By GARETH PORTER - March 8, 2010

It turns out...that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict..."This is all a war of perceptions."

By CBC News - March 5, 2010

Federal government documents on Afghan detainees suggest that Canadian officials intended some prisoners to be tortured in order to gather intelligence, according to a legal expert..."[W]hat [the documents] will show is that Canada partnered deliberately with the torturers in Afghanistan for the interrogation of detainees..."

By DAVE LINDORFF - March 5-7, 2010

...Canadian military chaplains and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sodomizing young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.

By DAVE LINDORFF - March 4, 2010

...Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968...Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres...There was...a massacre recently that...bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

By Anthony Fenton - February 24, 2010

"It's now fair to speculate that the [Olympic] Games have been used even more cynically -- as cover for a massive new NATO offensive in Afghanistan that has already claimed many Afghan civilians' lives. Operation Moshtarak, with Canadian Forces participation, was launched in the southern province of Helmand on Feb. 12, the day of the Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver."

-- Vancouver Anti-War activist Derrick O'Keefe writing in rabble.ca

By Derrick O'Keefe - February 11, 2010

Many of Canada’s athletes were bitterly disappointed [by the boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games] in 1980, but our country’s authorities assured them that the rights of the people of Afghanistan were worth the sacrifice of their athletic ambitions...Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism in general and Canada’s role in the occupation of Afghanistan in particular.

By Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald - January 23, 2010

Without a care for the consequences, the U.S. first fostered Islamic extremists in the 1980s...Once a person with a cause has been linked to a policy and established in Washington, that person remains forever as the go-to person regardless of their subsequent history. One such example is the Afghan terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar...

By Ron Jacobs - January 21, 2010

The US involvement in Afghanistan that began under [former US President] Jimmy Carter was not an accident. It was the result of a concerted effort by the US Right to regain its power in the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam...[W]hat it meant for Afghanistan was that Washington "was (now) backing a class of mullahs and landowners that had been fighting any social reform for generations"...The mujahedin war and what followed destroyed the social progress made under previous Afghan governments.

By BRIAN M. DOWNING - January 8-10, 2010

...[I]t is not puzzling as to why Pakistan chooses to protect the Taliban and other insurgent and terrorist groups such as Hizb-i Islami and the Haqqani network. Americans see Afghanistan as part of the war on terror. Pakistan sees it quite differently. While paying lip service to American concerns in the region, Pakistan considers Afghanistan as part of the war on India. And various groups such as the Taliban and Lashkar-i Taiba enjoy government patronage.

By Jackie Shymanski - 9/01/2010

[Malalai Joya] states more than once that though a withdrawal of U.S., Canadian and British troops might very quickly result in the internecine fighting that led to the Taliban, that is actually preferable to foreign occupation in support of yet another corrupt regime.

By JOSHUA FRANK - January 7, 2010

Natural habitat in Afghanistan has endured decades of struggle, and the War on Terror has only escalated the destruction. The lands most afflicted by warfare are home to critters that most Westerners only have a chance to observe behind cages in our city zoos: gazelles, cheetahs, hyenas, Turanian tigers and snow leopards among others.

By DAVE LINDORFF - January 4, 2010

...[T]he apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by a US-led group of troops, was pretty much blacked out in the American media. Especially blacked out was word from UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedroom and handcuffed.

By Ian Sinclair - Znet

In the introduction of his new book Decoding the New Taliban, Dr Antonio Giustozzi argues the public debate surrounding Afghanistan has been "dominated by superficial or plainly wrong assumptions"...[He] uses the term "neo-Taliban" or "new Taliban" to refer to the Taliban which has been operating in Afghanistan since the US-NATO invasion and occupation in October 2001. "It has the same leadership,"...but it is now "an insurgent force - essentially an underground operation."

By John Pilger - December 31, 2009

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth["]...Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies".

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY - December 24, 2009

One of the main arguments made by self-proclaimed "liberal humanitarian interventionists" in support of President Obama's escalation of the Afghan War is that a return of the Taliban to power will condemn women to conditions approaching slavery...[T]he central question of humanitarian intervention is fundamentally one of whether the US escalation will improve things or make matters...The United States has a sorry track record in this regard, and we bear a heavy moral burden for the current state of affairs, including the dismal state of woman's rights. worse.