For the second time in less than a month, US forces carried out airstrikes “in self defense” in Afghanistan, only to discover that they were actually attacking Afghan security forces. The Wednesday strike ended up wiping out an entire unit, though officials have yet to disclose the exact number of deaths, beyond it apparently being everyone present.

The previous attack saw US ground troops believing they were under fire, and the warplanes attacking police, killing 18. In this case, too, US officials said they believed the troops came under fire, and the airstrikes targeted the Afghan forces, who had been firing machine guns.

Despite all the talk of self defense and US troops being “under effective fire,” officials insist not a single US casualty occurred. US officials expressed “regret” for the deaths of Afghan partners.

SOURCE: ANTIWAR.COM
By Jason Ditz
For the second time in less than a month, US forces carried out airstrikes “in self defense” in Afghanistan, only to discover that they were actually attacking Afghan security forces. The Wednesday strike ended up wiping out an entire unit, though officials have yet to disclose the exact number of deaths, beyond it apparently being everyone present.

The previous attack saw US ground troops believing they were under fire, and the warplanes attacking police, killing 18. In this case, too, US officials said they believed the troops came under fire, and the airstrikes targeted the Afghan forces, who had been firing machine guns.

Despite all the talk of self defense and US troops being “under effective fire,” officials insist not a single US casualty occurred. US officials expressed “regret” for the deaths of Afghan partners.

Authored by Danny Sjursen via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for more than seventeen years. Despite many years of effort and billions spent, the U.S. military is still suffering casualties in that remote land. In 2017, fourteen American soldiers died in Afghanistan — some, in fact, shot from behind by their supposed local allies. Already, through January 2019, two more American troopers have been killed. They were the 2,418th and 2,419th U.S. military deaths in the war since 2001.

None of this sacrifice has defeated the Taliban or staved off enemy military advances throughout the country over the last several years. In fact, there have been a number of spectacular Taliban successes and attacks of late. On August 21, 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s speech in the heavily fortified capital city of Kabul was interrupted by dozens of mortar rounds fired by the Taliban. It was no mere anecdotal anomaly.

The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for more than seventeen years. Despite many years of effort and billions spent, the U.S. military is still suffering casualties in that remote land. In 2017, fourteen American soldiers died in Afghanistan — some, in fact, shot from behind by their supposed local allies. Already, through January 2019, two more American troopers have been killed. They were the 2,418th and 2,419th U.S. military deaths in the war since 2001.

None of this sacrifice has defeated the Taliban or staved off enemy military advances throughout the country over the last several years. In fact, there have been a number of spectacular Taliban successes and attacks of late. On August 21, 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s speech in the heavily fortified capital city of Kabul was interrupted by dozens of mortar rounds fired by the Taliban. It was no mere anecdotal anomaly.

Australian police stormed a building belonging to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), as part of an ongoing investigation against stories from 2017 related to Australian forces involved in possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison tried to downplay the matter, though this was actually the second day of such raids against the reporter involved, while insisting that his government is “committed to press freedom.” He sought to avoid responsibility, however, saying that probe was actually started before he became premier. He also pointed out that ABC is a state-run outlet.

The 2017 articles in question were specifically related to the use of “unlawful killings” by Australian special forces. The warrant demanded drafts of the stories, access to reporter emails, and handwritten notes. Over 100 pages of documents were taken, and two USB drives.

It was 4am when Masih Ur-Rahman Mubarez’s wife Amina called, an unusually early time for their daily chat. When he picked up the phone, he could hear the panic in her voice.

The call ended with Masih saying he would call again when things had calmed. But at 9am, when he dialed his wife’s number, her phone was off. He tried again at 9.30am. Still off. Through the whole of that day and the next, he repeatedly called. But Amina’s phone remained off.

It took another day for him to the learn the truth. Relatives avoided his calls or gave vague replies to his questions, until finally his brother broke the news. “He tried to avoid telling me the whole story, but I insisted that he tell me the truth,” Masih recalled in a wavering voice. “He told me to have patience in God - no one is left.”

An airstrike on Masih’s house had killed his wife and all his seven children, alongside four young cousins. His youngest child was just four years old.

SOURCE: ALJAZEERA.COM
The Afghan Taliban is unlikely to call a ceasefire any time soon, the group's leader has indicated, even though the "doors of dialogue" with the United States to end the 18-year-long war in the country remain open.

In his annual message on Saturday, ahead of next week's Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada pledged to continue fighting until the group's objectives were reached.

"No one should expect us to pour cold water on the heated battlefronts of Jihad or forget our 40-year sacrifices before reaching our objectives," he said in the message, adding that the Taliban aimed for "an end to the occupation and establishment of an Islamic system".

His statement comes days after a Taliban official said that "decent progress" had been made during talks with a group of senior Afghan politicians in Moscow.

A group of Afghan politicians led by former President Hamid Karzai and a 14-member Taliban team led by the co-founder of the group Abdul Ghani Baradar sat for the second day in Moscow to discuss the Afghan peace, but behind the closed doors.

