These primitive people ... so irrational, so ungrateful, so recalcitrant. Didn't Our Genius Chickenhawk Weasel President already explain to them that their highest aspiration is duh-mocracy? Didn't he make it clear, 'way back in late '01, that current Western political fashions -- including, most definitely, Respect for the Rights of Wimmyn -- are fully mandatory everywhere in the world? You would think, then, that those Afghani wimmyn would be properly on board with the GWOT. But noooooooooo:
And start filing our bloody claws again.
Each time the old woman breathed out you could hear a small groan of pain as she sat, her head in one hand, her other shoulder shattered by shrapnel and fixed in a coarse plaster.I'm sure that when these tribal primitives again raise the hand of ingratitude and terror against us -- their benefactors! -- we'll spend a few minutes being all hurt 'n' confused about why they hate us. Then, no doubt, we'll remember that they hate us because we're so good and free and all.
Her son Mohammad and his wife Khwara sat next to her - they were mourning the death of their 18-year-old son and her brother.
Both were among 57 killed - almost half of them women and children - when American forces bombed their village in Shindand, western Afghanistan, and destroyed 100 homes.
"The bombardments were going on day and night," said Mohammad Zarif Achakzai, who had to flee their mud house in the Zerkoh Valley.
"Those who tried to get out somewhere safe were being bombed. They didn't care if it was women, children or old men."
Khwara explained how it started: "Americans came to the village without consulting any elders," she said.
"They just came into to the women's part of the house, so we women went to the elders, and we told them if you don't stop this, we women will stand against them."
Remembering what happened she began to get angry: "Death to America," she shouted. "Death to the America that killed my son."
And start filing our bloody claws again.
1 comment:
Unlike in Iraq, the US military actually enjoys a large majority of support from the population in Afghanistan. However, acts like this will erode that very quickly.
I read something today while travelling that surprised me. In an article in the latest New Republic Peter Bergen quotes an anonymous US military official:
"A similar point was made to me by a U.S. military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence information. "Mullah Omar is still in Quetta," he said, referring to a city in southwestern Pakistan. "We know exactly where he is. He never comes into Afghanistan. We even know the compound he goes back and forth to." He described Pakistani cooperation in fighting the Taliban as "schizophrenic," pointing to the case of Mullah Osmani--a Taliban commander killed by a U.S. air strike inside Afghanistan last December--as an example of what Pakistan can do when it wants to help. "We would not have got him without Pakistani information," he said. On the other hand, a Western official based in Pakistan told me that detailed intelligence--known as "target folders"--on the locations of high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda officials provided by the U.S. government to Pakistan during the past six months has not been acted on. Whether the Pakistanis lack the capacity to arrest these targets or merely the will is an open question--though the impending fall election in Pakistan could very well be part of the explanation."
So we're in Iraq but yet we know where one of the highest targets is and we're not doing anything?
Par for the course...
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