Just to spark a conversation on something other than a pregnant 17 year old . . .
Wonder why the Taliban is so resurgent (aside from the Bush administration’s almost total neglect of the war against the people who brought us 9/11)? Maybe it’s because we (i.e., NATO and the US forces) still aren’t winning hearts and minds with our bomb first, ask questions later tactics in Afghanistan.
KABUL (Reuters) – NATO-led forces said on Monday that foreign forces had accidentally killed three children in southeast Afghanistan, a toll that fuelled mounting anger over civilian casualties.
The deaths, in Paktika province, were expected to deepen the rift between foreign forces and the Afghan government, which says more than 500 civilians have been killed during operations by foreign and Afghan forces this year.
The U.S. military said earlier that U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops had killed more than 220 suspected Taliban militants in strikes in southern Afghanistan last week, the biggest insurgent toll reported in recent weeks.
Even smart bombs can’t discriminate between “insurgents” or Taliban fighters and small children, women and other innocent people. They aren’t programmed to be that intelligent. And neither are our military commanders, either, because they keep ordering these bombing raids based on thin intelligence and lack of adequate ground forces to secure the country. And innocent people, including kids, keep getting killed by a foreign occupation force. Maybe this is an issue (how to properly fight the war against the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks) that we ought to be asking our Presidential candidates about, rather than how nasty left wing bloggers can be, don’t you think?
It’s the pipeline. The pipelines that runs from all those ‘stans through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the ocean.
The war never had anything to do with 9/11, or only that 9/11 was the excuse. After all, bin Laden’s been gone for what five, six years.
And considering that the Taliban were ready to cut a deal on bin Laden to hand him over to a third country for trial (and I’m sure no one in Langley wanted a real trial where real evidence could be heard in public) you’d have thought that they’d be able to come to some agreement. But it was the breakdown of the talks over the pipeline that was the final straw.
Maybe the work in Iraq is pretty much done, and the oil will be flowing under the control of the oil companies no matter what the mess on the ground. Mission accomplished. So now the focus shifts to Afghanistan.
And maybe with this new Cold War and the THREAT to the pipeline running through Georgia we’ll actually start to hear some reports about the Afghanistan pipeline.
You know?
had killed more than 220 suspected Taliban militants It’s all about body count. Or “Everybody we kill is an insurgent.”