Antiwar.com Weekly Newsletter for April, 6 2021

Your source for foreign policy news.

April 6th, 2021

Get Out of Afghanistan!

The twentieth anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is only six months away, and it is still uncertain whether the Biden administration will withdraw the last remaining American troops from America's longest war. Last month, President Biden seemed to pour cold water on the possibility of leaving by the agreed-upon May 1 deadline, but also added that "we are not staying a long time." Given how long the war has dragged on and how intense the resistance to withdrawal is in Washington, it is hard to believe that US forces will finally exit Afghanistan this year. The administration's apparent unwillingness to remove the remaining troops on time is a bad sign that they will find some pretext to keep thousands of Americans in harm's way in a war that the US lost long ago.

By Daniel Larison

Pentagon Publishes Pictures of Syrian Kurds Training to Call in Airstrikes

Last month, US Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) trained members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) during live-fire attack helicopter exercises. JTACs direct military aircraft during combat and pictures published on a Pentagon website show the JTACs training SDF members to call in airstrikes, which appears the first time the US is giving non-state actors such training, at least publicly.

According to a report from Air Force Times, the pictures might be the first time JTAC training with the SDF is publicized, but the training is nothing new. SDF fighters have had the ability to call in US airstrikes for years now.

The report said the SDF fighters were not trained to be JTACs themselves but relayed coordinates to US JTACs who would then order the airstrikes. During the campaign against ISIS in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was decimated by US bombs in 2017, some SDF members were given an app for their tablets that they could put GPS coordinates into, which they would share with JTACs through encrypted messaging.

By Dave DeCamp

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Peace Prospects Dim as Ukraine Tries To Drag US, NATO Into Its Confrontation With Russia

Numerous statements by Ukrainian and Russian officials reported this Easter Sunday bode ill for hopes of diminishing tensions in Eastern Ukraine. Growing indications of impending intervention by the Pentagon and NATO make the situation yet more grim. U.S. European Command has raised its Ukraine watch level from possible crisis to potential imminent crisis, the highest level, according to Stars and Stripes.

The past few days have witnessed a phone conversation between President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky and a similar exchange between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his, Defense Minister Andrii Taran. In both instances the American officials assured their Ukrainian allies of American support not only in their steadily mounting conflict with the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the Donbass in what was formerly Eastern Ukraine, but with its war of words, and veiled words of war, with Russia which borders the two republics.

By Rick Rozoff

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Washington Has Backed Islamist War Criminals in Syria

When large-scale demonstrations broke out against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in early 2011, Barack Obama's administration promptly exploited the situation and began to back anti-regime factions. As those demonstrations evolved into an armed insurgency later that year, Washington cooperated closely with outside sponsors of the rebellion, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey, to channel financial and logistical assistance to the insurgents. By September 2013, Washington was openly sending arms and money of its own to the rebels.

In addition to interfering in Syria's internal affairs by aiding an insurgency, U.S. leaders have repeatedly misled the American people about the nature of the factions Washington supports.

By Ted Galen Carpenter

Stephanopoulos, Blinken Score Win for MICIMATT

Interviewed Wednesday on The Critical Hour, I took issue with the prevailing conventional view that George Stephanopoulos's mousetrapping President Biden into calling Putin a "killer" and Secretary of State Blinken's boorish attempt to get China to kowtow in Alaska were "disastrous".

One must always ask cui bono? Who profits from those two "disasters". Were they not a boon to the people with inordinate influence over those we elect (at least nominally) to run the country? I refer, of course, to those of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex who profiteer from tension.

The MICIMATT needs credible foreign enemies to "justify" obscene levels of military spending and to line the pockets of the wealthy "one percent" - whom the Russians still call "the ruling classes". As for the rest of us, as comedian George Carlin might put it, the ruling classes with their bastard-child MICIMATT make up a big club, and were not in it.

By Ray McGovern

US Army Advisers Make First Mission to the Maldives With Eyes on China

US Army advisers traveled to the Maldives this year and spent February and March training the countrys military in what is expected to be the first of many rotational deployments.

The Maldives is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, located to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka. The US signed a defense agreement with the Maldives last September, part of the Trump administration's efforts to boost military ties in the region, an effort that is being continued under President Biden.

According to a report from Army Times, the US Army's 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB), a unit formed in 2019 for training missions, plans to keep one-third of its roughly 820 soldiers deployed across the Indo-Pacific.

By Dave DeCamp

'Made Possible by Viewers Taxpayers Like You': French African-Adventurism & Wedding-Bombings

Grant Smith on Israeli Apartheid and the False Promise of a Two-State Solution

Iran Calls for Immediate, Full Sanctions Relief

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