breaks my heart,when i think of the last 9 years!!

9 years of slaughter and murder

Eight years of mucking up Afghanistan. It’s past time to end Bush’s war.

Thank you Siun for bringing us their voices.

All these scary-smart soldier metrics aren’t worth a hill of beans. This is the graveyard of empires.

TROOPS
HOME
NOW

God Damn Dick Cheney and George Fucking Bush.

But they’re just poor, brown-skinned Third Worlders, so they don’t count.

[/snark]

and all those who want to debate their pet COIN theories or their latest “nationbuilding” schemes, would do well to pause and listen.

Thank you for this, Siun. The same people who do this have never justified being there in the first place… certainly not in the last seven years.

But do not forget that Taliban set this all up.. We don’t know their true motives… but maybe it was to lure these innocents in so they could be used as their pawns. I sure don’t know if that is true but people like them would have no qualms at doing so for their own purposes, they have no respect for life as they have show us time after time. And I do feel terrible for those who died because of the whole thing that was set up by the Taliban in the first place!!

NO, it has morphed into obombya’s war. obombya and the demtillians have moved this invasion onto a footing that the bushit never gave it.

try to think of obombya’s afghanistan invasion as tantamount to nixon’s cambodian invasion.

By refusing to end it, the current president has assumed ownership. It is Obama’s war now.

Unlike our immense respect for human life as evidenced by the bombing of a whole lotta folks just trying to get some gas to heat their homes for the winter … or how many who just wanted to go to a wedding or …

I suspect the Afghans have a rather hard time seeing our intense respect for human life.

Near as I can tell, the only reasons why the Afghan war continues are because (1) the U.S. doesn’t want to lose and (2) war supports the MIC. Can’t think of any other rationales.

I do agree that the loss of even one innocent life is tragic, we must remember that the Taliban have been repressing and killing Afghans for a long time! One thing we do know is that they do not respect women or for that matter life in general. If what I do know is true the Afghans really do not like the Taliban….

When I think of the poor truck drivers who were beheaded so that the Taliban could steal the aircraft fuel in the attempt to use the laden trucks as giant bombs…

So whadaya think the score is? How many “excess deaths” of Afghans have been caused by the U.S. vs the Taliban?

Maybe because we left them to the warlords after the Soviets were expelled and gave rise to the Taliban and Al Quaida?? (spelling)??

Assume for the moment that’s true. It still makes no sense to me that “we” would locate our own trucks (via satellite?) and just blow them up.. even if people were not around. Seems like we could take the trucks back at a later date.

Who needs an enemy if we are just going to destroy our own equipment?

Better yet, the U.S. shouldn’t have gotten involved during the Soviet occupation. If history is any indicator, the Soviets would have been forced to withdraw eventually without our involvement, just as the U.S. will ultimately slink away from the current conflict.

The U.S. chose the Taliban as the U.S. proxies after the Pak-SA-US coaltition threw the Soviets out. The U.S. didn’t abandon Afghanistan; it chose the Taliban as the leaders. The U.S. nation building effort! Dya think the U.S. can do any better now?

oh siun. it’s so heartbreaking. we kill and injure the afghanis and mentally destroy our soldiers. all at great economic cost. what if we spent all that money on developing alternative energy instead of trying to install leaders who will make a favorable deal with us over natural gas pipelines. obama has escalated this hideous war. i hate this.

I really don’t think you can keep or should keep a score! That is really a bit too much, to try and keep SCORE is in of it self vile!! Besides is this what it is all about or maybe we should be just mourning those innocents who were drawn into their deaths by those who have no value of life….

A truck full of aviation fuel makes a dandy bomb.

precisely

The version I remember is that the Soviets rolled over Afghanistan like oats. If it weren’t for the US-Pak-Saudi coalition, the Soviets won easily. And even with the UPS coalition, the Soviets sill were winning until the U.S. provided the opposition with shoulder fired rockets.

Which raises my perpetual unanswered Q. Why is the U.S. so incompetent that the U.S. can’t even duplicate what the Soviets did? The U.S. has more troops plus privateers in the country than the Soviets did? Is the U.S. incompetent or what?

But then again do ya think they could have defeated the Soviets without our help??

I do not deem to think I know the answer to this mess but I do know that the Taliban could care less about human life.. And they would just love to become the repressive Government that enabled Bin Laden and his ilk and put to death many Afghans!

Yes, America is not really in a position to speak ill of those who have “no qualms” since we, it appears, also have none.

Whatever a qualm is.

Well, if the U.S. has killed more innocents than the Taliban, depending on the order of magnitude (which I suspect is quite large), it could be quite revealing. How else would you judge the relative positions of the two sides? One is local and kills fewer people; the other is a foreign interloper and kills many more. If that were accurate (making no pretentions of knowing if that is accurate, justa hypothesis), you gotta go with the Taliban.