The group rejected the calls for a ceasefire which was the main demand by Afghan politicians – who publicly raised the demand at a ceremony in Moscow on the centenary of Afghanistan-Russia diplomatic ties on Tuesday, May 28.

Sources said the second day of the meeting was also focused on peace and pressuring the Taliban to agree on a ceasefire with the Taliban – at least in the upcoming Eid al-Fitr.

Backing their deputy leader’s stance, a Taliban spokesman told reporters on Wednesday that ceasefire is not possible in presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan – who are helping the Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban and other insurgent groups since 2001.

The alleged attack comes days after the Taliban targeted a US convoy in north-eastern Afghanistan, killing three soldiers.

Taliban* militants have claimed they shot down a US B-52 heavy bomber, Syrian news site Muraselon reports.

The incident purportedly took place when the aircraft was departing from the Shawrab Airbase in southern Afghanistan in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

"Mujaheddin (a militia fighter) of the Islamic Emirate targeted a US B-52 bomber with heavy weapons today early morning in Lar area in the Washir district of Helmand Province," a spokesman for the Taliban was quoted as saying.

The B-52 is said to have crashed after the strike, killing all of its crew. Both Afghan and US authorities are yet to comment on the matter.

Afghan politicians are set to attend a two-day meeting with the Taliban in Moscow this week, officials confirmed Monday, as fighting continues to rage in Afghanistan amid troubled peace talks between the US and the militants.

The meeting -- set to run the 28th and 29th of May -- will mark the 100th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Russia and Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said a 14-member delegation was heading to Moscow, led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group's top political leader.

Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban's chief negotiator and former deputy minister of foreign affairs, will also attend, Mujahid said in a statement.

From the Afghan political establishment, former president Hamid Karzai is set to make an appearance, with his spokesman Yousof Saha suggesting the Afghan and Taliban delegations might meet on the sidelines for informal talks, but he noted nothing was guaranteed.

SOURCE: ZERO HEDGE
In keeping with their spectacular reputation of violating privacy and rigging elections, Facebook has said that it removed "hundreds of accounts" from Facebook and Instagram that were used to influence elections in Africa, according to CNN. Only it wasn't Russia who was behind this latest intervention, but Israel.
Archimedes Group, an Israeli company, reportedly spent more than $800,000 in advertising (far more than the Kremlin allegedly spent on its "ad campaign" to crush Hillary Clinton and get Trump elected) and ran accounts that had nearly 3 million followers, for the purpose of targeting African elections. The group primarily targeted Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia.

For perspective, the $800,000 reportedly spent by the group compares to the $100,000 that has been claimed by the U.S. mainstream media to have been spent for ‘Russian bots’ used to allegedly sway the 2016 US presidential election, according to RT.

US airstrikes killed 17 Afghan police officers and wounded 14 others due to a "miscommunication" while fighting with Taliban forces, according to Stars and Stripes, citing Afghan officials.

A US airstrike conducted Thursday in Afghanistan killed more than a dozen local policemen and wounded just as many.

When a firefight broke out between the Taliban and the local police force after the latter attempted to take down a Taliban flag in southern Helmand province, Afghan forces on the ground called in an airstrike, telling the US that the area was clear of friendlies, Stars and Stripes reported, citing Resolute Support.

Unfortunately, they were not, and a tragic accident resulted," the NATO mission in Afghanistan explained in its statement. "We're examining the miscommunication to ensure it is not repeated. We regret this tragic loss of life of our partners and are committed to improvement every day with every mission."

The longest war in U.S. history has cost 2400 American lives and nearly a trillion dollars. Still, the government in Washington conceals the truth and most of the populace yawns. By now there should be no doubt that America has lost the battle for Afghanistan, placing it in good company with the British and Soviet empires that failed to conquer that famously xenophobic country. I just wish the Trump administration – as self-touting “truth-tellers” – would admit it. Seriously, a public acceptance of defeat would be strangely refreshing. But don’t count on it!

Trump and company have a better idea. They’ll just stop telling the American people anything about how this perpetual war is going. Seriously, the powers that be have taken just about all the relevant, measurable data on the war and either stopped tracking it or deemed it classified. How’s that for some Orwellian political spin?

An Afghan journalist and political advisor, who was vocal about women’s rights in the country, has been gunned down in broad daylight, just days after saying she believed her life was in danger.

Mena Mangal was shot dead on Saturday morning in a public place while she was on her way to work in the capital city of Kabul.

The French prosecutor on Friday said it had opened a preliminary investigation into a suspected file assembled by Bayer’s seed maker Monsanto to influence various personalities in France.

The probe was opened after a complaint was filed by daily newspaper Le Monde.

According to Le Monde and other French media, Monsanto built up a file of some 200 names that includes journalists and law makers in the hope of influencing their positions on pesticides.

The file, Le Monde reports, dates from 2016 and was leaked by U.S public relations and marketing agency FleishmanHillard.

