Afghanistan 'like a human abattoir'

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/story.html?id=c3891785-e9bd-4f61-9d56-f7b676668487

OTTAWA -- Canadian troops pelted with rocks by hostile Afghans, French soldiers disemboweled by Taliban fighters, and paratroopers soiling themselves at the thought of facing fierce enemy fire.

Increasingly, these are the accounts that are emerging from southern Afghanistan and they are not coming through official channels, nor through the newspaper reports and television broadcasts of the Canadian, British and U.S. forces who fight under the NATO banner in the war-torn country.

Those reports are governed by a contract that restricts the movements of journalists and the types of information that can be reported from Afghanistan. Unlike the official accounts, those from soldiers are the descriptions that the government does not want Canadians to see. They come directly from the soldiers in the field who have relayed the grisly details of combat through Internet postings and e-mails to friends and family back home.

They detail some of the fiercest fighting that soldiers have encountered in the country, and the stark horrors of combat.

"We headed off to what can only be described as the Wild West," one Canadian artillery officer wrote of a July 6 mission in Helmand province in support of a company of British soldiers under attack from Taliban fighters. The Brits had been reduced to boiling river water to drink after a failed air drop of supplies that ended up in the hands of the Taliban.

[jhrobbins]

1. I know it's French, but I still hate that word - in any language...

And yet it seems so appropos for this issue.

[teryang]

2. NATO forces crazy to take this mission on

They bought the "war on terror" propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Are they taking on the Taliban for the opium warlords? Are the opium warlords the basis for "democracy" in Afghanistan?

[SoCalDem]

3. Fighters who will willingly die, are almost impossible to defeat

Even during the height of the "big war", most enemy soldiers wanted to live.. Fighting a religious war, against an enemy who faces glorious martyrdom in death, is an enemy you cannot vanquish.

People who have noting to lose, fight forever..and if they die, their progeny picks up where they left off.

rinse & repeat

[Jed Dilligan]

4. Not so sure about that...

The Japanese soldiers were pretty reluctant to surrender--maybe no less self-sacrificing than today's jihadi.

Also, SS soldiers knew they would be killed if captured so they generally fought to the death.

[pscot]

5. But we had a lot more enthusiasm

for killing Japanese and SS than we do for killing Arabs. In that sort of war it takes moral clarity to do what needs to be done. I don't see that we really have that going for us in the middle east.

[Jed Dilligan]

7. That may be true

I think it isn't a matter of enthusiasm for killing but willingness to self-sacrifice. Plenty of Americans would be happy to slaughter defenseless Arabs, but fewer of us today would charge that machine-gun nest or throw ourselves on a grenade. Selfishness is the state religion now.

[pscot]

6. You may not be able to vanquish them

but you can, theoretically, kill all of them. It would take a strong stomach for the work. I don't see us or the Europeans as being up for it.

[ConsAreLiars]

9. Kill a billion people?

You may have the stomach for that kind of massacre, or wish that the US people had the guts, but I don't think any sane person would possibly imagine that that would solve anything.

Your fantasy is as delusional and psychopathic as that of the PNACer's who initiated this slaughter.

[Ms. Clio]

8. The more things change. . . .

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.--Rudyard Kipling

[ConsAreLiars]

10. Exactly. Kipling saw the insanity of Britain's attempt to enslave these

proud people. The stereotype is that they are just rubes. The reality is that they have a long history and tradition, and that honor means both autonomy and vengeance against those who do them injustice. I say this because I once had the good fortune to have a long discussion with a Pathan (Pushtun) tribesman about his life history and moral outlook, and he taught me more than I realized at the time.

[Ms. Clio]

11. I am also disturbed by the notion that they are religious fanatics

willing to die for the giggling virgins and whatnot. And what most people don't realize is that the repression of women is a product of history and tribal traditions, not Islam.

The Afghans have been slaughtering invaders for millennia, long before the Prophet was even born.

That must have been an interesting conversation -- did he say what he thought about the U.S. and morality? I ask because I was just reading James Wolcott's declaration of war on Dinesh D'Souza's monumental new piece of shit, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

[Disturbed]

12. Afghanistan: Five Years Later

Afghanistan: Five Years Later
by Stephen Zunes

Barnett Rubin, America's foremost scholar on Afghanistan, described the country as not having “functioning state institutions. It has no genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government. Most of the country's meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles.” According to Rubin, the goal of U.S. policy in Afghanistan “was not to set up a better regime for the Afghan people, but to recruit and strengthen warlords in its fight against al-Qaida.”

While women are now allowed to go to school and leave the house unaccompanied by a close male relative-­rights denied to them under the Taliban-­most women in large parts of Afghanistan are afraid to do so out of fear of kidnapping and rape. Human Rights Watch reports that, despite the ouster of the misogynist Taliban, “Violence against women and girls remains rampant.”

The security situation in the countryside is so bad that groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres-­which stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet war and occupation of the 1980s, the civil war and chaos of the early to mid-1990s, and the brutal repression of the Taliban through 2001-­have completely withdrawn from the country.

