Afghanistan bomb attacks kill twenty-one US soldiers in 48 hours
Sep 1, 2010 afghan war
Richard Gray
Telegraph
August 30, 2020
Twenty-one American troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Friday in one of the bloodiest periods of the summer.
A series of bomb attacks have badly hit US troops in eastern and southern Afghanistan in the past 48 hours.
The death toll among in the Nato-led coalition has reached 484 this year and is predicted to far surpass 2009’s total of 521.
Deaths have risen consistently each year since 2001. Afghan police and civilians have suffered far higher casualties.
The coalition blames the rise in troop deaths partly on the influx of reinforcements, which is allowing commanders to target previously untouched insurgent safe havens where rebels are mounting stiff resistance.
Gen David Petraeus, senior US and Nato commander in the country, warned last week fighting would “get harder before it gets easier”.
In two of the most deadly recent incidents, three Americans died in eastern Afghanistan on one bomb attack on Tuesday. Five died in a single bomb attack in the south on Monday.
Military spokesmen would not say if the bombs hit vehicles or foot patrols.
Homemade bombs using old shells or homemade explosives and hidden in roads, tracks, walls, streams and buildings have become the Taliban’s favoured weapon.
Their use has sparked an arms race with foreign troops evolving tactics, or relying on more heavily armed vehicles and mine detectors to try and avoid them.
Tags: 48 hours, afghanistan
Al-Qaeda using new tactic in war
Apr 19, 2010 World News, afghan war
BAGHDAD: Al Qaeda in Iraq is rigging houses and shops with explosives in a new tactic that has killed and maimed civilians in recent weeks and defied the thousands of security forces in Baghdad, officials say.
The renting of residential buildings for targeted bombings has forced police and the army to adapt their operations, in a bid to prevent more of the attacks that have killed dozens since the country’s inconclusive March 7 election.
The US military has even coined a new acronym — HBIED (house-borne improvised explosive device) for the bombings, which have left hundreds wounded in the past month in the Iraqi capital.
The HBIED follows the IED (improvised explosive device — homemade bomb) and VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device — car bomb) into a terrorist lexicon started in Iraq and subsequently transported to Afghanistan.
“Our forces are focussing on the renting of apartments and buildings,” Maj-Gen Qassim Atta, a Baghdad security forces spokesman, said.
Militants were continually looking to exploit gaps in the city’s defences, he said.
“They change their methods periodically because most of their plans and tactics have been discovered. I believe they are already searching for another method of attack, maybe churches or bridges.”
Some 25 people were killed on election day, when explosives destroyed two buildings in northeast Baghdad. The US military, which pointed the finger at Al Qaeda, said the properties had been rented and deliberately blown up.
A further 35 people died on April 6, when explosives were planted in houses and shops in mostly Shia neighbourhoods, leading Atta to say Iraq was in an “open war” with Al Qaeda and loyalists of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
A number of those properties had also been rented days earlier, security officials said.
Counter-terrorism experts say the insurgents are placing bombs in houses and shops despite the methods being frowned upon by much of Al Qaeda.
“These stories are credible,” said Brian Fishman, a counter-terrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, and author of “Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside Al Qaeda in Iraq”. —AFP
Tags: Al-Qaeda, Baghdad, cia, Nato Forces, taliban, war on terror
Now it’s Pakistan blaming the US for letting the Taliban slip away
Apr 18, 2010 World News, afghan war
The young, immaculately turned out Pakistani soldiers responsible for guarding the world’s most inhospitable terrain were finding it hard to conceal their frustration. For the past 18 months, they had been fighting to drive thousands of Taliban militants from their strongholds in the remote tribal regions that straddle Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
The campaign reached its climax last month, when Pakistani forces finally dislodged the Taliban from heavily fortified positions in Bajaur, just a few miles from the forbidding mountain passes that lead to Afghanistan.
became one of the first Western journalists to reach Bajaur following the Taliban’s defeat, the detritus of battle lay everywhere. Along the roads to the border villages stood semi-demolished houses riddled with bullet holes, where Taliban fighters had made their last, desperate stands. Occasionally, frightened children would peer from dilapidated alleyways and wave nervously at our passing convoy of military lorries.