Officials at Bayer were not immediately available for comment.

Despite ongoing talks between Washington and the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan, US forces and their Afghan allies have killed more civilians than all insurgent groups combined so far this year.

The ongoing talks between the US Trump administration and the Afghan Taliban are being hyped as a significant step towards ending the 17-year war in Afghanistan.

In truth, though, the talks, if successful, may end up only ending one of the many wars currently being fought in the country. The US-led intervention has passed its 17th year, but conflict and chaos in Afghanistan have been taking place for the past 40 years.

A senior official from Iran's Foreign Ministry has said millions of Afghan refugees will be expelled from Iran if the sanctions on Tehran are increased.

According to Iranian officials, more than three million Afghan refugees are living in Iran with over two million of them working in that country.

In an interview with Iran’s IRNA news agency, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Sayed Abbas Araghchi said Iran would ask the Afghan refugees to go home if sanctions are increased, adding that the migrants annually send three to five billion Euros to Afghanistan.

Araghchi said: “468,000 Afghan students are getting education freely in Iranian schools and every student costs 600 Euros on an average basis.”

Speaking to the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joe Dunford insisted that “I don’t think anybody would want to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan or the broader Middle East more than me.” He then went on to oppose withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan.

18 years into the US occupation of Afghanistan, the situation on the ground is worse than ever. Diplomatic progress, however, is offering the possibility that the US could negotiate some sort of settlement to get them out of the country within a real, measurable amount of time.

That’s not sitting well with Dunford, who insists the US needs to keep ground troops in Afghanistan “as long as an insurgency continues.” He added that there are still 20 extremist groups in Afghanistan.

Taliban officials have issued an English-language statement this weekend related to the ongoing Doha talks with a US delegation. They report that they and the US are getting closer on a timetable for the withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan.

During this most recent round of talks, they reported that the US and Taliban delegations both offered new proposals for a drawdown of troops, and that the differences at this point simply center on how quickly this will happen.

US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad didn’t elaborate on the talks themselves, but simply continued to back Afghan government calls for “all sides” to disarm quickly to end the war. All sides likely doesn’t mean the US.

A program to train Afghan attack pilots in the United States has been disbanded after nearly half of the airmen went AWOL in Texas.

It has been revealed that more than 40 percent of Afghan Air Force students enrolled in the program went absent without leave in the middle of training.

The attack pilots were being trained to fly the AC-208 Combat Caravan, a light attack combat aircraft, according to a quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Only one class graduated from the US-based program. The students that did not go AWOL were pulled back to Afghanistan to complete their training.

Afghanistan’s grand tribal council named Loya Jirga wants the United States to immediately pull out its forces from the war-torn country, says a commentator.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani opened the grand peace assembly, known as a Loya Jirga, under a huge tent in central Kabul on Monday, with some 3,200 tribal elders as well as senior community and religious figures from all over the country in attendance. The four-day negotiations were aimed at finding ways to strike a peace deal with the Taliban militant group.

Kevin Barrett, author and Middle East expert, told Press TV on Friday that the Afghan people do not want to live under US military occupation, because they have not allowed foreigners to occupy their country in the course of history.

“People in Afghanistan have pride and historically they haven’t allowed their country to be occupied without fierce resistance and today they’ve actually defeated the world’s self-proclaimed sole superpower,” Barrett argued.

It should come as no surprise to most that the United States' over 18-year long war in Afghanistan is a continual nightmare wrought with endless difficulties, earning America's lengthy post 9/11 quagmire the moniker of "the forever war".

But a new Pentagon inspector general report has confirmed the situation to be even worse than commonly perceived: the war to roll back the Taliban is not merely stalled, but there's indicators suggesting jihadist insurgents are actually winning. The report finds Afghan national forces backed by the US have seen a 31% surge in casualties in recent months.

Casualties among Afghan National Defense and Security Forces rose 31 percent from December 2018 to February 2019 over the same period a year earlier, while troop levels fell short again of authorized strength for the first quarter of this year.

The International Criminal Court recently delivered a shock ruling.

The ICC’s pre-trial judges decided unanimously against opening an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan.

Opening an investigation would not serve the “interests of justice,” according to the judges.

Yet is hard to see how the judges have themselves served the interests of justice. They have denied any redress to victims of atrocities.

The decision was made despite the clear findings of an assessment by Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor. She concluded there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that war crimes had been committed by the US military, the CIA, the Taliban and Afghan state forces.

Having long insisted that data on control of Afghan territory was “the metric that’s most telling in a counterinsurgency,” the Pentagon has informed the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that they will no longer be keeping track of that at all, and won’t be providing that data to SIGAR.

SIGAR John Sipko was critical of the move, saying that the Pentagon was providing even less information for the American taxpayers to “gauge whether their investment in Afghanistan is a success.”

