I won’t say I am surprised, but I am highly disappointed. First the order to stop the trials at Gitmo, then the plans to shut Gitmo within the year, and now this. True to form….Democrats, especially inexperienced, ultra-liberal Democrats are not friends of the military.
God help this country.
Oh an my poll answer is definitely changed. I don’t need to wait any longer, he has pretty much ruined any chance that I will support him at all. And he did that within 11 days of taking office.
If you are interested in knowing how we got where we are today in the Global War on Terror, but more importantly the war we fight in Afghanistan then you need to check your local listings to watch “Inside The Taliban” on National Geographic Channel. Afghanistan has a long and colorful history as a country, but this only goes back to the post-Soviet timeframe. It covers in depth how Mullah Omar came into power, how Osama Bin Laden got into the country and who he was invited by (hint, it wasn’t the Taliban), and the culture that Afghanistan has which still exists today. This was not produced until 2006, while I was there which is a shame becuase I would have loved to have this knowledge before I went. In fact my Commanding General (BG Pritt), in Afghanistan is interviewed a few times during this documentary.
Again, this film really explains a lot and I think for anyone that cares about what is happening in Afghanistan, is about to go to Afghanistan or has been there and would like to know more about how they ended up there and maybe some of the reasons they saw the stuff they did…..this film is for you. You can read about it on National Geographic’s website at channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/inside-the-taliban-3274/Overview
LATE NOTICE- This week Scott Kesterson will be screening AT WAR at the Oregon Military Department. The screening will be on Friday, 30 January 2009 at 4pm in Conference Room 436. It is open to all military personnel.
Think of it as Facebook or Myspace, but for military only. It is called Together We Served and it is quickly growing into a great place to find old service-buddies, guys that were in your unit or anyone else that you may have known. You can get to it at army.togetherweserved.com/army and if you ever served in the Army, Marines, Air Force, or Navy there is a place for you. If you want to join, then send me an email at Troy@bouhammer.com and I will invite you.
I have linked up with lots of old buddies, some I haven’t seen in years. Facebook is fun, MySpace is popular, but your military brothers are the ones that count share bonds that none can break. Find them again by joining Together We Served.
The Frontier Post from India covers Afghanistan pretty good even though their articles are not formatted that well. They hit some pretty good points in this story and I must say I think the nickname “the mayor of Kabul” as hilarious and sadly very true. Karzai’s reach and influence does not go much beyond the city limits of Kabul.
Karzai fighting for political life
LONDON (NNI): Hamid Karzai is fighting for his political life. He has often been written off as “the mayor of Kabul”, but he does not intend to go quietly just because the Pentagon has increasingly seen him as an obstacle to its plans for a “surge” or increase in US troop strength by 20,000 or 30,000 to try to turn the corner in the Afghan war.
Karzai’s weaknesses are well known. He did not have his own party and is dependent on the US. His younger brother is believed to be one of the leading figures in the drug business. In the early years of his presidency, the US cultivated the Afghan warlords as allies, ignoring the fact that popular hostility to the warlords had been one of the causes of the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. No doubt Karzai has been ineffectual, but would anybody else do any better?
In response to what he deems to be moves to replace him or make sure that he does not stand again for the presidency in elections later this year, Karzai has been burnishing his nationalist credentials. At the opening session of the Afghan parliament, he criticised the US-led coalition for its conduct of the war, disregard for Afghan casualties of air strikes, its bypassing of the government, links to warlords and tolerance of drug traffickers. All this is strange behaviour for a man seen by many Afghans as a puppet of the US, The Independent reported.
Overall, Karzai is critical of the “surge” and with good reason. It will probably lead to intensified fighting in Afghanistan. The US-led coalition may be able to hold more ground but a greater foreign military presence may also lead to an Afghan nationalist backlash. A new US-backed candidate put forward for election might simply further discredit the government in Kabul as a foreign pawn. Karzai has been demanding greater control over allied operations.
The Pentagon’s enthusiasm for a surge in US troop numbers may be based on a false belief that it was this which transformed the war in Iraq. What really brought Iraq’s Sunni insurgency to an end was not extra US troops but fear on the part of the Sunni that they were being ethnically cleansed by the Shia majority. It is difficult to see the Taliban being defeated so long as they are able to base themselves across the border in Pakistan. It is also unlikely that the Pakistani army will ever abandon the Taliban as one of its few assets in the region, particularly at a time of increased tension with India.
Karzai has become increasingly close to Delhi and the US has not relished his denunciations of Pakistan. NNI
I have said it before and I will say it again. If the Afghans want to lower the number of “innocents” being killed by Coalition forces, then all they need to do is turn over the bad guys or stand up to them, or better yet the “innocents” should quit shooting at the Coalition forces.
A U.S.-Afghan rift grows as raid accounts differ
By Carlotta Gall- International Herald Tribune
Monday, January 26, 2009
MEHTARLAM, Afghanistan: The U.S. military declared the nighttime raid this month a success, saying it killed 32 people, all Taliban insurgents – the fruit of an emphasis on intelligence-driven use of Special Operations Forces.
