Afghanistan, air power takes out another wedding party.

[JohnyCanuck]

November 04, 2008 - "Globe and Mail" --- KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Dozens of Afghan civilians are dead and dozens more are wounded after a series of air strikes aimed at Taliban fighters fell short of their target and exploded in the middle of a wedding party in a mountainous region north of Kandahar city, tribal elders and wedding guests told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday.

Survivors of the attacks, which occurred in the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kowt on Monday evening, said the majority of the dead and injured were women – the bombs struck while male and female wedding guests were segregated, as is customary in Kandahar province.

They said the bodies of at least 36 women have been identified, and hundreds more men and women have been injured. Local leaders have yet to establish a firm casualty count because many of the victims remain buried beneath rubble, said Abdul Hakim Khan, a tribal elder from the district.

In interviews at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar city, where at least 16 male victims and dozens of female victims were being treated Tuesday night, several villagers described the attack. While Mr. Khan corroborated much of the information witnesses gave during a separate interview, it was not possible to independently verify their account or the numbers of dead and injured they gave.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21153.htm

The 'good war' is a bad wa
by John Pilger

SNIP

Indeed, Rawa’s understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a “good war”. When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: “We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in Karzai’s government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands.”

The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was “to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11”. The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: “By experience, that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region.”

The truth about the “good war” is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban’s links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America’s proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the “jihadi card” could be used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, during the Clinton years, they were admired for their “discipline”. Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “(the Taliban) are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history”.

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.”

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

[RC]

1. Why are we, the United States fighting any wars?

We made most of the terrorists in the first place by interfering with the internal affairs of many other countries, usually against the wishes of those countries. Our government lies to us about why we 'had to invade' or 'help' all these other countries we occupy. We need to bring our troops home no matter where they are and and stop this war mongering madness.

[deaniac21]

7. Countries in which there is a significant US military presence :

Iraq
Afganistan
Cuba
Bahrain
Greece
Belguim
Turkey
United Kingdom
Italy
Portugal
Spain
Netherlands
Germany
South Korea
Thailand
Japan

They ALL need to be home!

[leftchick]

2. another must read article on the 'good war'.......

I love John Pilger too. Thanks for that.


How We Lost the War We Won
A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

NIR ROSEN

Posted Oct 30, 2008 9:19 AM

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23612315/how_we_lost_the_war_we_won/print

• Embedded with the Taliban: Photos and commentary by Nir Rosen
• Video Interview: Nir Rosen on his experience in Afghanistan

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

<snip>

But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing more soldiers into combat won't help. "More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman."

It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree that the situation is, in the words of one official, "incredibly bleak." Using suicide bombers and other tactics imported from Iraq, the Taliban have cut Kabul off from the rest of the country and established themselves as the only law in many rural villages. "People don't want the Taliban back, but they're afraid to back the government," says one top diplomat. "They know the Taliban will ride into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition."

According to the diplomat, military solutions are simply no longer viable. "The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse," he says. "CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. You have an extremely weak president in Afghanistan, a corrupt and ineffective ministry of the interior, an army with no command or control, and a dysfunctional international alliance."

[Xipe Totec]

3. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it

First in Russian uniforms, then in American ones.

[ixion]

4. indeed

and Afghanistan has a long history of repelling invading armies... by breaking them down over time. We lost the campaign for the "hearts and minds" years ago, and bombing their wedding parties, as we seem to do with staggering consistency, is not going to change that.

Every country on this planet needs the other countries to some degree. We could solve all these issues by simply working together diplomatically. The key, much like punishing a child, is that it must be fair and consistent.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. Afghanistan—Great Power Rivalry and Energy Pipelines

Not a "Good War" Gone Bad
By LARRY EVEREST

SNIP

One thing that’s not been up for debate in the Presidential campaign is Afghanistan: both candidates (not to mention George W. Bush) agree on the urgent need to escalate – and win – that war. This stance has overwhelmingly gone unchallenged – even by most who opposed the invasion of Iraq. But the war in Afghanistan is not the proverbial "good war," now gone bad. It was an unjust, imperialist war of conquest and empire from the start. And it continues to be an unjust, imperialist war of empire today.

