I don’t know why the US military keeps thinking it can just bomb insurgencies against a foreign occupation into oblivion, but they do:
KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO airstrike early Friday killed at least 80 people, many of them civilians, in a once-calm region of northern Afghanistan that has recently slipped under control of insurgents, Afghan officials said.
Hours after the airstrike, NATO officials in the Afghan capital acknowledged that a coalition aircraft had attacked and destroyed two fuel tankers in the tiny village of Omar Kheil, 15 miles south of Kunduz.
The officials said the airstrike had targeted insurgents, but Afghan leaders said the attack killed many civilians who were siphoning fuel from the trucks.
This is cruel, inhumane and it won’t work. But I suspect our generals will just keep doing it anyway. You wonder if they learned anything from the Vietnam War about the limits of air power? All this does is strengthen the hand of the Taliban. What’s the cliche? Penny wise, pound foolish. No doubt we killed a few Taliban fighters. But we also likely created a few more from the families of those we murdered who were not our enemy (until now) and handed another propaganda victory to a radical bunch of religious extremists. In a war against a guerrilla force any “military target” is inevitably a civilian target as well. Unless we intend to kill everyone who lives in those areas of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban such tactics are profoundly stupid. It goes without saying that their inherent immorality is not debatable.
The morning news has a lot of focus on internal debates on Aghan policy.
Does anyone actually think that Obama has a say on whether or not we stay in Afghanistan?
Mmm, I think he does. But the problem to me is that the discussion in the media about the war in Afghanistan is, I’m sure, very different from the game as it is actually being played ‘for real’ by the US government at the moment.
Until we manage to bring public opinion to more or less the same place where the actual discussion is taking place, this to me feels a lot like being against the Iraq war all the way up to the invasion in 2003.
It’s like fighting a chimera, where ‘everybody’ is against it, but the actual (‘rational’) reasons for supporting the behavior are unknown, and so there are all these explanations and arguments that people more or less invent to support it anyways – but none of them actually has the ring of a comprehensive explanation. A bit like watching the healthcare reform town halls, and even the media blitz against Obama’s classroom speech right now, maybe? What do you think?
I think the deeper lesson here is that national policy, especially when it comes to military decisions, has a momentum of its own no matter which party or officials run Washington. We’re stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq. There seems to be some chance of getting out of Iraq before too much longer. But Afghanistan was bought by all political sides as the “good” part of the “war on terror”. There can be no “victory” there, no “mission accomplished”, so it will be politically impossible to justify bringing it to a quick end.
The Afghanistan action never made any sense: you deal with a Sept 11 as in international crime, with an international law enforcement operation, not with soldiers and bombers. You’d think we’d have at least learned something from the American Revolution.
It’s telling that the news focus lately has been shifting to the opium farms, “warlords”, and “drug trade,” which are absolutely none of our business, and away from “terrorism”. Everybody knows the war is doing nothing or next to nothing to protect America or anyplace else, but to just do the rational thing and end it would be politically impossible — not just in the sense that it would make Obama a one-term president, but that it would be literally impossible to accomplish within our political system.
Will we ever learn that you don’t put a Bush in power while imagining that the damage he does will just be reversed by another election? Apparently not. You’d have to know a little about history for that.
What a sad thing to see. Hope this carnage will stop.
Digital Frame Guy