But the two young men who lay wincing in a hospital ward here told a different story in mid-January, one backed up by the pro-American provincial governor and a central government delegation.
They said that 13 civilians had been killed and nine wounded when U.S. commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on Jan. 7 in the hunt for a known insurgent in Masamut, in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan. The residents were so enraged that they threatened to march on the U.S. military base here.
The conflicting accounts underscore a dangerous rift that has grown between Afghans and the U.S. forces trying to roll back widening Taliban control of the countryside.
With every case of civilian casualties or mistaken killings, the anger that Afghans feel toward the government and foreign forces deepens and makes residents less likely to help U.S. forces, Afghan officials said.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces are reluctant to share information about future military raids with local officials, fearing that the information will be passed on to the Taliban. Added to all that is a complication for U.S. forces here: many villagers are armed, in the absence of an effective local police force.
The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after a new American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including two women and three children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai.
Karzai condemned the raid, saying it had not been coordinated with Afghan officials, and called for such raids to stop. The U.S. military said that 15 armed militants, including a woman, had been killed.
In an indication of how serious the episode was, an U.S. military spokesman, Colonel Greg Julian, said a U.S. military investigation team would be sent to the area, The Associated Press reported.
Raids like the ones in Laghman Province by U.S. Special Operations Forces, on Jan. 7 and on Friday, have been a special focus of complaint for several years.
Provincial governors say the tactics used, and the lack of coordination with Afghan and other American and NATO forces, alienate villagers and cause unneeded casualties among civilians. The raids are undoing much of the good work done by other American and international troops and reconstruction teams, they say.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission warned that the lack of accountability of those conducting such raids, and the lack of redress for civilian victims, was stoking resentment. “The degree of backlash and community outrage that they provoke suggests they may often not be an advisable tactic within the Afghan context,” the commission concluded in a report in December.
Karzai said in an address at the opening of Parliament on Tuesday that he had once more sent written requests to U.S. forces and to NATO to end civilian casualties.
Afghans would never complain about casualties among their security forces, but they would never accept the suffering of civilians, he said, to a great shout of support from the chamber. The speaker of the Senate, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, followed with a warning that if more care was not taken, the nation could rise up against the foreign troop presence here.
A number of different U.S. units, Special Forces and others, have been conducting counterterrorism operations around the country for the past seven years, operating out of the Bagram and Kandahar airfields, and several small Special Forces bases. They do not operate under NATO command and usually do not coordinate their operations with Afghan forces, because they argue that the element of surprise is critical.
The raid in Masamut on the night of Jan. 7 was typical of many conducted in Afghanistan before.
U.S. Special Operations Forces entered the village under cover of darkness looking for a known Taliban insurgent, Gul Pacha, who was killed in the raid, along with a visitor to his home, another Taliban member, Bahadur Khan.
According to several villagers, the nighttime raid stirred alarm and confusion as people were roused from their sleep.
One of the first to be shot and killed was a man called Qasem, a member of the Afghan Border Police who was at home on leave. His brother, Wazarat Khan, said Qasem was killed as soon as he looked out his front door.
“We did not think they were Americans; we thought they were thieves,” he said. “They killed my brother right in the doorway.”
One of the men in the hospital, Abdul Manan, 25, who had a bullet wound in the shoulder, said he woke up when he heard a female neighbor calling for help and heard three shots. He said he came out of his house and saw soldiers wearing headlamps. “I thought they were smoking cigarettes,” he said. “They said something in English that I did not understand, and then they shot me.”
Another man, Darwaish Muhammad, 18, who lay in the hospital with shrapnel wounds, said he was awakened by the mother of a neighbor calling for help. Her son, Shahpur Khan, had been shot.
Muhammad said he and two others rushed to help carry the woman’s son on a rope bed down a slope outside the village to get help. They were 10 minutes from the village when a helicopter fired a rocket at them, killing the wounded man and two of the bearers. He and the boy’s mother were badly wounded but survived, he said.
A U.S. military spokesman, Colonel Jerry O’Hara, confirmed that U.S. air support forces had fired on a group of five carrying a wounded person outside the village. He said all five had been killed and all were militants. That some of the villagers survived may explain some of the discrepancy on the toll.
O’Hara added that care had been taken not to use air power inside the village, to avoid civilian casualties. He dismissed the villagers’ accounts that they had mistaken the soldiers for thieves. “I am not buying that,” he said. “These people were acting as sentries.”
In a statement, O’Hara said, “Coalition forces exercised great restraint and prevented any civilian casualties at the same time the enemy placed the whole village in harm’s way by operating the way they do.”
The villagers of Masamut readily acknowledged that Pacha had been a member of the Taliban. They had even nicknamed him “Al Qaeda.” But they criticized the U.S. forces for killing his elderly father and two sons along with him, and for the shooting of the other villagers.
The governor of Laghman Province, Lutfullah Mashal, acknowledged that some of the villagers were armed. But he explained that because there was no police force to speak of in rural areas, villages kept security through a kind of neighborhood watch. “Whoever came out with a weapon, he was shot because the American forces have night-vision devices,” the governor said.
