Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An interview with filmmaker Mariam Ghani

We have to end the permanent wars

"Operation Northmoor was set up by the government in 2014 and looked into 52 alleged illegal killings. Its closure was announced by the government before Royal Military Police detectives even had a chance to interview the key Afghan witnesses." This is very interesting. Language and selectivity by a corporate machine are two of the tools that reflect power relations within an imperialist state (e.g. PR) and in its relation to other states. The BBC article doen't even allude that the British regime and the military were in Afghanistan and Iraq as an ally with the American-led mission to fight "the terrorists" and "liberate" the people (in Afghanistan, especially women). What happened after that and the chaos left until the present day was not the responsibility of the coalition forces. "We did our bit." The "illegal killings" or "war crimes" must have occured in "very hard conditions" and "highly

"A Quiet Revolution" by Leila Ahmed I personally disagree with the word veil and hijab because they are not specific. They both mean a cover, but they don't specify what is covered. "Hijāb" in Arabic means "to cover"/"to hide". "Headscarf" is a more accurate term. 

History of the British Empire How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians A new research

Humans facing violence at home and violence abroad Just replace each of the photographs by stories of animals and they would see showers of millions of likes and messages of solidarity and tears. A Polish taxi-driver told me today that the priority is to Christian and skilled Ukrainians coming to Poland, not to Syrians, for example. I refrained from telling him: You are right. What would the Polish gain from "Syrian infidels with backward culture and backward religion? Wasn't the Polish regime part of the imperialist 2003 invasion of Iraq? Who made the situation there worse? Why did we get such a wave of refugees in the past few years? And I hope the ordinary Polish have gained something from their government's adventure in joining that criminal invasion and destruction.  Today the Polish government is rewriting history, including criminalising anyone who says that some Polish were involved in the Nazi extermination of the Jews on Polish soil. I managed to tell hi

A liberal account of 'humanitarian intervention' The Liberal Defense of Murder

Trailing ... The Mujahidin, Taliban and the CIA  (wikipedia) Sleeping with the devil (the Washington Post) The CIA and Islamic fundamentalism   (Weekly Worker) How the Taliban got their way in Afghanistan (the New York Times, a review of Ahmed Rashid's Taliban ) Political Islam in the service of imperialism (Samir Amin)

" The Saur Revolution had been based on a coup led by young officers. But Afghanistan had a conscript army, with men from every corner of the country, mostly from the families of small peasants and sharecroppers. Those soldiers followed orders, but they had not been politically convinced. There had been no urban uprisings and no peasant war for land. In that sense, the Saur Revolution was a top-down coup with little rural support. The idea that Communism or socialism required a dictatorship by a minority was widely accepted among radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Karmal had learned his politics in prison in Kabul, Taraki had learned his in Bombay, and Amin had spent years in New York. The Afghan Communists were simply doing what the Left globally knew had to be done if they really wanted to change the world. Their tragedy is, in an acute and terrible form, the same one replicated elsewhere ." Related The West's favourite Afghan

"The growth of large-scale migration is after all part of the system of corporate globalisation that took hold in the past 30 years and widened inequality both within and between countries. It's also been fuelled by 15 years of western wars and intervention from Afghanistan to Somalia. And in Eastern Europe, the exploitation and migration of low-waged and skilled workers has been central to the neoliberal model imposed after 1989." Seumas Milne, the Guardian online, 01 January 2013 Italy as an example ' Migrants are more profitable than drugs' Raped, beaten, exploited

A big setback for the "free world" and its long-time endeavour "to liberate and civilize" Afghanistan by bringing "human rights" and "prosperity" to its people. However, at least "we saved" a young girl and she is now an undergraduate at Oxford University.  Taliban threatens 70% of Aghanistan, the BBC finds

The Middle East and Henry Kissinger's "grand strategies"

A student of Arabic thought that the word "madrasa" in the Arab countries was like the Afghan "madrasa". No. The Washington Post  reported  in 2002: The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings …. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books …. The Council on Foreign Relations  notes : The 9/11 Commission  report (PDF)  released in 2004 said some of Pakistan’s religious schools or madrassas served as “incubators for violent extremism.” Since then, there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to militancy. Promoting violence — in the form of jihad against the Soviet invaders and their local proxies — was the goal of the U.S.-funded education effort in

Malala: The West's Unsaved Others

"The only politics that offers a way out of the dilemma of contemporary Third World sovereignty is an internationalism that recognizes that its subjects are political actors, not just suffering subjects; that the repression launched by struggling secularist regimes undermines secularism just as it invites intervention; that the beneficiaries of Western intervention are to be found in Moscow, Riyadh, Arlington, and Islamabad, not Homs and Benghazi; and that the struggles of global refugee diasporas are coextensive with the domestic political communities they were forced to leave behind." How humanitarianism became imperialism

Imperialist feminism and liberalism

How the elite is created Malala Yousafzai to study politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at Oxford University. One day, she will probably join the elite of Afghanistan. What is PPE?

"It was the deadliest single attack on a military installation in the entire 16-year history of the Afghan conflict." 170 Afghan soldiers killed. Last year a record number of Afghan forces were killed - 6,800 in total. That is three times the losses of American forces during the entire 16 years of this conflict."  — the BBC website

" The most cherished myths of American culture tell us that, while war is terrible,  our  wars are noble, fought only under duress, and in the service of freedom, human rights, and democracy. If we fail in our ventures, as we did in Vietnam and Iraq and probably will in Afghanistan and Syria, that failure was not in our intentions, which were righteous, but merely in our execution. Our worst sins, in these myths, are not ambition, cruelty, or greed, but hubris and lack of foresight. Against such myths, which can be found articulated in the latest Hollywood movies, in the editorial pages of  The New York Times , in Brookings Institution essays, and in Amazon’s “Hot New Releases in World War II History,” Brecht’s ideological critique, which is founded in its own mythology of good and evil, can do little or nothing. Indeed, it’s not clear what one can do about such myths at all, since the power they have is precisely that which deforms and obscures reality into something comprehensi

Afghanistan Surprise! Surprise! Recycling Hekmatyar, not mentioned here, but it is stated in the Arabic version of the article that he was supported by the U.S., including receiving money from the CIA through Pakistan.