Yet the Bush administration continues to be in denial about the worsening situation in Afghanistan. President Bush recently declared that Afghanistan was doing so well that it was “inspiring others … to demand their freedom.” And Vice President Cheney has referred to the rapidly deteriorating Afghan republic as a “rising nation.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld earlier described the new Afghanistan as “a breathtaking accomplishment” and “a successful model.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1014-22.htm

[Ms. Clio]

15. I am reminded that I was one of the few who opposed this misadventure

and predicted that it would turn out like this.

[ConsAreLiars]

14. You are right. The culture and values of the various Afghan peoples

were shaped by a very long history. Islam, as practiced there, has shaped itself to that heritage. As well as a harsh geography, the population is very decentralized, and the "Central Government" has been totally irrelevant to daily life. Subsistence agriculture based on complex irrigation networks that had been created by many generations, nomadic goat herding, and some specialized craft workers. People relied first on family, village and clan relationships for survival against adversity of all sorts, ranging from weather to bandits. It was not so much a "nation" as a region where many different cultures and ethnic groups had been co-mingled.

This conversation took place during Vietnam, before Brzezinski decided that fostering religious extremism and turning Afghanistan into a killing field would be a really good thing for world capitalism.

The young man I talked to, around 20, was just returning to Afghanistan from England, where he had been educated after his family had been killed in a bandit raid and he had been "adopted" by a diplomatic family. My companion and I were hunkered down in a hotel in Peshawer, Pakistan during a massive street demo by an Islamic nationalist Party (the hotel manager had told us to keep out of sight) and this guy introduced himself. While talking, he mentioned that one reason for his return was his obligation to kill those who had murdered his family, as well as a more general desire to return to his roots.

It wasn't based on the sort of "to get vengeance" attitude we are familiar with, but more a matter of simply being the right thing to to, just like being hospitable to a guest or keeping one's promises or helping a friend. It wasn't his first priority, he wasn't going out hunting, but he would always be looking to identify the killers and then to kill them or (I believe) their surviving family.

Arguments about the virtues of pacifism, turning the other cheek, or "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," and "ending the cycle of violence" were familiar to him, but they just seemed dishonorable, or cowardly, or delusional, or just plain wrong. He wasn't accusing people who made that kind of argument of being those things, but explaining that he simply could not see the world in those terms. It was just, simply, the right thing to do, and it had nothing to do with heavenly rewards. It was just a matter of personal integrity.

[Ms. Clio]

16. Fascinating info -- what you describe as his obligation to seek vengeance

makes it so clear that the United States has been killing people whose relatives will feel duty-bound to seek to even the score somehow. And that it won't have anything at all to do with "hating freedom" or feeling offended by our "loose" women and shocking morals.

[ConsAreLiars]

17. I opposed the invasion for this reason, but if sane and honorable people

had been in command in the US, and the diplomacy been wise and informed instead of being based on cowardly bluster and arrogant threats, I am sure bin Laden and his gang would have been turned over to a third party and tacit permission granted for a Special Forces hit squad to round up or kill the rest of the gang.

Look at how houses and whole towns are designed with high strong walls and heavy gates, and reflect on my "teacher's" experience, there have been many generations living in conditions where the distinction between intruder and guest is a a matter of life and death.

The Taliban said they were not willing to turn their "guest" over to his enemies without proof and a decision by an Islamic court. They, being religious zealots, were framing the decision in terms of Islam, but the same sort of hard decision in some isolated village could very well have been deferred to a village elder or maybe a tribal chief. The wrappings are a little different, but the content of the moral dilemma is the same, as is the form of resolution, and this sense of justice was shaped by centuries of life under conditions very unlike ours.

If you have the time, take a look at "Taliban Country." A half hour excerpt of the 45 minute documentary is at: http://www.journeyman.tv/?lid=17451 . The "story" aspect is important, but if you listen and look at the people and their world, you can also see some of what I had discovered.

And now, in Iraq, the Monsters have ordered soldiers to become gestapo and to seal off sections of Baghdad, as they did in Fallujah and so on, systematically break down doors and search every home for whatever. Whatever they might find, one thing is certain, they leave behind a sense of being unjustly violated. A week ago or so, some General boasted of good progress with 100,000 or so homes having been searched. When asked, he said they "of course" did not knock, but just broke down the doors without warning so people didn't have a chance to hide stuff or something. No surprise that 2/3 now say killing US soldiers is just.

[Lisa]

13. an Afghan friend warned me about this ...

A couple of years back, when Canadian and other coalition commanders were smirking over what an "easy" job it had been to "pacify" the place, and "letting young girls go to school" (in one of Bush's favourite phrases) -- he told me that this was NOT how people in the rural areas were seeing them. An occupying force which runs over someone's child or crushes someone's irrigation channels with a tank, might just think it's "no biggie". But people who remember Canada occupying the Netherlands in WWII told me that they still remember things like this -- and this is Europe, where they loved us! How about in a country where virtually everybody alive remembers either the decades of war against the Soviets ... or the collapse of civil authority since then -- plus a cultural heritage of fighting against successive waves of invaders (including the British empire).