- Reaction score
- 2,389
- Points
- 940
Wow; that's a pretty broad brush.Colin P said:
I Corps' presence in Ft Lewis consists of:
...or, effectively, the entire Canadian Army.
"You're in the Army? I've heard they've had discipline problems."
NATO apologizes after U.S. soldier opens fire on Afghan civilians
- Thread starter Kalatzi
- Start date
I Corps' presence in Ft Lewis consists of:
"You're in the Army? I've heard they've had discipline problems."
J
jollyjacktar
Guest
Sad to say, but I believe you are right. I tried to explain to my workers how on the whole our legal and justice system is pretty fair, the police are not corrupt and incompetent etc. They did not really buy it as they have no experience in that regard. So in this case, I don't believe the average Afghan would be happy with anything less than a speedy trial and swift hanging. It won't of course go that route. I wonder how many revenge killings will come of this. Not a good Spring so far for progress on winning the hearts and minds.Colin P said:
A
aesop081
Guest
jollyjacktar said:
At what point do we just say "f**k their hearts and minds" and just leave ?
- Reaction score
- 2,535
- Points
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In Canada's case, for now, anyway , 2014CDN Aviator said:
J
jollyjacktar
Guest
There comes a time, when just like an older car it starts to nickle and dime you to death and you just know. Or as Kenny Rodgers sang in "The Gambler - you have to know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run". Personally, I don't see long term success there anymore. The Taliban will come home, either by force or treaty and will take over the place again like a cancer. Maybe we never had a chance at winning their hearts and minds to begin with. History will judge.CDN Aviator said:
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
I found this article. I don't know what you think of Carl Prine, but I feel this is a good article.
Reproduced under the fair use provision of the copyright act.
The Dead of Pangwai
By Carl Prine Monday, March 12th, 2012 9:06 am
Posted in On Media, On War
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/12/the-dead-of-pangwai/#ixzz1ovWgiLzL
Reports from Kandahar’s Pangwai district are sketchy and often contradictory, but it appears apparent from both Afghan government and ISAF declarations that at least one U.S. soldier has murdered in cold blood more than a dozen villagers near an American military outpost.
At least nine of the victims were children. The gunman has been described in the various western media as a non-commissioned officer, either a sergeant or staff sergeant. Reports have said that he surrendered to authorities after allegedly committing what only can be considered a war crime.
Villagers have said that in one of the homes, he stacked the bodies, including those of toddlers, and set them ablaze. Neighbors extinguished the fire and reporters have counted 16 bodies there punctured with bullets. Our surgeons shall continue to treat the survivors, several of whom might die in the coming days or weeks, prolonging the crisis with each obituary broadcast by Afghan media or the Taliban.
The massacre follows the accidental killing by NATO gunships of four Afghan civilians in Kapisa Province during operations against the Taliban. And news of the murders arrives in the wake of nationwide demonstrations because U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Qur’an that had been confiscated from prisoners accused of using the holy books to pass messages.
In the American mass media, discussion of these tragedies has been dominated by questions of 1) whether they shall speed the exit of U.S. ground forces; 2) what the events mean to relations with the Hamid Karzai regime in Kabul as we put the final touches on a long-term security pact; 3) the short-term implications for U.S. troops as demonstrations like those in the wake of the Kapisa killings flare nationwide; and, 4) the political fallout in the U.S. as the GOP nomination grinds on and President Barack Obama prepares for his reelection campaign.
Let me fire up the speculation machine and try to answer the questions in turn.
1. The Panjwai massacre is unlikely to quicken the pace of the U.S. drawdown.
While Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has flirted with a 2013 exit, ISAF seems committed to leaving in large numbers in 2014 when Afghan National Security Forces are predicted to be ready to take on increasing responsibilities for the fight against the various Taliban militias.
Depending on how one conjures these numbers in the dark art of predicting kandak competency, we might say that perhaps after more than a decade of war and tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, about 30 Afghan army battalions can operate largely on their own, even if they can’t really supply themselves with materiel.
The rest of the force is prone to drug addiction and desertion and we won’t discuss the National Police at all because it’s too depressing.
Suffice it to say that our lofty goals have conspired with Afghan perfidy and incompetence to produce a security force that’s unreliable and unlikely to take the field soon to defend their own people.
So we’re stuck with the training mission until they are ready, and the latest allegation of NATO war crimes isn’t going to change that.
Hell, the U.S. Army left 170 Vietnamese peasants in a My Lai ditch in 1968 (see photo) and our last combat battalion didn’t leave until four years later.
2. Nothing changes with the Karzai kleptocracy.
Karzai, his corrupt and incompetent functionaries and the illiterate warlords backing them shall bemoan the latest round of bad news, but so what? They also detest the night raids run by U.S. units to kill and capture Taliban and we’re not going to stop those, are we?
Karzai’s flunkies and their muscle are addicted to western money because it makes them – and not the half of all adult males there currently unemployed – rich; just as they’re hooked on our military might because it keeps them from having to fight the Taliban.
We’re Karzai’s crutch and our sergeants could commit a thousand war crimes and the regime would still have to lean on us or fall. Just as we’re still stuck on the advisory mission with the ANSF, so Karzai’s kleptocracy is shackled to ISAF. And we can’t end the hated night raids because a resurgent Taliban slobber-slapping the ANSF around might prevent us from leaving.
Yes, our ongoing support without any tittle of concern for Afghan or Pakistani perceptions makes Karzai appear to be a weak, feckless, corrupt puppet screeching meaningless homilies about Kapisa and Panjwai and the desecration of Qur’ans and yada yada yada.