At the border village of Damadola, where the insurgents lost their final battle, all that remained from their reign of terror was the network of caves they had carved into the surrounding mountains, which were filled with the dusty sleeping bags and clothes abandoned in their haste to escape the military’s advance.
But even though Pakistani forces have inflicted a crushing defeat on the Taliban in the semi-autonomous tribal region of northern Pakistan, their senior officers are furious that hundreds of fighters escaped across the border into Afghanistan, where they are being housed and protected in camps set up by Afghan supporters.
Pakistani commanders insist that they informed their American opposite numbers that large numbers of Taliban were fleeing into territory that is supposed to be under US control, but they failed to intervene. Now the Pakistanis fear the Taliban will regroup in Afghanistan and launch a fresh offensive to re-establish its presence in northern Pakistan.
“We have done everything the West asked us to do,” Col Nauman Saeed told me when we met at the headquarters of the Bajaur Scouts, who spearheaded the campaign against the Taliban. “We feel badly let down.”
Previously, Nato commanders had accused the Pakistani authorities of not taking effective action against Taliban bases on their soil, which have been used to plan terrorist attacks against Western targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Now the Pakistanis are turning the tables on Nato. The irony of these claims will not be lost on the Americans, who faced similar accusations in late 2001, after they led the coalition that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan. On that occasion, US forces failed to prevent the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies from escaping across the border to Pakistan, undermining attempts to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader.
Since then, the insurgents have exploited the goodwill of Pashtun leaders in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas to build a new administrative structure. They used this to terrorise the population through the strict application of sharia law, and also provided a haven for al-Qaeda terrorists. Pakistani intelligence sources believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden’s key lieutenants, was given shelter in Bajaur itself.
The Pakistani military was finally forced to intervene after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, and the Taliban moved south and seized control of the Swat Valley, close to the capital of Islamabad.
But the fact that, nine years after Western forces first deployed to the region, there appears to be no proper co-ordination between Nato commanders in Afghanistan and their Pakistani counterparts does not bode well for the future success of this campaign.
After all, the whole point of the new strategy devised by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces, is that it involves those on both sides of the border working together to defeat their common enemy.
What I found particularly disconcerting during my visit this week to the war zone in Pakistan was that the complaints I heard from Pakistani officers were not dissimilar to those I heard from their British counterparts when I visited Helmand this year. While both sides have made significant military gains against the Taliban, they are critical of the lack of support they are receiving from their allies.
The British and Americans accuse the Pakistanis of not doing enough to stop Taliban fighters fleeing across the border, while the Pakistanis complain about the ease with which the Taliban can move in the opposite direction.
It is clearly in the interests of everyone that this impasse is resolved quickly, as the glaring disconnect between Nato and Pakistan threatens to undermine the entire international effort to prevent this region from being a haven for Islamist terrorists. And with President Obama sticking to his pledge to start withdrawing American troops from the region in July next year, time is of the essence.
Tags: afghanistan, Bajaur, Taliban militants
Karzai threatens to join the Taliban
Apr 6, 2010 World News, afghan war, war on terror
Agence France-Presse
April 6, 2010
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has slammed Western backers for the second time in a week, accusing the United States of interference, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
In a private meeting with up to 70 Afghan lawmakers Saturday, Karzai also warned that the Taliban insurgency could become a legitimate resistance movement if foreign meddling in Afghan affairs continues, the Journal said, citing participants in the talks.
During the talks, Karzai, whose government is supported by billions of dollars of Western aid and 126,000 foreign troops fighting the Taliban, said he would be compelled to join the insurgency himself if the parliament does not back his bid to take over Afghanistan’s electoral watchdog.
His comments came less than a day after Karzai sought to defuse tensions over his earlier anti-foreigner outburst by assuring US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he was committed to working with the United States.
Kabul and Washington said they were putting behind them the incident which saw Karzai publicly claim last week that foreigners orchestrated election fraud.
Tags: afghanistan, Karzai, taliban
Afghan children face world’s worst conditions – U.N.
