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On Aug. 31, the day the U.S. completed its pull-out of evacuees and military forces from Afghanistan after 20 years, President Joe Biden spoke in a national address, of the “end of an era.” The same day in Afghanistan, the Taliban held two press conferences in Kabul—one at the international airport, and one at the national TV building, at which leaders announced their commitment to Afghanistan’s sovereignty, building its economy, asking for international support, and or the return of Afghans to build their nation.

“Get the solutions out front,” was the urgent call to action today, by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. This is a turning-point moment, she stressed. There are the immediate humanitarian needs in Afghanistan, as well as ongoing crises from the pandemic and famine worldwide which must have attention, and there is the necessity to launch infrastructure-building for basic livelihoods and the future. In the forefront is the necessity to build capacity to provide world health security. All this requires international collaboration.

“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” The American Presidency, as represented by Joe Biden, has, as of August 31, potentially shut the door on more than three decades of post-1989 trans-Atlantic triumphalism by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); by Bush #41 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s neocon 1990 “5/20 Committee;” by Margaret Thatcher’s and George Bush’s 1990-1991 “Desert Shield/Desert Storm” Gulf War; by Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago “responsibility to protect” speech; and by the "forever wars of the post September 11, 2001 period.

President Biden declared yesterday that the decision to leave Afghanistan is about "ending an era of military operations to remake other countries."  This raises the obvious question, what will replace this era, which has been characterized by "endless wars"?  Will the U.S. and NATO continue to pursue, unilaterally, an arbitrary Rules-Based Order, demanding submission to the failed neoliberal policies insisted upon by globalist financial and corporate cartels?  Or will civilization advance to policies based on economic cooperation among sovereign nations, committed to mutual benefit?

by: Harley Schlanger
August 27 -- Even before the bloody ISIS-K terror attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, there was a proliferation of calls for President Biden to resign, be removed under the 25th Amendment, or be impeached. Leading the charge in the U.S. are war hawks and neoconservatives, including supporters of former President Trump, such as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who said, "I think Joe Biden deserves to be impeached" for leaving behind Americans and Afghans who worked with U.S. forces. Graham seems to have missed Biden's pledge to evacuate as many as possible by the August 31 deadline, and the effective evacuation underway by the U.S. military of more than 100,000 since the Taliban marched into Kabul on August 15. Joining Graham is Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, and the unhinged Congresswoman from "Q-Anon", Marjorie Taylor Greene, who announced that she will file impeachment charges on August 27. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, was among the first to suggest that the 25th Amendment be used to remove Biden; the amendment calls for removal when a President is incapable of conducting his duties, and was previously promoted by anti-Trumpers such as Nancy Pelosi and the London Spectator.

Most of those involved in dissections of "What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?" are missing the obvious point.  What was wrong is the system, which placed the American military in a series on no-win wars, in defense of a "unipolar" world order which benefitted the few, i.e., those who run the global central banks and financial institutions on behalf of City of London and Wall Street interests.  That system should be buried, and replaced by a new system, which can bring lasting peace through economic development.  The era of "endless wars", of "Color Revolutions" to conduct "regime change", has been exposed on a global stage by the western military withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Good Riddance to that system -- we can now enter the era in which Development Is the Name of Peace.

Obituary by Harley Schlanger

Ed Asner, with Harley Schlanger, following a performance of “FDR” in Galveston, Texas in 2012.

August 30 -- Ed Asner, a much-honored American actor, who was a civil rights and anti-war activist, passed away yesterday at 91 years old. He won multiple Emmys for his performances in two popular tv series, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Lou Grant." Later, as President of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-1980s, his role in leading the fight to expose the "Iran-Contra affair", the dirty war in Nicaragua directed by then-Vice President Bush, likely led to his blacklisting in Hollywood in the mid-to-late 1980s, which did not deter him from continuing to speak out boldly on many issues. In later years, he re-emerged as a character actor, with many film and television credits.

The massive hype by the war parties in the U.S. and the U.K. that China covered up the “fact” that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has taken a hit, as the 90-day investigation by the U.S. intelligence community, mandated by the Biden Administration, found no evidence that the virus had any source other than through nature. The idea that an intelligence community could determine such a thing was an absurdity from the beginning, but apparently the claims against China were so lacking in evidence that the intelligence agencies did not wish to risk being exposed for carrying out a purely political witch hunt, as happened with their fake “proof” of Russian collusion with Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

The final flights bringing foreigners and Afghan refugees out of Kabul are now in process, with President Biden sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline. A second U.S. drone attack today, in Kabul, claimed to take out a car with several intended suicide bombers inside who were heading to the airport. The profound issue facing the world today is whether or not the U.S. will join with China, Russia and the countries in the region to begin an economic development process for this war-torn nation, to become the prosperous crossroad of Eastern and Western civilizations, or to become again an impoverished center of terrorism and drug production. If the former, such a transformation would serve as a model for the development of the other nations destroyed by the Anglo-American regime change wars over the past 20 years, establishing the notion of “peace through development” as the necessary new paradigm to replace the failed geopolitics of British imperialism.