Here’s what I take from the Republicans’ obsession with Benghazi:

Wars where thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghan people died are perfectly cool even though they were based on lies, lies that were protected by such extreme actions as outing CIA agents, because a Republican did it.

Embassy attacks are not cool, even if Republicans cut funding for embassy security and blocked requests for more. It’s not their fault and they won’t admit their complicity. (And, ironically, they’ve outed CIA agents during the Benghazi hearings too.)

This is why I won’t vote Democrat or Republican. Both sides are fully willing to overlook their own failures and demonize the other, usually wasting an eff-ton of taxpayer money and time in the process.

I’d much rather these assholes focus on jobs.

4 ♥ 05.11.13

To my Kansas City peeps:

It’s official. I’ve adopted a US soldier for the holidays. His name is Brandon.

If anyone would like to contribute items to a Christmas care package for him, I’d appreciate it immensely. I’m looking for the following items: Blankets, pillows, personal care items/toiletries, snacks, candy, baby wipes, books/magazines. Any money donated will go towards the purchase of these items and/or shipping them to the his base in Afghanistan.

Even if you just want to give him a thank you card, I’d gladly forward it for you.

I’ll tentatively plan to ship everything out in a couple of weeks, so if you’re interested, please let me know.

2 ♥ 11.20.12

ericmortensen:

A mourner cries over the bodies of Afghan civilians, allegedly shot by a rogue US soldier, seen loaded into the back of a truck in Alkozai village of Panjwayi district, Kandahar province on March 11, 2012.

via Jangir/AFP/Getty Images

It’s past time to end the farce and give the Afghan people what they want: a complete withdrawal of US forces.

91 ♥ 03.14.12

U.S. Soldier’s Rampage May Fuel Calls for Obama to Speed Afghan Withdrawal

somepolitics:

anticapitalist:

Good.

Let’s get our troops out right now.

As if this shouldn’t have already happened.

Afghanistan has been calling for us to withdraw for years, and events like this don’t do anything to speed that process. Don’t forget, we’ve been deliberately targeting civilians in our war zones since World War II. It’s our modus operandi.

Last year we shot a missile at nine kids, and our military even went so far as to admit their mistake. A US soldier convicted of war crimes in January just got off scot free. (No jail time, just a demotion.) The UN itself has challenged reports that the US has made any progress in Afghanistan, and yet, we persist.

All of these events drew outrage from Americans and from Afghanis, but it changes nothing. The meat grinder goes on grinding.

38 ♥ 03.11.12

A U.S. soldier went on a shooting rampage outside Kandahar city early Sunday [11 March 2012], killing up to 18 civilians, Afghan officials said, in yet another devastating blow to Americans’ battered image in the country after 10 years of warfare.”

One wonders if this monster will walk away scot-free like Frank Wuterich.

58 ♥ 03.11.12

Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai backs anti-woman "code of conduct"

socialismartnature:

Despicable. Ten years ago when the U.S. was launching its war on Afghanistan, it relied heavily on the argument that an invasion was needed in order to ‘liberate’ women. What a farce that seems now.

Of course, since Karzai is the U.S.’ hand-picked puppet, maybe he is just seeing the all-out war currently being waged by U.S. politicians against American women and has concluded that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

While this may seem an aberration to some, the Afghan women’s rights activist, and anti-war firebrand, Malalai Joya, has long been pointing out the ways in which the U.S. war and occupation of her country reinforces the most oppressive and misogynistic tendencies within Afghanistan.

===

Afghanistan’s president endorsed a “code of conduct” issued by an influential council of clerics which activists say represents a giant step backward for women’s rights in the country.
President Hamid Karzai’s remarks backing the Ulema Council’s document, which allows husbands to beat wives under certain circumstances and encourages segregation of the sexes, is seen as reaching out to insurgents like the Taliban.

It baffles me why modern women endorse and subject themselves to religious codes that exist to keep them in a state of medieval subservience to men in power.

12 ♥ 03.07.12

tordify:

Obama & War

Tordify, you do realize, of course, that this isn’t about Quran burning. You remember how you felt on Sept 11th? That’s how Afghans feel every fucking day, because this war is on their doorstep and we’ve been occupying their country for more than a decade. Now, not only do they have to fear getting bombed or losing their homes or fields at any moment, but their occupiers piss on their religion too.

It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back for a small number of Afghans, and if you know the first thing about how we’re running the war in Afghanistan, one has to sympathize with the horror they endure every single day of their lives.

39 ♥ 03.01.12

Why the entire town of King NC rallied against an atheist Afghan War hero

ladyatheist:

Almost the entire town it seems, anyway.

Afghan War veteran – Steven Hewett – demanded that the city remove the Christian Flag that was raised over the public memorial to veterans like him. They called him a coward, and threatened to beat him up (and the handful of other supporters). They demanded that people like Steven be run out of town so that any pending lawsuit would lose its legal standing.

Clearly, they are fueled by the history revisionism of Liars for Jesus like author David Barton. (‘Merica is a Christian nation. Thomas Jefferson ordered the Marine Corps band to play at the Sunday church service in the Capitol Bldg… etc.) Weird little half-truths so brutally distorted that they only convince those who actively want it to be true.

A Senator and a NC Representative joined a rally against Hewett’s efforts, on stage. It was pretty damned offensive:

[Read More]

Everyone, see for yourselves the sickening manner in which the Republican Christian hypocrites of King, NC thank a brave soldier for risking his life in their service.

54 ♥ 01.23.12

socialismartnature:

Leave it to my ridiculously narrow-minded bigot of a co-worker to bring up the video that has been leaked of the U.S. soldiers pissing on the stacked bodies of the Afghan fighters, and to say nothing more than: “I think people are overreacting about the whole thing. And whoever leaked that video is an asshole and a fucking idiot. It’s just going to get more Americans killed.”

Leave it to my idiotic countrymen to be angrier and more outraged about soldiers pissing on dead bodies than the fact that we bomb children, women, and civilians’ homes and the country doesn’t even want us there. Thinking about it infuriates me.

10 ♥ 01.13.12

Does the US military want Afghanistan to get even nastier? - The Guardian

It would seem, from US Embassy cables (Thank you, Wikileaks!), that the US invites even greater violence from the Taliban as a means of achieving more support for the war from within Afghanistan.

Is it any wonder they want us out of their country?

Per The Guardian:

But not everyone thinks such horrors are an entirely bad thing. Indeed, some within the US war machine have long argued the emergence of a nastier insurgency could be really quite useful for Nato’s war aims. So useful, in fact, that foreign forces should try to encourage such behaviour.

One of them was Peter Lavoy, a former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, the body that examines data from across the US government’s intelligence gathering machine and turns it into high-grade analysis that is rarely discussed publicly. At a closed-door meeting with ambassadors at Nato headquarters in Brussels in December 2008, Lavoy spelled out a strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan that has never been uttered publicly: “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009 in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he said, according to a State Department note-taker in the room. “This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”

His words, which we only know courtesy of WikiLeaks, are extraordinary because they have been proven at least partially right. They also differ fundamentally from the publicly stated strategy in Afghanistan. Known as population-centric counterinsurgency, or Coin, the fundamental principle is that foreign forces should try to keep ordinary Afghans safe from insurgents and thereby win their support.

13 ♥ 01.04.12