‘Nother ‘Nam
Filed Under Bullshit, Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
“To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
– Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968
Uncle Walter could have most-easily been talking about Afghanistan, where yesterday 12 US peoples were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber struck a vehicle in a NATO military convoy.
Four Afghans, including two students, were also killed.
In the US, at least a baker’s dozen of mothers will be weeping in unimaginable sorrow — a continuing grief that apparently has no end, even as a big majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war, a conflict which started right, but has become a beyond-Halloween horror show.
(Illustration of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman I‘ found here).
The Afghan war has morphed into a terrible stalemate, the dying of more US military service people will continue unabated if the war continues on its current path, and there ain’t no indication it won’t.
According to the CNN story, four US GIs and eight US contractors were killed in the blast — first reports told of five American soldiers dying, but later released word one of those was Canadian.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident — a suicide driver/bomber drove a Toyota packed with 1,800 pounds of explosives into an armored bus, called a RhinoRunner (typically a 13-ton vehicle described by its builder as “The Toughest Bus on Planet Earth”).
Well, not so much against a Toyota packed with exploding shit.
And WTF this: Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said the incident is indicative of an attack where a suicide bomber will “drive up and down the roads waiting for a target.”
Apparently, an opportunity kind of approach.
Also on Saturday, 10 Australian soldiers were fired upon by a trainee Afghan soldier in Kandahar Province, killing three and wounding seven — an interpreter was also killed.
The shooting occurred at a morning parade, and despite it all, the shooter was said to be a rogue soldier, yet he had been in the army for three years.
Meanwhile, one incident didn’t pan out when a female suicide bomber was stopped outside a branch of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in northeaster Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, and then detonated her package, injuring five people, two civilians and three security officials — she was the only fatality and had awaited for hours at a nearby female-only bus stop before attacking.
A casual-like oddity, huh?
And this was just Saturday.
The whole theater of war has become infected — some ‘major‘ incidents:
– Sept. 20: An insurgent with a bomb wrapped in his turban assassinates former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading a government effort to broker peace with the Taliban.
The explosion kills four bodyguards and also wounds of a key presidential adviser working to lure Taliban fighters off the battlefield.
— Sept. 13: Taliban insurgents fire rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans in the coordinated daylight attack.
No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt.
— Aug. 19: Taliban suicide bombers storm the British Council, the U.K.’s international cultural relations body, killing eight people during an eight-hour firefight as two English language teachers and their bodyguard hid in a locked panic room on the anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain.
— Aug. 6: A CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashes in eastern Wardak province after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing 30 U.S. special operation troops, a translator, and seven Afghan commandos.
— June 29: Nine insurgents armed with explosive vests, rifles and rocket launchers storm the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul, killing at least 12 people and holding off NATO and Afghan forces for five hours.
…
— Feb. 26: Suicide attackers strike two residential hotels in Kabul, killing 20 people, including seven Indian nationals.
And in September, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of US training for the Afghan military reported (from Wired‘s Danger Room blog): Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.
Which would explain why the guy who shot and killed the Australians, supposedly a three-year veteran, was still considered a trainee.
Not only that, 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, which led Caldwell to say that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.”
Instead of truth, US peoples get bullshit.
From Time magazine:
Last week, the Pentagon sent Congress its required semi-annual assessment that said a “firm foundation” exists to shift responsibility for defending the country from foreign to Afghan troops.
“After five consecutive years where enemy-initiated attacks and overall violence increased sharply each year (example, up 88 percent in 2010 over 2009),” the report noted, “such attacks began to decrease in May 2011 compared to the previous year and continue to decline.”
In the latest CNN/ORC International Poll released Friday, 63 percent of US respondents opposed the war:
But that opposition is not a reflection of the original decision to get involved in Afghanistan a decade ago,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“It’s what Afghanistan has turned into in the subsequent decade that has soured Americans on the war effort there.”
The survey indicates that 57 percent say it was not a mistake to send military forces to Afghanistan in October 2001, several weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
But according to the poll, 58 percent now say that the war in Afghanistan has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in Vietnam, six points higher than the number who felt that way a year ago.
