Foreign policy

If you want a concise, thoughtful background briefing on the ISIS crisis, this is it – written by a journalist with three decades of experience in the region. This is a compelling account of how the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has managed to conquer an area the size of Britain. Patrick Cockburn knew something was coming: he nominated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, as the Independent’s ‘man of the year’ for the Middle East on
1 January, days before ISIS…

This book offers important insights into US covert military operations over the past decade. While US drone strikes tend to get the headlines, behind the scenes – and perhaps even more lethal – is the work of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on which much of this book is focused.

In the first 100 pages, Scahill traces the rise of the neocon movement back to Watergate, and…

  Chemical bombing of Halabja, 1988, pencil (30 x 42cm).
Osman Ahmed

As the US and Britain threaten to attack Syria on the basis of an alleged chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb of Damascus, confirmation has emerged of US government complicity in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

As PN went to press, UN…

Wambunga Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara outside the High Court, London. Photo: Leigh Day

More than 60 years after Britain declared the Kenyan ‘Emergency’, the British government has been forced to provide compensation to over 5,000 Kenyans for atrocities committed during its counter-insurgency campaign.

During the Emergency, an anti-colonial coalition, Mau Mau, responded to British imperialist control in Kenya. As a result, thousands of Kenyans in Kikuyu, Embu and Meru areas were…

Central America is currently the most violent region on the planet. Some of that is attributable to the drugs trade, which itself feeds on the atomisation and insecurity produced by global neoliberalism. Some of it stems from the region’s brutal and traumatic past, when state forces could commit atrocities with total impunity. But much of it is due to the attitude of the United States, which continues to look for military solutions to social issues.

As a result, the Obama…

In a letter printed last issue, Martin S Gilbert questioned our earlier article about Libya (PN 2537), asking: ‘If it was a coup, how could western “spooks” have gained control?’ and ‘how could this popular revolution be turned into a coup?’ He suggested that: ‘This was the Spanish civil war of our time, an event that could have stopped Hitler.’ He criticised the approach of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which he characterised as: ‘if it’s American and NATO, it must be bad’, and he called…

It is hard to grasp the horror of the US-led war in Afghanistan. It is also hard to grasp the depth and scale of the lies that the war has been based on. How do things look to the masters of war? Watch a chilling leaked night vision video recorded in October 2001 by a US AC-130U Spectre gunship. The seven-minute video (link at the end of this article) documents an attack on an Afghan village.

There is a soundtrack: calm, unhurried conversation between the men in the plane. You also…

Indeed, according to a recent report for Inter Press Service (IPS) by journalist and historian Gareth Porter, the Taliban’s leadership is prepared to negotiate a peace settlement as soon as the US “indicates its willingness to provide a timetable for complete withdrawal.”

Ready to withdraw?

Taliban officials explained the movement’s position in late July during a meeting in Kabul with the former Afghan Prime Minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai.

“They said once the Americans say…

On of the most recent of his Radio Four series on Russia (“The Wild East”) Martin Sixsmith quite casually mentioned that in May 1945, Churchill had floated plans for invading Russia. I must confess I had not previously heard of this, presumably it was revealed under a war-sensitive extension to the 30-year act (hiding some of its significance under the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union); it certainly has not sparked off the sort of discussion it merits. It is an interesting insight…

Asked days after the 11 September 2001 attacks if US president George W Bush’s “war on terror” was winnable, Noam Chomsky responded: “If we want to consider this question seriously, we should recognise that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the US was condemned by the World Court for ‘unlawful use of force’ (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling…

As PN went to press, over three months into the NATO war on Libya, Libyan rebels said that they were expecting a new peace proposal from the regime, transmitted via a special committee of the African Union (AU), which met to discuss the conflict on 26 June.

The key issue is whether the rebels (and their British and French backers) will maintain their position that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (and his family) must not only leave power, but leave the country, before a ceasefire and…

Recent claims by Afghan president Hamid Karzai that the US has started “peace talks” with the Taliban – and official US confirmation that it has been engaged in “very preliminary” contacts with them – have fuelled media speculation about the possibilty of a negotiated end to the war, the option long favoured by the majority of ordinary Afghans (see PN 2530).

Though US officials have publicly justified military escalation by claiming that it is needed to force the Taliban to the…

British forces are likely to remain in Afghanistan long after David Cameron’s 2014 deadline for the end of Britain’s “combat” mission, according to the commander of British forces in the country, general James Bucknall.

Bucknall told the Guardian, “December [2014] is not a campaign end date but a waypoint – a point at which the coalition security posture changes from one that is in the lead to one that is mentoring and advising, but is still here.”

Following press reports that…

Yet another war in the Middle East is materialising in front of our very eyes. In Libya, as in Afghanistan, Vietnam or Iraq, our politicians start off shedding floods of crocodile tears for the innocent civilians/protestors. Then we persuade the UN to create a “no fly” zone; and under the umbrella of that resolution we agree to bomb Gaddafi’s forces.

Then our “military advisors” are sent in to assist the rebels. All of these steps have now been taken in Libya. We start off under the…

“[W]e must talk to the Taliban. Without that, we will leave a broken country. Our present strategy, says one official who has been at the heart of it, “is all a big, big lie”” - Guardian columnist Julian Glover.

Following “extensive interviews in Washington with many of the key players involved in Afghan policy”, renowned Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid recently reported that the US is “preparing for extensive diplomatic initiatives in the next few months to take the fledgling peace…