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.

US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad commented on the Afghanistan negotiations on Friday, saying he believes “the sooner the better” on such a deal, and that it is his hope that a deal could be reached before the July presidential election in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad confirmed a framework deal is already in place, though he downplayed this, saying major hurdles remain, and also downplayed the chances of US troops actually leaving the country in the near term.

Instead of withdrawing upon reaching a peace deal, the condition the Taliban are seeking, Khalilzad indicated that the US would only leave if “there is no threat to our national security from Afghanistan.”

He also suggested that he didn’t believe anything that the Taliban has said, insisting that the US “do not trust the words of any of the protagonists” in Afghanistan. He reiterated that nothing is agreed to until the US agrees to everything.

“The Taliban are the victors,” says retired US Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who saw 69 of his soldiers killed in Afghanistan. “We just haven’t figured that out yet.”

Absorbing the fact that the US has lost militarily in Afghanistan will be a "bitter pill" for the soldiers he fought with, Bolduc told Yahoo News Friday.

"They did what they were asked, they did the right thing, and they watched their teammates get maimed, get killed, and because of the failure of our policymakers and our senior military leaders, they're going to have to swallow this pill," he said.

The Pentagon is at risk of mismanaging yet another multi-billion project in Afghanistan — a modernization program intended to equip the Afghan Air Forces (AAF) with 159 state-of-the-art Black Hawk helicopters as part of efforts to address capability gaps, a U.S. watchdog agency reported Tuesday.

In an audit of the program, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) noted that the estimated cost of providing the helicopters between 2017 and 2023 varies from $5.75 billion to approximately $7 billion in American taxpayer funds — a figure that covers procuring and sustaining the aircraft as well as training pilots and crewmembers.

SIGAR warned that there will not be enough Afghan pilots or engineers trained to fly and maintain the aircraft by the time the war-ravaged country receives the helicopters.

The Taliban says no timeframe has been agreed for the pullout of American troops from Afghanistan despite Washington’s earlier promise to draw down half of its forces from the war-torn country.

A Taliban official on Wednesday said that the United States had promised to withdraw half of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of April, but the US says it has not set a timeframe for that.

"The Americans told us (last month) that they would withdraw half of their troops from the beginning of February to the end of April," Taliban official Abdul Salam Hanafi was quoted as saying by RIA.

A US State Department spokeswoman said Washington had "not agreed to any timeline for a possible drawdown of troops.

Representatives of the Taliban met with other Afghan delegates in Moscow to discuss the prospects of peace and the removal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan. Among those present was the first US-backed president Hamid Karzai.

The Taliban were represented by Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, a former mujahideen fighter who has led the movement’s office in Qatar since 2012.

Several members of the Afghan diaspora in Russia, as well as former government officials from Afghanistan, also attended. The government of President Ashraf Ghani is boycotting the talks, however, having rejected the Taliban’s key condition for peace: that all foreign troops have to leave Afghanistan.

The warmongers in the US Senate will never have enough of Afghanistan and Syria and other wars in the Middle East. After President Donald Trump called for an end to "endless wars," the US Senate voted to keep troops in Syria and Afghanistan.

The US Senate voted 70-26 in favor of keeping US forces in both countries.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that he still believes ISIS and al Qaeda are still significant threats and that “a precipitous withdrawal” may only bolster their efforts.

Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan jihadists on the behest of Washington.

Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile "freedom fighters" to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph "Spike" Dubs, was assassinated on Feb. 14, 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.

In a second vote on last week’s procedural vote, the Senate has once again endorsed the McConnell amendment, which expresses non-binding opposition to the US withdrawing from either Afghanistan or Syria, citing the idea that Iran or Russia might take advantage.

The vote was 70-26, with overwhelming Republican support. The only Republicans to vote no were Sens. Ted Cruz (TX), Rand Paul (KY), John Kennedy (LA), and Mike Lee (UT). Democrats were more split on the matter.

Conspicuously, however, the Democratic Party Senators who opposed the amendment include everyone who has set themselves up to run for president in 2020. They may believe this further splits them ideologically from the Republican Senate leadership.

