The war cost the lives of as many as 70 million people, soldiers and civilians alike.
In the nuclear age the world would not survive any attempt at a similar conflagration.
But that war is increasingly becoming the frame of reference for the fighting in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater.
In the April 1st edition of Toronto's Global and Mail Michael O'Hanlon, director of research and senior fellow on foreign policy issues at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an opinion piece called "Kandahar is what the Canada-U.S. alliance is all about" that "Americans need to feel unabashed about asking Canada to stay on in Afghanistan past 2011," as the two nations "are beginning the most important combined wartime operation since the Second World War." [14]
The carnage against Afghan civilians perpetrated by the U.S. and NATO from the sky and on the ground is steadily mounting (as deaths from U.S. drone missile attacks in adjoining Pakistan near the 800 mark). From Kunduz last autumn and Marjah the last two months to the unconscionable murder of two pregnant women (one a mother of ten, the other of six), a teenage girl and others in the village of Khataba in Paktia province in February, the counterinsurgency strategy of General McChrystal, commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is producing its lethal effect.
The war is also costing NATO a rising number of casualties in the military bloc's first ground war. As of April 3rd Western nations had lost 144 soldiers this year. In the first three months of 2010 the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) acknowledged at least 138 deaths as compared to 78 during the same quarter in 2009, which itself was the deadliest year for U.S. and NATO forces - 520 losses - since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. "Military planners have said they expect an escalation of deaths and injuries among foreign troops as deployments surge to a peak of 150,000 by August...." [15]
American combat deaths also "roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year," and "have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March."
"U.S. officials have warned that casualties are likely to rise even further as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban's home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in the coming months." [16]
On April 2nd three German soldiers were killed and five seriously wounded in a firefight with an estimated 200 insurgents in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz. According to Deutsche Presse-Agentur, "It was the highest number of casualties the postwar German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, have suffered in battle and brought to 39 the number of German soldiers killed in Afghanistan." [17] That is, the three soldiers killed represented the most German combat fatalities in a single skirmish since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. The 39 deaths in total are the first since the end of World War II.
German NATO troops responded by killing six Afghan government soldiers in the same province on the same day.
In mid-March German General Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff of the International Security and Assistance Force in the Afghan capital, informed German public radio that "There will definitely be an operation up there in Kunduz (province)," and that the offensive would be "similar" in scale "to the offensive currently underway in the southern province of Helmand involving 15,000 US, NATO and Afghan troops." [18]
Germany currently has approximately 4,300 troops in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent after the U.S. and Britain and the most deployed abroad in the post-World War II period since 8,500 troops were assigned to the NATO force in Kosovo in 1999. [19]
In Afghanistan, as evidenced above, they are in an active war zone for the first time in 65 years. Last September 5th German troops called in NATO air strikes against villages near their base in Kunduz which resulted in the deaths of over 150 Afghan civilians. [20]
German Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Dirk Niebel, who was in Afghanistan on the day of the deadly fighting that cost the lives of five of his own country's soldiers and six from the government of Afghanistan, the protection of which is the pretext for German military involvement in the nation, in speaking of his nation's combat troops at a ceremony for those killed on April 2nd stated, "They want people to understand that they have to defend themselves - sometimes also preventatively. And they don't understand why they have to explain themselves to the German public, or why they could even be prosecuted." [21]
Another report of the same day quoted German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg asseverating, "We will stay in Afghanistan" although the mission is being conducted under "war-like" circumstances and the situation confronting German troops could be categorized as a war.
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