BIDEN HAVING DRUNK BUSH'S KOOL-AID DEFENDS WAR IN AFGHANISTAN AS JUSTIFIED AND NECESSARY

Why is it that so many Washington insiders think that American wars are "justified" and "worth" the casualties? All this sounds so much like Bush-speak. Now we have VP Biden saying the same rubbish about the war in Afghanistan.

Mark Tran writes on The Guardian's web page today:

"Speaking in the deadliest month for British troops since the US-led invasion in 2001, Biden insisted that the current offensive against the Taliban in Helmand province was worth the effort and was a "prerequisite" to get the country ready for presidential elections next month.

"In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme Biden said: "In terms of the national interests of Great Britain and the national interests of the United States and Europe, it is worth the effort we are making and the sacrifice that is being felt and more will come.""

No war is worth the lives of any soldiers or of any civilians. This applies to the war in Afghanistan. There is no such thing as a "justified" war. Soldiers never solve anything because, at the root of all wars, is a political problem that statesmen just don't want to solve diplomatically.

Biden is in effect saying that U.S. and British soldiers must first kill the Taliban in order to get Afghanistan ready for elections. This is outrageous bull and pure sophistry. The Taliban are Afghanis, they know their own country, they have their own social system. Foreign armies of the U.S. and Britain are never going to defeat them or make them change their views. So Biden would have Afghani villagers killed, members of the Pashtun tribe eliminated, women and children bombed, all in the cause of preparing for Karzai's re-election.

Reports Tran:

"With the British government under increasing political pressure as casualties mount, Biden restated the case for Nato's presence in Afghanistan.

""This is the place from which the attacks of 9/11 and all those attacks in Europe that came from al-Qaida have flowed – between Afghanistan and Pakistan … It is a place that, if it doesn't get straightened out, will continue to wreak havoc on Europe and the United States.""

Biden wants to straighten out 20-year Afghani villagers who think they are waging a holy jihad in trying to kill American and British troops. Frankly, I don't see members of the Taliban boarding an airplane in Kabul and flying to London or New York to carry out some mayhem or havoc on Europe or the U.S.

Everything that Biden said about justifying this foolish war seems wrong and short-sighted. And this is a guy who opposed Bush's bellicose foreign policy. Now he himself has come under the spell of defending a misguided war.

TAMANAHA ON BALKINIZATION: WHAT IF TALIBAN WATERBOARDED U.S. SOLDIERS?

I just read a post by Brian Tamanaha on Balkinization in which he theorizes about the scenario where members of the Taliban capture U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and subject them to waterboarding. The Bush administration especially Dick Cheney claim that waterboarding is not torture, so there is no violation of any Geneva Convention provisions. Furthermore, Tamanaha "quotes" the Taliban as saying that eminent legal scholars (one thinks of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, John Yoo, David Addington, Jay Scott Bybee and Steven Bradbury) have opined that waterboarding is not torture, therefore the Taliban are not committing war crimes.

STOP U.S. AIR ATTACKS IN AFGHANISTAN

Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall report in today's The New York Times that U.S. bombing has killed up to 100 villagers in western Afghanistan, many of them women and children. Apparently Afghan forces attacked a suspected Taliban house and then called in U.S. war planes. The result is all too predictable.

Write Shah and Gall:

"Dozens of civilians, including women and children, have been killed during bombing raids by United States forces in western Afghanistan as Afghan troops battled Taliban fighters in heavy fighting, the Red Cross said Wednesday, confirming earlier accounts by Afghan officials.

"Enraged villagers brought between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show them to officials, the officials said Tuesday. Villagers’ accounts put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said."

I have been long arguing for a complete cessation of U.S. air attacks. There is no way that such attacks are not going to inflict unacceptable civilian casualties. Perhaps the U.S. government still permits these attacks, misunderstanding who the "enemy" is. Members of the Taliban are just ordinary Afghanis, undereducated, simple farmers living with their families in agrarian villages. The Taliban thus represent a true insurgency against U.S. occupying and invading military. If the U.S. and Obama are going to "defeat" the Taliban, it cannot be by force of guns or war planes dropping bombs.

Consider the following from the Shah and Gall report:

"Villagers told Afghan officials that they had put children, women, and elderly men in several housing compounds away from the fighting to keep them safe. But the villagers said fighter aircraft later attacked those compounds in the village of Gerani, killing a majority of those inside, The A.P. reported.

"Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani.

"“These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,” Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. “People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.”"

TALIBAN PUBLICLY EXECUTE YOUNG COUPLE ACCUSED OF SEX WITHOUT BEING MARRIED

There is a horrible cruel report from Afghanistan that the Taliban have executed a young couple 21 and 19 for having sex without being married. The couple apparently was planning an elopement to Iran, but their parents learned of their plans, reported them to the Taliban, and now they are dead.

The BBC reports:

"Correspondents say that the killings took place in a remote and dangerous region, where the government has no access.

"The Taleban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and during that time implemented its austere interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, carrying out public killings and floggings.

"Unmarried men and women were forbidden from talking or meeting in public and women were not allowed out of their homes without a male relative. Girls were discouraged from going to school.

"Extrajudicial "honour killings" have been widely carried out in Afghanistan since then by conservative families angered by a relative who has brought them shame - usually by refusing to marry a chosen partner."

The Taliban show that they are living in medieval times. Forget about human rights or the right to choose whom to marry or to love. Religious fervor dominates society, and the irrational precepts of religion come into domination. The Taliban's is a dark world of religion, unforgiving, anti-female, irrationally obsessed with sex.

