The U.S. and NATO have refused to put an end to night raids on Afghan homes, despite repeated objections and pleas from Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Night raids have become the top issue among many Afghans, exemplifying for them the grievances they have living under military occupation. Karzai has repeatedly asked they be put to an end, only to be met with staunch refusals by the U.S. and NATO.
Obama has more than tripled the incidence of night raids, which very often kill civilians, and which a study from back in September found fuel resentment and undermine the mission in Afghanistan.
“An estimated 12 to 20 night raids now occur per night,” according to the report, “resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” And many of the associated tactics, like “mass detention operations, holding entire villages for questioning on site for prolonged periods of time,” may violate international law, the report found.
Civilians bear the brunt of these hardline tactics. As one man from Nangarhar, interviewed in the report said, “They claim to be against terrorists, but what they are doing is terrorism. It spreads terror. It creates more violence.”
According to senior commanders in the Joint Special Operations Command, these various nightly raids get the wrong person 50 percent of the time. For a war-torn population living through a decade of US military occupation, ninety-two percent of whom have never even heard of 9/11, these are counterproductive indeed.
NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, on the other hand, told the media that raids are safe, account for less than 1 percent of civilian casualties and in 85 percent of cases no shots are fired.
But recent history reveals Jacobson’s characterization should be met with skepticism. A July United Nations report which claimed that only 30 civilians died in raids during the first six months of 2011 included only a very small fraction of night raids in which civilians were killed, according to officials of the independent Afghan commission that co-produced the report.
According to official statistics later released by the U.S. and NATO, well over 1,500 civilians were killed in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011. That would make night raids among the most deadly of all military operations in Afghanistan.
"“An estimated 12 to 20 night raids now occur per night,”"
According to former Reason magazine editor and Huffington Post reporter Radley Balko, we have an average of 150 no knock SWAT raids a day in America. So while it probably sucks to live under the American government in Afghanistan it still doesn't suck as much as it does to live under the American government in America.
The difference is that, as far as I know, there is no collateral damage to Americans yet. That´s the good news.
The other difference is that Iraq and soon Afghanistan will have both kicked our sorry asses out of their countries, while we´ll be stuck with those same sorry asses in America and Europe for a long time. That´s the bad news.
I think you can argue that there is a ton of well documented collateral damage:
http://www.theagitator.com/category/paramilitary-…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/25/jose-gue…
Say it ain't so, the mayor of Kabul can't get the US to stop killing innocents, how surprising. And what does this say about the US and NATO that they insist on this lunacy?
It says that they are not about to give up one of their own essential tactics…terrorism.
For NATO and america is not important, how many civilians are killed. We know what drone attacks have left in Pakistan. Destroyed infra structure and killed thosands with out trial or legal process.
Not even the Einsatztruppen were this prolific.
You can't say that the military under Obama hasn't learned from their mistakes…Bush's military obeyed the instructions from Maliki to cease and desist night raids and such – and see where that got them? Gone. What started out as an occupation turned into a retreat.
This time there won't be any retreat – just endless war and NATO's (US) version of terrorism – and eventual defeat – (they already wear the mantle of disgrace in the eyes of the rest of the world.)
endless war – not possible, the berrings on the printing press will seize up trying to keep up with the QE's, no bribes no war.
Karzai predictably whines as if on cue. If the guy were anything but a puppet we might actually hear him to tell Uncle Sam to hit the road, but not before his helicopter is fueled and laden with cash. Can't live in exile on hearts and minds alone.
Aside from the evils of the war itself, what absolutely puzzles me is why we have spent ten long, expensive years (and more to come) in this little, land-locked, backwater of a country on the other side of the globe to begin with? What's there that's so important?
It is not so much 'what's there' that is so important, as the ongoing profits to be reaped by the Captains of War Industry and Zion to be derived from the very wars they themselves create.
Friends, if we don 't knock America off its perch, the whole world will pay a terrible price. America is putting 1984 into action. America is succeeding where Japan and Germany failed. It does it by pretending to be spreading democracy and human rights while it is setting up fascism!
We, the people of the world, have to unite against our common enemy: AMERICA. I, for one, don't want to live in a world that it controls!
http://www.dangerouscreation.com
And exactly HOW, Mr Grayling, do you propose to "knock America off its perch?"
What strategies and tactics, methods and means do you propose?
And when America collapses in chaos (which it will do — probably sooner than any can or dare imagine — and "We, the people of the world" will have had absolutely nothing to do with that collapse), then HOW do you propose to deal with what takes America's place on The Perch?
The Ultimate Question, then, is this: HOW is The Fourth Reich to be confronted, combatted, defeated, and destroyed, and with it, any and all possibility of a Fifth Reich?
It´s very depressing that we seem to blow it all up now and then (e.g. a 300.000-year -old coin has been found in the US, etc.-see mcremo.com), few survive in the mountains and some hundred thousand years later we have forgotten all about it and we can blow it all up once again. We simply ignore all the things found, the Piri Reis map, a 300-mio-years old gold chain, a 600-mio-years-old metal vase, the description of planes and weapons like nuclear weapons in the Vedas, ETC. It seems that we´ll have to blow it all up several more times before we learn. A clue: The MX was cancelled but why was the warhead put on Minuteman-3 ? Because that warhead and the D5 on Trident-2 minimize nuclear winter effects if used against missile silos according to Professor Paul Rogers. That was the reason GPS (NAVSTAR) was developed. Of course, it leads to Launch On Warning. Bloody fools in the Pentagon !