But I bet there are a few more people who do now, thanks to this “unfortunate incident.”
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Four Afghans, including a child and two women, were killed Saturday when U.S. forces opened fire on a car in southern Kandahar city, police said.
A man in the car also was killed when a U.S. military convoy opened fire on the civilian vehicle, Kandahar police official Shah Agha told Reuters. He said a U.S. Special Forces convoy appeared to be involved. […]
U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued a directive in July stressing the importance of avoiding civilian casualties, which have undermined support for the war against the Taliban.
Of course they could have been suicide bombers, even that kid. They are only Muslims after all, and we all know “those people” don’t respect human life as much as we do here in America.
Seriously, though, what is our continued presence in Afghanistan gaining for us? I’d like to know that all the billions of dollars we are spending to keep troops over there are accomplishing something that will benefit Afghanis and Americans. Yet, as the years of our military occupation continue to trundle by without any sign of progress on any front, civilian or military, I find it harder and harder to justify our presence there. I’m sure the Russians could remind us how wonderful their adventure in nation building in Afghanistan went, but I suspect their leaders are taking too much glee in seeing us make the same mistakes that they did, only with more expensive toys.
Well, I’m sure there are tons of reasons for American forces to stay “over there” for the indefinite future. I’m sure some of the comments to this post will mention them. I’m just not convinced anymore that those reasons are good ones. Are you?
I can definitely see why we don’t want Taliban (and Taliban-like) people to have control of southern Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan. My problem is that they seem to be growing stronger and I don’t see an affordable, feasible plan that is going to set things right to the point that we can declare ‘Mission
ImpossibleAccomplished’ and come home.permeability of Afghan- Pakistan border and potential for nuclear terrorism seems to me the reason for not leaving immediately. Maybe David Rohde is the new Judith Miller, and the timing of his series in NYTimes about his escape may be suspect for that reason. But seems to me Obama is buying time to get a coalition of regional interests in place (and a gov in Afghanistan).
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Across the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan: Swat Valley and South-Waziristan with the Taliban capital Kotkai. Pakistan leadership is risking a civil war with militia forces of three terror groups. They also must act due to US pressure and arch enemy India. Once Taliban terror in the villages is receding, the Afghan and Pakistan people will have a chance for education and economic development.
After months of skirmishing, threats and deadly Predator drone attacks, war is finally returning to South Waziristan. The Pakistani Army is poised to launch a major military operation against Taliban insurgents in one of the wildest, al-Qaeda-infested regions of its northwestern tribal areas.
Criss-crossed by mountain ridges laced with ravines and dried up creeks, South Waziristan is difficult terrain to fight in. It is populated by fierce, almost fanatical Pashtun tribesmen, notorious for their hostility to outsiders. It’s also home to about 10,000 Pakistani
Taliban fighters and foreign jihadists from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Algeria and Morocco.
Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and their top advisors may also be holed up there.
Now, after three unsuccessful offensives, years of failed raids, doomed peace deals and repeated public humiliation, Pakistan’s military is determined to launch an ambitious assault against the Pakistani Taliban’s leaders.
A spate of suicide bombings that killed nearly 125 people across Pakistan last week and a 20-hour Taliban siege of the country’s main military headquarters in Rawalpindi are fuelling demands for a sharp military response to the growing threat posed by the Taliban.
“They are enemies of Islam and Pakistan. They are hired killers,” Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, said this week. “Their sole target is to destabilize Pakistan and bring misery to the people.”
Obama signs $7.5bn Pakistan aid package into law
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."We’re there to protect american manhood, first of all. And keep the military industrialists happy. And probably to keep a watch on regional oil politics. Or something like that. I don’t think the war machine people give too much thought to any sort of endgame. We have to be there so we have to be there. That’s the point. That’s all the media needs, a small towel to cover up the naked enterprise of empire.
We’re obviously not there to stop the flow of heroin. We’re also obviously not there to kill Al Queda since they are in Pakistan.