The horror is that ordinary US peoples can’t do a thing about it.
Nowadays, we’re not as naive and ignorant as we were in February 1968, when Cronkite gave his grim assessment of the Vietnam war — LBJ’s supposedly infamous retort: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America” — but then again, there wasn’t a Fox News in them days either.
The situation in Vietnam had been highly-altered in 1968 by the Tet Offensive, which was just winding down when Uncle Walter rendered his editorial, and had changed the landscape of how US peoples viewed the grinding conflict.
From Gallop polling via PBS, Americans responded to the question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”
The results — in August 1961, 61 percent had said “no,” it was not a mistake, and by February 1968, that number had dropped to 42 percent, and by May 1971, only 28 percent.
And most-telling from those polls, however, was from a secondary question of ‘Proportion classifying themselves as “hawks”‘ — before the Tet offensive, the amount was 60 percent, after Tet, them hawks had flown down to 41 percent.
Disaster compounded by lies will change attitudes.
And with that current CNN poll of 63 percent of respondents opposing the Afghan war, it led to UK’s ultra-right-wing The Daily Mail dishing President Obama for both the war, and, the floundering health care system, comparing the two to a horrific 2012 election: It is difficult to imagine the re-election of a president whose No. 1 foreign policy and No. 1 domestic policy both flopped while unemployment rose.
Of course, no one on the right ever, never brings up the Iraqi war, which actually doomed the Afghan effort and put the US in the quagmire it finds itself today.
Canker in the ‘Predator Pie’
Filed Under Just Plain War, Orwellian, Technology | Leave a Comment
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says.
“But no one’s panicking.
“Yet.”
(Illustration found here).
The quote above comes from a Danger Room blog post on a computer virus that’s infested the US unmanned drone program, and although reportedly the canker hasn’t bothered flight operations at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the problem is no one knows for sure the source.
And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus.
“We think it’s benign.
“But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks.
The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread.
But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech.
That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
This throws a stick in the flywheel — drones are the future of US military adventures.
Even though officially the program doesn’t exist — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — it might be the single worst kept secret in the U.S. government.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, may as well have confirmed what most of the world already knows when he made two light-hearted references to the secret CIA drone program during a trip to Italy.
When the subject of Predator drones came up Friday during an appearance here at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Mr. Panetta said that in his old job, he had become “very familiar” with Predators.
Earlier in the day, speaking to Navy sailors in Naples, he made another crack about the effectiveness of Predators.
“Having moved from the CIA to the Pentagon, obviously I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had in the CIA, although the Predators weren’t bad,” Mr. Panetta said.
Leon is just one big belly laugh, huh?
The evolution of UAVs — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — is not all that hilarious, however, and has more than just a whiff of souless terminator about its infrastructure.
In February 2001, the machines unknowingly became self aware with the successful launch off itself of Hellfire missiles, thus, helping it evolve from a non-lethal, reconnaissance asset to an armed, highly accurate tank killer.
Or whoever.
The cowboy in George Jr. smoothed the transition — the first reported UAV-assassination use was in November 2002 with the blasting away of a SUV in the deserts of Yemen.
The SUV supposedly contained Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and some other guys — all were killed.
This, however, near the bottom of the USATODAY article reporting the incident (the link above): A Predator targeted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar at the start of the war on Afghanistan, but military lawyers could not decide whether he could be struck, officials have said. Its missiles were ultimately fired near him, but not to kill him.
Odd that, considering most-recent history.
The U.S. made nine drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007, 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009 — Obama’s first year in office — and 118 in 2010.
Through Oct. 2, 2011, a recorded 60 strikes.
Under George Jr., a drone strike every 40 days, and with Obama, way-up to one every four days.
All this bad shit by two drone operations — one through the US military, the other via the CIA.
The latter, according to a detailed New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, is the boner:
The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there.
As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare.
The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based.
It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel.
The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.