Washington is trying to take full control of talks with the Taliban movement and conduct them in secrecy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday. “There is a need to search for a political solution apart from resolving security issues. Russia has been calling for intra-Afghan dialogue, which would involve the government and the Taliban movement,” Lavrov said.

The Taliban has killed at least 47 people in separate attacks in Afghanistan, despite the beginning of peace talks with Afghan officials in Moscow.

The armed group launched a pre-dawn attack on an army base in northern Kunduz on Tuesday, killing 26 members of the security forces, Mohammad Yusouf Ayubi, head of the provincial council said.

There were at least 23 soldiers and three members of the local police force among those slain.

According to Ayubi, 12 troops were wounded in the Taliban onslaught, which lasted for over two hours until reinforcements arrived at the besieged base and the attackers were repelled.

"Day by day, the security situation is getting worse in and around Kunduz city," said Ayubi, adding there are fears the city could again fall into the hands of the Taliban as it did briefly on two occasions in recent years - in September 2015 and in October 2016.

Since 2002, billions of U.S. tax dollars have been spent rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of war. A big chunk of that money pays Afghan soldiers and police.

But it turns out a lot of those troops may not, in fact, exist. On “Full Measure,” we investigate how your tax money is being wasted on “ghost soldiers.”

Here’s my interview with John Sopko, who is the inspector general watching over the U.S. taxpayer billions spent to rebuild Afghanistan.

US President Donald Trump reaffirmed, in an interview, his determination to pull US troops out of "endless wars" in Syria and Afghanistan, but said they should stay in Iraq to watch Iran.

Having drifted back and forth a few times on the US withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, President Trump seemed solid on leaving last week, but facing growing opposition from the Senate now shows signs of backtracking once again.

Previously talking up how the wars in Afghanistan and Syria can’t last forever, Trump is now saying he wants a “smaller number” of troops to stay in Afghanistan, despite the Taliban already making it clear that was a non-starter for the peace deal.

In Syria, Trump is now focused on the idea that the pullout can only happen after assuring that “Israel is protected,” which is as close to a recipe for permanent warfare as one can get. Israeli officials have made clear they want the war to be about Iran, not ISIS.

And that seems to be he case in Iraq, as well, where President Trump is now saying US troops will remain, seemingly forever, to “watch Iran,” and make sure they don’t “do nuclear weapons or other things.”

The US Senate Democrats and Republicans' vote against withdrawing troops from Syria and drawing down the American hold on Afghanistan is evidence that there's really only one political party, and that's the war party, anti-war activist and journalist Cindy Sheehan told Sputnik.

In a rebuke of President Donald Trump, the Republican-led US Senate advanced largely symbolic legislation on Thursday opposing plans for any abrupt withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

The Senate voted 68-23 in favor of a non-binding amendment, drafted by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying it was the sense of the Senate that militant groups in both countries continue to pose a “serious threat” to the United States.

The procedural vote to cut off debate meant that the amendment would be added to a broader Middle East security bill likely to come up for a final Senate vote next week.

The amendment acknowledges progress against ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria and Afghanistan but warns that “a precipitous withdrawal” without effective efforts to secure gains could destabilize the region and create a vacuum that could be filled by Iran or Russia.

Manichaean Cold War myopia and ludicrous Russiagate allegations have produced one of the worst periods of American “geopolitical” thinking in recent decades. Consider President Trump’s recently announced withdrawals of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Instead of applauding these long-overdue steps, the bipartisan US political-media establishment has denounced them as “Trump’s gifts to Putin.”

But why would Russian President Putin want to be without the United States as an ally in the fight against terrorists in these two countries, which Moscow has long regarded as its geopolitical backyard?

In Syria, where, as Putin has repeatedly warned, thousands of jihadists with Russian passports have appeared and vowed, if they take Damascus, to return to Russia and wage the same war there?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Thursday it was "ludicrous" for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to call taking troops out of Syria and Afghanistan “precipitous.”

“To call it a precipitous withdrawal after 17 years is ludicrous,” Paul said on Fox News. “We’ve been there 17 years.”