Yes, our lawmakers grumble that Karzai stole an election and seems to be scheming to remain in power beyond his term, picking our pockets until NATO is penniless.
It changes nothing. We’re stuck with each other in our own uniquely dysfunctional co-dependent relationship and there’s no diplomatic version of Dr Phil to talk us away from each other.
3. We likely shall see the Taliban and other anti-government forces escalate the demonstrations because they’re a handy tool used to discredit the Karzai regime and the US-led coalition.
There likely will be spontaneous protests in many parts of the nation, including the Kandahar we’ve screwed down by massing troops there, but those won’t be the interesting ones.
I’ll pay more attention to those that appear to be orchestrated by the cadre of the various Taliban networks in the rest of the country, including Kabul. I suspect that these likely will be led by the one militia with a uniquely honed ability to wield violence and protest theatrically to psychologically addle the government elites and the urban masses.
Which is to say, the Haqqanis.
Expect a few SBVIEDs here and couple of protests there – before the cameras, of course – because that’s what the Haqqanis do and they’ve been rehearsing this sort of thing for three decades. Or, as I put it previously, they “articulate symbolically the larger discontent against the U.S.-led coalition and our proxy government in Kabul and we should expect to see the gyres of civil disobedience, symbolic terror and propaganda swirling into a vortex of Afghan anger.”
Along with the Haqqanis’ blood-dripped dramaturgy, the coming spring offensive by the Quetta Shura Taliban might help those sorts of tornados form into a larger, more unruly storm of Afghan discontent. Sort of a monsoon season of anti-occupation symbolic terror and protest.
But like all inclement weather,these patterns of violence and demonstration come and go. Just as thunderheads and their lightning can’t dislodge the mountain, so the Pashtun-dominated and Pakistani-abetted militias can’t evict the U.S. or our proxy Karzai from Kabul.
Just so, the mountains can’t stop the rain from falling, even as it erodes their peaks and scarps. The worst weather blows over, this they know.
And so the war continues.
4. The latest atrocity, as the larger war itself, means nothing to the American people and won’t affect either the primary or the general election.
Yes, the American people, like our European friends, have grown to hate this war. They’ve long lost any faith in the cant vomited from the mouths of politicos or the generals about the likely end state for Afghanistan, a nation our voters care no more about than they do Lilliputia or Utopia.
It’s the latter that our more dissembling generals and spies apparently believe is obtainable through the current oplans.
If we were a serious nation that concerned itself with battle and those who we send to wage it, we likely would find some fault with the commander in chief, Obama, for a failed strategy. If we were grownups who elected competent lawmakers more concerned about our democracy than the vanity of their corporate sponsors, we might even obtain a Congress willing to hold hearings about a lost decade of warmaking and enact statutes to fix that sort of thing.
Surely they might at least go through the motions in some grudging bureaucratic honor to our dead, right?
But we’re not that sort of people and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has left us despondently inarticulate about such matters. Unless you’re Newt Gingrich, a man never lost for words.
Gingrich seems to have pivoted in recent weeks away from his heady optimism about our Afghan misadventure, saying our strategy in Kabul is now “undoable.”
This might be a wise move on Gingrich’s part. As a former Speaker of the House, his departure from Congress long predates our surge in Afghanistan so he doesn’t have to own it as Obama would. Nor is Newt as slack-jawed stupid on foreign policy issues as Rick Santorum, so he can approach the subject with some nuance (missing, one might add, from his bellicose Iran pronouncements).
But no one believes either Gingrich or Santorum will take on Obama in the fall. And should he be elected, glum frontrunner Willard Romney likely shall confect an Afghanistan policy similar to the president’s, even if he now suggests otherwise.
The general election will come down to jobs, the economy and whatever pointless diversion political beat reporters can trip over (Mitt has a new haircut that’s not presidential! Obama forgot the first name of his Secretary of Transportation during a stop in Cleveland! ), not generals.
So, what should come of all this?
Well, ultimately this tragedy matters most to the Afghan people who suffered the worst of it and our military, which must see if it can harvest some lessons from Kandahar’s killing fields.
I can think of no war that lacked atrocities. But our military is drawn from the well of free peoples, and the hallmark of a democratic society should be our willingness to account for moral failure.
We also should study ourselves, to see if the latest war crime is a systemic problem or rather – as some are quite quick to say – that it was all the work of a sociopath on a rogue thrill kill spree.
Regardless, the inquiry should be transparent and the final reports on the slaughter shared widely with the democracy that must sustain an Army that reflects us.
Too often over the past two administrations this hasn’t been the case. We’ve buried the skeletons of our mistakes, even the murders — often sooner than the families buried their dead – leaving whistleblowers seared by the memories of what was done before their eyes. They whisper what they witnessed later to a democracy that doesn’t care.
This, mind you, often after a military bureaucracy has waged a reprisal campaign against the honest who turned in the killers.
This time, let’s not do that. In the wake of the slaughter in Pangwai, let’s pray that the last death isn’t of the truth.
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/12/the-dead-of-pangwai/#ixzz1ovVI9LZf
Reproduced under the fair use provision of the copyright act.
The Dead of Pangwai
By Carl Prine Monday, March 12th, 2012 9:06 am
Posted in On Media, On War
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/12/the-dead-of-pangwai/#ixzz1ovWgiLzL
Reports from Kandahar’s Pangwai district are sketchy and often contradictory, but it appears apparent from both Afghan government and ISAF declarations that at least one U.S. soldier has murdered in cold blood more than a dozen villagers near an American military outpost.
At least nine of the victims were children. The gunman has been described in the various western media as a non-commissioned officer, either a sergeant or staff sergeant. Reports have said that he surrendered to authorities after allegedly committing what only can be considered a war crime.