After nearly two decades of bloodshed, meaningful progress is finally being made towards a conclusion of the war in Afghanistan. Negotiations with the Taliban in Qatar have achieved an uncommon consistency. On the domestic front, a bipartisan resolution matching the Taliban’s proposed timeline has emerged in the U.S. Senate. The main voices opposing peace originate from within the Pentagon and the Afghan National Unity Government. In a departure from their constitutionally mandated subordinate role, top generals are calling for yet another extension on murky grounds. Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has also urged against a timely withdraw, claiming that the government in Kabul lacks the strength required for independence. Whether by incompetence or corruption, neither contingent should have the credibility to dictate the plan for removing U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

The Following text is Section 5 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,
by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

*

Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

*
Contents

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty

Dozens of seats remain empty in the newly inaugurated parliament amid allegations of rigging and irregularities.

Afghanistan will convene on Monday a rare ‘loya jirga’ – a meeting for delegates from across the country to discuss US efforts to forge a peace deal with the Taliban. More than 2,000 people have been invited to gather amid tight security for four days of debate under a large tent in Kabul, AFP reported. A loya jirga, or ‘grand assembly’ in Pashto, is traditionally comprised of Afghan elders.

The US has spent $1.5m (£1.15m) a day since 2001 fighting the opium war in Afghanistan. So why is business still booming?

For the first time in recorded history, the U.S. and the Afghan government, whose forces are trained by Americans, killed more civilians than did the Taliban in the first quarter of 2019, according to a United Nations report. Increased bombing campaigns by the U.S. and increasingly reckless search operations by pro-government forces have fueled the trend reversal.

While the U.S. war in Afghanistan was bloodiest in its infancy, little data is available until 2009, when the UN started keeping track of civilian casualties and the U.S. started accounting for the bombs and munitions it drops on the country.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says it is “concerned” with “significant increases in civilian casualties from aerial and search operations, which drove an overall increase in civilian casualties by Pro-Government Forces.”

A girls’ school was destroyed in an attack by unknown armed men in Farah province in the west of Afghanistan on Monday night, local officials confirmed.

Another school in the province was destroyed on Sunday night.

The schools were destroyed by use of explosives, the head of Education Department Mohammad Azimi said.

This comes after another girl’s school named Benafsha Girls High School was burned down by unknown armed men on Sunday night in Tosak village on the outskirt of the city.

Farah education department head Mohammad Azimi said the unknown armed men entered Nawdeh Girl’s High School on Monday night and replaced explosives devices inside the building and then exploded the devices.

According to Azimi, the school building completely has been destroyed and all the facilities and books have been burned.

At least 2,000 girls were enrolled in the two schools, Azimi said.

Women will be included for the first time in the Taliban delegation to peace talks in Qatar this month, the movement's main spokesman said on April 15, ahead of the latest round of meetings aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan.

For a group notorious for its strictly conservative attitude to women's rights, the move represents a step towards addressing demands that women be included in the talks, intended to lay the foundations for a future peace settlement.

The April 19-21 meeting in Doha will be between the Taliban and a delegation comprising prominent Afghans, including opposition politicians and civil society activists. It follows similar talks between the two sides in Moscow in February.

The non-Taliban delegation that was in Moscow could be expanded next week to include some government officials, but acting in their private capacities as the insurgents have refused to hold formal talks with Kabul.

Apr. 15, 2019 - 3:21 - Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) says he is highly suspicious of the Taliban’s desire for peace talks.

See, my book wasn’t aimed at cataloging the failures in Iraq per se, but in trying to make sure we didn’t do the same thing in Afghanistan. The initial title wasn’t We Meant Well, but Lessons for Afghanistan from the Reconstruction of Iraq. The early drafts were pretentious scholarly stuff, outlining our mistakes. Harvard Business School-like case studies. Maps. Footnotes. It would have sold maybe five copies, and so my editors encouraged me to add more funny parts. NPR’s Fresh Airactually added a laugh track to my interview. I figured I’d get the lessons across with humor more effectively anyway. In such situations, you have to think that way. You can’t believe that what you went through didn’t matter and keep getting out of bed every morning.

I now know officially that it did not matter. It was pointless. SIGAR shows I accomplished nothing.

U.S. president promises 'swift and vigorous response' to any attempt to charge Washington and its allies after court rejects investigation of possible American war crimes in Afghanistan

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has rejected its prosecutor's request to investigate alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Court judges highlighted instability and the lack of co-operation with investigators in the country.

The ruling was hailed by US President Donald Trump as a "major international victory" but human rights group Amnesty International criticised it.

It comes a week after the US revoked ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's visa.

The ICC judge claimed a lack of evidence and a poor outlook for state cooperation — the latter reason essentially meaning the US and UK have already condemned the prospect of opening such an investigation.

The ICC had previously vowed to continue to operate "undeterred" by any US threat of punitive action against the ICC when it first considered examining allegations that US personnel committed war crimes, including instances of unlawful detention and torture of Afghans, as well as killing of civilians. The window of time ICC prosecutors considered for their investigation ran from May 2003, within the opening years of the US occupation, to 2017.