And this bit is from nearly two years ago.
So now the killing via drone in late September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki has revealed more publicly the darkness behind UAVs.
The al-Awlaki incident has opened a legal can of worms, raised all kinds of moral and ethical questions, but the concern is too late.
From Reuters:
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said.
Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Glenn Greenwald has a most-interesting post on the subject here, and this note: Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list — in secret, without a shred of due process — would be a bridge too far?
And the other side of the bridge?
Unimaginable security opportunities.
Technology eventually shrinks both costs and ease of use — metro drones could eliminate the need for a lot of actual police officers, and with some modification, ID the shit out of just about anything:
A miniature airborne drone has helped archaeologists capture images for creating a 3-D model of an ancient burial mound in Russia, scientists say.
Archaeological sites are often in remote and rugged areas.
As such, it can be hard to reach and map them with the limited budgets archaeologists typically have.
Scientists are now using drones to extend their view into these hard-to-reach spots.
“There are a lot possibilities with this method,” said researcher Marijn Hendrickx, a geographer at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
Ah, the possibilities…
Info/intell off a little battery-powered four-propeller “quadrocopter” could just as easily be sent to the Creech Air Force Base control room or the local FBI/Pentagon/CIA shop, which could trigger the appearance of the quad’s bigger, and much-more-violent cousins, instead of some archaeologists mapping ancient tombs.
One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the possibilities.
And these machines are already flying over the US — working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, fire fighting in Arizona and Texas, inspecting flood damage along the Mississippi River, and so forth.
Reaper drones are in training in northern New York state: Army officials say the pilots will randomly pick out targets such as buildings and vehicles to observe during the training flights.
Which brings up this from the LA Times last month: Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the unregulated use of drone aircraft “leaves the gates wide open for a dramatic increase in surveillance of American life.”
However, these machines are becoming more and more domesticated, as one guy says in the above story: “People are constantly coming up and wanting a piece of that Predator pie.”
Of course, the very name, Predator, means there’s nasty-pointed thorns in that pie.
The actual indiscriminate horror on the ground in the near-vicinity of these UAV attacks is not so sweet for any bystanders, men, women, or children.
Just this morning, Press TV reported 16 civilians were killed and 50 others injured in a drone strike in southern Somalia near the border with Kenya — US operates drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.
And whole killing operation is bullshit, especially from within the US government.
The CIA claims no civilians have been killed in drone strikes for over a year — the New York Times last August begged to differ: In a UAV strike in May which bagged a bunch of insurgents, the CIA claimed no innocents died, but a report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists reveals the strike hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, and although the militants died, so did six civilians.
Says the Times: Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.
Hard to fathom Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, huh?
Obama’s antics since in office apparently prompted this commentary from Pakistan’s The Nation:
Obama is, in short, the Rambo of drone warfare and so it is not fair to accuse him of being soft on terrorists.
This is a heavily caveated assessment, for one of the differences between Obama and Bush is that Bush developed a more coherent and systematic strategy and embedded the kinetic dimension within that larger strategy (reasonable people can debate how effective the Bush administration was in implementing that strategy).
Obama’s overall strategy is not as coherent and systematic (cf. Iraq policy, artificial and arbitrary timelines, inattention to mobilising support, etc.).
And on some of his terror policies, the incoherence does seem tied in part to what critics could consider “softness.”
But there is no doubt that Obama, as he promised during the 2008 campaign, has shown a vigour in deploying one important weapon in his arsenal: drone strikes.
Obama and change, but ‘Rambo?’
Toll of Endless War
Filed Under Bullshit, Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
“How can we let this happen? How is that acceptable in the United States of America? The answer is, it’s not. It’s an outrage. And it’s a betrayal — a betrayal — of the ideals that we ask our troops to risk their lives for.”
– Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, April 2008, reacting to the suicide of an 89-year-old WWII veteran
War is nowhere fun.
In this so-called modern age, however, war is everywhere — more of a world at war then even the two named world wars, and US GIs are getting the shit end of the stick.
