A US military helicopter launched an overnight attack on a group of what it believed were “militants loading munitions into a van,” killing five of them. According to police in the rural district of the Kandahar Province, they weren’t militants, and those weren’t munitions.
Instead, the Apache helicopter launched its attack on a group of farmers who were loading cucumbers they had grown into a van to be sent to a nearby bazaar. Despite police confirming the van it hit was full of cucumbers, NATO maintained that those it killed were militants. The attack is the second disputed incident of civilian killings in Kandahar Province in as many days.
The previous night, another helicopter launched an attack on a family’s compound, killing four people, three of them children. The family insists the four were sleeping at the time of the attack, NATO insists they were carrying “plastic jugs” and that it assumes they were planting roadside bombs. NATO maintains the four were “insurgents” despite the young age of three of them.
The pair of incidents come as the new NATO chief is visiting the nation, and just a week after a UN report cautioned that the escalation of war in Afghanistan is taking a rising toll on the civilian population of the country. With the US trying to convince farmers to switch crops to stem the rising opium exports from the nation, the fact that they can’t distinguish between cucumber and small arms is doubtless to make some farmers think twice.
Wouldn't it be less expensive and more effective to pay the Afghan opium farmers the going rate for their crop and immediately destroy it in the field. Immediate destruction of the crop would eliminate its value to the drug lords and terrorists, as well as remove their ability to finance their drug business and terrorism. Destruction of the crop in the field would undoubtedly bring the bad guys directly to us, thus eliminating the need to chase them all over the unfamiliar terrain populated by a decidedly unhappy population. It would also remove the ability of the bad guys to influence farmers with a pay check. We would be the ones with the power to write the checks. In addition, we would not have to spend millions of dollars chasing the processed product all around the world, while maybe finding 15% of it. Anyway, don't you think it's a little illogical to expect an Afghan farmer to plant our suggested alternative crop and earn less for his efforts?
It would make more sense. Still, it would have made more sense to have pursued Bin Laden, which we were lied about, instead of acquiring launching pads for further conflict. As we know now the Taliban kept opium production down without us having to do a damn thing but now it has skyrocketed. Funny how wherever the U.S. sticks its nose, and other protruding organs, there is a boom in the drug trade. Maybe the safest place on earth is Antarctica. That is, of course, until Uncle "Snowman" Sam claims there are Meth labs there damaging the worlds "chillin". In which case we can expect the bipartisan bombs to fall until he gets his cut of the action.
These were cucumbers of mass destruction!