“The chamber hereby decides that an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice and accordingly rejects the request,” the judges said in their decision, as cited by Reuters. But the obvious first question is: whose interests are being served here?

The Taliban on Friday announced their annual spring offensive, which comes as the U.S. and Afghan politicians try to negotiate a peace settlement with the Islamist militants.

Operation Fath – meaning “victory” in Arabic – will be conducted across Afghanistan with the aim of “eradicating occupation” and “cleansing our Muslim homeland from invasion and corruption,” the Taliban said in a statement.

The spring offensive traditionally marks the start of the so-called fighting season, though the announcement is largely symbolic as in recent winters the Taliban have continued fighting Afghan and U.S. forces.

The Taliban claimed it shot down US B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber while it was taking off from Shawrab airbase in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

“Mujaheddin of the Islamic Emirate targeted US B-52 bomber with heavy weapons today early morning in Lar area in Washir district of Helmand province, the bomber went down and all its crew were killed while smoke still rising from the crash site”, Taliban’s spokesman Qarri Muhammad Yousef Ahmad said.

No confirmation or comment by officials in Afghanistan or the US yet.

An explosion in Afghanistan, claimed by the Taliban on Monday, killed three U.S. Marines and injured another three.

The three men died after they hit a roadside bomb near their Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. “We feel and mourn the loss of these Americans with their families and loved ones,” said Gen. Scott Miller, Commanding General of Resolute Support and U.S. Forces Afghanistan. “They volunteered to protect their country. We will continue our mission.”

Military authorities initially believed the attack had killed a fourth man, but they later determined he was alive and receiving medical treatment alongside the other casualties.

“The contractor who was reported as killed, is alive,” the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan, Operation Resolute Support, said in a corrective statement on Tuesday. “The contractor, an Afghan citizen, was initially treated along with other injured civilians, later identified as a contractor and treated at Bagram Airfield.”

According to a US military statement, three US servicemembers and a civilian contractor have been killed by the explosion of an improvised explosive device near Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

Three other servicemembers were wounded and have been evacuated for treatment, according to a statement by Resolute Support, the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.

The attack comes as Washington is in the process of negotiating a military exit from the Central Asian country with the Taliban, the primary political antagonist to the Washington-backed government in Kabul. Two rounds of negotiations have taken place so far this year and a third is expected this month.

As President Donald Trump threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border in recent days, his Department of Homeland Security nearly doubled the number of temporary guest worker visas available this summer.

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DHS and the Labor Department plan to grant an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this summer on top of the 33,000 H-2B visas they had planned to give out, the agencies confirmed.

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The H-2B visa is for foreign workers to come to the United States and work for several months at a company such as a landscaper, amusement park or hotel. About 80 percent of these visas went to people from Mexico and Central America last year, government data show.

Washington has annulled the entry visa of Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, after the State Department vowed to shield Americans from “unjust prosecutions” of possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

“We can confirm that the US authorities have revoked the prosecutor’s visa for entry into the US,” Bensouda’s office told Reuters in an email. However, the move should not restrict her travels to the UN headquarters in New York City.

Over the last two years, the Gambian lawyer has been probing US-led war crimes in Afghanistan but has not yet opened a formal investigation into alleged atrocities conducted over the last 18 years. For now, the preliminary inquiry remains in Pre-Trial Chamber, even though Bensouda found a “reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan.”

Whenever President Trump is dealing with NATO issues, there is always the question of whether Trump is going to praise NATO as the greatest thing since sliced bread, mock them as a relic of the past, or somehow manage to do both at once.

Meeting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday, Trump played up the pledges for increased military spending, while pushing for even more. He also cheered the “great strides” made in Afghanistan militarily by NATO, while terming the war ‘ridiculous.’

Trump is well known to be weary of the Afghan War, and hopeful of making a negotiated deal with the Taliban to withdraw from the nation. It’s a good thing this was known beforehand, as he did not elaborate beyond calling the war “unfortunate” and “ridiculous.”

The US handed over the Camp Kearney base in Paktika Province to the Afghan government in 2014, with an estimated $8 billion in equipment still inside. Today, the estimation is that about $1 billion worth of equipment is left.

So what happened between then and now that cost the site about $7 billion? Mass looting. The provincial governor says that former governors, local mayors, MPs, and commanders have all had a go at the site, and everyone has been entering the base and taking anything that isn’t nailed down.

Though he didn’t name names, pretty much everything was considered fair game, with military equipment stripped, vehicles stolen and sold off, and even locked containers full of weapons broken open and looted.

President Trump has promised repeatedly to end “endless wars,” during both his campaign and his tenure so far in office. Despite this rhetoric, endless — and, frankly, pointless —wars are, sadly, still the American norm.

Two more Americans were just killed in Afghanistan — a war that the Trump administration realises needs to end, but seems in no hurry to actually do so. In December 2018, Trump announced that all US troops would be withdrawn from Syria, only to later rescind that declaration in favour of a small force of 400 to 1,000 troops to stay behind indefinitely, complementing the more than 5,000 troops in Iraq, who are there to satiate the administration’s obsession with Iran.

