Faced with growing calls from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to scale back the nearly decade long Afghan War and end the practice of launching night raids on individual homes, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the practice.
‘We believe that the use of intelligence driven, precision targeted operations against high-value insurgents and their networks is a key component’ of the strategy,” Clinton insisted. US officials have reacted with anger at President Karzai’s complaint, and Gen. David Petraeus has warned him not to repeat his criticism of the war effort.
But complaints about the night raids are nothing new. The attacks have regularly killed civilians and the previous commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, repeatedly issued new rules designed to curb their use, acknowledging that the attacks were causing major public outrage.
General Petraeus, on the other hand, appears to have little interest in the public relations side of the war, ordering a number of McChrystal’s restrictions loosened as part of an effort to improve troop morale. The result has been a significant increase in civilian casualties, and a significant increase in the number of times US officials have had to defend the war from a growing outcry.
The arrogance and hubris that emanates from Secretary Clinton during her foreign policy tirades is mind-numbing. For starters, the US has no legitimate business occupying Afghanistan. The "war on terror" is a phony justification. Afghanistan played absolutely no role in 9/11. The Taliban made several overtures or extradition opportunities to solve the Osama bin Laden impasse available to the US which were resolutely ignored. So, the question must be…what is behind the occupation of Afghanistan? Oil, pipelines, abundant strategic resources or perhaps all of the above.
There is just no defense for the terrorizing and murder of innocents as well as the destruction of another country based on fabrications and or misrepresentations.
I would like to think America is better than that!
Naturally she defends them, it's not her family that's getting shot and tortured. "…intelligence driven, precision targeted operations against high-value insurgents…" makes it sound so damn important and professional, as if we couldn't possibly be doing the wrong thing, we have such professional objectives and jargon. Who could possibly question our motives ? If the Klu Klux Klan had used this kind of language they might still be in charge of this country. What a shame they were too stupid to cloak their sinister objectives with such professional sounding language. But I suppose they're just as happy charging into the homes of Afghan citizens and hunting them down like animals.