Alan Kent Wrote:The elephant in the room of US policy in this area is the simple fact that any military strike kills innocents along with "bad guys." The "hearts and minds" of those whose loved ones are murdered by these sorties are not likely to be "won."

The vast majority of those who have been willing to express an opinion in Iraq and Afghanistan believe the United States military presence to be the main force responsible for their current misery. Every wedding party we bomb creates that many more "terrorists."

This seemingly endless circle of military action and "anti-American extremism" will continue as long as the United States proceeds on a policy of imperial dominion in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chevronistan, ...all the "Stans."

The current administration policy of picking up the "killing fields" from Iraq and moving them into Afghanistan/Pakistan cannot achieve the stated objectives. Over one million Iraqis have been sent to heaven as a result of past policies. Future escalation in Afghanistan will result in a comparable amount of death.

Hatred of America will (understandably) grow even more intense. The only policy that has a chance of restoring our tattered image (not to mention our tattered national souls...) is that of a principled disengagement from these exercises in imperial power.

Let us hope and cajole, but let's not hold our breath...

Peter Lemkin Wrote:I don't know that anyone has made an accounting of [even purported] badguys v. innocents killed, but my sense is it is about 1 to 20, or so.....

Quote:Up to 100 Afghan civilians may have been killed during an air raid by US forces during a joint operation targeting suspected fighters, a provincial governor has said.

If the claims are verified the deaths in Farah province on the western border would be the largest loss of civilian life in a single incident since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

Rohul Amin, the governor of Farah province, said on Wednesday that he feared that 100 civilians had been killed in the Bala Boluk district of the province, about 600km from Kabul, the capital.

Amin said that the Taliban were reportedly using civilian homes to take shelter during the fighting.

Earlier reports had said that 50 civilians had been killed in Monday's raid.

Burials

Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that the organisation sent a team to the region after concerned tribal leaders had contacted them seeking help.

"When [our team] went to the first two villages where these incidents took place they saw dozens of bodies. They saw graves and they saw people being buried," she told Al Jazeera.

Barry said that an ICRC community-based first aid volunteer and his extended family, including his five daughters and three sons, were among the dead

She said that they were killed while sheltering in their home.

The US said on Tuesday that it was conducting a joint inquiry, along with the Afghan government, into the deaths, with investigators from both sides visiting the sites.

Robert Wood, the acting US State Department spokesman, said in a statement: "Coalition forces and the Afghan government have received reports of civilian casualties in conjunction with a militant attack on Afghan National Security Forces in Farah Province on May 5.

"A joint investigation will be conducted to determine exactly what happened."

'Dozens of dead'

Colonel Greg Julian, a US military spokesman, acknowledged that a battle had taken place, but could not say if there had been civilian deaths.


"Once we get eyes on the ground we will have a better idea of what may have happened," Julian said.

Monday's attack occurred after Taliban fighters killed three former government officials in a village for co-operating with the state, Amin said.

Amin said that villagers had brought lorry loads of bodies to his office in the provincial capital as proof of their death.

The US government has come under increasing criticism during the past year for civilian deaths during operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

Barry said: "I think that it is important to remember that this is not a one off situation. There has been a rise in casualties over the last year.

"It is absolutely important to remind all sides that civilians must not be harmed."

However, Wood said: "US and international forces take extensive precautions to avoid loss of life among Afghan civilians as well as international and Afghan forces during operations against insurgents and terrorists."

Washington talks

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is in Washington DC for talks with Barack Obama and Asif Ali Zardari, his US and Pakistani counterparts respectively.

The meeting is being held to address the war against the Taliban in both nations.

The Taliban has used Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks in the two countries since their five-year rule in Kabul was ended by a US military invasion in 2001.

Washington has heightened its focus on fighting the Taliban since the Obama administration assumed power this year, with an added 21,000 troops being sent to Afghanistan.

There are more than 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan already, alongside a similar number of troops from other foreign nations.

Last year about 2,000 civilians were killed in fighting against the Taliban, according to the UN.

Quote:The US military has been embarrassed by footage broadcast on al-Jazeera television which shows soldiers and a chaplain discussing how to convert Afghans to Christianity.

This brought a predictable reaction in Afghanistan, where former prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai told Reuters news agency: "We consider this act as a direct attack on our religion that will arouse Afghans' emotions to take actions against them."

The US miltary claims the footage was shown out of context and al-Jazeera insists it was not. The troops in the video seem aware that Centcom's General Order Number 1 forbids them from proselytising while on active duty but one says there are ways around this – for example, by presenting people with Bibles as "gifts".

