Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

War photography by David Pratt

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)

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 effor...

"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

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.

A reminder How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11 (The Washington Post) Related How the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq

I disagree with the writer here in using "socialist states" and "stalinist states" to mean the same thing. The analysis, otherwise, is very interesting. The Anti-colonial Origins of Humanitarian Intervention: NGOs, Human Rights and When Humanitarianism Became Imperialism