The libertarian-leaning lawmaker said the U.S. had secured a victory in Afghanistan because it “got bin Laden” and “disrupted the people who attacked us.”

He argued that the money spent on the war could be better spent domestically, including on a border wall.

The U.S. has been leading an international coalition against ISIS in Syria since 2014, while the war in Afghanistan began in late 2001.

In a surprising vote Thursday, the Senate voted 68-23 to pass a resolution from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressing opposition to President Trump’s plan to withdraw US troops from Syria, and expressing opposition to any theoretical pullout from Afghanistan that might result from a negotiated deal to end that war.

The non-binding resolution was passed with overwhelming support from the Republican majority, setting them squarely against parts of President Trump’s foreign policy. A number of Democrats who voted against it expressed concern that it was tantamount to a vote advocating a state of permanent war.

Which it realistically is. The 2001 authorization for the Afghan War was built around 9/11 and the defeat of al-Qaeda. Neither are hugely relevant issues in 2019 Afghanistan, and a peace treaty being negotiated centers heavily around the Taliban promising to keep al-Qaeda and ISIS out of the country in the future.

Lest anyone be tempted to believe that President Trump and other U.S. interventionists are intervening in Venezuela because of some purported concern for the Venezuelan people, let’s examine just a few examples that will bring a dose of reality to the situation. This latest intervention is nothing more than another interventionist power play, one intended to replace one dictatorial regime with another.

Egypt comes to mind. It is ruled by one of the most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships in the world. The U.S. government loves it, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for the Egyptian citizenry, who have to suffer under this brutal tyranny and oppression.

Saudi Arabia also comes to mind. It too is a brutal and tyrannical dictatorship, also a murderous one. The U.S. government loves it too, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for Saudi citizens who have to suffer under this brutal tyranny and oppression.

The United States, champion of freedom and self-determination, is now in its 18th year of colonial war in Afghanistan. This miserable, stalemated conflict is America’s longest and most shameful war. So far it has cost over $1 trillion and killed no one knows how many Afghans.

This conflict began in 2001 on a lie: namely that Afghanistan was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the US. These attacks were planned in Europe and the US, not Afghanistan, and apparently conducted (official version) by anti-American Saudi extremists. This writer remains unconvinced by the official versions.

We still don’t know if Osama bin Laden instigated the attacks. He was murdered rather than brought to trial. Dead men tell no tales. However, Mullah Omar, leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, told my late friend journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave that bin Laden was not involved in 9/11. Who benefited? Certainly not the Afghans. They have been at war for the past 40 years.

A large number of prisoners, all of them senior members of Daesh (also ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group, broke out of a Taliban prison in northwest Afghanistan after US troops helped them escape through a covert operation.

According to Tasnim dispatches, American forces operating in Afghanistan carried out a secret military operation in the northwestern province of Badghis two weeks ago and helped the Daesh inmates escape the prison.

The report added that 40 Daesh ringleaders, all of them foreigners, were transferred by helicopters after American troops raided the prison and killed all its security guards.

Taliban officials said US negotiators on Saturday agreed a draft peace deal stipulating the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan within 18 months of the agreement being signed.

The details were provided to Reuters by Taliban sources at the end of six days of talks with US special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in Qatar aimed at ending the United States’ longest war.

They have yet to be confirmed by US officials nor has either side released an official statement. Officials at the US embassy in Kabul were not immediately available for comment.

Khalilzad is heading to the Afghan capital Kabul to brief President Ashraf Ghani after the longer-than expected talks, the sources and a diplomat said.

A large number of prisoners, all of them senior members of Daesh (also ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group, broke out of a Taliban prison in northwest Afghanistan after US troops helped them escape through a covert operation.

Dramatic news is filtering in from Qatar where the United States Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and his delegation were huddled together with the representatives of the Taliban for four consecutive days since Monday. The duration of the talks unmistakably signifies that complex negotiations have taken place. Things are moving almost entirely in the direction I had indicated in my earlier blog US officials converge on Pakistan seeking peace.

Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.

Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.

An ancient Hindu prayer says, ‘Lord Shiva, save us from the claw of the tiger, the fang of the cobra, and the vengeance of the Afghan.’

