That Other War
Jul 8th, 2007 at 7:37 am by Susie
Oh yeah, it’s all coming back to me now:
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 7 — Amid a continuing flurry of reports about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the leader of a tribal council in Farah Province said Saturday that 108 noncombatants had been killed Friday in a NATO airstrike.
The report was denied by a NATO spokesman and could not immediately be confirmed from other sources.
“NATO soldiers, along with the Afghan National Army and people from the national police, came to Shewan Village and told us they needed to search three or four houses,” the tribal chief, Hajji Khudai Rahm, said in a telephone interview. “As we talked, a firefight began and 20 houses were destroyed when the planes dropped bombs.
“We counted 108 bodies, including women and children,” he said. “Fourteen local policemen were among the dead. Right now, things are calm, but people are digging through the rubble to find more bodies.”
That would be this same war:
WASHINGTON, July 7 — A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.
But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.






Under the Dick & Dubya regime’s watch in Afghanistan,
opium production has now reached an all-time high.
Way to go, Bushco!
That cancelled mission shows why we won’t win that war or any other until we are willing to do it completely and without reservations. Something the leadership in this country hasn’t had the guts to do since Aug. 9, 1945.