Apparently our fight with the Taliban is really a war between India & Pakistan

[Lemon Eddy]

name one of the children killed by the Taleban. Just one. Without googling it.

Let's be fair, off the top of my head I couldn't name any of the approx 200 children that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reckon have been killed by drone strikes.

 

[SpineyNorman]

The indian goverment is slightly better than pakistan given the fact that india is improving while pakistan is er pakistan

Yes. Clearly in both cases that's down to the governments and there's absolutely nothing else going on here.

 

[SpineyNorman]

had to be done ......the bearded pakistani guy at 1:17 has been doing it for years ...he has got dramatic ceremonial anger and contempt down to its utter essence like no other ......

I'm all for this on the Severn bridge .........Get a bunch of valley commandoes ....adidas uniforms....(polyester with stripes) .....tank them up beforehand (brains SA)...and unleash them on the M4 tolls .... it would be epic ...isn't it ! ...I would pay to watch !

incidentally .....most of the Punjabi I knew in london..... hate the taliban ......

Why .... do .... the .... thickest .... fuckers .... on .... the .... internet .... always .... and .... without .... exception .... pepper .... their .... posts .... with .... ellipses .... in .... inappropriate .... places?

 

[butchersapron]

Nope, if you purposely attack children you're in the wrong.

You've fallen for the propaganda of the STWC and other groups.





I said the government were scum (which you agree with).

Could you point to anything from the STWC or other related groups that says that the taliban are 'noble freedom fighters please'?

 

[Tankus]

Why .... do .... the .... thickest .... fuckers .... on .... the .... internet .... always .... and .... without .... exception .... pepper .... their .... posts .... with .... ellipses .... in .... inappropriate .... places?

winds up .....the biggest wankers

 

[J Ed]

Nope, if you purposely attack children you're in the wrong.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/2...killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen (since expanded massively since then)

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-8174771.html

As the drone circled it let off the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they could help they were struck again.

According to reports at the time, three local rescuers were killed by a second missile whilst a further strike killed another three people five minutes later. In all, somewhere between 17 and 24 people are thought to have been killed in the attack.

The Datta Khel assault was just one of the more than 345 strikes that have hit Pakistan's tribal areas in the past eight years but it reveals an increasingly common tactic now being used in America's covert drone wars – the "double-tap" strike.

More and more, while the overall frequency of strikes has fallen since a Nato attack in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained US-Pakistan relations, initial strikes are now followed up by further missiles in a tactic which lawyers and campaigners say is killing an even greater number of civilians. The tactic has cast such a shadow of fear over strike zones that rescuers often wait for hours before daring to visit the scene of an attack.

"These strikes are becoming much more common," Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents victims of drone strikes, told The Independent. "In the past it used to be a one-off, every now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap. There is no justification for it."

 

[yield]

Thought provoking piece by William Dalrymple in the Grauniad:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/nato-taliban-india-pakistan

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention Iran once. Not part of William Dalrymple's agenda I assume.

The second most spoken language in Afghanistan is Dari which shares a lot of similarities with Farsi.

The Northern Alliance received support from Iran, India and Russia. The Iranian Qods fought alongside the USA at the Battle of Herat in 2001.

Anyway the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline looks like it's going ahead. So as much as they dislike each other business is business.

 

[Ole]

'Why US shouldn’t accept Dalrymple’s reading of Afghan ‘history’'

 

[FNG]

No mention of the ongoing crisis in Balochistan either where Pakistan's state forces and Al queedia are both persecuting Baloch Secular Nationalists.

Pakistans state apparatus is operating a kill and dump policy,in which hundreds of civillian activists are being arrested and killed,their bodies turning up hundreds of miles away having been shot and their bodies showing signs of torture, over 700 since 2003 and the numbers escalating. The taliban and their religious allies in the L-e_J have in Queta on the other hand have been targeting Balochi's in reprisals for drone strikes against its leadership,and yet as is often the case the two, supposed adversaries aims eerily co-incide.

The Balochi's like the pashtuns were victims of the Durand line cutting their regional homeland between afganistan and pakistan,and despite a wealthy ruling elite, most balochi's have been deprived of the spoils of Balochistans vast mineral wealth, leading to calls for autonomy.As pakistans hand in afganistan weakens its grip on balochistan is likely to tighten, unleashing more religious motivated violence upon the region.

http://balochwarna.com/features/articles.18/Pakistan039s-secret-dirty-war.html
http://gmcmissing.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/pakistans-drone-operations-in-balochistan
http://balochwarna.com/xnews/articl...-and-shutter-down-against-Pakistan-nukes.html

it does make me wonder given the ISI's role in intelligence gathering whether some of the misidentified civillian targets hit by drone strikes were as accidental fuck ups as they first appear

 

[iROBOT]

Baluchistan is about to explode, the oppression there is very extreme.

