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This week on Uprising:

* Afghanistan Plagued By Fake Mullahs, Fraudulent Elections, More Troops, and Delayed Withdrawal
* Will Black Farmers Finally Win Justice?
* Black Agenda Report on the Hypocrisy of the Outcry Over Airport Security Measures
* Remembering Chalmers Johnson in His Own Words

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Afghanistan Plagued By Fake Mullahs, Fraudulent Elections, More Troops, and Delayed Withdrawal

A NATO summit on Afghanistan just wrapped up in Portugal over the weekend. NATO officials unveiled a transition plan to hand over military control of the war-torn nation to its own army over the next four years. The July 2011 date that was originally cited by President Obama as the planned end of the occupation, has now been transformed into the start date for US and NATO forces to begin a long-drawn out withdrawal. However, before the drawing down of forces begins, the US military’s Lieutenant General David Rodriguez announced that troop numbers would first increase. Rodriguez is also the commander of NATO’s ISAF Joint Command. But the new infusion of troops will likely lead to an increase in the so-called “night raids” by US forces in Afghan villages, which are so unpopular that even the Afghan President Hamid Karzai has denounced them. Undermining the NATO summit was the embarrassing revelation that a man thought to be one of the highest ranking members of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, was actually an impostor. The New York Times broke the story saying that Mansour repeatedly fooled Afghan and NATO officials and was apparently paid large amounts of money. Meanwhile, the results of Afghanistan’s September 18th parliamentary elections were released on Wednesday. The elections were so wrought with fraud that election officials threw out 1.3 millions votes out of 5.6 million, and disqualified at least 24 candidates, President Karzai’s cousin among them. The results reveal that Pashtuns, the largest ethnic minority, have lost control of the Parliament, while Afghanistan’s notorious Northern Alliance warlords led by Abdullah Abdullah are claiming victory. Karzai’s government, unhappy with the results, has threatened to indict two top election officials.

GUEST: Gareth Porter, investigative journalist and historian specializing in US national security policy, writer for the Inter Press Service

Read Gareth Porter’s work online at www.ipsnews.net.

Will Black Farmers Finally Win Justice?

The Senate on November 19th approved a funding bill to fulfill two settlements previously awarded in two separate class action discrimination suits brought against federal agencies. In total the Senate approved over $4 billion in settlements. Of that, $3.4 billion was approved for Native Americans represented under the settlement reached last year in Cobell v. Salazar. The suit was brought against the Department of the Interior in 1996 by Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from Browning, Montana. The Cobell suit argued that the Department of the Interior owed royalty payments for land use for oil, gas, and grazing rights to hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. Funding for Cobell must now be approved by the House. The Senate bill also authorized $1.15 billion to go toward Black farmers represented under what is known as the Pigford II case. The original Pigford suit was brought against the US Department of Agriculture in 1997 by Tim Pigford of North Carolina, and a group of Black farmers. Prior to the Pigford suit, a USDA investigation uncovered decades of systemic discrimination against generations of Black Farmers, leading to the denial of loans, or unfair loan terms. The original Pigford lawsuit included 22,000 farmers, and was settled for $2.3 billion. However the terms of the settlement were criticized, and a majority of farmers who applied for Pigford money were found ineligible on what they complained were bureaucratic technicalities. This year Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder approved a second settlement of 1.15 billion for additional claimants, known as the Pigford II. However approval for the funding had been held up in the Senate until last week.

GUEST: John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Association

Find out more at www.blackfarmers.org.

Black Agenda Report on the Hypocrisy of the Outcry Over Airport Security Measures

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on the Hypocrisy of the Outcry Over Airport Security Measures.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Remembering Chalmers Johnson in His Own Words

Chalmers Johnson, foreign policy expert and life-long intellectual, died on Saturday November 20th at the age of 79. He is survived by his wife Sheila. Johnson was a veteran of the Korean war, a consultant to the CIA from 1967–1973, and an academic. He chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972, and left the University after 26 years in 1988. That year he moved to UC San Diego to join the newly opened School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired from academia in 1992 and founded the Japan Policy Research Institute. Chalmers was considered a vanguard intellectual in the development of nations, especially in Asia. Steve Clemons, a student and long time friend of Johnson, said of his impact, “From my perspective [he] rivals Henry Kissinger as the most significant intellectual force who has shaped and defined the fundamental boundaries and goal posts of US foreign policy in the modern era. …Johnson was an apostate and heretic in the field of political economy. [He] challenged conventional wisdom … writing the significant treatises documenting the growing prevalence of state-led industrial and trade and finance policy abroad, particularly in Asia.” In 1995 the brutal rape of a 12 year old Japanese girl by two US soldiers stationed in Okinawa, Japan, spurred a fundamental shift in Johnson’s view toward American foreign policy. He argued against the presence of US military bases around the world, viewing them as unnecessary and destructive. He wrote and lectured frequently about the United States slide toward Imperialism and the embrace of a perpetual war state. Johnson was perhaps best known for his 2000 book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. The book did not receive wide attention until after the events of 9/11, when it was instantly seen as prophetic, and became a best seller. Following Blowback, Chalmers Johnson wrote the books, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic,” “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” and his last book just released in August, “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope.”

Today we’ll pay tribute to Chalmers Johnson by playing clips from a speech and an interview:

Chalmers Johnson spoke on March 18th 2007 at the San Diego 1st Unitarian Universalist Church about his book Nemesis. Special thanks to Global Voices for Justice.

On January 8th, 2008 Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed Chalmers Johnson after the film Charlie Wilson’s War was released.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions.” — Chalmers Johnson