Mar 22, 2010 afghan war
More than a quarter of Afghan children — 257 out of 1,000 — will die before they reach their fifth birthday and 165 out of every 1,000 will die in the first year of their lives, more than any place in the world
By Jonathon Burch
HERAT, Afghanistan – Afghanistan is the hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for UNICEF said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse.
“The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child,” Daniel Toole said on a visit to Afghanistan this week.
“If I could take one challenge, it’s survival.”
Three decades of war and a worsening insurgency have made it ever tougher for an Afghan child just to survive, Toole told Reuters during a visit aimed at highlighting what UNICEF calls the worst conditions for children on earth.
One of the girls he had just met in a woman’s shelter was only nine years old when she was forced to marry a total stranger. Another was just 11.
More than a quarter of Afghan children — 257 out of 1,000 — will die before they reach their fifth birthday and 165 out of every 1,000 will die in the first year of their lives, more than any place in the world, according to UNICEF data from 2008.
Afghanistan also has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world after Sierra Leone, with 1,800 women per 100,000 live births dying during child birth, according to UNICEF estimates from 2005.
“On top of that, we overlay the conflict, and so children are being displaced, their food production has been disrupted, so the chances of being yet further endangered by the security situation … make it that much more dramatic,” said Toole.
“DRAMATIC STORIES, PAINFUL STORIES”
Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst levels since a U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 overthrew the Taliban. Since then, intense fighting between insurgents and foreign and Afghan troops has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes.
An increasing number of children are also fleeing across Afghanistan’s borders, said Toole, with many turning up as far away as Western Europe without their parents.
Last April, 24 Afghan children aged between 14 and 16 were found living on a sidewalk of a railway station in Rome. The Save the Children aid group said Afghan children now made up one of the biggest groups of unaccompanied minors in the city.
Other major problems facing children in Afghanistan, particularly girls, said Toole, is underage marriage and sexual abuse. Forty-three percent of girls aged 20-24 were married before they were 18, according to UNICEF figures from 2009.
Girls are often married against their will to men more than twice their age and are forced to have sex with their husbands before they reach puberty.
Toole described a visit he made to a women’s shelter supported by UNICEF in the western city of Herat. The shelter is the only place in the city where girls who have been sexually abused or married at a young age can seek refuge.
“Two young girls, one who was nine who was married. She didn’t even know she was being married until she arrived and was told, ‘here is your husband’. Another married at 11 against her will,” said Toole after meeting the girls at the shelter.
“Dramatic stories, painful stories, but I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. I found myself thinking, ‘how many girls have had this happen and and can’t get to this centre?’,” he said.
But despite the difficulties facing Afghan children, Toole said progress was being made, especially in education with an increasing number of girls being sent to school. “There is a lot of improvement but there is still so much more to do here, even if I just think about survival,” Toole said.
Tags: Afghan children, U.N, UNICEF
Putting a price on Afghan life
Mar 22, 2010 Videos, World News, afghan war
What is the price of a human life?
In Afghanistan, if foreign troops kill an innocent civilian by accident, families may receive compensations of around $2,500.
But there is no fixed system for compensation – something that Stanley McChrystal, the top US general in Afghanistan, is now calling for.
But many bereaved families aren’t convinced that money will heal deep wounds.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel Hamid reports from Kabul – where civilian casualties are rising.
Tags: Afghan life, drone attacks, Nato Forces, US troops, war on terror
U.S – NATO Offensive Unravels in Afghanistan: The Longest Foreign War in U.S. History
Mar 11, 2010 afghan war
Global Research, March 8, 2010
The Pentagon offensive against the Afghan city of Marjah was public-relations media hype from the very first day. The sole purpose of the offensive in Marjah was to convince the U.S. population and increasingly tepid NATO allies that this imperialist war is winnable.
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now the longest foreign war in U.S. history, on both the air and the ground. The Pentagon described the Marjah offensive as the biggest military operation in more than eight years of occupation, but now calls it a prelude to a larger assault on the city of Kandahar.
In U.S. counterinsurgency warfare, such an offensive means dropping heavily armed troops in an area seeking to draw enemy fire. The troops then call in air support, long-range artillery fire, machine-gun fire, rockets, white phosphorous bombs and anti-personnel bombs. The latter cover the ground with bomblets that emit thousands of razor-sharp fragments.