 

[iROBOT]

'Why US shouldn’t accept Dalrymple’s reading of Afghan ‘history’'

This is a good counter to WDs piece.

I can see why WDs article is so popular in the USA as it lets off the West and its involvement as a side show when the real player was India.

Classic Western guilt displacement.

 

[Peter Dow]

Thought provoking piece by William Dalrymple in the Grauniad:

No, it's a pathetic attempt at NATO face-saving.

Forget Nato v the Taliban. The real Afghan fight is India v Pakistan

Forget a fight with the Taliban which our NATO generals haven't been able to win?

Forget NATO's embarrassing failures?

Our politicians have ordered a pull out, short of victory against the Taliban and to avoid an inquest into why our generals are so hapless, and there is a propaganda effort on to try to save face, to try to convince us that the fight in Afghanistan was "never ours, so it doesn't matter that we're withdrawing leaving the Taliban threatening a come-back". Pathetic!

Oh, so according to Dalrymple, it never was our fight so it doesn't matter that we can't win it and are pulling out short of victory? Pathetic!

We sent our forces to Afghanistan to get those who did 9/11.

It turns out the Taliban are a proxy force for the imperial ambitions of the Pakistani military. So the Pakistani military had their agents do 9/11, not directly, but it was their terrorists who did it.

Then Pakistan made billions of dollars in payments from the West for assistance to capture terrorists which the Pakistani military themselves had sponsored.

Bin Laden was a guest of the Pakistani ISI when he was killed.

So really it always was the Pakistani military NATO had to defeat, force the Pakistani military to crush their own terrorist groups which their own intelligence service, the ISI set up, trained and supply to this day.

Of course, you'd know that if you had watched and remembered SECRET PAKISTAN, a Panorama broadcast in 2011.

BBC Panorama's "SECRET PAKISTAN - Part 1 Double-Cross"



BBC Panorama's "SECRET PAKISTAN - Part 2 Backlash"



So if it is thought-provoking you want. read my analysis, not Dalrymple's.

If you are allowed to read my stuff because Urban 75 and the Guardian haven't always encouraged you to follow my links. Seems I get under their skin a bit too much.



Peace talks with the enemy is where poor generals with a failed war strategy end up.

Weak strategic thinking and planning by US and then NATO generals has dragged out the Western intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 and caused far more casualties to our soldiers than was ever necessary.

The military general staff has lacked vision about the enemy and failed to comprehend and react appropriately to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadi terror groups are proxies for hostile states, typically managed from Pakistan and funded from Saudi Arabia.

Military strategic essentials have been neglected, such as - when occupying territory, always ensure secure supply routes from one strong point to another.

Instead NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan have been deployed in isolated bases, deployed more like tethered goats as bait for the enemy than a conquering or liberating army.

Some combination of military incompetence by the generals and a preference for appeasement on the part of the civilian political leadership has perversely left the West bribing our enemies within the Pakistani terrorist-proxy-controlling state and continuing business-as-usual with our enemies in the Saudi jihadi-financing state.

It’s never too late to learn lessons and adopt an alternative competent and aggressive military strategy and to that end, I have published a detailed improved AfPak military strategy in posts in the Republican Intelligence forum which I administer.


Military strategy against the Taliban in Afghanistan & Pakistan


AfPak Mission Channel on YouTube


AfPak military strategy blog

 

[UnderOpenSky]

name one of the children killed by the Taleban. Just one. Without googling it.

Mohamed. I think I'm in with a chance here.

 

[butchersapron]

francis rowntree, killed by british army, 29.4.1972 aged 11

No regrets, says soldier who fired rubber bullet that killed 11-year-old boy

Giving evidence by videolink from an undisclosed location, the man known only as Soldier B said: "I have nothing to be reproachful about."

Eleven-year-old Francis Rowntree died on April 22 1972 - two days after he was struck on the head by a rubber bullet while walking through the Divis Flats complex close to Belfast's Falls Road.

The case is mired in controversy with disputed claims on whether the boy was hit directly or injured by a ricochet, and if the bullet had been doctored to make it potentially cause more harm