Villagers have said that in one of the homes, he stacked the bodies, including those of toddlers, and set them ablaze. Neighbors extinguished the fire and reporters have counted 16 bodies there punctured with bullets. Our surgeons shall continue to treat the survivors, several of whom might die in the coming days or weeks, prolonging the crisis with each obituary broadcast by Afghan media or the Taliban.
The massacre follows the accidental killing by NATO gunships of four Afghan civilians in Kapisa Province during operations against the Taliban. And news of the murders arrives in the wake of nationwide demonstrations because U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Qur’an that had been confiscated from prisoners accused of using the holy books to pass messages.
In the American mass media, discussion of these tragedies has been dominated by questions of 1) whether they shall speed the exit of U.S. ground forces; 2) what the events mean to relations with the Hamid Karzai regime in Kabul as we put the final touches on a long-term security pact; 3) the short-term implications for U.S. troops as demonstrations like those in the wake of the Kapisa killings flare nationwide; and, 4) the political fallout in the U.S. as the GOP nomination grinds on and President Barack Obama prepares for his reelection campaign.
Let me fire up the speculation machine and try to answer the questions in turn.
1. The Panjwai massacre is unlikely to quicken the pace of the U.S. drawdown.
While Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has flirted with a 2013 exit, ISAF seems committed to leaving in large numbers in 2014 when Afghan National Security Forces are predicted to be ready to take on increasing responsibilities for the fight against the various Taliban militias.
Depending on how one conjures these numbers in the dark art of predicting kandak competency, we might say that perhaps after more than a decade of war and tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, about 30 Afghan army battalions can operate largely on their own, even if they can’t really supply themselves with materiel.
The rest of the force is prone to drug addiction and desertion and we won’t discuss the National Police at all because it’s too depressing.
Suffice it to say that our lofty goals have conspired with Afghan perfidy and incompetence to produce a security force that’s unreliable and unlikely to take the field soon to defend their own people.
So we’re stuck with the training mission until they are ready, and the latest allegation of NATO war crimes isn’t going to change that.
Hell, the U.S. Army left 170 Vietnamese peasants in a My Lai ditch in 1968 (see photo) and our last combat battalion didn’t leave until four years later.
2. Nothing changes with the Karzai kleptocracy.
Karzai, his corrupt and incompetent functionaries and the illiterate warlords backing them shall bemoan the latest round of bad news, but so what? They also detest the night raids run by U.S. units to kill and capture Taliban and we’re not going to stop those, are we?
Karzai’s flunkies and their muscle are addicted to western money because it makes them – and not the half of all adult males there currently unemployed – rich; just as they’re hooked on our military might because it keeps them from having to fight the Taliban.
We’re Karzai’s crutch and our sergeants could commit a thousand war crimes and the regime would still have to lean on us or fall. Just as we’re still stuck on the advisory mission with the ANSF, so Karzai’s kleptocracy is shackled to ISAF. And we can’t end the hated night raids because a resurgent Taliban slobber-slapping the ANSF around might prevent us from leaving.
Yes, our ongoing support without any tittle of concern for Afghan or Pakistani perceptions makes Karzai appear to be a weak, feckless, corrupt puppet screeching meaningless homilies about Kapisa and Panjwai and the desecration of Qur’ans and yada yada yada.
Yes, our lawmakers grumble that Karzai stole an election and seems to be scheming to remain in power beyond his term, picking our pockets until NATO is penniless.
It changes nothing. We’re stuck with each other in our own uniquely dysfunctional co-dependent relationship and there’s no diplomatic version of Dr Phil to talk us away from each other.
3. We likely shall see the Taliban and other anti-government forces escalate the demonstrations because they’re a handy tool used to discredit the Karzai regime and the US-led coalition.
There likely will be spontaneous protests in many parts of the nation, including the Kandahar we’ve screwed down by massing troops there, but those won’t be the interesting ones.
I’ll pay more attention to those that appear to be orchestrated by the cadre of the various Taliban networks in the rest of the country, including Kabul. I suspect that these likely will be led by the one militia with a uniquely honed ability to wield violence and protest theatrically to psychologically addle the government elites and the urban masses.
Which is to say, the Haqqanis.
Expect a few SBVIEDs here and couple of protests there – before the cameras, of course – because that’s what the Haqqanis do and they’ve been rehearsing this sort of thing for three decades. Or, as I put it previously, they “articulate symbolically the larger discontent against the U.S.-led coalition and our proxy government in Kabul and we should expect to see the gyres of civil disobedience, symbolic terror and propaganda swirling into a vortex of Afghan anger.”
Along with the Haqqanis’ blood-dripped dramaturgy, the coming spring offensive by the Quetta Shura Taliban might help those sorts of tornados form into a larger, more unruly storm of Afghan discontent. Sort of a monsoon season of anti-occupation symbolic terror and protest.
But like all inclement weather,these patterns of violence and demonstration come and go. Just as thunderheads and their lightning can’t dislodge the mountain, so the Pashtun-dominated and Pakistani-abetted militias can’t evict the U.S. or our proxy Karzai from Kabul.
Just so, the mountains can’t stop the rain from falling, even as it erodes their peaks and scarps. The worst weather blows over, this they know.
And so the war continues.
4. The latest atrocity, as the larger war itself, means nothing to the American people and won’t affect either the primary or the general election.
Yes, the American people, like our European friends, have grown to hate this war. They’ve long lost any faith in the cant vomited from the mouths of politicos or the generals about the likely end state for Afghanistan, a nation our voters care no more about than they do Lilliputia or Utopia.
