As violence continues following the burning of Qurans by ISAF in Afghanistan, insiders in Washington, D.C. and in the media are wasting quite a bit of breath asking the rhetorical question, "Why aren't the apologies working?" Military commanders in Afghanistan apologized profusely, President Obama exposed himself to the demagoguery of Republican primary opponents with his own apology. Why does the violence continue?
For the professionally clueless (and by this I mean the people in the insider press and the consensus peddlers in D.C.), let's make this simple:
The military forces in Afghanistan are well aware of the factors generating such intense anti-American hostility. Here's an excerpt from a declassified U.S. Army report from 2011 (PDF) focusing just on the anti-Americanism rampant in the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) we're paying to train:
ANSF members identified numerous social, cultural and operational grievances they have with US. Soldiers. Factors that created animosity were reviewed through a content analysis that measured frequency and intensity of the perceived grievances. Factors that fueled the most animosity included US. convoys not allowing traffic to pass, reportedly indiscriminant [sic] return U.S. fire that causes civilian casualties, naively using flawed intelligence sources, U.S. Forces conducting night raids/home searches, violating female privacy during searches, U.S. road blocks, publicly searching/disarming ANSF members as an SOP when they enter bases, and past massacres of civilians by U.S. Forces (i.e., the Wedding Party Massacre, the Shinwar Massacre, etc.). Other issues that led to altercations or near-altercations (including many self-reported near fratricide incidents) included urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals. They found many U.S. Soldiers to be extremely arrogant, bullying, unwilling to listen to their advice, and were often seen as lacking concern for civilian and ANSF safety during combat. CAT 1 interpreters' (n=30) views were similar to the ANSF's.
For the record, the feeling is mutual:
U.S. Soldiers' (n=215) views of ANSF, particularly of the ANA, were also collected; they were extremely negative. They reported pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapons handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high AWOL rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs. Perceptions of civilians were also negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies and cruelty towards women and children.
So here we have a war that's lasted longer than a decade, peddled to the public and the politicians as primarily a war for "hearts and minds" in which our "local partners" would be built up and handed a country as we declare victory. Only, it turns out that after all this time, all these lives, and all this money, not only have we not won over the Afghan street, we've not even won over the hearts and minds of the people we're giving guns and paychecks. Sorry--"not won over" is an amazing understatement. Not only have we not won over the ANSF, but a great many of them are killing U.S. military officers. In many cases, they're killing the officers training them. The Army's report goes on to disclose, emphasis ours:
Of note, during the last six month period (November, 2010 through April, 2011) Westerners stationed within Afghanistan's N2KL region (Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar and Laghman provinces) who regularly interact and/or train with ANSFs have been over 150 times more likely to be murdered by an ANSF member than a U.S. police officer is to be murdered in the line of duty by any perpetrator (see Appendix B, pg. 59 for calculation); this excludes the additional risks associated with regular combat for these coalition personnel. Further, such ANSF fratricide-murders represent 30 percent of all U.S. field grade officer hostile deaths in Afghanistan (7 of 23), 25 percent of all hostile U.S. female military deaths (4 of 16) and over 50 percent of all hostile U.S.A.F. officer deaths (7 of 13).
... However, the common refrain from many ISAF political and military officials has been that such murder incidents between ANSF and ISAF are ''isolated'' and "extremely rare." Such proclamations seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.
As we at Brave New Foundation have been saying for years through our Rethink Afghanistan project, the Afghanistan War isn't making us safer and it's not worth the cost. In fact, the military-first policy in Afghanistan is so extraordinarily broken that it leads to U.S. military officers sitting in the middle of heavily guarded Afghan ministries being killed execution style before their killers apparently just walk out the door unmolested by their colleagues working in largely U.S.-funded government jobs.
Any politician standing in the way of a highly accelerated withdrawal -- the blindingly obvious right move -- deserves a taxpayer funded paycheck about as much as Hamid Karzai or a security guard at the Afghan interior ministry. For God's sake, get out and bring our troops, our money and our attention home.
