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Title: 3 U.S. Service Members Killed by Afghan Bombs
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URL Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583756,00.html?test=latestnews
Published: Jan 24, 2010
Author: AP
Post Date: 2010-01-24 11:42:55 by christine
Keywords: None
Views: 150
Comments: 8
KABUL — NATO says three U.S. service members have been killed in two bombings in southern Afghanistan. Statements from the international military coalition say the Americans died Sunday in separate strikes but gives no further details. It's the second day of deadly attacks on U.S. troops in the south, which is expected to be the main focus of a U.S. troop surge. At least 25 American deaths have been reported so far this month — compared with 14 for the whole of January last year.
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#1. To: christine (#0)
And at home Americans are preparing for spring.
deleted
The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
first and foremost, americans must stop enlisting and refuse to go kill and be killed for the empire.
Have any of the blood dancers who voted for war weighed in on these latest murders yet?
Indeed! If folks stateside think Iraqis insurgents behaved in a cold nasty fashion towards our troops [ beheadings], wait until Obumski gets our military fully engaged in Afghanistan. The Afghans are N-A-S-T-Y on steroids. If the Afghans capture any of our troops, the captivity will be B-R-U-T-A-L. There's a reason why the Paki military don't mess with the Afghans who reside in their mountainous no man's land border region. There's a reason why the Russian soldiers, whose own Russian officers subject them to brutality, were so happy to get their butts out of Afghanistan and way far away from Afghan guerilla fighters. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the greater likelihood, unfortunately, of our boys - like the Russians and the British before them - will experience first hand what the Afghans are capable of doing. Here are 2 articles, with some cut and paste of key facts, that should give you an idea of the calamity Dear Leader Obumski is entrenching us in. A. www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/63581.html "Russian advice: More troops won't help in Afghanistan" 03/09/09 ...Many challenges that bedeviled the Soviets confront the American operation today, the retired envoys and generals said. Among them are vicious tribal rivalries, a weak central government, radical Islamists, power-hungry warlords, incompetent or corrupt local military commanders, failing infrastructure and the complexity of fighting guerrilla groups. The former officials also cautioned that trying to bring democracy to Afghanistan, or anything resembling it, will be as fruitless as their attempts to install communism. "You may elect a parliament, you may invite parliamentary delegations from Afghanistan to visit Europe, but it means nothing," said Boris Pastukhov, whose service as Soviet ambassador began in 1989, the year the Red Army withdrew. "The decisions by parliament cannot be compared with the decisions of a jirga," a tribal council. "History didn't listen to us," said Tabeyev, who's now 81. "All our efforts to restore peace in the country . . . this was a flop in the end." The fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that it isn't a country in the way the West thinks of countries, said retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev, who did two tours there and left as a regimental commander. "There has never been any real centralized state in Afghanistan. There is no such nation as Afghanistan," said Aushev, who's a former president of the Russian Caucasus republic of Ingushetia and now heads a veterans group in Moscow. "There are (ethnic groups of) Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks, and they all have different tribal policies." As a result, any occupation force will spend much of its time propping up a government that has little relevance outside Kabul and trying to corral disparate ethnic groups and tribes into a national army that's often unwilling to fight, Aushev said. "We made the same mistake when we put the weak Babrak Karmal as the head of state," Aushev said of a former Afghan president. "He was so weak that no one obeyed him. He was hiding behind the backs of Soviet soldiers. . . . Today the situation is the same; (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai is being protected by U.S. special forces." Retired Gen. Pavel Grachev, who spent two tours in Afghanistan, including commanding an airborne division, had a tone somewhere between disbelief and shock when he discussed the news of Obama's troop buildup. "I believed as sincerely as American officers do now that we were fighting there to help make our country safer," said Grachev, who later became defense minister and sent in Russian units to quell Chechnya during the 1990s, a campaign that also ended in disaster. "After the war, as a politician, I could see this war had been pointless."