The war in Afghanistan was never simply a response to 9/11. It was conceived of by the Bush administration as the opening salvo in an unbounded war for greater empire under the rubric of a "war on terror." This war’s goal was to defeat Islamic fundamentalism, overthrow states not fully under U.S. control, restructure the Middle East and Central Asian regions, and seize deeper control of key sources and shipment routes of strategic energy supplies. All this grew out of over a decade of imperialist planning, strategizing and intervention. And from the beginning all of it was part of an overall plan to expand and fortify U.S. power—to create an unchallenged and unchallengeable global imperialist empire.

SNIP

Afghanistan—Great Power Rivalry and Energy Pipelines

During the 1990s, Afghanistan was one focal point of U.S. efforts to strengthen its grip on global energy sources and military-political supremacy. Afghanistan sits at the very heart of the Eurasian land mass. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, argued, "A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions.... About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well...Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources." (Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, New York, 1997)

Following the Soviet collapse, relations in the region were shifting rapidly. Five Central Asian Republics—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—formerly part of the Soviet Union were unmoored and up for grabs.

As A World to Win magazine analyzed in 2001: "As the Soviets retreated in the early 1990s, the U.S. imperialists thus embarked upon a policy to replace Soviet influence over the Central Asian countries with their own, to connect them into the world market and to break up the Russian monopoly over the pipelines to that market. They also set out to build an alternative to the Persian Gulf region as a key energy supply in order to reinforce the U.S.’s dominant global position. One of the key aspects of this was, of course, preventing Russia from re-emerging as a major rival in the region. The pipeline the U.S. needed had to cross through Afghanistan to Pakistan to the open seas in order to freely access the Western market." ("A History of the Imperialist ‘Great Game,’" A World to Win, 2002/28) The U.S. also sought to weaken and isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran by preventing pipelines from being built through Iran—a natural bridge to the Persian Gulf—and by surrounding it with hostile states. This was another reason the U.S. initially supported the Taliban in Afghanistan—it served as a "Sunni buffer" on Iran’s eastern border.

http://www.counterpunch.org/everest10172008.html

[bdamomma]

6. this is becoming a common occurrence.

terrible.

[JohnyCanuck]

8. kick n/t

[JohnyCanuck]

9. "End Civilian Deaths, Karzai Tells Obama"

End Civilian Deaths, Karzai Tells Obama
Afghan Says Airstrike Killed Dozens

By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 6, 2008; A03

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 5 -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday called on President-elect Barack Obama to end U.S. airstrikes that risk civilian casualties after coalition forces allegedly killed dozens of people at a wedding party in southern Afghanistan this week.

Karzai said that about 40 civilians were killed and 28 wounded Monday after coalition forces in Kandahar province bombarded the village of Shah Wali Kot during a clash with Taliban fighters in the region. Few details about the airstrike were available Wednesday, but Karzai said coalition troops called in the attack on a wedding party in the village as it traveled through the heart of Taliban territory.

Maj. John Redfield, a spokesman for the U.S. military, said U.S. and Afghan officials are investigating the claim. "We're aware of the claims of civilian casualties. In this case, it is uncertain from the facts what exactly happened," Redfield said. "If innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences to the families and the people of Afghanistan."

Karzai has repeatedly called on NATO and U.S. forces this year to reduce their reliance on airstrikes after several high-profile bombings that resulted in scores of casualties, including a strike in August that U.N. and Afghan officials said killed at least 90 civilians. Under pressure to soothe the public, Karzai has in recent months publicly excoriated Western military forces for their reliance on airstrikes to counter the fierce insurgency that has taken root across the country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Hamid+Karzai?tid=informline