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To Progressives out there I ask, how many more soldiers need to be killed dou to this silly book? Progressives would laugh were Christians upset over a Bible burning.. show complete outrage over killings like Islam is doing.. good piece overall.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/03/01/2-troops-killed-by-afghan-soldier-civilian/
We've no business trying to make a corrupt country in the image of America. They don't want it and simply won't have it. No matter how much money we throw at the problem, and it's in the trillions now. No matter how much American blood gets spilled they will kill over paper and ink or a look, they have no morals and they treat their women like human waste. Less than that! We can't fix them. We can't do anything for them. They are living in the 6th century and they will never change. They would just as soon kill us as look at us. Our government officials can't see this because they sit up in their a/c ivory towers lording over the rest of us who have to work for a living. They've no idea how the real world works, nor do they care.
We should bring our troops home and let them protect OUR borders for once. We should be putting AMERICA first! We don't need to feed and police the world anymore. America is crumbling around us and Washington's asleep letting it happen.
Thousands of innocent lives have been lost in Afghanistan as a result of our war with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Then an "accidental" burning of a Koran.
It's all senseless.
But there is a religious element to our foreign policy under conservative leadership. Bush bringing up the old testament with the "Gog and Magog" reference and biblical prophesy unfolding in Iraq. Perhaps the western world doesn't think small when exerting dominance by killing a few people when angry. The western world economically subjugates the non-christian WORLD.
I appreciate your comments. I'm just trying to look at this situation from an outside perspective. Killing someone for burning a book can never be justified in my opinion.
By the way that wasn't the point. Don' t look at this as an American, Muslim, or Christian. Look at this as a human being. It's ALL madness. These people are on a killing spree because someone burned a book. The US goes to war over corporate gain. Bush spoke of Gog and Magog and biblical prophesy unfolding in Iraq.
This all leads to deaths of innocents. And it's ALL madness. It's not right when they do it, and it's not right when our country does it. It's all wrong.
of the many Wars that their country has experienced.
Their culture and their beliefs are probably the only thing they cling to. They do not understand
"Nation Building" a pet project of the Bush/Cheney Administration.
We have rid ourselves of the man responsible for 911 and although I know Iran is strategic to
Iran and Pakistan, I truly believe that we should pull out pronto. Al Qaida is everywhere and with
great intelligence and being constantly vigilant we can prevail.
"In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."
... despite the presence of huge numbers of foreign troops, it is now impossible – or at least extremely foolhardy – for any westerner to walk around the capital, Kabul, without armed guards ... In all other directions, travel is possible only in an armed convoy.
In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare – in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion – thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.
... a full-scale rebellion against the British broke out in Kabul, and the two most senior British envoys, Sir Alexander Burnes and Sir William Macnaghten, were assassinated, one hacked to death by a mob in the streets, the other stabbed and shot by the resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations.
It was on the retreat that followed, on 6 January 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe half that many again Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by Afghan marksmen waiting in ambush amid the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter ...
... it was the country's greatest imperial disaster of the 19th century.
For the Afghans, the British defeat of 1842 became a symbol of freedom from foreign invasion. It is again no accident that the diplomatic quarter of Kabul is named after the general who oversaw the rout of the British in that year: Wazir Akbar Khan.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/06/british-afghanistan-government
“America and Afghanistan are close to signing a strategic pact which would allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/19/us-troops-afghanistan-2024_n_931970.html
Were not going anywhere regardless if combat troops come home. We’ll have at least 25,000 troops there labeled as other than combat troops with their lives on the line every day. The few killed last week were advisers too.
Committing to another 12 years cuts off any other president from even bringing advisers etc home unless that president breaks Obama’s deal with Kabul, and here we are going into a second decade still propping up an illegal government and a thief whose loyalty extends only as far as his wallet–and ours.
How easy it would be for an 18 yr. old soldier who has been given one of the worst jobs aside from cleaning the latrines to clean out a cell infested with disease. 110 degrees and instructed that if he doesn't want fleas, lice, or typhus or some other unknown disease he will need to wear a hazmat suit......these young soldiers are so afraid all they can think about is swooping up all the belongings into the hazardous bag that they forget how sensitive some of the books might be in the cell....all they can think about is how quickly they can get the job done and get the hell out......
Lets not forget.....since when did burning a piece of paper equate to physical harm of others make that excuseable? Had you told me these people were retaliating against the base for killing innocents I could see your point but this in NO WAY should be seen as "excusable" or "thats what you get for burning a book"......for those who see it this way.....please explain to me how burning a piece of paper physically harmed ANYONE?