To believe we’re there so our troops can get ambushed now and then, blown up occasionally, and so that we can shoot up the occasional taxi and drop a hellfire missile on the occasional wedding party is a bit crazy. The whole “nuclear” fear about Pakistan is laughable. We’ve been to that rodeo. It was called Iraq. To the extent that there is such a possibility, war cheerleaders are faced with the unfortunate problem that our presence in the region has destabilized pakistan and made the loss of a nuke, however unlikely, more possible, not less. And I’m dubious 100,000 american troops in a wicked terrain the size of texas are going to be able to do much about a nuke (which is in another country anyway). Jesus they can’t stop metric tons of heroin leaving the country every day.
I’d like to think Obama is carefully feeling out how he can wind down this pointless and bloody occupation. But probably not. This point, along with his actions wrt to FIRE and his final actions with health care will define his presidency.
Here we go again. The American Cannonball is slipping inexorably and surely into another major conflict on the asian continent. Will this be the imbrologio that unhinges the imperial regime of the US of A.? Time will only tell but I seem to hear the soft footsteps of Nemesis drawing ever closer. She has a sure fire cure for the hubris of the neo-conservatives and others of like belief – destruction. How do we avoid this lamentable fate?
As obscene as our presence has been since day one in Afghanistan — as early as 2004 and certainly by 2005 the playbooks began revealing themselves.
There’s a lot of reasons that the rest of the world wants us to stay in Afghanistan until the end. Our end. The world is even willing to lend us money and send “pretend” troops to encourage us and show solidarity. China is counting on it, for a number of pragmatic reasons not unconnected to regional resources.
By the time the US exits the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, the world will be a safer place because the major terrorist threat to the world — the United States — will be marginalized and bankrupt.
Afghanistan has, throughout history, provided a helpful service to the world: neutralizing rogue states dumb enough to go there. And, they have never failed once.
Open source Intelligence circles are pretty agnostic about it. It’s an ugly job, but somebody has to do it.
This cute little tell-all chart is revealing, although there’s much more to the labyrinth than “Durable Goods” exports. It does, however, show the latest surge, which has already been baked into the cake:
What the hell is Obama thinking? How can he sit there in the White House, getting regular reports of US forces shooting Afghan civilians and bombing them with computer-controlled drones, and not fucking realize that this mess isn’t going to have a happy ending? Just try to imagine a foreign power occupying the USA, killing our civilians. I wonder how that would go over….
I think The tea bagger crowd already think we live in an occupied country. Or at least the ones that listen to Glenn Beck.
We don’t belong there. Obama has to wait for the results of the election run off.
If he wanted to escalate the war, he would have just sent more troops in September.
I think that this about how to get out.
Well they might have been. Booby-trapped kids were used in Vietnam. I’m not going to second guess a soldier with his life on the line regarding a car that refuses to stop. There was a similar incident a few years ago in Iraq. It was a great tragedy, but I can’t blame the soldiers who machine-gunned the minivan coming at them that refused to stop.
I totally agree that we shouldn’t be there and should “bug out”, not take years to leave. But I’m not going to be silent as the blogosphere slips into 1960’s “babykiller” deja vu.
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Joan Baez, a recent diary @Orange.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — Afghanistan’s president is downplaying accusations of widespread fraud in his country’s recent elections, but he’s emphasizing the importance of a runoff for the sake of ensuring peace and stability in his nascent and war-torn democracy.
“There were some mistakes. There were some instances of fraud, but the nation as a whole was clean, and the result was clear. I decided for peace, for stability and for the future of democracy in Afghanistan and for the future of institutional order in Afghanistan to call for a runoff, and I find that in the interest of the Afghan people.”
The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission invalidated nearly one-third of Karzai’s votes because of “clear and convincing evidence of fraud.” Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission then certified the voting results, which gave him less than the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.
In light of the fraud claims and in the face of Western pressure, Karzai agreed to a November 7 runoff with his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.
Karzai said, the “last election was not as bad as it was claimed; it was a lot better.”
“Afghanistan is a poor country, in Western terminology — a Third World country,” he said, observing that it “has gone through years of war.”
“The institutions are just young toddlers in this democracy that resembles a toddler. It walks and falls. We have to understand that, and we have to accept the Afghan elections in the context of the Afghan situation and the poverty and lack of means in this country,” Karzai said.
Karzai and Abdullah in Runoff Election
[Can one take this puppet clown as a serious leader for Afghanistan? – Oui]
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."