The Soviets easily toppled the existing government and installed a puppet but could not stabilize the entire country. After years of increasing bloodshed and squandered resources they cut their losses and left. Sound familiar?

Seems as though the Taliban were well on their way to losing before the UPS intervened. And why do you think the Taliban respects human life less than the U.S.? I was trained in science, and would determine the A to that Q by measurement, not by sentiment.

Not when it’s stuck.

Alexander the Great would recognize that story, too.

I don’t think that the math works in favor of the Taliban when judging civilians killed, particularly not if you use civilians deliberately killed.

The only reason the Soviets could not control Afghanistan was because US-Pak-Saudis used it as a proxy war. Otherwise the Soviets would have had it all under their control.

Never mainly because of the way they treated women and girls… They practiced a very Radical form of Islam that said that Women and females in general were no better than chattel and they exploited them incessantly! Why do you think the Afghans hate the Taliban?? This is not a game of numbers!!

Ahem, and the civilians killed by the U.S. are NOT deliberate? Surely you jest. The Taliban go thru their own justice system. The U.S. kills wantonly, with no system whatsoever.

But then again do ya think they could have defeated the Soviets without our help??

Yes.

Among other things, our involvement sowed the seeds of Al-Qaeda. I for one don’t believe training people across the globe in the art of murder and mayhem constitutes good foreign policy.

Most estimates place Taliban killings of Afghans higher than NATO/US ones and that may be quite accurate.

What is very difficult to factor in is our inability to actually define “Taliban” – so for example when our forces kill a number of Taliban who are actually local villagers who oppose foreign involvement, etc is that the same as when we are fighting one of the more formal Taliban groups with allegiance to the former repressive government, etc.

As is usually the case, there are probably no real good guys – but that does not excuse our bad guy actions.

So the US “war machine” creaks forward. We will again issue apologies and point out how brutal the Taliban are, as if that was justification for being there. We are the invaders, the Taliban live there, it’s that simple. Yet even the Obama admisistration has yet to see this. No, we are not brave warriors, as we see ourselves pictured on TV, in news reports and documentaries. We are boys playing with guns having no idea where all this is going and trying mightily to find reasons to justify it on a daily basis. But we can’t find those reasons, because there is no justification for it. Meanwhile, the propaganda machines glorify the “bravery” of our soldiers, as if they really belonged there, as if our clouded and confused goals are really worth them being there.

They weren’t supposed to be stuck and weren’t going to stay stuck. The Taliban gathered the villagers to get the trucks moving again. The fuel give away was in exchange for help and to lighten the load.
The Germans expected (so they said) that the trucks were going to be driven into their base and exploded.

never said it was good policy but the facts speak for themselves… without stinger missile the Soviets may be still there… But of course the Soviets had a slew of their own problems at home…..

Oh go to blazes. What business is it of ours how the Taliban or Pashtuns treat women? It’s their business and only theirs. And BTW, if you wish to intervene on such matters, the U.S. is gonna have more wars than you can shake a stick at.

Another BTW: during the Soviet puppetism of Afghanistan, women’s rights made great forward strides. They went to school in much greater numbers and came to be prominent, if not dominate, professions such as medicine. It was the backlash, when the UPS threw out the Soviets, and installed the Taliban, that was responsible for much of the anti-female situation of which you complain.

Link & numbers?

Yes it was a proxy war. The part about the Soviets being able to hold it is conjecture. If so, only at a high cost. I suspect that by the end of the ’80s at the latest, with the entire Soviet bloc unraveling, they’d have pulled out… So, not that different from what transpired.

Did we blow up the villagers deliberately?
And no, the Taliban don’t go through any type of justice system when they’re setting off bombs. They blew up twenty-one other Afghans at a ceremony at a mosque at about the same time as this incident.

Once again Siun thanks for showcasing the insanity of this phony war. Five and a half years in Irak and eight years in Afghanistan, what have we got, more war!

Why would anyone expect never ending military occupations to win the minds and hearts of a subjugated population. Militarily, these are the greatest failures in our history (if you do not include Viet Nam). This is not the fault of the boots on the ground, or even their commanders. The Bushie’s corrupted the military with lies, corruption, torture, and were working secretly for corporate war profiteering. Enough is enough.

Al Qaeda is a phony cooked up terror group, which began over 20 years ago and updated by the PNAC crew. Follow the money and you will find Exxon, Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs and Halliburton.

Lt. Col. Oliver L. North said today that CIA Director William J. Casey dreamed up an ultimate goal for the millions of dollars in excess profits generated from the Iran arms sales: a super-CIA, outside of the government, working secretly for U.S. foreign policy goals.