It’s the latter that our more dissembling generals and spies apparently believe is obtainable through the current oplans.
If we were a serious nation that concerned itself with battle and those who we send to wage it, we likely would find some fault with the commander in chief, Obama, for a failed strategy. If we were grownups who elected competent lawmakers more concerned about our democracy than the vanity of their corporate sponsors, we might even obtain a Congress willing to hold hearings about a lost decade of warmaking and enact statutes to fix that sort of thing.
Surely they might at least go through the motions in some grudging bureaucratic honor to our dead, right?
But we’re not that sort of people and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has left us despondently inarticulate about such matters. Unless you’re Newt Gingrich, a man never lost for words.
Gingrich seems to have pivoted in recent weeks away from his heady optimism about our Afghan misadventure, saying our strategy in Kabul is now “undoable.”
This might be a wise move on Gingrich’s part. As a former Speaker of the House, his departure from Congress long predates our surge in Afghanistan so he doesn’t have to own it as Obama would. Nor is Newt as slack-jawed stupid on foreign policy issues as Rick Santorum, so he can approach the subject with some nuance (missing, one might add, from his bellicose Iran pronouncements).
But no one believes either Gingrich or Santorum will take on Obama in the fall. And should he be elected, glum frontrunner Willard Romney likely shall confect an Afghanistan policy similar to the president’s, even if he now suggests otherwise.
The general election will come down to jobs, the economy and whatever pointless diversion political beat reporters can trip over (Mitt has a new haircut that’s not presidential! Obama forgot the first name of his Secretary of Transportation during a stop in Cleveland! ), not generals.
So, what should come of all this?
Well, ultimately this tragedy matters most to the Afghan people who suffered the worst of it and our military, which must see if it can harvest some lessons from Kandahar’s killing fields.
I can think of no war that lacked atrocities. But our military is drawn from the well of free peoples, and the hallmark of a democratic society should be our willingness to account for moral failure.
We also should study ourselves, to see if the latest war crime is a systemic problem or rather – as some are quite quick to say – that it was all the work of a sociopath on a rogue thrill kill spree.
Regardless, the inquiry should be transparent and the final reports on the slaughter shared widely with the democracy that must sustain an Army that reflects us.
Too often over the past two administrations this hasn’t been the case. We’ve buried the skeletons of our mistakes, even the murders — often sooner than the families buried their dead – leaving whistleblowers seared by the memories of what was done before their eyes. They whisper what they witnessed later to a democracy that doesn’t care.
This, mind you, often after a military bureaucracy has waged a reprisal campaign against the honest who turned in the killers.
This time, let’s not do that. In the wake of the slaughter in Pangwai, let’s pray that the last death isn’t of the truth.
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/12/the-dead-of-pangwai/#ixzz1ovVI9LZf
J
jollyjacktar
Guest
FTFYCrantor said:
Fisher: U.S. soldier shooting rampage occurred in one of Canada's model villages
By Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News March 11, 2012
Article Link
MOSCOW — The community of Belanday, where a rogue American army sergeant reportedly began a murderous spree Sunday, killing 16 Afghans including several little girls, was one of Canada’s model villages in Kandahar where Canadian and later American troops lived in small groups in proximity to the local population and invested tens of thousands of hours between 2009 and 2011 to win their confidence.
“If it happened there, this will be shocking to the people of Belanday, as you can imagine, but I think that they can recover. One bad actor cannot spoil the reputation of the whole. I believe that to be true,” said Maj.-Gen. Jon Vance, whose idea it was three years ago to create model villages where troops interacted closely with the locals.
The community was chosen as a model village by Vance in the fall of 2009 as part of a project that had begun nearby in April 2009. It was copied across southern Afghanistan after NATO’s top Afghan generals, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus saw firsthand what Canada had achieved there.
Reports from the scene were confusing and contradictory Sunday with some indicating the shooting by a lone U.S. soldier had begun in Belanday before spreading to two other villages to the north in Panjwaii District. The entire region was part of Canada’s area of military operations until the Harper government withdrew its combat forces last summer. It lies in the middle of a hardscrabble desert about 20 kilometres from Kandahar City.
“It was an interesting place,” Vance, who commanded Canadian combat forces in Afghanistan in 2009 and again for five months in 2010, recalled in an interview on Sunday. “It was a definite transit point for Taliban on their way to Kandahar City.
“We went there with two objectives. We no longer wanted it to be a transit point for the enemy and we wanted to directly engage the local population.”
The arc to the west and southwest of Kandahar City that Canadian troops first entered in the spring of 2006 was one of the most dangerous in southern Afghanistan until Canadian forces, with U.S. assistance, began to have sufficient forces to establish model villages there in 2009.
When I was in the area several times last year where Sunday’s shootings occurred, I witnessed Canadian and American soldiers going on long joint foot patrols, patiently making friends with local children in the narrow warren of streets. Through such encounters International Security Assistance Force troops got to know their parents, or, at least, their fathers a bit. It was an approach which eventually paid big dividends but that may be reversed after Sunday’s tragic event.
“By the time all Canadian forces had left it was quiet because it had become a toxic environment for the Taliban,” Vance said.
More on link
By Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News March 11, 2012
Article Link
MOSCOW — The community of Belanday, where a rogue American army sergeant reportedly began a murderous spree Sunday, killing 16 Afghans including several little girls, was one of Canada’s model villages in Kandahar where Canadian and later American troops lived in small groups in proximity to the local population and invested tens of thousands of hours between 2009 and 2011 to win their confidence.