OPEN LETTER TO OBAMA: DON'T AMPLIFY WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

Dear Barack,

I read today in The New York Times a report by Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker saying that your administration is elevating war over diplomacy in Afghanistan.

This is a major mistake. Don't do it! To extend American involvement in war in Afghanistan is to commit the United States to an intractable problem that cannot be solved by tanks and guns. Many others including Senator McGovern have urged you to declare a moratorium on war for at least five years. This is the right path.

There is no American interest in pacifying the Taliban with American military might. It was not the Taliban who flew commercial jets into American buildings in 2001. Taliban are not planning to attack the U.S. If they choose to pursue their own life style that is drawn wholesale from the Middle Ages, it clashes with American modern culture, but so be it. Don't enlarge the war or send in another 30,000 American troops to try to effect cultural change.

Talk with Taliban leaders. Use diplomacy to try to prevent Taliban from supporting jihadist Arab anti-Western insurgents. Make any attempt to capture Al Qaeda adherents a police action, not an objective of war.

Sincerely,
Roberto Antonio Hussein in Utah

TEN FRENCH SOLDIERS DIE IN AFGHANISTAN IN USELESS HOPELESS WAR

Ten French soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan yesterday. Yet the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kourchner says today that France is committed to send and keep its troops to fight there.

There must be a better way. After all, what is the purpose of having NATO troops in Afghanistan?

• to capture Osama bin Laden? Not very likely. Bin Laden is probably safely ensconced in the tribal territories in northwest Pakistan.
• to defeat and kill the Taliban? Again, not much chance of this. The Taliban consists of local and mostly uneducated Afghanis who believe in fundamentalist Islam and who also resent the presence of foreign soldiers in their county. No foreign army will ever defeat the movement.
• to protect the rights of women? Laudable, but it will never happen in Afghanistan, an Islamic country that does not believe in rights except for men.
• to prop up Karzai? If Karzai has not by this time secured the loyalty of Afghanis, nothing will protect him, not George Bush himself with thousands of Army Rangers.

So what should be done vis-a-vis Afghanistan?

• withdraw all foreign troops.
• start negotiations with leaders of the Taliban and allow them representation in the Afghani government.
• make the search for bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda a police operation. Dropping bombs on villagers and sending in the army with tanks has never convinced the locals that they are wrong and the army is right.

AFGHAN HISTORY: FOREIGN INVADERS ALWAYS DEFEATED

Today in The New York Times Carlotta Gall and Eric Schmitt describe the recent attack by Taliban insurgents on a U.S. outpost in Afghanistan.

"The Taliban insurgents who attacked a remote American-run outpost near the Pakistan border on Sunday numbered nearly 200 fighters, almost three times the size of the allied force, and some breached the NATO compound in a coordinated assault that took the defenders by surprise, Western officials said Monday.
"The attackers were driven back in a pitched four-hour battle, and they appeared to suffer scores of dead and wounded of their own, but the toll they inflicted was sobering. The base and a nearby observation post were held by just 45 American troops and 25 Afghan soldiers, two senior allied officials said, asking for anonymity while an investigation was under way.
"With nine Americans dead and at least 15 injured, that means that one in five of the American defenders was killed and nearly half the remainder were wounded. Four Afghan soldiers were also wounded."

In the multi-thousand year history of Afghanistan and its tribes, has there been any successful invasion and occupation? The answer is a resounding NO! The Afghanis have defeated one occupier after another. No one survives as a foreign invading force in Afghanistan.

Look what happened to the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan initially in 1978. Ten years later the Russians were pulling out as fast as they could. The Mujahadeen killed Russians by the hundreds, shot down Russian choppers, inflicted cruel punishment for any Soviet soldier unfortunate enough to be captured alive.

So how does the United States think that Americans will win in Afghanistan? And what is wrong with Barack Obama for saying that the U.S. should send two more brigades? Surely Obama cannot believe that the military force of an invading nation, even the powerful U.S. military machine, can possibly succeed where so many other invaders have failed.

Leave Afghanistan to its people and tribes. Withdraw all U.S. and other NATO forces. Stop the indiscriminate bombing of Afghan civilians.

Afghanistan is a black hole where foreigners are destined to lose.

U.S. AIRFORCE - STOP BOMBING CIVILIANS IN AFGHANISTAN

Once again there are reports that many civilians, including women and children died as a result of bombing in Afghanistan. See the BBC report today by Charles Haviland.

"Earlier several dozen villagers near the town of Gereshk told the BBC that "foreign forces" had bombed their area for two to three hours late on Friday after earlier clashes with Taleban rebels.


"They believed between 50 and 80 civilians had been killed, including women and children, and said they were bringing the bodies to the local authorities."

So far this year, there have been more than 200 civilians killed by war planes dropping bombs. This reinforces my argument that the United States should do away with its war planes. Airplanes have become a killing machine, and they do so in a cruel and fiery way. People should not be the targets of a airplane flying high above dropping incendiary bombs.

The United States military tries to claim it targets Qaeda forces and not civilians.

"Foreign forces and the Afghan government say the Taleban often take refuge in civilian areas after launching attacks, ordering people to shelter them."

However, when the U.S. Air Force bombs villages, it already knows or should know that it is bombing civilians. Just because Taliban take refuge in a civilian's home should not justify that the pilots can or should drop their bombs, civilians be damned.