A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over US operations." (Reuters also reported that Farah Province deputy governor Yunus Rasooli said residents of two villages hit this week by U.S. warplanes had produced lists with the names of 147 people killed in the attacks.)
The protests were elevated by the reaction of the Afghan government to the deadly airstrikes. INN reported that Afghanistan Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, Mohammad Younus Qanoni warned the Afghan government to submit the 'legalisation plan' of foreign military presence within a week to the parliament. Some MPs were said to suggest 'sealing off' the parliament as a protest.
Afghan President Karzai on Friday finally put some substance behind his repeated demands the U.S. end the bungling raids and check the collateral killings of his countryfolk. "We believe strongly that air strikes are not an effective way in fighting terrorism. That's not good for the US, that's not good for Afghanistan, that's not good for the conducting of the war," Mr. Karzai told CNN in an interview.
"We demand the proper conduction of operations. We demand an end to these operations," Karzai said. "We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban or for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians," he said.
Karzai, upbraiding the entirety of tactics that the escalated NATO forces have been employing in their presumed 'defense' of Kabul, complained that, "the air strikes, especially, and sudden bursts into homes at night are not in any way good for this war."
Silly puppet . . . the U.S. military doesn't give a damn about what you want.
"If there's one lesson I draw from the past, it is the importance of our staying engaged," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Friday at Forward Operating Base Airborne in northern Afghanistan. "And if there's a lesson for Americans and the international community, it's that we don't dare turn our backs on Afghanistan. This will work if we stay engaged."
That was basically the attitude back at the Pentagon today as U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias disputed the 140-plus that the Afghans are insisting were killed in the airstrikes. She told reporters that, "The investigators and the folks on the ground think that those numbers are extremely over-exaggerated." "We are definitely nowhere near those estimates."
The Pentagon responded with their own over-exaggeration, trotting out an 'anonymous' military official to insist the airstrikes were done in broad daylight and were actually for the Afghan's own good. "This was not a night raid, this was not a scheduled operation, we came to their assistance," the official said on condition of anonymity. "We were supporting our Afghan partners," anonymous told AFP.
If this is the best our forces have to offer in 'defense' of the Afghan regime, it's understandable why the protected head is looking to pull the plug on the military forces' most destructive tactics. Mr. Karzai has to realize, though, that the defense of his precarious regime is not the primary mission of the U.S. dominated NATO force. America is engaged in a war on an ideology in the Middle East which the leadership at the Pentagon believes can and should be 'won' in Afghanistan.
Mr. Gates last May, cast the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same kind of 'ideological' battle that Bush had promoted in defense of his unbridled military aggression across sovereign borders:
"Afghanistan and Iraq are the most important battlefields in the fight today, Gates said, and his priority has been "getting us to a point where our strategic objectives are within reach in those two countries . . . America's best opportunity to discredit and deflate the extremist ideology is in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates said.
"Just as the hollowness of communism was laid bare by the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too would success in those countries strike a decisive blow against the ideological underpinnings of extremist movements," Gates argued.
The best evidence, so far, has not pointed to any 'collapse' of the ideology of resistance to U.S. aggression and expansionism across sovereign borders. If anything, the self-perpetuating cycle of attacks and reprisals has provided text and substance for the militarized resistance and their recruiting of Afghans driven to violent expressions of self-determination and liberty. Is anyone at the White House paying attention?
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