“If it happened there, this will be shocking to the people of Belanday, as you can imagine, but I think that they can recover. One bad actor cannot spoil the reputation of the whole. I believe that to be true,” said Maj.-Gen. Jon Vance, whose idea it was three years ago to create model villages where troops interacted closely with the locals.
The community was chosen as a model village by Vance in the fall of 2009 as part of a project that had begun nearby in April 2009. It was copied across southern Afghanistan after NATO’s top Afghan generals, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus saw firsthand what Canada had achieved there.
Reports from the scene were confusing and contradictory Sunday with some indicating the shooting by a lone U.S. soldier had begun in Belanday before spreading to two other villages to the north in Panjwaii District. The entire region was part of Canada’s area of military operations until the Harper government withdrew its combat forces last summer. It lies in the middle of a hardscrabble desert about 20 kilometres from Kandahar City.
“It was an interesting place,” Vance, who commanded Canadian combat forces in Afghanistan in 2009 and again for five months in 2010, recalled in an interview on Sunday. “It was a definite transit point for Taliban on their way to Kandahar City.
“We went there with two objectives. We no longer wanted it to be a transit point for the enemy and we wanted to directly engage the local population.”
The arc to the west and southwest of Kandahar City that Canadian troops first entered in the spring of 2006 was one of the most dangerous in southern Afghanistan until Canadian forces, with U.S. assistance, began to have sufficient forces to establish model villages there in 2009.
When I was in the area several times last year where Sunday’s shootings occurred, I witnessed Canadian and American soldiers going on long joint foot patrols, patiently making friends with local children in the narrow warren of streets. Through such encounters International Security Assistance Force troops got to know their parents, or, at least, their fathers a bit. It was an approach which eventually paid big dividends but that may be reversed after Sunday’s tragic event.
“By the time all Canadian forces had left it was quiet because it had become a toxic environment for the Taliban,” Vance said.
More on link
J
jollyjacktar
Guest
Yes, I see you point and agree with you.Crantor said:
Belanday. I was nearby in Deh-e-Bagh when I was OTW. All that good work in Belanday and area, ruined.
I was there the day this was filed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVu1bx9MFYQ
Pieman
Army.ca Veteran
- Reaction score
- 27
- Points
- 530
Ah Good old Dog-E-Bag. Funny, I was there that day too. Vance was super excited about what was going on there, it was his idea and he was really pushing it. Things really took a turn in a different direction once our American buddies took control of a certain FOB I was on. Much more 'pro-active' than Canadians.
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
- Reaction score
- 9,230
- Points
- 1,160
Journeyman said:
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Lewis-McChord-most-troubled-base-in-military--112680799.html
Nearly 130 gang and extremist group members have been identified on the Fort Lewis, Washington, Army Installation since 2005. These gang members are believed to be responsible for many of the criminal misconduct instances reported on base.
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/justicelawlegislation/a/gangs.htm
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/11/army-report-blames-lapses-on-stryker-commander-112711w/
I have heard other stuff about the issues there, most of it seems to point to the leadership of a number of units as the reason problems were left unchecked and allowed to get out of hand.
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
Some may not care for the writer's sarcasm in my last post.
RecceGuy madde reference to My-Lai. Many will not have heard of it.
I think that the following article makes some thoughtful points.
Reproduced under the fair use provision of the copyright act.
America's self-defeating cycle in Afghanistan
By Jeremi Suri, Special to CNN
Editor's note: Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor of history and public affairs and a Distinguished Fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Suri is the author of numerous books, most recently "Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama."
Austin, Texas (CNN) -- The past month has been the worst for the United States in Afghanistan since the war began after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
There have been more difficult periods of combat against the Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgents. There have been more fragmented and confused moments in allied strategy. There has, however, never been a time when American soldiers acted with such obvious and offensive disrespect for Afghan citizens.
The past month has witnessed a string of incidents, including the alleged killing of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier and the burning of Qurans, the holiest touchstone of the Islamic faith, at a NATO air base. The United States has crossed a self-defeating threshold in Afghanistan where our soldiers are seen as attacking the very people and culture they are deployed to protect. We are destroying villages in order to save them.
We have witnessed this dynamic before. In early 1968, it became apparent that American soldiers in South Vietnam were fighting a stubborn communist enemy without the support they expected from South Vietnamese citizens. To the contrary, residents of South Vietnam frequently gave assistance to the insurgents killing Americans.
Frustrated and desperate, particularly after the Tet Offensive in January 1968, American soldiers took the war to the population with devastating consequences. Counterinsurgency warfare meant burning rural villages, bombing crowded areas and killing innocent civilians. The My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, was the most notorious example, but it was not unique. After failing to catch insurgents who fled the village, angry American soldiers killed more than 300 women, children and elderly residents in cold blood. The United States was massacring the same South Vietnamese it was fighting to save.
We do not know what motivated the American soldier who is accused of going house-to-house, murdering Afghan families, on Sunday.
Based on the patterns of the past month, the question arises: Was he acting in ways that echo My Lai?
The U.S. military might be the strongest fighting force in the world, but it is still a collection of emotional and fragile human beings who react to the circumstances, pressures and incentives around them.
As in Southeast Asia more than 40 years ago, the American soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting a war against an elusive enemy amidst a population that is increasingly resistant to American demands for assistance. Afghan citizens know that the United States is planning to leave soon, and they sense that the Americans they meet care more about an "exit strategy" than the welfare of their society. Afghan intransigence furthers the frustration and resentment among American soldiers, fueling violent behavior directed at innocent civilians.
This self-defeating cycle reflects specific policies. President Barack Obama has acknowledged the corrupt Afghan leadership of Hamid Karzai, but he is doing nothing serious about it.
