Tag: Afghanistan War

Shell shock The war still isn't over for those in the 2/7 Marine Battalion, which was at the center of the fighting in Afghanistan. In...

A new Bloomberg News poll indicates that nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe that legislators should reach a compromise on the federal budget in order to avert a government shutdown.

Talk about strange bedfellows. Tuesday night, liberal Democrat Jared Polis joined Colorado's two Republicans -- U.S. Reps. Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn -- voting against the $106 billion Iraq-Afghanistan war funding bill, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives on a 226-202 vote with strong Democratic support. The remainder of the state's House members, all four Democrats, voted for the bill.

The erosion of human rights in war-torn Afghanistan spurred Denver U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a vocal critic of the Iraq War, last week to support an $91.3 billion supplemental budget, that largely funds an $85 billion military spending package for the dual wars there and in Iraq.
The budget bill, however, comes at a delicate time for U.S.-Afghan relations. DeGette spoke to The Colorado Independent about a historic fact-finding mission to Kabul and the Kandahar Province by a bipartisan delegation of six women members of Congress. The trip was organized following international outcry when the Afghan government passed a proposed law in February that legalizes marital rape and violates fundamental women's rights.

The New York Times and Sunday morning political talk shows are contorting themselves into linguistically-torturous positions in a feeble attempt to avoid using the word "torture" to describe the immoral and criminal techniques employed at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites against suspected al Qaeda-linked prisoners. Now, Foreign Policy magazine has produced the euphemism-free "ultimate guide to the Bush Administration's journey to the dark side."

The Obama administration recast the seven-year-long war in Afghanistan on Friday with a deepened commitment to both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

Tonight's episode of Democracy Now! discusses the "unprecedented number of deaths" -- both suicides and homicides -- at Fort Carson in Colorado following an Army report that record numbers of soldiers took their own lives last year.

Newly arrived Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) asks a question close to my heart: How can Defense Secretary Bob Gates institutionalize the counterinsurgency lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Following on our Dec. 15 story that international military-humanitarian coordination problems are sinking U.S. success in Afghanistan, a new UPI report claims that there is more grumbling about Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in the perpetually troubled Helmand Province.

When it takes seven bone-jarring hours to drive just 90 miles over war-scarred dirt roads from Kabul to the troubled Helmand Province in southwest Afghanistan, the complexity of the intertwined U.S. diplomatic and military missions becomes clear pretty fast.