JROTC and the Militarizing of America

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the...

How Veterans Return From America's Wars

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

[The text of this piece is an excerpt, slightly adapted, from Ann Jones's new book They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The Untold Story, just published by Dispatch Books/Haymarket Books]

In 2010,...

The Cost of War, American-Style

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The last time I saw American soldiers in Afghanistan, they were silent. Knocked out by gunfire and explosions that left them grievously injured, as well as drugs administered by medics in the field, they were carried from medevac...

12 Years in Afghanistan Down the Memory Hole

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Will the U.S. still be meddling in Afghanistan 30 years from now?  If history is any guide, the answer is yes.  And if history is any guide, three decades from now most Americans will have...

Tyrants at Home and Abroad

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Picture this.  A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own.  He confronts an enemy.  He barks orders.  He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall.  He plants himself in the...

Three Lousy Options: Pick One

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Kabul, Afghanistan -- Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double...

Dead Americans, Dead Goats, and Half a Million Gunmen on the Loose

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Recent weeks have brought yet another sad chance to watch badly laid plans in Afghanistan go haywire.  In three separate incidents, allies, most from the Afghan National Army (ANA), allegedly...

Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian: One Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Where did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

Looking for a way out of Afghanistan?  Maybe it’s time to try something entirely new and totally different.  So how about putting into action, for the first time in recorded history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325?

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up...

I must take exception to the very unprofessional attack lodged against my integrity by blogger Melissa Roddy ("Correcting the Record on Bibi Ayesha," posted Sept. 7) as she tries to make the case for keeping US troops in Afghanistan by rerunning the story of Aisha, the mutilated young...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

In the eight years I’ve reported on Afghanistan, I’ve “embedded” regularly with Afghan civilians, especially women.  Recently, however, with American troops “surging” and journalists getting into the swing of the military’s counterinsurgency “strategy” (better known by its acronym, COIN), I decided to get with the...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working.  So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s firing.  But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean?  And if the strategy really isn’t working, just...

Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com.

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans -- Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn't bet on Them.

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

A Film That Captures Some Edgy, Fearful Truths

Kabul, July 2009 -- I've come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Women in the Crosshairs

Wake up, America. The boys are coming home, and they're not the boys who went away.

On New Year's Day, the New York Times welcomed the advent of 2009 by reporting that, since returning...

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war George W. Bush neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, "winning" the military campaign against the Taliban...

As an aid worker, I've divided my time for the last four years between the United States and Afghanistan. Whenever I return stateside, Americans ask about the changes I've witnessed "over there." But the biggest changes I see are right here at home. Lately, we're getting to be a lot...