Breach of trust

[Forkboy]

Leaked documents indicate deadly flaws in US-Afghan relations

PRESIDENT OBAMA must confront fresh revelations that the Afghan war itself and Pakistan’s alleged duplicitous participation remain out of control. On Sunday, The New York Times, the Guardian in London, and Der Spiegel in Germany published unflattering classified military documents leaked by WikiLeaks, an Internet whistleblower organization. As for the war, the excerpts from 2004 to the end of 2009 portray a quagmire. The US effort to train Afghan security forces continues to be undermined by corruption, police brutality and defections to the Taliban. Civilian casualties continue to alienate the Afghan people from American forces.

Some of those civilian casualties have come in the escalating number of secret special operations. In one botched raid intended to capture or kill a high-level member of Al Qaeda, a US rocket strike killed seven children. After the rocket strike, Army Delta Force and Navy Seal commandos swooped down and killed six men. ln the aftermath, the governor of the region was given “talking points’’ by the US military to calm angry villagers. The governor ended up blaming local people for not exposing the presence of insurgents.

Another coalition air strike was ordered on the pretense that insurgents were making off with stolen fuel trucks. It ended tragically when the bombs killed 60 civilians who were trying to remove fuel from abandoned trucks.

Added up, the Times said the reports “illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.’’

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/07/27/breach_of_trust/