U.S. says airstrike killed 30 Taliban militants - Bush's puppet says they killed 76 civilians

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-afghan24-2008aug24,0,5206231.story

The U.S. military says its airstrike on militants in Herat province killed 30 people, including five women and children, and it will investigate the Afghan report.

By M. Karim Faiez and Laura King, Special to The Times
August 24, 2008

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- President Hamid Karzai on Saturday denounced an airstrike by U.S.-led forces that his government said killed 76 Afghan civilians.

Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive subject in Afghanistan, where the government has repeatedly pleaded with Western troops to exercise greater care to avoid injuring and killing noncombatants. Karzai broke down in tears during one such appeal.

The U.S. military initially put the number of dead at 30, describing all of those killed Friday in a remote part of Herat province, on Afghanistan's western border, as Taliban militants. On Saturday, U.S. spokesmen said that five of the dead were believed to be women or children, and that allegations of a much higher and predominantly civilian death toll would be investigated.

[dysfunctional press]

1. as a member of the world community...

we SUCK!

[sarge43]

2. Bet the young male relatives of those 30 people

are feeling all warm and fuzzy toward the USofA right now. So, kill a handful of militants and create maybe that many more.

And the beat goes on.

[Strelnikov_]

3. But . . but . . They hate us for orur freedom? n/t

[sarge43]

5. See below

Having your family reduced to ground round just because they were in the way is absolutely no reason to be upset. Really, these people tend to over react.

:sarcasm: (just in case)

[JohnyCanuck]

4. Pentagon's generals say, "What's a little collateral damage between friends!"

The Good War is a Bad War

John Pilger

SNIP

Acclaimed as the first “victory” in the “war on terror”, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra, his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. “Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are innocents,” Gulam Rasul told me. “Was the killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt.”

There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as “Taliban”; or, if they are children, they are said to be “partly to blame for being at a site used by militants” – according to the BBC, speaking to a US military spokesman.

The British military have played an important part in this violence, having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they took over command of Nato forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a contrived news event was the “fall” of a “Taliban stronghold”, Musa Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to “liberate” rubble left by American B-52s.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=470

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Brutal and corrupt warlords turned into democrats

The Afghan fire looks set to spread, but there is a way out

Seumas Milne

snip

In a damning indictment of the impact of Nato's occupation on Afghanistan, aid agencies reported earlier this month that insecurity was spreading to previously stable areas and the killing of civilians by all sides rising sharply. The US air force seems to have developed a particular habit of attacking wedding parties - last month 47 civilians were killed in one strike - while British troops, who lost 13 soldiers in June alone, killed a woman and two children last weekend, which the high command naturally blamed on the Taliban.

This is the conflict western politicians have convinced themselves is the "good war", in contrast to the shame of Iraq. Britain's defence secretary, Des Browne, recently declared it "the noble cause of the 21st century". Nicolas Sarkozy, who faces a similar level of domestic opposition to the Afghan imbroglio as in Britain, insists that France is fighting for "democracy and freedom". Barack Obama calls it the "central front" in the war on terror and, like Gordon Brown, is committed to transferring troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to bolster the fight.

snip

The original aims of the invasion, it will be recalled, were the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the destruction of al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the US and its friends brought back to power an alliance of brutal and corrupt warlords, gave them new identities as democrats with phoney elections, and drove the Taliban and al-Qaida leaderships over the border into Pakistan.

Far from reducing the threat of terrorism, this crucible of the war on terror has simply spread it around the region, bringing forth an increasingly potent campaign of resistance and giving a new lease of life to a revamped Taliban as a champion of Pashtun nationalism. And as mission creep has detached the Afghan war from its original declared target of al-Qaida - let alone the claims made about women's rights, which have been going into grim reverse again in much of the country under Nato tutelage - it has morphed into the kind of war of "civilisation" evoked by Sarkozy and Browne, a certain recipe for conflict without end. No wonder British politicians have talked about digging in for decades.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/afghanistan.nato

Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time
By CRAIG MURRAY (former British ambassador to Uzbekistan)

snip

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government ? the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.

When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons ? especially those grouped in the Northern Alliance ? to do the ground occupation. We bombed the Taliban and their allies into submission, while the warlords moved in to claim the spoils. Then we made them ministers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469983/Britain-protecting-biggest-heroin-crop-time.html