“The director was interested in going to an off-the-shelf, self-sustaining entity that could perform functions for the United States,” North said, and he saw nothing illegal or unconstitutional about such an extra-governmental operation.

Do you think the Afghans care whether or not it was deliberate? Sorry, we accidentally incinerated your family… still trying to win hearts and minds, though.

So I guess the U.S. & Saudi contribution of $20 billion/year, back when $20 billion was real money, was worthless, and U,S. Stingers, according to your calculation.

Good details here — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…..ghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)

The estimates are a bit hard to pin down of course.

So we should oblidge the taliban whenever they “set up” a trap for innocent bystanders, by killing the people they “set up”? this sounds like bad communication, bad judgement, bad execution, bad policy and bad omen. but we should go on with this because, why?

Don’t think they much care, but I expect that they’re rational and moral people able to understand the difference.

If the Soviets lost a proxy war, why can’t we win a war without proxies? Or are there proxies on the other side the US won’t name? Or is there actually no “winning” in Afghanistan, ever, for anyone?

Oh ecahn… Mistreating women for any reason is wrong! You know it! I didn’t say it was worth going to War over it but then again the Taliban enabled 9/11 and had we done the job right in the first place in 2001 we may still be there. Bush and his wish to have revenge on Saddam Hussein for his papa fucked every thing up!! We might even has some semblance of a democracy!! Put the blame where it belongs with the Bush Administration! Really just how many people have died because of those Criminals??

Of course the U.S. blows up Afghans indiscriminately, aka murder. When the U.S. sends bombs and drones, it has no idea whether the alleged target is legit or not. Mostly the intelligence is bogus, and the U.S. knows that. So such operations constitute deliberate murder of innocent parties.

Well.. if we can’t keep it from being stolen to begin with..and are quite willing to blow up stuck equipment, not going anywhere with fuel in it…. and quite willing to blow up a bunch of villagers ta boot.

We are no better than taliban. Certainly a strong competition for the low IQ, uber hubris award.

None of it makes any sense.. and the burning innocent flesh is all on our hands.

There is no good answer to the killing of innocents EVER! But then again at least the US does try and avoid/mitigate the killing of innocents..

Ah, but the U.S. made the treatment of women in Afghanistan worse by supporting the Taliban rather than the Soviets.

The Taliban had very little to do with 9/11. No one’s made the case that they knew what al Qaeda was doing (maybe they did, but I haven’t seen anyone on the U.S. side show the evidence). And the Taliban offered to turn OBL over to a legitimate Muslim authority. For any reasonable opponent, i.e., not the U.S., that would have been a starting point for negotiations.

I think your “analysis” is more than just a little bit juvenille. I dont think the occupation of afghanistan is serving any good purpose,they need a plan to withdrawl, a timetable and the will to carry it out. Blaming Obama for becoming preisdent 7 years into cheneys wars and demanding imediate complete withdrawl isnt helping anyone either.

How interesting to see the bombing justified by some when even McChrystal thought it was a mistake.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…..lians.html

I havent noticed that is true.i dont belive that is true.

If they can retain their rationality after inhaling the stench of burned flesh of friends and family they are indeed extraordinary. As for morality, the Taliban kill civilians, we kill civilians. Hard for me to believe either have a legitimate claim to moral superiority.

That seems to be a stub with further links. Any that are particularly revealing?

Respectfully, e, I don’t think that we’re indiscriminate in our bombing. We’ve been making quite a big deal about avoiding this type of horror.
I understand what you’re saying, but this was not deliberate murder legally or morally.
What it was, was something that we didn’t intend.

Try this link as a start – http://tinyurl.com/3txjex

Just the cold comfort of thinking that we want to avoid killing civilians and they find that to be of less importance.

You seem to be a victim of U.S. DOD propoganda. In how many of the bombings and drone attacks has the U.S. averred that it got an important opponent? Not very many by my causal keeping track. And, of course, any time the DOD claims they got a real enemy you gotta divide by 10 to get close to the real numberm, to discount for the propoganda factor. Just like the U.S. tortures anyone it feels like, the U.S. murders anyone it feels like. And the sooner you come to grips with this the sooner we can band together to stop it.

Very interesting reading the rationale of those here who support our intervention in Afghanistan. I wonder how many decades we’ll be there, to say nothing of the cost in NATO and Afghan lives. I have to assume that a corrupt puppet government supported by NATO, eventually only American, troops is acceptable, whether the Afghans like it or not.

Talk is cheap, like human life.

Would take a lot of time to add up the allegations, and who knows whether they are true or not. Perhaps I’ll give it a closer look tomorrow, so thanks for the link.

My reason for slanting toward the Taliban perpetrating fewer horrifics is that they still seem to have a lot of local support. If they were as bad as the U.S. sez, don’t think the local support would be forthcoming.