The U.S. government has told its more than 80,000 troops in Afghanistan that they must help create a stable and secure Afghan nation, despite rampant corruption, in less than a year. Young American soldiers are under enormous pressure, in hostile circumstances, and they are increasingly isolated from support networks within the United States.
For all the talk of "supporting the troops," the Afghanistan war receives little serious attention in American public debate. Obama rarely mentions the war, and his Republican challengers say little about it either. The American soldiers in Afghanistan are under orders to do the impossible at light speed, and they are ignored by their fellow citizens. We have re-created the conditions of extreme stress, isolation and victimization that were evident in Vietnam. We have turned a frustrating war into a breeding ground for American atrocities.
This is what happens when our national leaders try to fight a war and exit a war at the same time. We cannot do both. Our soldiers cannot build a functioning nation when they are told that we are not doing nation-building. They cannot defeat an enemy when we refuse to engage fully. They cannot work peacefully with local citizens when they are told that local citizens are the problem.
The choice is not to use more firepower or withdraw. The real choice is whether the United States is committed sufficiently to Afghanistan and willing to invest in supporting long-term efforts that will give our soldiers and local citizens a reason to believe that things will get better.
If the United States is unwilling to make these commitments, then it should admit it and reduce the demands on its soldiers. Either way, Americans must create a realistic basis for their activities in Afghanistan and end the fiction of a smooth transfer of authority from our overburdened soldiers to Karzai's corrupt administrators.
Realism will not please many Americans, but it will at least help to reduce the cycle of atrocities in Afghanistan. The time has come to escape the worst dynamics of Vietnam and re-learn the limits of American power.
RecceGuy madde reference to My-Lai. Many will not have heard of it.
I think that the following article makes some thoughtful points.
Reproduced under the fair use provision of the copyright act.
America's self-defeating cycle in Afghanistan
By Jeremi Suri, Special to CNN
Editor's note: Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor of history and public affairs and a Distinguished Fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Suri is the author of numerous books, most recently "Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama."
Austin, Texas (CNN) -- The past month has been the worst for the United States in Afghanistan since the war began after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
There have been more difficult periods of combat against the Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgents. There have been more fragmented and confused moments in allied strategy. There has, however, never been a time when American soldiers acted with such obvious and offensive disrespect for Afghan citizens.
The past month has witnessed a string of incidents, including the alleged killing of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier and the burning of Qurans, the holiest touchstone of the Islamic faith, at a NATO air base. The United States has crossed a self-defeating threshold in Afghanistan where our soldiers are seen as attacking the very people and culture they are deployed to protect. We are destroying villages in order to save them.
We have witnessed this dynamic before. In early 1968, it became apparent that American soldiers in South Vietnam were fighting a stubborn communist enemy without the support they expected from South Vietnamese citizens. To the contrary, residents of South Vietnam frequently gave assistance to the insurgents killing Americans.
Frustrated and desperate, particularly after the Tet Offensive in January 1968, American soldiers took the war to the population with devastating consequences. Counterinsurgency warfare meant burning rural villages, bombing crowded areas and killing innocent civilians. The My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, was the most notorious example, but it was not unique. After failing to catch insurgents who fled the village, angry American soldiers killed more than 300 women, children and elderly residents in cold blood. The United States was massacring the same South Vietnamese it was fighting to save.
We do not know what motivated the American soldier who is accused of going house-to-house, murdering Afghan families, on Sunday.
Based on the patterns of the past month, the question arises: Was he acting in ways that echo My Lai?
The U.S. military might be the strongest fighting force in the world, but it is still a collection of emotional and fragile human beings who react to the circumstances, pressures and incentives around them.
As in Southeast Asia more than 40 years ago, the American soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting a war against an elusive enemy amidst a population that is increasingly resistant to American demands for assistance. Afghan citizens know that the United States is planning to leave soon, and they sense that the Americans they meet care more about an "exit strategy" than the welfare of their society. Afghan intransigence furthers the frustration and resentment among American soldiers, fueling violent behavior directed at innocent civilians.
This self-defeating cycle reflects specific policies. President Barack Obama has acknowledged the corrupt Afghan leadership of Hamid Karzai, but he is doing nothing serious about it.
The U.S. government has told its more than 80,000 troops in Afghanistan that they must help create a stable and secure Afghan nation, despite rampant corruption, in less than a year. Young American soldiers are under enormous pressure, in hostile circumstances, and they are increasingly isolated from support networks within the United States.
For all the talk of "supporting the troops," the Afghanistan war receives little serious attention in American public debate. Obama rarely mentions the war, and his Republican challengers say little about it either. The American soldiers in Afghanistan are under orders to do the impossible at light speed, and they are ignored by their fellow citizens. We have re-created the conditions of extreme stress, isolation and victimization that were evident in Vietnam. We have turned a frustrating war into a breeding ground for American atrocities.
This is what happens when our national leaders try to fight a war and exit a war at the same time. We cannot do both. Our soldiers cannot build a functioning nation when they are told that we are not doing nation-building. They cannot defeat an enemy when we refuse to engage fully. They cannot work peacefully with local citizens when they are told that local citizens are the problem.
The choice is not to use more firepower or withdraw. The real choice is whether the United States is committed sufficiently to Afghanistan and willing to invest in supporting long-term efforts that will give our soldiers and local citizens a reason to believe that things will get better.
If the United States is unwilling to make these commitments, then it should admit it and reduce the demands on its soldiers. Either way, Americans must create a realistic basis for their activities in Afghanistan and end the fiction of a smooth transfer of authority from our overburdened soldiers to Karzai's corrupt administrators.
