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Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Afghan Message


SOYMB came across this article by Dave Lindorff .

Three months after it lied about the execution-style murder by US forces of eight high school students and a 12-year-old shepherd boy in Afghanistan, and a month after it lied about the slaughter by US forces of an Afghan police commander, a government prosecutor, two of their pregnant wives and a teenage daughter, the US military has been forced to admit that these and other atrocities were the work of American Special Forces, working in conjunction with “specially trained” (trained , of course , by the US) units of the Afghan Army.These incidents were not mistakes; they were planned actions and the US carries the guilt of having committed war crimes. Statistics show that the US has routinely killed more civilians than actual enemy fighters.

It is the way the US has always done counterinsurgency. In a war in which the insurgents are a part of the people the goal is to drive a wedge between those fighters and the rest of the population. In Pentagon propaganda parlance, this is referred to as “winning the hearts and minds” of the people, but in reality, the US military doesn’t give a damn about hearts and minds. It simply wants the people to become unwilling to hide or support the enemy fighters it is facing. If it can accomplish that by making people afraid, then that is what it will do, and making people afraid is much easier than “winning hearts and minds.”

How do you make people afraid of supporting or hiding and protecting enemy fighters like the Taliban? You terrorize them. You bomb their homes. You conduct night raids on their homes. You bomb their weddings and their excursions to neighboring towns or markets. You shoot them when they get too close to your vehicles.

It simply wouldn’t do to tell Americans that their country is conducting a war of terror. They are supposed to be the good guys who are bringing peace and democracy to a benighted land.So let’s just face the facts squarely. The US is not the good guy in Afghanistan.

The message is clear: allow the Taliban to operate in your town, and we’ll kill you--not just your men -- but also your wives and your children, too.

The SPGB has said the agenda is same as it always has been – US global domination in the military and economic fields and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

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