It is not the first time the US military has got into hot water over religion. Lt Gen William Boykin, an evangelical Christian and warrior against Satan, caused a stir by recalling how a Muslim fighter in Somalia had claimed to have the protection of Allah against US forces.

"Well you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his," Boykin said. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Quote:

On Sunday, May 3, the Al Jazeera English network and I made an agreement to produce a broadcast segment from a rough cut of my documentary film. This opportunity came after a May 2009 Harper's magazine cover story called "Jesus Killed Mohammed." While he researched and prepared that article, I allowed the author Jeff Sharlet to view the work-in-progress documentary. Sharlet's article brought the film to Al Jazeera English's attention.
My documentary, titled The Word and the Warriors, is inspired by a personal experience I had while serving as a combat flight crew member during the first Gulf War. During a very difficult and emotional time at war, an Army chaplain provided me comfort and counsel. I will never forget the important advice or the man who - without questioning my own faith - helped me at a time of need.
For two-and-a-half years, I have been researching and producing this film. I have traveled the world, interviewing both military servicemembers and civilians about the important role of these religious leaders/military officers.
During April/May 2008, I went to Afghanistan. With the assistance and full cooperation of the U.S. Army, I was allowed to film at Bagram Air Field. During that time, I was always wearing press credentials, and I was always accompanied by a media liaison while filming. The media liaison staff knew everything I filmed and - as I was told by them - they filed reports every evening about what I had filmed. It was my primary media liaison, an Army NCO, who - on my first day - invited me to meet LTC Gary Hensley. Hensley, the ranking chaplain in Afghanistan talked to me off camera expressing a concern he had about allowing me to film his chaplains. At the conclusion of the discussion, he agreed that I would be allowed to embed with his chaplains and invited me to film several hours of religious services.
Those hours at the Enduring Faith Chapel included his own sermon at a service called Chapel Next. With the exception of a few minutes I could not film because I was reloading my camera or moving to position for another shot, I videotaped Hensley's entire sermon.
Any contention by the military that his words are purposefully taken out of context to alter the tone or meaning of his sermon is absolutely false...
In recent press statements, the military also contends that - in the footage depicting the Afghan-language (Dari and Pashto) bibles - a cut was made before "it would have shown that the chaplain instructed that the Bibles not be distributed." This is a false statement. The chaplain - as seen in the footage before the cut - instructs the group to be careful and reiterates the definition of General Order #1. After this cut he begins to organize the group for the evening's bible study lessons.
Finally, and in my opinion most important, is the fact that EVERY FRAME of the rough cut from Bagram was provided to the U.S. Army Public Affairs Office in advance of this release. On Thursday, April 30 at approximately 1 pm EST, the Army took possession of a DVD with this footage by accepting a FedEx from me. Since Al Jazeera English first aired the piece Sunday, May 3 at 10pm EST, the Army had every frame of this rough cut for more than 80 hours.

Quote:This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.

