Afghanistan

From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used.

A powerful earthquake has struck north-east Afghanistan close to the border with Tajikistan. Strong tremors were felt in Pakistan, Tajikistan and India, as far away as New Delhi, with reports of casualties and damages. RT reports: The quake had a depth of 210km and took pace 39km from the town of Ashkasham, Afghanistan, the USGS reported. The China Earthquake Networks Center first measured it at 7.3 magnitude, with various centers then putting the magnitude anywhere between that and the USGS’ measurement of 6.6.

A War was the Danish submission to the Oscars this year for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015. It lost out to a Hungarian movie set in a Holocaust concentration camp, but A War is well worth seeing, with or without awards. It’s in Danish, with large and clear English subtitles—you will have no problem following the action.

Bowe Bergdahl walked off.

In the court of public opinion, this is the central fact all can agree upon—-that a 24-year-old Army private first class who had been in Afghanistan fewer than two months walked off his outpost one day and vanished.

Everything that happened between Bergdahl’s walk-off and the present moment, where he stands trial for desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy,” has formed the basis of one of the most bizarre and dramatic tales of a missing soldier in recent memory. To say this case has become a political flashpoint is an understatement.

Everyone knows America’s campaign in Afghanistan has been an enormous foreign policy success.

The Taliban harbored al-Qaeda before and after 9/11 so naturally, the US had to oust Mullah Omar and company on the way to chasing Osama bin Laden through the mountains whilst laying waste to whatever civilization existed prior to the American invasion.