Civilian dead are a trade-off in Nato's war of barbarity

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/afghanistan-nato

killing of innocent Afghans by US bombs is the result of a calculation, not just a mistake. And it is fuelling resistance

Seumas Milne The Guardian, Thursday October 16 2008

While the eyes of the western world have been fixed on the global financial crisis, the military campaign that launched the war on terror has been spinning out of control. Seven years after the US and Britain began their onslaught on Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, the Taliban surround the capital, al-Qaida is flourishing in Pakistan and the war's sponsors have publicly fallen out about whether it has already been lost.

As the US joint chiefs of staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen concedes that the country is locked into a "downward spiral" of corruption, lawlessness and insurgency, Britain's ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is quoted in a leaked briefing as declaring that "American strategy is destined to fail". The same diplomat who told us last year that British forces would be in Afghanistan for decades now believes foreign troops are "part of the problem, not the solution".

The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. "We're not going to win this war," he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to "talk about a political settlement", that was "precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this". The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship.

This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain.

In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July - US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[gratuitous]

2. How do you ask a man to die for a mistake?

That is, if this was a mistake and not a coldly calculated move to bankrupt the treasury, enrich some fatcat contractors, and saddle George W. Bush's successor with all the problems that grow from the branches of this poisoned tree.

And I remind the assembled masses of DU that Afghanistan has been touted as the good war, the better of the two elective wars of conquest and empire.

[NNN0LHI]

3. I know you been around long enough to know I never belonged to those assembled masses of DU

I was against it from the beginning.

Still am.

Don

[tuckessee]

4. Why are so many Americans willing to kill for a mistake?

Since they do much more killing (20-50x) than dying that should be the question.