Realism will not please many Americans, but it will at least help to reduce the cycle of atrocities in Afghanistan. The time has come to escape the worst dynamics of Vietnam and re-learn the limits of American power.
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:bowdown: ...with sincere apologies (and MilPointsColin P said:
)
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From CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/12/afghanistan-us-sergeant-opens-fire.html
U.S. soldier accused of killing Afghans had head injury
The American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, most of them children, had been trained as a sniper and recently suffered a head injury in Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday.
The name of the suspect, a married, 38-year-old father of two, has not been released.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta said the soldier may face capital charges, and that the U.S. must resist pressure from Washington and Kabul to change course in Afghanistan because of anti-American outrage over the shooting.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/12/afghanistan-us-sergeant-opens-fire.html
U.S. soldier accused of killing Afghans had head injury
The American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, most of them children, had been trained as a sniper and recently suffered a head injury in Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday.
The name of the suspect, a married, 38-year-old father of two, has not been released.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta said the soldier may face capital charges, and that the U.S. must resist pressure from Washington and Kabul to change course in Afghanistan because of anti-American outrage over the shooting.
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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Journeyman said::bowdown: ...with sincere apologies (and MilPoints
No worries i have often tasted my foot here and at tanknet. :nod:
thanks for the points
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Taliban threatens to behead U.S. troops in retaliation
Suspected insurgents fired on an Afghan government delegation on Tuesday investigating the massacre of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier, officials said, hours after the Taliban threatened to behead American troops to avenge the killings.
Two of President Hamid Karzai’s brothers, Shah Wali Karzai and Addul Qayum Karzai, were with senior defence, intelligence and interior ministry officials travelling to the scene of the massacre in Najiban and Alekozai villages, in Kandahar’s Panjwai district, when insurgents opened fire.
Karzai’s brothers were unharmed in the brief gunbattle during meetings at a village mosque, but a soldier and a civilian were wounded. The area is a Taliban stronghold and a supply route.
“The Islamic Emirate once again warns the American animals that the mujahideen will avenge them, and with the help of Allah will kill and behead your sadistic murderous soldiers,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement, using the term with which the Islamist group describes itself.
As the first protest broke out in Jalalabad city over the weekend shootings, the Taliban said Afghan government demands for an open trial of the U.S. Army staff sergeant being held for the slayings would not blunt civilian hostility towards Western combat troops.
The unnamed U.S. soldier - said to have only recently arrived in the country - is accused of walking off his base in Kandahar province in the middle of the night and gunning down at least 16 villagers, mostly women and children.
A U.S. official said the accused soldier had suffered a traumatic brain injury while on a previous deployment in Iraq.
More at link
Suspected insurgents fired on an Afghan government delegation on Tuesday investigating the massacre of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier, officials said, hours after the Taliban threatened to behead American troops to avenge the killings.
Two of President Hamid Karzai’s brothers, Shah Wali Karzai and Addul Qayum Karzai, were with senior defence, intelligence and interior ministry officials travelling to the scene of the massacre in Najiban and Alekozai villages, in Kandahar’s Panjwai district, when insurgents opened fire.
Karzai’s brothers were unharmed in the brief gunbattle during meetings at a village mosque, but a soldier and a civilian were wounded. The area is a Taliban stronghold and a supply route.
“The Islamic Emirate once again warns the American animals that the mujahideen will avenge them, and with the help of Allah will kill and behead your sadistic murderous soldiers,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement, using the term with which the Islamist group describes itself.
As the first protest broke out in Jalalabad city over the weekend shootings, the Taliban said Afghan government demands for an open trial of the U.S. Army staff sergeant being held for the slayings would not blunt civilian hostility towards Western combat troops.
The unnamed U.S. soldier - said to have only recently arrived in the country - is accused of walking off his base in Kandahar province in the middle of the night and gunning down at least 16 villagers, mostly women and children.
A U.S. official said the accused soldier had suffered a traumatic brain injury while on a previous deployment in Iraq.
More at link
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More of what the Taliban have to say here:PMedMoe said:
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/104772/post-1123400.html#msg1123400
Matthew Fisher has allowed emotion to sieze control, but I fear he may be correct. This story from the Ottawa Citizen is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.
Now is the time to speed up move out of Afghanistan
Consequences of shooting spree will hurt many
By Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News March 13, 2012
As perhaps the only independent witness to every phase of Canada's military engagement in Afghanistan from 2002 to this year, I have always been among the evolving mission's strongest backers. I have observed what has been learned and what has been accomplished, and have always come away impressed by the soldiers and leaders who are part of what is the best small army in the world.
But only a couple of weeks after visiting Canada's trainers in Kabul and Herat, I am in a quandary.
What a lone American sergeant did early Sunday morning - patiently going door-to-door in a parched stretch of rural Kandahar which was for more than five years a Canadian responsibility, to murder 16 sleeping Afghan civilians, including nine kids - is beyond comprehension.
What the consequences will be for coalition troops - including slightly more than 900 Canadian advisers, who work closely every day with thousands of Afghan soldiers and police - is unknown.
But consequences can surely be expected for the actions of this soldier, who was apparently able to walk off by himself because he was attached to a group of U.S. Special Forces commandos who frequently operate outside of forward operating bases.
As a second rotation of Canadian trainers, built around a Royal Canadian Regiment battalion from New Brunswick, arrives this week in Afghanistan to begin an eight-month tour, the Conservative government and senior military commanders must urgently review the increased risks those Canadians may now face, and weigh them carefully against what Canada's trainers might still be able to achieve in Afghanistan before their advisory mission ends in March 2014.
