Two More US Troops Killed by Afghan Trainees

The US is literally training their own Taliban enemies to kill American soldiers

Two more American soldiers were killed and several others wounded on Friday when multiple Afghan security personnel opened fire on their supposed allies, in the latest so-called “green-on-blue” attack, which have now killed 39 international troops so far this year.

In the first incident, “A member of the Afghan Local Police turned his weapon against two USFOR-A service members,” NATO said. Hours later, NATO confirmed that “a number” of foreign and Afghan soldiers were shot and wounded by another Afghan soldier in the southern province of Kandahar.

The failure of the US mission in Afghanistan – to build up and train a centralized state and security apparatus – is illustrated clearly in the constant killing of US soldiers by their Afghan counterparts. Much of the security force has been infiltrated by the Taliban or Pakistani agents.

On Thursday it was reported that the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Omar issued a statement bragging about extensive insurgent infiltration in America’s trained security personnel in Afghanistan.

“They are able to (safely) enter bases, offices and intelligence centers of the enemy,” he said. “Then, they easily carry out decisive and coordinated attacks, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy.”

As a former US official told Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “several hundred soldiers in the Afghan Army are thought to be agents for the Taliban or for Pakistan.” He said that many insurgents who have infiltrated the Afghan forces and killed US troops “had been planted in the Army by the Taliban or by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main intelligence branch.”

The US mission in Afghanistan has failed miserably. President Obama’s supposed justification for building up Afghan security forces is so they serve as a bulwark against a return to Taliban rule. But the Taliban have seeped deep into those forces the US is spending billions of dollars on training, and the insurgency is as strong as ever.

Author: John Glaser

John Glaser writes for Antiwar.com.