WSJ: State Department veteran calls for heavily-armed NATO troops in western Ukraine + Some History

The author, Ludovic Hood, identifies himself as a fifteen-year veteran of the State Department and currently Special Advisor to Vice President Harris for the Middle East and North Africa and Senior Advisor to the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the State Department.

Such forces, drawn from NATO states and possibly other allied countries, could be structured similarly to NATO-led missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan….

WSJ: State Department veteran calls for heavily-armed NATO troops in western Ukraine

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Afghanistan, 1979-1992: America’s Jihad

Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story

In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia

Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda

Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda

As a result of the current escalation of events in Ukraine, it appears inevitable that the effort to use RIM to paint Russia as a driving force behind “transnational white supremacism” are due to resurface. This effort appears to have as one of its goals the minimization of the role that neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, the Neo-Nazi paramilitary unit embedded within Ukraine’s National Guard, are actively playing in the current hostilities.

In January of this year, Jacobin published an article about the CIA efforts to seed an insurgency in Ukraine, noting that “everything we know points to the likelihood that [the groups being trained by the CIA] includes Neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.” It cites a 2020 report from West Point which states that: “A number of prominent individuals among far-right extremist groups in the United States and Europe have actively sought out relationships with representatives of the far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.” It adds that “US-based individuals have spoken or written about how the training available in Ukraine might assist them and others in their paramilitary-style activities at home.”

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MATTHEW HEIMBACH AND THE LEFT’S VULNERABILITY TO FASCIST INFILTRATION

How to Make Russia Bleed

How to Make Russia Bleed

The only way to move Moscow from its disastrous policy, in the 1980s and today, has been to bleed it. Ratchet up the cost to the Russian people, economically, politically, and, yes, in body bags holding Russian troops (not civilians). In addition to sanctions and other measures the Biden administration has enacted, we need to increase the pain to Moscow on the ground by stepping up economic warfare, psychological operations, and robust covert military support to the Ukrainian insurgency.

US-trained Afghan intelligence agents, elite troops reported joining ISIS

US-trained Afghan intelligence agents, elite troops reported joining ISIS

Given US imperialism’s record in Afghanistan and the CIA’s intimate connections to the emergence of ISIS, there is every reason to ask whether this bloody campaign is backed by Washington with the aim of destabilizing Afghanistan and preventing the emergence of any regime not under its thumb.

A report issued in June by the United Nations cites information that the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an Islamist separatist group dedicated to carving out a Uyghur state in Xinjiang, China had “established corridors for moving fighters between the Syrian Arab Republic, where the group exists in far larger numbers, and Afghanistan, to reinforce its combat strength” and “facilitate the movement of fighters from Afghanistan to China.” The ETIM has aligned itself with ISIS-K against the Taliban government.

US imperialism views Afghanistan through the prism of its declared military strategy centered on “great power” confrontation with China and Russia. Just as US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski promoted the CIA-orchestrated mujahedeen war of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of giving the Soviet Union its “own Vietnam,” today Washington sees an Afghanistan in chaos undermining Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia and potentially provoking terrorist campaigns against both countries.

*Xinjiang*