Soldiers who were children when the Afghanistan war began are dying. It’s well past time to bring all of our troops from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq home.

10 million people in Afghanistan (population 35 million) are facing severe acute food insecurity following 3 years of drought and recent floods.

Three years of drought have contributed to massive crop failure, economic hardship, hunger and loss of life, forcing 266 000 people from their homes, Afghan Red Crescent Society and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said March 28.

American airstrikes have killed around a dozen Afghan civilians in the northern province of Kunduz, local officials have said. The strikes came as US-backed Afghan forces and Taliban militants vie for control of the area.

One provincial councillor put the death toll at twelve, while another estimated that 13 civilians died, including children, in Saturday’s strikes. NATO spokeswoman Sergeant. Debra Richardson told Reuters that the alliance’s Resolute Support mission is aware of the casualty reports, and that it investigates all such credible allegations.

“We take every measure to prevent civilian casualties, in contrast to the Taliban who intentionally hide behind women and children,” Richardson said in a statement.

Afghan security forces have been harassing contractors and confiscating their equipment at military bases across the country, costing the U.S. hundreds of thousands of dollars, a government watchdog said.

The confiscated property and equipment, belonging to two international companies that were awarded maintenance and operations contracts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is worth more than $780,000, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a report published Monday.

There were times when the Afghan employees of the contractor Exelis, Inc. — previously known as ITT Systems Corp. — tried to remove their equipment from work sites, but were “held against their will at gunpoint and locked in containers for extended hours” by Afghan forces, company officials told SIGAR.

How appropriate, don’t you think? America’s longest war, the Afghan one, now heading into its 18th year, may set another kind of record – for the longest withdrawal ever. The Pentagon recently revealed news of its daring “plan” to end that war. It will take up to five years to get 14,000 U.S. troops (and unknown numbers of private contractors), military equipment, and the like out of that country successfully, ensuring a war of perhaps 23 years (without, of course, a victory in sight).

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford issued a statement Monday denying weekend media reports that the US plans to leave around 1,000 troops in Syria, saying the reports are “factually incorrect.”

Dunford presented the current planned “residual force” as 200, saying that this hadn’t changed since February. The US announced 200 would stay on February 21, but on February 22 officially increased that number to 400.

It’s not clear from Dunford’s statement where the “incorrect” aspect of the new report, which came out of a Wall Street Journal, exists. That report suggested that the 1,000 figure was not yet finalized, but was being discussed. Dunford’s comments didn’t include any details on what is actually being discussed, but just that nothing was finalized.

The United States and China unleashed a war of words Friday (Mar 15) over Beijing’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) after the United Nation Security Council adopted a resolution extending the mandate of the council's political mission in Afghanistan for another six months, reported The Washington Post.

The 2018 resolution extended the council's mission for a year aimed at strengthening regional economic cooperation involving Afghanistan, including the BRI to connect China to Europe, and Africa. The 2016 and 2017 resolutions had similar BRI language.

Council diplomats said China wanted to embed BRI language into the 2019 resolution, but the U.S. strongly objected.

The United States will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel seeking to investigate possible war crimes by US forces or allies in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.

"The ICC is attacking America's rule of law," Pompeo told reporters in Washington on Friday.

"I'm announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel.

"We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation."

In the latest bizarre story to come out of the US "endless war" in Afghanistan, American warplanes obliterated an allied Afghan military post in an act of "self defense" on Wednesday.

The incident took place in the tribal Uruzgan province of south-central Afghanistan and reportedly began when a joint convoy of US troops and Afghan Special Forces came under fire by another unit of Afghan ground troops in what appears a major instance of accidental friendly fire resulting in a devastating two dozen total casualties on the Afghan side.

The National Security Adviser of Afghanistan on Thursday accused U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy in charge of peace negotiations with the Taliban of “delegitimizing” and “weakening” the Kabul government during the talks to serve his ambitions of one day running the war-ravaged country.

An official from the U.S. Department of State (DOS) — which oversees the office of U.S. reconciliation envoy Zalmay Khalilzad — denied the assertions by Hamdullah Mohib, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s national security adviser who served as ambassador to Washington.

“Mr. Mohib’s comments are inaccurate and unhelpful, and we will be responding to them privately,” a State Department official told the Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.

In the latest bizarre story to come out of the US "endless war" in Afghanistan, American warplanes obliterated an allied Afghan military post in an act of "self defense" on Wednesday.

The incident took place in the tribal Uruzgan province of south-central Afghanistan and reportedly began when a joint convoy of US troops and Afghan Special Forces came under fire by another unit of Afghan ground troops in what appears a major instance of accidental friendly fire resulting in a devastating two dozen total casualties on the Afghan side.

The incident is under investigation, but US mission spokesman Bob Purtiman appeared to excuse US actions in a statement on Thursday: "We are operating in a complex environment where enemy fighters do not wear uniforms and use stolen military vehicles to attack government forces," he said.