And from noted war correspondent Richard Engel on NPR last month: “And I’ve seen battles like this on little outposts in other parts of Afghanistan and when you add them up, [you ask] ‘Why? What are these amounting to?’”
Yes, the $1.2 trillion question.
Right now, there’s about 40,000 troops still in Iraq and more than 90,000 in Afghanistan, and although the US is supposed to be out of Iraq by this December, it’s still up in the air about how many will remain, while apparently we’ll be involved in the Afghan horror for years to come.
(Illustration found here).
Not only are these war zones horrible, these GIs are bring the horror home with them.
Although 96 percent of soldiers are proud of their service, the trauma will remain with them seemingly forever.
In a study by Veterans for Common Sense, nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions, and the situation won’t get better for a long while.
From McClatchy Newspapers:
“A large number of people serving overseas have mental health impacts, and more and more are coming home,” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “I am deeply concerned that we are not ready.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is trying to grapple with the wave of new and damaged veterans, has been under considerable stress.
In a related development this week, an internal VA survey requested by Murray’s committee found that its staff doesn’t think it has the resources to handle the growing demand from new veterans for mental health services.
Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that in 2003, the government expected that the VA would see about 50,000 new patients from both wars.
With nearly three-quarters of a million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans already in the VA system, he said, the long-term estimate was “ominous.”
“More than 1 million total patients from the wars by the end of 2013,” Sullivan predicted.
And some terrible stats:
Of the 109,000 casualties since combat in Iraq and Afghanistan began, 6,200 troops have been killed.
Among those were 298 war-zone suicides, according to the study.
Overall, it reported 2,300 active-duty suicides since 2001.
Suicides have been a persistent problem, underscoring the stress that 10 years of war have placed on the troops as a result of multiple deployments.
In 2009, suicides exceeded deaths in combat.
The study said that nearly 1 million troops — 42 percent of all service members sent to the combat zones — have been deployed at least twice.
And these wars appear nowhere at an end.
A new Pew Research poll reports a third of US military think all this war mongering is not worth it and we should get our ass out of foreign shit and focus more on shit at home.
From the UK’s The Guardian:
One in three US veterans of the post-9/11 military believes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and a majority think that, after 10 years of combat, America should be focusing less on foreign affairs and more on domestic problems, according to an opinion poll.
…
The Pew survey found that veterans were ambivalent about the net value of the wars, although they were generally positive about Afghanistan, which has been a more protracted but less deadly conflict for US forces.
One in three veterans said neither war was worth the sacrifice; a view shared by 45 percent of the public polled.
Some 50 percent of veterans said the campaign in Afghanistan had been worthwhile; 41 percent of civilians agreed.
Among veterans, 44 percent said the war in Iraq was necessary; 36 percent of civilians shared that view.
Of the former service members who were seriously wounded or knew someone who was killed or seriously wounded, 48 percent said the war in Iraq was worth fighting, compared with 36 percent of those with no personal exposure to casualties.
Exposure to casualties had an even larger impact on attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan.
Some 55 percent of those exposed to casualties said the military campaign in Afghanistan had been worth the cost to the US, whereas 40 percent of those who were not exposed to casualties held that view.
And the survey also touched upon US civilian outlooks on the military:
Pew said its survey results found “isolationist inclinations” among the war veterans.
About six in 10 said the US should pay less attention to problems overseas and instead concentrate on issues at home.
In a survey it conducted earlier this year, a similar share of the public agreed.
The results also reflected what many view as a troublesome cultural gap between the military and the public.
Although numerous polls have shown that Americans hold troops in high regard, the respondents in the Pew research admitted to a lack of understanding of what military life entails.
Only 27 percent of adult civilians said the public understood the problems facing those in uniform, while the proportion of veterans who said so was even lower at 21 percent.
The toll of war on the homeland for generations to come.
And somebody should ask Obama about the political reality of his use of the word, betrayal.
Dismay-In-Chief
Filed Under Just Plain War, Lying, Politics, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
One despicable poll out Tuesday from the American Red Cross really, really reveals just how far the US war machinery has influenced its people, especially the young.