Thanks.

And, in terms of body count, one could argue that if the U.S. left, the Taliban might kill fewer people. I’m a victim of those incredible anti-Taliban U.S. art movies, so as far as I know, the Taliban kill and dismember people regardless of anything. But if this is the case, isn’t it up to the Afghans to address the problem themselves?

I prefer to follow the lead of RAWA who say “Neither the Taliban, nor warlords nor foreign invaders”

Remember that the Taliban are not one coherent force but many, some small local insurgent forces, some not. Read folks like Anand Gopal for reliable info.

Thanks, but I don’t always feel like I’m a propaganda victim or some simple cheerleader for any particular point of view.
I think I’m pretty much like everybody else, working with a very incomplete set of facts and trying to sort through them.

“Neither the Taliban, nor warlords nor foreign invaders”

And the other choice is? And who’s gonna make sure that is the chosen choice?

The US certainly didn’t have any qualms about the excesses of the Taliban prior to 9/11. IIRC it was only after the invasion that the rights of women, etc became an issue, you know, that whole “spreading democracy” mumbo jumbo.

Which facts make you think that the U.S. is not indicriminantly bombing Afghan and Pak civilians? It is abundantly clear that the U.S. indiscriminantly tortures. Is it such a stretch to think the U.S. indiscriminantly bombs?

Off to see the wizard.

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.

Namaste

One of the thoughtless glomons of U.S. feminists, who apparently knew nothing about the history or anthropology of Afghanistan. Lucky for me, I knew so little I was unable to comment, otherwise, I might have made great errors.

Afghans themselves – read RAWA and Malalai Joya for example.

I don’t think it’s indiscriminate. I think that once a “target” and his location are identified I don’t think they give a rat’s ass if anybody else is in the area. The intelligence certainly isn’t going to provide that information and the drone operator in Mog Mog, Iowa doesn’t have a clue. We hear the constant denials that civilians were in the area then the lame ass backtracking.

http://anandgopal.com/

It’s not even rational to think that the US indiscriminately bombs. We’ve got a hell of a lot of airplanes and a hell of a lot of bombs.
I would ask you to compare the bombing in Afghanistan to the level of bombing that we employed in WWII or Vietnam.
Here, we’re dropping bombs two at a time.

(and I would urge you to take a few minutes and read the RAWA stuff as Siun suggests.)

Americans need to be confronted with the suffering caused by our wars. During the Vietnam war, this kind of reporting sometimes made it into the mainstream US media, which helped turn the public against the war. The neocons knew that and consciously decided to “get it right this time”, and one of the ways of doing that was more censorship and control over the media. It’s a near total blackout as far as the suffering of people who are experienced by Americans as real people. Numbers don’t do it. It has to be visual and personal, as it is in this video.

“collateral damage” says it all, and it’s totally predictable when using air power. It’s also totally one-sided in a 3rd world country. Peasants are burned alive by anonymous high tech machines in the sky. Is it any wonder that the local people are enraged by this?

If you know any reporters, you might ask them if they’re discouraged from going to Afghanistan by our military.
In this war, it’s the other side that has one or two things that they use to discourage reporters from the West. You could look it up.

Good link.

Anyone else see this article in UK Daily Mail concerning alcohol use among coalition forces and how it is inhibiting investigation of this incident?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new…..lians.html

I don’t think that the report really means that investigation is being inhibited. I think it indicates that the General was displeased and is suggesting that he wants them to exercise care rather than their damned elbows.

This is what we have come to.

When Americans stand before God at the end of time, and we are judged, this will weigh heavily upon us. Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you?

All I can hope is, when my name is called, that I can respond, ” I tried, Lord, I tried.”

Lots of people live under governments they’d prefer not to. I am sure the Iraquis would prefer to be living under Saddam rather than have gone through the last eight years. Times change. Dictators die. Pinochet is a good example. We, in our infinite wisdom, installed him, but he passed. If we see ourselves as the lone ranger righting wrongs where we see them, we are deservedly despised. We had no business going into Afghanistan, although in our short sightedness we supported the Taliban against the Russians just as we supported Pol Pot. Our policy makers don’t care about non-white people. As for the Taliban setting those people up, that’s nonsense. Even if it were true, what does that make us for falling for it?

“Even if it were true, what does that make us for falling for it?”

Innocent.

When I confronted Rep. Rob Andrews of NJ about report that in 800 drone murders there were 16 targets and 784 extra murders, he didn’t deny the numbers. I think the thinking goes that if this “war” is going to go on for generations you might as well murder them before the grow up to resist your occupation forces.

Your tax dollars at work.

I don’t think he would deny it. He would probably just speak soothingly to you.