Following the news Monday that geologists have found a mother lode of minerals in Afghanistan — reports argued deposits of iron, copper, gold and other goodies could collectively be worth close to $1 trillion — it’s worth asking a few extra questions.

In particular, there’s been an unusually strong focus on the lithium portion of the find. A key ingredient in high-tech batteries for laptops, smart phones, electric cars and the like, its been heralded as the future cornerstone of the world’s energy infrastructure.

But is lithium really going to save Afghanistan, as many media outlets seem to think? Nope, not even close.

In the words of Brian Jaskula, a lithium commodity expert with the United States Geological Survey, “We’ll be extracting lithium from the ocean before we’ll be extracting it from Afghanistan.” (Jaskula was not involved with the Afghanistan work.)

A “marathon” round of talks with the Taliban in Qatar has produced an “agreement in draft” on counter-terrorism assurances and American troop withdrawal, said US envoy for peace in Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad.
“The conditions for peace have improved,” Khalilzad tweeted after the talks. “Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides.”

It’s clear all sides want to end the war.

Troop withdrawal and counter-terrorism assurances are the first two issues that Khalilzad and the Taliban reached an “agreement on principle” during the talks in January.

When the final deal is reached on those two issues, the Taliban will start negotiations on “a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire,” with the government in Kabul and other factions in Afghanistan, Khalilzad said.

On Saturday, US airstrikes against the village of Naser Khil in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province destroyed two houses. The houses belonged to the village’s only doctor, and his brother, and killed both of them along with their families.

That was 13 civilians in all: two men, their wives, and nine children. The provincial government had claimed a Taliban commander was also slain, but there appears to be no confirmation that this is actually the case.

NATO confirmed that the airstrikes took place, but did not comment on the civilian deaths that were already confirmed, saying only that they were looking into the matter, and emphasizing the attacks were “self-defense.”

How blowing up a doctor’s house counts as self defense isn’t entirely clear, though a NATO spokesman claimed that the attack meant to target a Taliban operations center. Clearly, it did not.

A bipartisan resolution has been introduced in the Senate on Monday calling for the US to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan. The bill is co-sponsored by Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Tom Udall (D-NM).

The resolution, called the 2019 Afghan Forces Going Home After Noble Service Act (AFGHAN Service Act), would declare victory. This is on the grounds that Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 and al-Qaeda is all but eliminated within Afghanistan.

The bill goes further than just Afghanistan, too, as with the completion of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, it would repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Though the AUMF was initially passed to invade Afghanistan, it has been broadly expanded by presidents since as a legal justification for wars across the world.

"The enemy is today attempting to continue the same ISIL plot implemented in Iraq and Syria in Afghanistan and this will harm China, Russia and all the regional states," General Shadmani said in an interview with the Persian-language Tasnim news agency on Saturday.

He noted that certain Arab rulers are supporting the US financially and logistically to transfer the ISIL to Afghanistan, saying that they are making their last-ditch efforts to attain their goals but they will not because the ISIL's body has collapsed.

In relevant remarks late in January, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei expressed deep regret over the massacre of the Afghan people in terrorist attacks, blaming the US for the tragedies by transferring the ISIL terrorists to Afghanistan to guarantee its presence in the region.

Limping as he climbed the stairs of a watchtower, the general turned his gaze south toward a once-sprawling base the Americans handed over to Afghan forces here in late 2014. Today much of it lies in ruins.

“Everything went to pieces,” Brig. Gen. Abdul Raziq Safi said of the base, which the Americans dubbed Forward Operating Base Shank. “Everything fell apart.”

After more than 17 years and $80 billion to build them up, Afghan security forces still struggle to secure their country, while corruption and other challenges strain their ability to maintain equipment and facilities provided by foreign forces, largely the United States.

Elected Presidents Assad and Maduro are not the brutal dictators. We are.

We are the ones imposing economic warfare, and regime change wars on non-belligerent countries. We are the ones supporting terrorists who impose the death penalty on hundreds of thousands with our weapons, our command and control, our mercenaries, our air support and our terror bombings.

We are dictating our will by destroying these and other countries, by changing “regimes”, by setting up non-democracies throughout the world.[1]

The newly proposed peace plan suggests cutting the US contingent in half immediately and withdrawing the remaining forces in three to five years.

The US would withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan in three to five years, under a new peace plan proposed during the talks between US officials and the Taliban.

Under the peace plan, the US will reduce its military presence by half from 14,000 to 7,000 in the coming months, a report by The New York Times says. The remaining 7,000 troops will withdraw together with the remaining 8,600 European and international troops within three to five years.

China’s Defense Ministry defended military cooperation with Tajikistan on Thursday following a report of a sizeable Chinese troop presence at a base in the Central Asian state. Cooperation between the two is “in line with” international law and related resolutions passed by the UN Security Council, said ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang. However, Ren said there was no Chinese presence in the adjacent Wakhan Corridor belonging to Afghanistan.

