A quiet city in the north of Afghanistan ignited today after yet another NATO night raid reportedly tore another family apart. Thousands of people took to the streets, again chanting, "Death to America!" as they pelted Karzai's billboards with mud and stones. They attacked police. They attacked the local NATO outpost. At least a dozen people were killed in the clash, which showed local rage directed at every level of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy, from the local security forces, to our corrupt and feckless local "partners" in the Karzai government, to the U.S. itself.
Worse, this isn't the only civilian killing by NATO forces even just this week. On May 16, Reuters reported:
"Foreign troops killed an Afghan child and wounded four others when responding to insurgent fire in volatile eastern Kunar province, the provincial Governor said on Monday, the third accidental killing of young civilians in less than a week."
These deaths were senseless enough before Bin Laden was killed and al Qaeda driven from the country. Now, they're downright obscene. With the last rational-sounding excuse for continuing the war, bringing Bin Laden to "justice," gone, continuing this counterinsurgency campaign makes no sense, and it's making Americans and Afghans less safe while wasting precious national resources. If you agree, please join Rethink Afghanistan in calling for an end to the war in the wake of Bin Laden's death.
The uprising in Taloqan triggered by NATO's killing of civilians is a microcosm of a larger dynamic playing out across the country. When one honestly looks at the data, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has been, at best, a miserable failure in its stated goal of "protecting the population," or worse, a key driver in an ever-increasing cycle of violence and instability that puts civilians at risk.
Rising Violence in the Shadow of Escalation
Despite an escalation launched under the pretext of "reversing Taliban momentum" and "protecting the population," attacks launched by insurgents and civilian casualties continue to rise. U.S. military leaders expect those numbers to continue to worsen over this summer. This is a strategy, remember, that Admiral Mike Mullen said, "must -- and will -- improve security for the Afghan people and limit both future civilian and military casualties."
Both civilian and military casualties have increased sharply following the escalation, by the way.
A new report published by the Minority Rights Group International shows the price paid by Afghans for the U.S. catastrophic pursuit of escalated military action as a solution to the Afghanistan crisis. MRG says that Afghanistan's population has seen a bigger spike in risk for mass killings than any other country on the planet this year. The military-first strategy for resolving the Afghanistan conflict hasn't made Afghans safer, at best. At worst, it raised the temperature of the conflict to a boil.
We sold the Afghans a bill of goods--that a huge influx of military forces was what was needed to protect them. As Rethink Afghanistan warned at the time, there was no way an escalation was ever going to mean more safety for people caught in the crossfire. Combine that false promise with the U.S.'s continued backing of deeply corrupt thugs in Kabul, and it's easy to understand why the Afghans are angry. The longer this dynamic persists, the less safe Americans become.
Meanwhile, special forces night raids continue all over the country, generating rage, humiliation, and needless death, at the cost of more than $2 billion a week and senseless military and civilian casualties.
The uprising in Taloqan wasn't the first, and unless the U.S. begins a serious drawdown of forces and ends these night raids, it won't be the last.
Tom Engelhardt: Bored to Death in Afghanistan (and Washington)
TCF is a progressive organization, and no particular friend of conservatives. In fact, Rethink Afghanistan has cited the organization's reports in the past. Yet they neglect to include important conclusions from the report in their "rethinking."
The report's final recommendations included this telling conclusion: "The large military effort undertaken since 2009 has provided the time and built the platform for achieving core U.S. objectives through negotiation."
It also does NOT call for a unilateral withdrawal. Rather it recommends it only as a part of negotiation: "The withdrawal of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and particularly of U.S. troops, will almost certainly be an essential component of a settlement."
The report also cites general progress in many areas: "The Islamic republic...has delivered some tangible economic and social improvements...It is developing a sizable army that aspires to professional standards and that, despite problematical ethnic imbalance in its officer corps, appears to enjoy the respect of much of the Afghan public...The lock they (the Taliban) had regained over Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country has been disrupted...by intensified U.S.-led military operations."
Report: http://tcf.org/publications/2011/3/afghanistan-negotiating-peace
-Card-Carrying American
http://cardcarryingamerican.blogspot.com/
However, it is a bit disingenuous to place the blame for civilian deaths on the U.S. and ISAF when the UN recognizes that the enemy is responsible for over 75% of the civilian casualties. The Taliban are killing civilians by the hundreds. Rethink Afghanistan's solution, strangely, is to stop trying to protect them. As if the killing of civilians by the Taliban is a brand new phenomenon brought on by the presence of U.S. troops. Any objective analysis of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan prior to the US intervention shows otherwise.
In 1998, the UNHCR noted in a report (link below) that in a single month, the Taliban killed over 2,000 civilians in a single city. This AFTER seizing control of the city. Anyone concerned for the well-being of Afghan civilians should be fighting to prevent a return of the Taliban to power. The current number of civilian deaths, even when you include those caused by the U.S., pales in comparison to the number when the Taliban ruled with no American in sight.
I wonder if Rethink Afghanistan's answer to America's highest murder rate in New Orleans is to pull out the police there.
-Card-Carrying American
http://cardcarryingamerican.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Card-Carrying-American/149565408390518
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,AFG,,45c9a4b52,0.html
Counting bodies like sheep (Replace Bush with Obama and you get your "yes we can feel-good" soup)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giaZnIr-faM
An insurance company - too big to fail - with an army.
What could go wrong?
This fiasco makes Vietnam look good!
Support the troops!
Bring them home now!
So what you got going for you?
What does winning look like to you?
How long do we stay?
Who wants to be the last to die for a mistake?
I'll hang out while you work on those answers........ I'll give you no more than ten more years to reply.......
And by the way, those proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare are going to be a Democratic boon in this election cycle. You been following the race in New York's 26th at all? Nice job alienating a key Republican demographic...
Anyone who believes that we will leave either Afghanistan or Iraq any sooner is smoking some good s**t.
well.. in the end, maybe Fukushima at least might have one good consequence...
"What is more American than shooting someone in the face?"