Quote: I was a bit surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see Jon Stewart nail Harry Truman as a war criminal. After all, Stewart is a typical Hollywood liberal, whose politics are by now a staple of the corporate, anodyne culture that permeates the airwaves, and this naturally excludes everything that might challenge the liberal groupthink that constitutes the conventional wisdom in the Age of Obama.
Certainly, in "respectable" quarters, criticism of anything or anyone connected to the great liberal "anti-fascist" crusade, the "Good War," is strictly verboten, and surely an intelligent guy like Stewart knows this. Yet – contrary to what he said later – this wasn’t an argument that arose in the heat of the moment, in the context of a robust discussion with obnoxious neocon Clifford May on the alleged merits of torture.
No, Stewart had apparently thought this one out, at least to some extent, because when May asked him if he thought Truman was a war criminal for nuking two Japanese cities, he didn’t just say "Yes" – he went into a whole riff about how, if we had first demonstrated the power of this new weapon on an uninhabited atoll somewhere, and then informed the Japanese government that they’d better surrender, or else that would happen in Japan, then and only then would it be okay to drop the Big One. The audience cheered him on, as he took apart the frenetically hysterical May, whose ferret-like features and organizational affiliations make him the perfect spokesman for a policy described by Stewart as "temporary insanity." Yet, a few days later, Stewart was back to the same subject, minus the rabid ferret, this time reversing his stance – and apologizing for calling the little haberdasher a war criminal.
My, that was quick.
Alas, apparently not quick enough for the executives at whatever network Stewart appears on – yes, I know, I have to be the only person in America who doesn’t watch his show – who no doubt would have preferred that he never said it at all. It was clearly the execs who reined in the freethinking Stewart and laid down the law, and the first law of "controversial," "provocative," and indubitably "edgy" television commentary is to never – ever, ever! – allow a deviation from the conventional wisdom that falls outside the contemporary Left/Right paradigm.
Rule number one in this game is that everybody must play their assigned role. You’ve always got to be "in character." If you’re on the Left, you can take on George W. Bush, murderer of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – but not Harry Truman, killer of even larger numbers of innocent Japanese civilians. Rightists regularly excoriate the crimes of Stalin, yet they are expected to remain silent when it comes to war crimes committed by the U.S., such as the "Phoenix program" during the Vietnam conflict – and they rarely disappoint.
This enforcement of a dubious double standard, by the way, goes beyond the issue of war crimes and mass murder. If you’re on the Right, you’re allowed to express unlimited disdain for the thuggish Hugo Chavez – indeed, it’s a veritable obligation – but even a hint of contempt for the equally thuggish Benjamin Netanyahu and his neo-fascist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, will earn you enough brickbats to build a Wall of Separation between your ideological comrades and yourself. Likewise, lefties are allowed to cuddle up to Fidel Castro while inveighing against Augusto Pinochet.
In any case, Stewart’s apology was embarrassing: for him, for the studio audience (which giggled nervously, and inappropriately, at awkward intervals), and for me. As he looked into the camera and babbled about how wrong he was – without giving a single reason, never mind a good one – you could almost see his strings being pulled by his corporate masters.
So let’s see if I get this straight: it is not okay to torture a member of al-Qaeda, who no doubt has information we need in order to stop terrorist attacks. Instead, we have to treat him as a prisoner of war according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, it is okay to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in cold blood, to incinerate entire cities and poison the land for generations to come, as long as your name is Harry Truman.
Am I getting this right so far?
I have stayed away from the torture "debate" for a number of reasons, because, after all, the issue isn’t debatable. Not in a civilized country, that is. We might as well debate the merits and demerits of infanticide or coprophagia. Normal people don’t argue about these things; they simply turn away in revulsion.
Another reason for my abstention from this ongoing brouhaha – which seems to have consumed the left wing of the blogosphere ever since Obama took office – is that there is something remarkably phony about the high moral dudgeon of the liberals when it comes to this non-question. How much moral moxie does it really take to come out, guns blazing, against torture? I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or anything to enlist in a campaign to ban pulling off the fingernails of defenseless prisoners, you just have to be halfway normal.
Furthermore, there is another reason to be suspicious of the liberals-against-torture campaign that now monopolizes the capacity of certain pundits for outrage: the amount of noise being generated about this issue very effectively – and conveniently – drowns out opposition to the rest of Bush’s ugly legacy, principally the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Obama’s escalation of the "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Exhausted by their 24/7 calls to expunge the stain of torture from America’s conscience – which is to be accomplished, supposedly, by trying Bush, Cheney, and the Republican gang for war crimes – the liberals have no moral energy to take on Obama’s wars.
Thus what passes for the Left in the America of 2009 is perfectly happy to make demands they know will never be met and rail against a practice that even those who advocate it in certain circumstances seem uneasy about. It’s so much easier than coming out against the foreign policy of a popular president whom liberals regard as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King combined.
It doesn’t seem to matter that those policies are murderous, just as Bush’s were, and potentially even more disastrous for the U.S. in terms of "blowback." If we are signing on to an occupation of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan that will make our activities in Iraq seem like the briefest of episodes, then liberals of the Kossack/Huffington Post/Jon Stewart sort don’t want to hear about it. That’s because they’re okay with it – as long as we don’t torture people individually, you see, by making them think they’re drowning or throwing them against a wall. Obama’s in the White House, and all’s right with the world!
Once Dear Leader has determined that it’s imperative we actually kill people en masse, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the defense of the United States, as we are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan – well, then, it’s nothing to get too excited about. Indeed, it’s actually praiseworthy, positively Truman-esque – and we all know what a heroic figure the gnome-like machine politician Truman was!
Cliff May and his ilk know what side they’re on, they know what they believe and what they want, and they are quick to home in on the many contradictions of ostensibly antiwar liberals like Stewart, whose instincts are good, but who don’t know anything but the permitted pieties about America’s role and actions during World War II. That’s why liberals are rendered practically speechless by ritualized neocon invocations of "Hitler" and "Munich" every time a supposedly deadly threat to the U.S. arises somewhere in the world.
For a moment, however, Stewart saw through the veil of myth and prejudice (yes, racial prejudice) that obscures the truth about what we did to Japan, which was ready to make peace on reasonable terms. Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender, upheld by Truman, rationalized mass murder on a scale never before seen, and at the time the liberals fell right into line, with nary a pip or a squeak from any of them.
It was inside the military and the U.S. government that dissent raised its head. Truman’s decision went against the advice of Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight David Eisenhower, not to mention his own secretaries of state and the Navy. In 1963, Eisenhower told Newsweek: "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Oh, but please don’t confuse us with the introduction of needless facts. What are you, one of those obstructionist Republican extremists? In the wake of Stewart’s faux pas and subsequent Soviet-style self-criticism, one thing is clear: measures must be taken. It is necessary – in this, the Age of Obama – to establish a firm doctrine from which no one, no matter how popular, how "provocative," or how "edgy" they might be, is allowed to dissent, and it is this: no Democratic president can ever be guilty of a war crime. No, not even Lyndon "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Johnson. Which means Obama has a license to obliterate Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran (as his secretary of state said she would like to do), and we can get on with the important business of conducting political show trials of our favorite Republican villains.
And all’s right with the world…