Nearly 3/5 youth (59%) – compared to 51% of adults – believe there are times when it is acceptable to torture the enemy.
More than 2/5 youth (41%) believe there are times when it is acceptable for the enemy to torture captured American prisoners, while only 30% of adults agree.
More than half of youth (56%) believe that there are times when it is acceptable to kill enemy prisoners in retaliation if the enemy has been killing American prisoners, while only 29% of adults agree.
When you use torture as part of your game plan, and then don’t prosecute US war criminals when all the horror comes to light then maybe one can not be surprised how this carries with the young — how this country’s future will be blighted.
George Jr. and his whole crowd, of course, are war criminals — proclaiming torture and using torture as a game plan of war — and when President Obama came into power he backed away from bringing these charges, making him an accessory after the fact and a major negative influence on this country’s future.
Most-likely the US people who are hurting the most right now are the people who not only voted for Obama, but actually took him at his word(s) circa 2007/2008.
One of the best, and most heartfelt examples of this let down was found this past weekend from a blogger with a handle of brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos reflecting pain and a not-so-happy future.
A couple of nuggets:
Instead of being the public leader, the transformational leader, that many of us expected, the leader he campaigned to be, he’s shrunk. \He’s just become another Washington insider playing the insider game. The insider game has him making choices between shutting down the government and stepping on the poor.
The insider game has him choosing between tax cuts for the wealthy or declaring war on the unemployed middle class.
The insider game has convinced him there is almost nothing he can do about the housing crisis.
The insider game has him appointing a corporate CEO who ships jobs overseas as the head of his domestic jobs council.
The insider game has him appointing the very same people who ran the economy into the ground as his principal economic advisers.
He told us of a Washington that was broken, but he was quite mistaken.
Washington works just fine.
Just not for regular people.
…
Lets face facts: fundamental change just isn’t going to happen by his doing.
He’s not that kind of guy, despite the high-flying rhetoric.
That is something we must live with, especially considering the alternatives.
For fear of what could come, he deserves to keep his job.
But if there is going to be any real change for the better in this country, it is going to have to happen in spite of him, and on occasion probably against his wishes.
His actions these past six months have made it clear he isn’t even interested in tinkering anymore.
He’s made his peace with the establishment.
The people of Wisconsin are showing us the way forward.
When I saw the president last week, I realized, sadly, that the Wisconsin Way is the only way forward.
Way sad, but very-much true.
War is the amphetamine of power and despite the age, the world is involved in total war, total time, thanks to George Jr. and his henchmen, and allowed to continue by Obama.
One of the best observers around on Obama’s war-hood-ness is Andrew Bacevich, who has a great post up at tomdispatch about how US-led conflicts are ending up disasters.
Some thoughts:
For all sorts of reasons, the expectations raised by Barack Obama’s arrival in the Oval Office were especially high.
Americans weren’t the only ones affected.
How else to explain the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor the new president by transforming its Peace Prize into a Prize Anticipating Peace — more or less the equivalent of designating the winner of the Heisman Trophy during week one of the college football season.
Of course, if the political mood immediately prior to and following a presidential inauguration emphasizes promise and discovery (the First Lady has biceps!), it doesn’t take long for the novelty to start wearing off.
Then the narrative arc takes a nosedive: he’s breaking his promises, he’s letting us down, he’s not so different after all.
The words of H.L. Mencken apply. “When I hear a man applauded by the mob,” the Sage of Baltimore wrote, “I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.”
Barack Obama has now lived long enough to attract his fair share of hisses, boos, and catcalls.
…
The key point is this: like those who preceded them, neither Obama nor his Harpies (nor anyone else in a position of influence) could evidently be bothered to assess whether the hammer actually works as advertised — notwithstanding abundant evidence showing that it doesn’t.
Bacevich’s term ‘Harpies‘ means Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council Human Rights Director Samantha Power — maybe the influence behind the throne.
