Ten plus years ago, the United States (oops, NATO) invaded Afghanistan and quickly won the war against the militarily (technologically) inferior Taliban government. Washington and its allies followed their victory by quickly losing the occupation challenge. As George W. Bush and company invaded Iraq, the Taliban crept back from Pakistan and undid the American war victory.

In reflecting on the disastrous last decade we might ask: what would the world be like today if the United Sates, Britain, Canada and the other countries using their military might to kill fanatical young people had instead used that money to buy school books, drill wells, educate people, and promote religious tolerance throughout the Middle East—and at home?

Ten years later it’s Afghanistan where the Americans, British, and Canadians among others have decided to dig their geo-political grave. However, the geo-political game in the Middle East and Northern Africa is a disaster and may be coming to an end.

Now in its eighth year, the US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan continues to grind on, its original—if entirely spurious—raison d’etre long since lost in the fog of war. Of all the paper-thin rationales, then, for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, the notion that ‘we’ are somehow deeply concerned for the welfare of the Afghani people is the most stubbornly, the most patently delusional.

There simply can be no genuine peace with justice where there is no will for it.

Like South Africa twenty-five years ago, Israel today portrays itself as a progressive liberal democracy, an endangered island of modernity in a backward and hostile region. The existence of a gay rights movement in Israel is deployed as another example of this modernity. I think that these similarities tell us a great deal, that they actually reveal the underlying process that they are designed to obscure—a common colonial project.

Despite almost a decade of warfare, including an invasion and occupation, the US military and its allies and client state armed forces are losing the war in Afghanistan. Outside of the central districts of a few cities and the military fortresses, the Afghan national resistance forces, in all of their complex local, regional and national alliances, are in control, of territory, people and administration.

When Israel announced a major new Jews-only building project of 1600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem, Netanyahu was sending a message to world: Israel backed by its billionaire-financed Presidents of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations, leads the US by the nose.

The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination. In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime.

The CPCCA has been meeting since last fall. “What Coalition?” you may be asking yourselves. Exactly this entity has been almost totally out of the public eye since its inception. Few Canadians are aware of this committee whose main aim is, to quote one critic, “an attempt to curtail freedom of speech and academic freedom across Canada, and to possibly criminalize certain kinds of human rights discourse.”