In light of recent events, the federal government should actively consider speeding up the withdrawal of the last Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan.
Relations between coalition forces and Afghans were already seriously strained after a couple of U.S. troops defied every pre-deployment cultural briefing when they torched several Korans at an airbase near Kabul. This sacrilege - for that is how every Afghan viewed it - followed the appearance of a video in which a gaggle of U.S. Marines appeared to urinate on the corpses of three insurgents.
Such vile gifts to the Taliban - who had been routed in Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand in 2010 and 2011 thanks to the bravery, intelligence and perseverance of Canadian, American, British, Danish and Afghan troops - are undoubtedly having a cumulative effect on the always-fragile Afghan psyche.
Another less-discussed complication is that, with the U.S., France and Germany now on an accelerated timetable to quit Afghanistan, those Afghans who support the coalition's presence - and despite what many commentators have said, it has long been a solid majority of the population - are feeling desperate. Twinning what Afghans regard as rising foreign disrespect for them and their ways and the looming withdrawal of western forces, the situation for those Canadians still on the ground is unquestionably more unpredictable and volatile today.
It will be mostly bluster, but the Taliban has vowed to avenge Sunday's killings. A greater danger is that Afghan civilians may take matters into their own hands because, as Afghan parliament has already declared, they have "run out of patience" with the foreign troops in their midst.
The blood and treasure that Canada has lost in Afghanistan are matters of brutal arithmetic. There have been 158 Canadian military deaths. The mission, which was supported by both the Conservatives and the Liberals, has cost taxpayers well more than $10 billion.
What cannot be quantified is how quickly the slow, incremental gains that Canadian combat troops achieved in Kandahar, during rotations that began early in 2006 and ended last summer, are being squandered by the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans.
Having seen at what high cost Canada's successes in Afghanistan were wrought - and the tentative but genuine friendships that were forged with Kandaharis in mudhut communities that cut through the so-called Taliban belt southwest of Kandahar City - I can only imagine the torment and extreme disappointment of the thousands of well-intentioned Canadians who have served in that ill-fated desert.
They deserved better than this. So did the Afghans.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Now is the time to speed up move out of Afghanistan
Consequences of shooting spree will hurt many
By Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News March 13, 2012
As perhaps the only independent witness to every phase of Canada's military engagement in Afghanistan from 2002 to this year, I have always been among the evolving mission's strongest backers. I have observed what has been learned and what has been accomplished, and have always come away impressed by the soldiers and leaders who are part of what is the best small army in the world.
But only a couple of weeks after visiting Canada's trainers in Kabul and Herat, I am in a quandary.
What a lone American sergeant did early Sunday morning - patiently going door-to-door in a parched stretch of rural Kandahar which was for more than five years a Canadian responsibility, to murder 16 sleeping Afghan civilians, including nine kids - is beyond comprehension.
What the consequences will be for coalition troops - including slightly more than 900 Canadian advisers, who work closely every day with thousands of Afghan soldiers and police - is unknown.
But consequences can surely be expected for the actions of this soldier, who was apparently able to walk off by himself because he was attached to a group of U.S. Special Forces commandos who frequently operate outside of forward operating bases.
As a second rotation of Canadian trainers, built around a Royal Canadian Regiment battalion from New Brunswick, arrives this week in Afghanistan to begin an eight-month tour, the Conservative government and senior military commanders must urgently review the increased risks those Canadians may now face, and weigh them carefully against what Canada's trainers might still be able to achieve in Afghanistan before their advisory mission ends in March 2014.
In light of recent events, the federal government should actively consider speeding up the withdrawal of the last Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan.
Relations between coalition forces and Afghans were already seriously strained after a couple of U.S. troops defied every pre-deployment cultural briefing when they torched several Korans at an airbase near Kabul. This sacrilege - for that is how every Afghan viewed it - followed the appearance of a video in which a gaggle of U.S. Marines appeared to urinate on the corpses of three insurgents.
Such vile gifts to the Taliban - who had been routed in Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand in 2010 and 2011 thanks to the bravery, intelligence and perseverance of Canadian, American, British, Danish and Afghan troops - are undoubtedly having a cumulative effect on the always-fragile Afghan psyche.
Another less-discussed complication is that, with the U.S., France and Germany now on an accelerated timetable to quit Afghanistan, those Afghans who support the coalition's presence - and despite what many commentators have said, it has long been a solid majority of the population - are feeling desperate. Twinning what Afghans regard as rising foreign disrespect for them and their ways and the looming withdrawal of western forces, the situation for those Canadians still on the ground is unquestionably more unpredictable and volatile today.
It will be mostly bluster, but the Taliban has vowed to avenge Sunday's killings. A greater danger is that Afghan civilians may take matters into their own hands because, as Afghan parliament has already declared, they have "run out of patience" with the foreign troops in their midst.
The blood and treasure that Canada has lost in Afghanistan are matters of brutal arithmetic. There have been 158 Canadian military deaths. The mission, which was supported by both the Conservatives and the Liberals, has cost taxpayers well more than $10 billion.
What cannot be quantified is how quickly the slow, incremental gains that Canadian combat troops achieved in Kandahar, during rotations that began early in 2006 and ended last summer, are being squandered by the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans.
Having seen at what high cost Canada's successes in Afghanistan were wrought - and the tentative but genuine friendships that were forged with Kandaharis in mudhut communities that cut through the so-called Taliban belt southwest of Kandahar City - I can only imagine the torment and extreme disappointment of the thousands of well-intentioned Canadians who have served in that ill-fated desert.
They deserved better than this. So did the Afghans.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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