NATO Chief ‘Concerned’ by Rising Opposition to Afghan War

Lauds Election as a 'Step Forward,' Claims Progress

Speaking at a military ceremony in Norfolk Virginia, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was “concerned” by the rising opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan, cautioning that “the public discourse on the effort in Afghanistan has started to go in the wrong direction.”

Rasmussen insists that despite public opinion, which shows a significant majority of voters in virtually every involved nation now squarely opposed to the eight year long war, the war has to continue into the forseeable future, cautioning that NATO cannot allow a future in which they withdraw from the nation.

Incredibly enough the NATO chief also claimed that the war effort was making “progress” in Afghanistan, claiming that while the massively fraudulent elections were not perfect there were “a step forward,” and also claiming that the new strategy in 2009 had led to a 95 percent reduction in civilian deaths.

The claims about the election, at a time when everyone else has abandoned any pretense that they were anything but a disaster, were bizarre enough, but the claim about civilian deaths were both demonstrably false and ill-timed, as NATO is still attempting to do damage control over the massive civilian deaths in Friday’s Kunduz air strike, when a US jet’s attack on two hijacked fuel tankers killed at least 70 civilians.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.