war on terror

"The US has basically already lost the war in Afghanistan, if they even knew what victory was defined at in the beginning," says Jeremy Scahill, just back from two weeks reporting unembedded in that country. The Taliban there are not unlike the Tea Party here, he notes, not popular in themselves but rather as a protest against the failures of the current regime.Then, this week, two bombs were found in packages in cargo holds on two planes from Yemen. Is this a new front on the "war on terror"? Jeremy fills us in on the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, the soft war in Yemen and other countries, and why the wars have been conspicuously absent from this year's election campaigns.

It's the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon this weekend, and while one war has ostensibly been wound up, another still rages--and inside the US the culture wars have reached a fever pitch, with Islamophobic ugliness centering on the anniversary seemingly everywhere. From a pastor in Florida threatening to burn Qurans on Saturday (and terror alerts being issued because of his actions) to the ongoing media arguments over the Cordoba House community center, American Muslims feel threatened, and the outreach to the larger Islamic world is threatened. To discuss the anniversary, we're joined by Fekkak Mamdouh, who was headwaiter and union leader at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center, and Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister of the Middle Collegiate Church. They talk about interfaith outreach, the hard work that has been done to create understanding since the attacks, and what we can still be hopeful about.

Afghanistan is now the longest war in United States history. Soldiers are deported everyday, institutionalized to fight the elusive “war in Afghanistan.” Civilians and villagers are caught between the Taliban and the United States. Often, soldiers are too busy trying to survive to ask the metaphysically political questions like, “why are we here?”

Stories about politics are rarely stories about people, but stories about people are often stories about politics. Restrepo is the title of a film by Tim Hetherington telling one of these stories. Restrepo was the medic. He was killed early in the deployment and became a metaphor for every soldier in the platoon. Now, Tim Hetherington joins us in the studio to describe his experiences as a war reporter creating Restrepo, not about the politics of Afghanistan but about the soldiers affected by politics in Afghanistan.