question, Joya took the opportunity to denounce in her characteristically passionate way the ‘fascist’ government of Iran, which she said was ‘worse than Hitler’. This was surprising to me, as by my judgment the Taliban and warlords in Afghanistan are significantly worse than the reign of Ayatollahs in Iran. Interestingly, what I liked was Joya specifically warning against illusions about the reformists in Iran, insisting the whole system needed to be overthrown. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 18-11-2010, 5 user comments

Frago 242

I used to think of the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars as somewhat Orwellian: the braying voices of politicians committing us to endless war against unseen enemies, the constant lies and the clumsy but barefaced covering up of those lies, the imprisonment of mildly dissenting citizens for crimes the state decides the nature of in secret and at their discretion and the presentation of the inciters of war as homely, steadfast and moral guardians of the social good.

Now, after the latest WikiLeaks release, it’s Dante that comes to mind. I need some metaphor to help with the visceral response to the revelation of Fragmentary Order 242. I’m not fond of using literary shibboleths to give me a way of coping with human suffering, but reaching for Orwell or the Inferno or both seems meaningful in this instance, as in others. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-10-2010, 12 user comments

Drugs, Afghanistan, Terrorism and US Corporations

We might be forgiven for thinking US and NATO allies are interested in keeping opium cultivation down. However, as Afghan farmers start sowing their next poppy crop, we’d be fools not to recognise how comprehensively embedded the heroin trade is – not only in the war in Afghanistan, but in the funding of terrorism in general and, in a further twist, the lining of Western corporation coffers.

Yossef Bodansky said in July 2010, in an article about the strategic ramifications of a US-led withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan:

In global terms, the key threat is the impact that the vast sums of drug money has on the long-term regional stability of vast tracks of Eurasia: namely, the funding of a myriad of “causes” ranging from jihadist terrorism and subversion to violent and destabilizing secessionism and separatism.

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Written by SJ Finn on 15-09-2010, 5 user comments

Don’t mention the war[s]

Gillard & Abbott

Although it is reasonable to expect any election campaign to focus predominantly on domestic issues, it is nevertheless somewhat disappointing that matters of foreign policy have been put on the backburner in this unfulfilling 2010 Labor/Liberal contest. Aside, that is, from the essentially meaningless Tony Abbott mantra ‘turning back the boats,’ and both sides affirming an Australian military presence in Afghanistan. Surely there must be more going on in the wor

Written by Dan Bigna on 20-08-2010, 19 user comments

Thinking about democracy

It is odd, how we think of democracy these days – as something ordinary, inherent to the West, something to strive for yet something taken for granted, also. It is a concept that has plagued the politically vexed mind since time immemorial, well, at least since our ancient forebears. Aristotle envisioned it, Plato feared it (‘Democracy passes into despotism’), as did Mill, and Machiavelli idealised it, believing that the majority would preclude oppression, which was preferable to the tyranny of the few, who would always look to subjugation to maintain control and order. It used to be a radical concept: tyrannical or feudal systems didn’t benefit the majority and were subject to the whims and natures of the privileged minority.

If we were to ask a passerby in the street, ‘How do you define democracy?’ it’s impossible to predict, based on recent observations of democracy in action in Australia, in the Unites States, in Israel, in the outbreak of democracy across the free world, what their definition would look like. George Orwell alluded to this when he wrote, ‘It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.’ ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 29-07-2010, 17 user comments

The passing of Generation Kill

Julian Assange said dryly, on the release of what he called the Afghan War Diaries, that war is just one damn thing after another, which is a somewhat polite way of putting it, and makes him sound a bit like Biggles. Perhaps ‘one fucking atrocity after another’ would have been more to the point.

The day before the WikiLeaks documents were released, I finished reading Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, a book I’d been meaning to get around to reading but life, etc. Generation Kill has become something of a celebrity book now. It’s Wright’s account of being embedded for two months with a company of marines of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion spearheading the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wright, who cut his reporting teeth – if that’s the word – writing porn reviews for Hustler, where he seems to have learned something about misogyny, has gained something of a reputation as a sort of latter day Hunter S. Thompson. A Thompson he isn’t, but he is a fine observer and takes full advantage of his role as an embedded journo. We won’t get an Australian equivalent as the ADF controls its info on its operations with an obsessive po-faced secrecy that borders on the ludicrous, and a compliant media ensures that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are events we are not going to be asked to think about too much. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 28-07-2010, 50 user comments

Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t

In last night's puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the 'job is done'. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is.

The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing an almost blow-by-blow account of the Afghan conflict. Here's what the Guardian says:

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-07-2010, 14 user comments

Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America

Most kids experience an amount of emotional turbulence on the way to adulthood, and I was no exception. And although there were aspects of my adolescence that make me cringe to this day, I could always be certain that at the end of the school day, I had a home to return to with my own bedroom, a dinner table, heating in winter and a backyard to assist in the fantasy of one day playing for the Australian cricket team.

I mention this because the foremost image remaining with me after a viewing of The Most Dangerous Man in America – a compelling documentary on Daniel Ellsberg who leaked a comprehensive RAND Corporation study officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times in 1971 – is of a young Vietnamese girl in obvious distress as US marines burn her village to the ground. Such images help explain why Ellsberg sacrificed a promising Government career to inform the American public that the Vietnam War had been packaged and sold as containment of the Communist threat, when in fact the historical record, as recorded in the Pentagon Papers, illuminated fervent imperial ambition across successive US administrations. ... read more

Written by Dan Bigna on 13-07-2010, 3 user comments

On the [il]legality of drone attacks

The Lede blog in the New York Times today has a post by Robert Mackey, ‘Drone Strikes Are Legal, U.S. Official Says’. Highly recommend reading.

I’ve embedded a video from the post in which Harold Hongju Koh, the US State Department’s top lawyer, defends the 'legitimacy' of drone attacks and targeted assassinations.

As Mackey points out, Koh was a strident critic of the Bush Administration’s policies when he was the dean of Yale Law School; he even described America as part of ‘the axis of disobedience’ alongside North Korea and Iraq.

Hard to imagine now.

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Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 30-03-2010, 6 user comments

The Monday review – write what you think when you think about Afghanistan

I've had this idea about writing lately that just won’t be stilled. Not wholly my idea (as if they exist) and it’s not limited to, though this review focuses on, writing.

The idea goes like this: perhaps there is something unhealthy about the state of writing today in Melbourne, in Australia, around the world.

Too often it seems our writers, our institutions, our courses and our practices are steeped in introspection, at times, to the neglect of the external world. We are transfixed by the personal, by our own experiences of what it's like to move through and inhabit this world. Write what you know, we are told. And the only things we know are our experiences and our inner world. Alternatively, we write what no-one knows, as in genre fiction, where the world is imagined. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 8-03-2010, 26 user comments