The United States, champion of freedom and self-determination, is now in its 18th year of colonial war in Afghanistan. This miserable, stalemated conflict is America’s longest and most shameful war. So far it has cost over $1 trillion and killed no one knows how many Afghans.

The United States has confirmed that its envoy met the Taliban in Qatar as Washington seeks to negotiate an end to the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad, US special representative on Afghan reconciliation, on Tuesday met Taliban representatives in the Qatari capital Doha, the US State Department said.

"We can confirm that Special Representative Khalilzad and an inter-agency team are in Doha today talking with representatives of the Taliban," a State Department spokeswoman said, adding that the talks were taking place over two days.

The Taliban and the US envoys have officially met four times since July, in an attempt to find a negotiated settlement to the war in the embattled country.

However, Wednesdays comments mark the first time the US State Department has confirmed his meetings directly.

The meeting came even though the Taliban claimed responsibility for an attack on Tuesday against an Afghan intelligence base in central Wardak province.

The U.S. war on Afghanistan continues to fail. Disunity of command and lack of political foresight guarantee that the U.S. will be losing it.

Throughout the last months the 'moderate rebels' in Afghanistan made great strides against the U.S. sponsored government forces.

Taliban militants killed over 100 members of the Afghan security forces in an attack on a military compound in the central province of Maidan Wardak, Reuters reported citing a source in the military.
“We have information that 126 people have been killed in the explosion inside the military training center,” an official told Reuters. The government said earlier that 12 people had been killed, but declined to comment further.

A Taliban suicide bomber drove a car bomb into the base following a firefight between the militants and security forces, Afghanistan’s Pajhwok News reported. The attack took place shortly after 8am local time on Monday.

Pakistani officials are reportedly intensifying their efforts to get together US and Taliban negotiators for a new round of peace talks in Afghanistan. They express confidence that they can get the two sides together, but say that any success or failure will depend on the negotiators themselves.

Talks between the two sides were going very well, with talk recently that there would be a deal to establish a new government in Afghanistan which would include Taliban representation. This was part of the reason the US wanted the existing Afghan government to delay their elections.

But in the last couple of weeks, things appear to have soured, as the US has apparently backed away from talk of a pullout, and are now trying to get the Taliban to grant them having “long-term bases” which has the Taliban threatening to withdraw from the talks entirely.

The long life of the Afghan war makes it hard to remember how popular it was when it began. As the fighting began, 80 percent of America supported it. Nobody in Congress except Rep. Barbara Lee (D–Calif.) was prescient enough to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force and its open-ended-enough-to-attack-a-dozen-more-countries wording. Not until 2014 did a majority of Americans begin to regret that the war ever started.

Now some polls suggest it's nearly as unpopular as the wildly unpopular ill-fated war in Iraq.

The United States invaded Afghanistan largely to restore the heroin industry and it is now making about $1.5 trillion every year from this business, according to Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic and political analyst.

US Army General John Nicholson, the commander of Resolute Support forces and US forces in Afghanistan, on Monday announced that American jets targeted drug producing facilities in Afghanistan for the first time under a new strategy aimed at cutting off Taliban funding.

He said that the air strikes were carried out on Sunday in the southern Helmand province, adding that Taliban militants generate about $200 million per year from poppy cultivation and opium production.

The general said that the US military carried out the raids under a new war strategy for Afghanistan announced by President Donald Trump in August.

Afghanistan will not allow the United States to use its bases in the country to conduct any act of aggression against Iran, says a top Afghan diplomat.

“Relations with neighbors are of special significance to the Afghan government in Kabul. Therefore, we will never allow the US to use its military bases against our neighbors such as Iran and Pakistan,” said Abdul Rahim Sayed Jan, Afghan ambassador to Turkey.

“The presence of US bases in Afghanistan has always been a source of concern for our neighbors, although, in line with the Afghan government’s agreement with the US, Washington can never use these bases against our neighbors,” added the envoy in his address to a conference on Afghanistan in Turkish capital Ankara, Turkish daily Yeni Akit reported on Saturday.