... B. www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/59479.html "U.S. Marines find Iraq tactics don't work in Afghanistan" 01/11/09 ...The men of the 3rd Batallion, 8th Marine Regiment, based at Camp Lejeune, are discovering in their first two months in Afghanistan that the tactics they learned in nearly six years of combat in Iraq are of little value here — and may even inhibit their ability to fight their Taliban foes. Their MRAP mine-resistant vehicles, which cost $1 million each, were specially developed to combat the terrible effects of roadside bombs, the single biggest killer of Americans in Iraq. But Iraq is a country of highways and paved roads, and the heavily armored vehicles are cumbersome on Afghanistan's unpaved roads and rough terrain where roadside bombs are much less of a threat. Body armor is critical to warding off snipers in Iraq, where Sunni Muslim insurgents once made video of American soldiers falling to well-placed sniper shots a staple of recruiting efforts. But the added weight makes Marines awkward and slow when they have to dismount to chase after Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan's rough terrain. Even the Humvees, finally carrying heavy armor after years of complaints that they did little to mitigate the impact of roadside explosives in Iraq, are proving a liability. Marines say the heavy armor added for protection in Iraq is too rough on the vehicles' transmissions in Afghanistan's much hillier terrain, and the vehicles frequently break down — so often in fact that before every patrol Marine units here designate one Humvee as the tow vehicle. The Marines have found other differences: In Iraq, American forces could win over remote farmlands by swaying urban centers. In Afghanistan, there's little connection between the farmlands and the mudhut villages that pass for towns. In Iraq, armored vehicles could travel on both the roads and the desert. Here, the paved roads are mostly for outsiders - travelers, truckers and foreign troops; to reach the populace, American forces must find unmapped caravan routes that run through treacherous terrain, routes not designed for their modern military vehicles. In Iraq, a half-hour firefight was considered a long engagement; here, Marines have fought battles that have lasted as long as eight hours against an enemy whose attacking forces have grown from platoon-size to company-size... ...They tell me that Afghanistan is Iraq on steroids," said Gilreath, who is on his first deployment and hasn't served in Iraq... ...At times, Afghanistan can feel deceptively like Iraq, they say. During a patrol that found the Marines surrounded by poppy fields, they spotted two men on a motorcycle trailing them. It was the only other vehicle on an otherwise unused paved road. "You see that. They're watching us," Gilreath radioed to his fellow Marines. In Iraq, such trailing often meant an attack was imminent. But not here. Marines said it could be months before the Taliban turns that information into an attack. "The lack of attacks has me asking: Are we doing something right or wrong?" asked company commander Capt. Sven Gosnell, 36, of Torrance, Calif., an Iraqi veteran. When the Taliban does take on the Marines, it's a different kind of fight, Marines said. For one, the Taliban'll wait until they're ready, not just when an opportunity appears. They'll clear the area of women and children, not use them as shields. And when the attack comes, it's often a full-scale attack, with flanks, trenches and a plan, said one Marine captain and Iraq veteran who asked not to be identified because he wasn't sure he was allowed to discuss tactics. Afghans "are willing to fight to the death. They recover their wounded, just like we do," said the captain. "When I am fighting here, I am fighting a professional army. If direct fighting does not work, they will go to an IED. They plan their ammunition around poppy season. To fight them, you are pulling every play out of the playbook."... U.S. troops also are frustrated by the different rules of engagement they must operate under in Afghanistan. Until Jan. 1, U.S. forces in Iraq operated under their own rules of engagement. If they saw something suspicious, they could kick down a door, search a home or detain a suspicious person. But in Afghanistan, they operate under the rules of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, of which U.S. troops are part. Under those regulations, only Afghans can search buildings and detain people....
Only downsized, HS dropouts would be dopey enough to search caves in Afghanistan on this bums order.
He like American generals are political animals and will do their masters bidding at all times. Professional soldiers are one step below professional politicians. The only difference being age limits forces them to retire, not so the politicians.
deleted
The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
NATO says three U.S. service members have been killed in two bombings in southern Afghanistan.
#2. To: christine (#0)
#3. To: Cynicom (#1)
#4. To: All (#3)
#5. To: Eric Stratton, Jethro Tull, Cynicom, christine, randge, abraxas (#2)
3 more American pawns, of an expendable variety, are wasted.
#6. To: All (#5)
(Edited)
#7. To: scrapper2 (#5)
Retired Gen. Pavel Grachev, who spent two tours in Afghanistan, including commanding an airborne division, had a tone somewhere between disbelief and shock when he discussed the news of Obama's troop buildup.
#8. To: scrapper2 (#5)
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