Apparently the future is so bleak and dark, I’ll surely not need shades — a little sunshine would create more dismay.
War in the Not-Abstract
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome.”
“…once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few.”
– Erasmus and War, 14th Century
(Illustration of Picasso’s “Massacre in Korea” found here via Google Images).
Despite the advance of so-called civilization, this particular era of human history would be much-considered a time of continuous war, and in conflicts circling the globe, the US has its cruel fingers wagging in most of them.
And despite President Obama proclaiming no US military boots on the ground in Libya, he was lying — the CIA already thin-skinned boots kicking up Libyan dust, and now it seem the US will indeed put our GIs on the stalemated Libyan ground.
War not in the abstract.
And the shit in Libya is gonna require more Western bootstraps as the so-called Libyan rebels are complaining enough is not being done by NATO.
From Der Spiegel:
But the Libyan rebels are not alone in their complaints: Within NATO, there is also increasing frustration at the slow progress on the ground.
The seemingly rudderless attacking and fleeing of the untrained fighters in the face of government soldiers is causing the Western allies to despair, albeit not in public, because it looks more and more likely that the undeclared aim of the international intervention — the removal of dictator Moammar Gadhafi — will probably never be achieved.
And again, Obama has said regime change is not in the plans — Yeah, right.
Meanwhile back at the bad burning pile of bushes — Afghanistan.
Even as US troops die, the anti-US feeling in Afghanistan, and Pakistan for that matter, is off the charts, as the theater of war in the area is going way south.
This is due mainly to everyday people getting the shaft: In both Afghanistan and Pakistan the domestic security situation is fast deteriorating, their economies are faltering, their governments are seen as corrupt and incompetent and ordinary people cannot see any improvement in their lives.
Events go downhill from there.
In a post at Counterpunch, Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier and a former president of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, describes Why the US is Doomed in Afghanistan.
He picks up on the infamous and notorious US “Kill Team.”
A few nuggets:
In ‘The Kill Team’, carried by ‘Rolling Stone’ on March 27 this year, Mark Boal revealed the exploits of ‘Bravo Company’, in which Staff Sergeant David Bram and Corporal Jeremy Morlock on one fine morning, early last year, decided to chalk up kills of innocent Afghans.
They picked them at random during their patrols or ‘cordon and search’ operations, took them to a ditch and shot them, collecting tips of little fingers as souvenirs and taking hundreds of photographs.
Everyone was in on the kills, many others joined in. the whole company was jubilant, taking photographs of each other with the dead body; one smiling, the other rakishly smoking a cigarette.
No effort was made to stop or discipline the men; in fact, all officers of Bravo Company helped cover for them, even as they continued their killing spree.
Finally, when one of their colleagues ratted on them, they threatened to kill him on their next outing.
Even that was covered up, but fortunately for the Rat, the story broke before his elimination.
According to Boal, Gen McChrystal and Hamid Karzai learnt of this scandal May last year.
Both joined in the cover up, destroying whatever documents, disks, hardware, software, photographs, and any other incriminatory evidence that could be found, while the killing continued.
Early this month, Morlock was finally sentenced to twenty four years, though no action is being initiated against any officer at any level.
Boal concludes his expose with, “Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur.
“None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.
Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan.
“Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ‘em.”
An eye-oping post — read the whole thing.
And how to explain this shit.
From the UK’s The Independent:
Something is happening at the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that mental health experts are finding hard to explain: British and American soldiers appear to be having markedly different reactions to the stress of combat. In America, there has been a sharp increase in the number experiencing mental-health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Between 2006 and 2007 alone, there was a 50 per cent jump in cases of combat stress among soldiers and suicides more than doubled. Why the precipitous rise? And why hasn’t there been an accompanying rise in these symptoms among British troops?
The conclusion that British soldiers appear to have a different psychological reaction to the stresses of these modern conflicts was the finding of several recent high-profile studies.
…
The simple but mind-bending truth is that mental illnesses such as PTSD can be both culturally shaped and utterly real to the sufferer.
And the real losers are everybody.