Tens of thousands of civilians were driven from the villages of Helmand Province, and the town of Marjah was partially evacuated. But thousands of Afghans were unwilling to leave their homes and animals in the cold of winter for the hunger, instability and flimsy shelter of refugee camps. Many are too poor to leave. They ended up as targets of Pentagon weapons.
The Marjah offensive’s stated goal was to introduce a ready-made, U.S.-created local regime, staffed by an Afghan puppet administration totally dependent on U.S. power. With cynical and racist arrogance, NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “We got a government in a box ready to roll in.” (New York Times, Feb. 12)
Afghan casualties unrecorded
Throughout this war, the Pentagon and corporate media have never counted and scarcely mentioned Afghan civilian deaths, injuries and trauma from bombings, fires and destruction. Tens of thousands more die of starvation, cold and infections in crowded refugees camps, swollen cities and isolated villages.
During the U.S. offensive in Marjah, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached the milestone of 1,000. This total confirms that youth are paying the price of the lack of education and job opportunities in the U.S. In addition, suicides among returning soldiers now exceed combat deaths and injuries are about four times the deaths.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point warned of sharp increases in U.S. troop casualties in the months ahead. “What I want to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect.” (Army Times, Jan. 7)
As the two-week offensive officially ended in Marjah, bombs exploded in one of the most secure areas of Kabul. Some reporters described it as a sophisticated and well-coordinated operation in the heavily guarded capital. A car bomb targeted housing of employees from countries connected to the occupation, apparently with the aim of undermining international support for the Afghan war.
During the offensive came the announcement on Feb. 21 that the Netherlands coalition government had fallen apart, due to heated opposition of a coalition party to keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. This sealed the planned withdrawal of 2,000 Dutch troops from NATO forces in Afghanistan, as of next August.
The Netherlands was the first NATO member to announce that it is quitting. The announcement was a big setback for the U.S. and NATO, and has prompted wide media speculation of other possible NATO withdrawals from the deeply unpopular war.
A Los Angeles Times editorial on Feb. 24 stated that the Dutch “withdrawal is likely to raise concerns about a fracturing of the international commitment to Afghanistan, and about the Afghan government’s ability to provide security in the long term . … The Dutch decision should serve as a warning to the Obama administration.”
The majority of the people in almost all the NATO countries opposes the war and wants their troops out. This has become a major issue in domestic politics and elections in many countries. Canada has announced the withdrawal of its forces by the summer of 2011.
Anti-war mood undermines NATO militarism
Following the Dutch announcement, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech at the National Defense University told NATO officers and officials that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader goals. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment. … Right now the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.” (New York Times, Feb. 24)
Gates also reminded NATO officials that, not counting U.S. forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were scheduled to increase to 50,000 this year — from 30,000 last year.
The total 43-country International Security Assistance Force, including U.S. soldiers, is presently at 140,000 troops in Afghanistan.
As journalist Rick Rozoff summed up a year ago: “The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the 60 years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and 12 other European and Caucasus nations linked to NATO. …
“The 12 European NATO partners who have sent troops in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent’s five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The European NATO and partnership deployments count among their number troops from six former Soviet Republics — with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic states … including airbases and troop and naval deployments in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean (where the Japanese navy has been assisting).” (rickrozoff.wordpress.com, March 25, 2009)
Military units from Australia, New Zealand, Jordan, Colombia and South Korea are also stationed in Afghanistan.
Afghans have a right to resist
Despite all these occupation forces, Afghanistan has become an imperialist quagmire with no stability, no security and no end in sight.
The resistance in Afghanistan has gained ground and broad support as it becomes clear to the whole population that U.S./NATO forces have brought only racist arrogance, corruption, repression and greater poverty. While occupation forces label all resistance as terrorism and Taliban-inspired, increasingly Afghans see resistance as a right and a patriotic or religious duty. It is essential in the period ahead that the anti-war movement supports the right of the Afghan people to resist this criminal occupation and increases the effort to bring all troops home now.
Tags: afghan war, afghanistan, cia, Marjah, U.S. History, war, war on terror
Taliban Still Working for the CIA?
