US Decimates Entire Afghan Village
January 19th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Stories like this should be unbelievable.
Writes Spencer Ackerman:
In October, a U.S.-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else. But it’s the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.
Ackerman quotes Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell who says there were no civilian casualties and argues that the village needed to be destroyed for the good of the people who lived there (emphasis is mine):
It seems difficult to understand how Broadwell or the 1-320th can be so confident they didn’t accidentally kill civilians after subjecting Tarok Kolache to nearly 25 tons worth of bombs and rockets. The rockets alone have a blast radius of about 50 meters, so the potential for hitting bystanders is high with every strike. As she clarified in a debate on her Facebook wall, “In the commander’s assessment, the deserted village was not worth clearing. If you lost several KIA and you might feel the same.” But without entering Tarok Kolache to clear it, how could U.S. or Afghan forces know it was completely devoid of civilians?
As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the U.S. needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.” An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.
“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”
Read the entire Wired article here.
Ms. Broadwell is a true believer, of the sort who litter history with corpses
http://breakingnewsdir.com/salute-to-service-veteran-paula-broadwell-shares-her-letter-to-america-117027.html
A desperation to deliver prior to the 2012 campaign is making the present US administration cross all limits in Afghanistan. The cost of ten year’s engagements in Kandahar and Helmand (2001-to date) will make it the most expensive conflict site in contemporary history. All this is in stark contrast with what the then defense secretary John Reid, declared in the spring of 2006 when the British government dispatched 3,000 troops to southern Afghanistan to join the limited number which had been there as part of an international security force (ISAF) since 2001. Reid expressed the hope that they would accomplish their mission in three years without a shot being fired. It fails all imagination
how after years of heavy presence, US marines
remain unable to establish any control even in small district like Sangin Helmand. In a NY Times report January dated 17th 2011, Michael Kamber thus describes the situation:
If the battlegrounds of Afghanistan are the “tip of the spear,” as Marines like to say, then the remote district of Sangin in Helmand Province may be its very point: the deadliest spot in the hardest-fought province for Marines leading the American offensive in Taliban territory. “This is probably the most dangerous place on earth,” said First Lt. Stephen Cooney, as he looked out over the landscape. “Or at least in Afghanistan.”
That is in part because the Taliban fighters here are well trained and battle-hardened, and many American units face daily firefights. But the insurgents’ bombs have been even worse than their bullets, and every move the Marines make now must come slowly, deliberately. Clustered tightly on trails, each one taking care to step in the footprints of the man before him, the Marines squint at every bump in the dirt in case it hides an improvised explosive device.
The way they have been forced to adapt highlights the intense challenges that Americans face as they try to root out an enemy that knows the terrain, can find support and shelter in many villages, and is patient enough to let booby traps do most of the fighting.
Neither the technology nor the morales seem to me at high level as grounds immediately surrounding Marine positions are often compromised:
“Thirty pounds of homemade explosive, enough to blow a man to pieces, lay buried along a footpath about 100 yards outside their base’s outer wire. The enemy had crept up under cover of darkness, hidden behind the low mud walls that line the landscape. Only the diligence of Lance Cpl. Luis Garcia, who spotted a small irregularity in the dirt, saved lives…
The explosive was designed to be triggered by a pressure plate made of wood and plastic foam, a very common design that makes the bomb nearly invisible to metal detectors.
“The batteries are the only thing you can find, and they bury them up to 10 feet off the trail, connecting them with low-metallic speaker wire,” Sgt. Aaron Beckett said.
“The metal detectors are often useless: we call them confidence boosters,” one officer said, with a grim laugh.
By no means does it seem to be the world’s
most powerful military machinery and superior technology establishing an upper hand on a rag tag band of irregular fighters.
Media reporters who project a surge of US troops in Afghanistan as a ‘success’ need to take a closer look
at Michael Kamber report published on January dated 17th 2011, in the New York Times for an appropriate dose of reality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/world/asia/18helmand.html?ref=global-home
[...] Just recently, NATO killed 9 Afghanistan children and offered a week apology. Before that, the U.S. obliterated an entire Afghan village and has generally killed more than can (or have) been counted in the country during our decade [...]