Quote: KABUL (Reuters) - Ninety-three children and 25 adult women are among a list of 140 names of Afghans who villagers say were killed in a battle and U.S. air strikes last week, causing a crisis between Washington and its Afghan allies.
The list, obtained by Reuters, bears the endorsement of seven senior provincial and central government officials, including an Afghan two-star general who headed a task force dispatched by the government to investigate the incident.
Titled "list of the martyrs of the bombardment of Bala Boluk district of Farah Province", it includes the name, age and father's name of each alleged victim.
The youngest was listed as 8-day-old baby Sayed Musa, son of Sayed Adam. Fifty-three victims were girls under the age of 18, and 40 were boys. Only 22 were men 18 or older.
The U.S. military continues to dispute the toll and a military spokesman said some of the names could be fake.
The dispute over the number of dead has worsened tension between Washington and Kabul, despite apologies President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made during a visit to Washington by President Hamid Karzai last week.
The Afghan government has endorsed the list, and Karzai went on U.S. television to call for an end to all U.S. air strikes, only to be rebuffed by Washington. Afghan officials say the issue helps insurgents by turning the public against foreign forces.
Since last year, U.S. officials adopted new procedures for investigations of civilian casualties designed to ensure their statements agree with those of the Afghan government.
Nevertheless, Washington has continued to dispute the death toll. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said villagers had an incentive to invent names of dead relatives in the hope of collecting compensation.
U.S. SAYS NO PROOF
"Well I could give you 140 names too. The problem is there is no evidence of that number of graves ... Are those real people? Did they ever actually exist? I can give you a list of 53 girls names with their ages," he said "There are no birth certificates and there are no death certificates."
"Conditions exist that encourage exaggeration," Julian added.
"If you say that the Taliban killed your family you'd get nothing. If you say the Americans killed your family, you might get assistance, whether they existed or not."
Julian said investigators had been shown 26 individual graves at the site and one mass grave, which he said was not large enough to contain so many bodies. He estimated the overall toll could not exceed 80.
Because of cultural sensitivity, there were no plans to dig up the graves to determine how many were buried inside, he said.
The U.S. military blames the Taliban for causing the deaths deliberately by herding civilians into houses it knew would be targeted by U.S. troops sent to rescue Afghan police and soldiers from an ambush. It also says the Taliban may have killed some of the villagers with grenades.
"Don't forget about who is responsible for this whole thing. This was a deliberate plan to create human sacrifices and then blame us," Julian said.
Karzai told CNN last week that Washington needs to rely on other tactics besides air strikes when it is facing Taliban fighters in villages where civilians might be present.
"The air strikes are not acceptable," Karzai said. "Terrorism is not in Afghan villages, not in Afghan homes. And you cannot defeat terrorists by air strikes."
But White House National Security Advisor James Jones said on Sunday that U.S. forces need air power to protect themselves: "We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back."

Quote:U.S. SAYS NO PROOF
"Well I could give you 140 names too. The problem is there is no evidence of that number of graves ... Are those real people? Did they ever actually exist? I can give you a list of 53 girls names with their ages," he said "There are no birth certificates and there are no death certificates."
"Conditions exist that encourage exaggeration," Julian added.