Nov 9, 2009 News & Events, afghan war, war on terror
Henry Makow Ph.D.
November 09 2009
As President Obama ponders whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, there is mounting evidence the Taliban is supported by the CIA. If correct, the Afghan war is a charade with a hidden agenda.
First, we have many reports that unmarked helicopters are ferrying the Taliban to targets, and relieving them when cornered.
“Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taliban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams,” an Afghan soldier said. “They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army.”
This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taliban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces.
“I saw the helicopters with my own eyes,” said Sayed Rafiq from Baghlan-e-Markazi.
“They landed near the foothills and offloaded dozens of Taliban with turbans, and wrapped in patus (a blanket-type shawl).”
“Our fight against the Taliban is nonsense,” said the first soldier. “Our foreigner ‘friends’ are friendlier to the opposition.”
CIA AIR BASES IN PAKISTAN
Last February, there were reports of CIA airbases within Pakistan used for drones. If this is true, Pakistanis are being attacked by drones based in their own country. Obviously, the Taliban helicopters could also come from these CIA bases.
In May, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, told NBC News that the CIA and the (U.S.-Funded) Pakistani ISI intelligence service “has created the Taliban.”
Zardari said that the CIA and the ISI are still supporting the Taliban.
On Oct 29, 2009, Hillary Clinton infuriated Pakistani officials by saying she found it “hard to believe” the ISI didn’t know where Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. Her role is to maintain the fiction that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not CIA creations.
Just the day before, (Oct. 18) four American citizens were caught photographing sensitive buildings in Islamabad. All four were dressed in traditional Afghan outfits and were found to be in possession of illegal weapons and explosives.
Their vehicles contained 2 M-16A1 rifles, 2 handguns and 2 hand-grenades. The police held the American citizens in custody for an hour before the Interior Ministry interfered and had them released without charge even as preliminary investigation was being carried out.
The CIA could be involved in the recent “Taliban” attacks on Pakistani institutions. Who knows? In some cases, the Afghan “Taliban” could be CIA mercenaries.
In Feb. 2008, the British were caught planning a training camp for the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan supposedly to make them “change sides.” Karzai expelled two top British “diplomats.”
THE HIDDEN AGENDA
All wars are charades. This is true of the world wars, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, 9-11 and the current war on terror. The human race is caught in a hologram controlled by the Illuminati Rothschild central bankers.
Wars are necessary to divide, distract and dehumanize us. Otherwise, we might focus on the small network of Masonic families, based in London, who control government credit. Therefore, the central banking cartel uses pawns like Bush and Obama, and intelligence agencies like the CIA, Mossad, MI-6 and ISI to foment war. They finance these wars by issuing debt repayable to them by the taxpayer.
As I have said, the ultimate goal is to translate their monopoly over government credit into a worldwide monopoly over power, wealth and culture; in other words, to disinherit and enslave the human race. This is called world government.
I’m not an expert on the politics of the Asian subcontinent. But it appears that the Afghanistan war should be seen in a larger regional context. Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated a “global-zone of percolating violence,” that included Central Asia, Turkey, southern Russia, and the western borders of China. It also included the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf (Iran), Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The plan to destabilize this vast area was outlined in Brzezinski’s book, “The Grand Chessboard” (1997) . Ostensibly, the purpose was to prevent Russia from becoming an imperial power again. But that doesn’t make sense.
What do these countries have in common? They are Muslim. Islam is the last redoubt of faith in God. The Illuminati are Satanists. Put two and two together.
The Afghan war has some immediate “benefits” to the bankers: perpetual war, arms spending, drugs, pipelines etc. But it is part of a larger “war of civilizations” designed to degrade and destroy Islam. Look for it to expand and go on forever.
———————–
On a related note, citing current and former U.S. officials, The New York Times reported Oct. 28, 2009 that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been getting regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Ahmed Wali Karzai is a suspected player in Afghanistan’s opium trade and has been paid by the CIA over the past eight years for services that included helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar,” the newspaper reported.
Tags: 9/11, afghanistan, Air Bases, cia, CIA Bases, obama, Pakistan, Pakistan Bases, taliban, war on terror
