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As the 20-year war in Afghanistan officially came to an end, President Joe Biden justified US military withdrawal in an address to the nation on Aug. 31: “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” While these remarks suggest a potential reckoning with the longstanding US policy of imperialist intervention around the world, increased US sanctions on Cuba demonstrate that such intervention persists in the form of economic warfare. From the dire strain US sanctions have put on the Cuban economy to the corporate media frenzy that exploited protests in Cuba this summer as a justification for interventionist “regime change,” it is clear that efforts by the US to “remake other countries” are not ending any time soon.

RT.COM—During their internment in the special brigade’s research unit, which was initially planned to hold 150 people, including Soviet pilots who had crash-landed in Manchuria, “new chemical poisonous substances and bacteriological agents” were tested on the prisoners, including anthrax and bubonic plague.

JIM MILES—The moral high ground assumed by Westmoreland, Schulz, Bundy, Biden, Blinken et al is that of an assumed morally superior civilization wondering why their technologically inferior opponents would not give up and surrender to them. Why would a philosophically Buddhist/Communist region resist the moral outreach of a Christian capitalist militarized state? Why would a tribe of Islamic fundamentalists, in association with many other variations of that religion, persist in resisting the modernization and moral uplift provided by the same capitalist militarized state, where democracy worked from the barrel of a gun or the warheads of drone missiles?

JOHN PILGER—Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.  

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

ISRAEL SHAMIR—The RPG rocket launcher, of the kind preferred by the Talibs, really hurts. It is not an imaginary feeling of discomfort, but a real hole in the armour. Or a torn-off head. There is nothing micro in its delivery. You do not need a mask on the battlefield for the mask won’t stop the launched rocket. You won’t worry about the virus when you encounter real bullets. On the battlefield, the problem of gender-neutral toilets does not arise. Twitter can’t ban a machinegun, but a machinegun can banish Twitter and the whole Twitter gang.