More civilians were killed in 2018 than in any of the previous nine years of the 18-year US war in Afghanistan, according to new data.

Hundreds of airstrikes failed to curb opium trade...

US policy-makers are continuing to oppose Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan. Speaking to Sputnik, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, economist, author and former US official, shared his views on the US' decades-long Afghanistan saga, surprising rise in opium crops under the American occupation and apparent use of Islamists by the US.

Donald Trump's decision to withdraw 1,000 or more US troops from Afghanistan has prompted concerns among American lawmakers and Washington's European allies. On 16 February the bipartisan group of US congressmen met with Afghan President Ashaf Ghani on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference to discuss the painful dilemma.

US policy-makers are continuing to oppose Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan. Speaking to Sputnik, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, economist, author and former US official, shared his views on the US' decades-long Afghanistan saga, surprising rise in opium crops under the American occupation and apparent use of Islamists by the US.

Donald Trump's decision to withdraw 1,000 or more US troops from Afghanistan has prompted concerns among American lawmakers and Washington's European allies. On 16 February the bipartisan group of US congressmen met with Afghan President Ashaf Ghani on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference to discuss the painful dilemma.

The US' Afghanistan war, which will mark its 18th anniversary this October, started in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attack under then-US President George W. Bush.

Central Command chief Gen. Joseph Votel is increasingly willing to publicly contradict President Trump on foreign policy stances, historically not something active US military leadership has done.

Votel went out of his way to oppose President Trump’s Syria policy during recent testimony to Congress, and is now laying the groundwork for a similar disagreement with comments to reporters on the ‘dangerous threat’ of ISIS in Afghanistan.

President Trump hasn’t announced a withdrawal from Afghanistan yet, but peace talks with the Taliban are heading in that direction, with negotiators hoping to have a deal done in a matter of months. The Taliban wants US troops out, and has offered to keep al-Qaeda and ISIS out of Afghanistan.

Votel presented ISIS in Afghanistan as a “very sophisticated and dangerous threat,” while another, unnamed official was quoted saying they are “closest to having the capacity to attack the homeland from Afghanistan.”

London and Washington worked against a genuine peace settlement in Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout 30 years ago, UK government papers released by the National Archives in London reveal.

Thirty years ago today the last Soviet soldier crossed the river Oxus from Afghanistan back into the Soviet Union. The almost 10-year war against Islamist extremism on the USSR's borders was over. But not the suffering of the Afghan people whose chances for a peaceful life were ruined by the duplicitous policies of the West.

A retired soviet commando, who captured evidence of US deliveries of anti-aircraft missiles to the mujahideen during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, has belatedly received Russia's highest national order.

Vladimir Kovtun is a decorated retired colonel with quite an eventful career behind him. While in service he was a commando officer of the elite special operation unit of the Military Intelligence Directorate, better known as the GRU. On Friday, he added a new merit to his collection – the golden star of the Hero of Russia, the country's highest military decoration.

Current US interest in a peace process in Afghanistan come amid a massive escalation. The US air war is continuing to pick up pace, with the number of US strikes already at their highest level in a decade.

In 2018, US officials report that 7,362 weapons were dropped on Afghanistan in various air campaigns. This is the highest number of strikes since the Pentagon started releasing figures, in 2009.

The escalation of the air war was facilitated in particular by the decline of ISIS territory in Iraq and Syria, as this freed up a lot of warplanes that were relocated further east to Afghanistan, where more targets were available.

As a practical matter though, the airstrikes have done little to help matters on the ground, as the Pentagon has consistently confirmed that Afghan forces have been losing ground. It is this growing loss that has the US looking to settle the war.

Israel has sent troops to Afghanistan to collect intelligence on Iranian military movement, Iranian media has reported.

According to Iran’s Tasnim news agency, Israeli troops are operating out of a United States Air Force base in Shindand in the western Afghanistan province of Herat some 75 kilometers from the Iranian border and were collecting intelligence on Iranian movement around the Persian Gulf region.

Acting Pentagon chief Patrick Shanahan arrived in Afghanistan on a surprise visit Monday as the United States seeks to support the Kabul government while negotiating peace with the Taliban.

Shanahan will meet President Ashraf Ghani, whose government was not part of major talks between US and Taliban officials last month that negotiators hope could bring a breakthrough in the grinding 17-year conflict.

Afghanistan is America’s longest war, at seventeen years and counting. It has run longer than the Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korean War combined. Yet Congress has conducted minimal oversight and done nothing as the executive branch’s aim devolved into pushing failure onto the next administration.

In Syria Washington chose to enter a civil war of minimal security concern to America. Syria was allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Washington’s previous forays in similarly imploding Middle Eastern nations—Lebanon and Libya—turned out badly. The executive branch concocted ever more outlandish duties for American military personnel: extirpate ISIS, exclude Iran, confront Russia, pacify Turkey, protect Kurds, and pressure Damascus. Yet Congress never voted on the continual usurpation of legislative power.