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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05...d/asia/15afghan.html

The district governor, Abdul Khalid, said he had feared a Taliban attack on the government center and had called for help from local Afghan security forces. At the same time, there was a raid, he said. “American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him,” he said.

“People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes,” Mr. Khalid said.

...

On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article...dUSTRE74F31G20110516

Fazlullah Wahidi, governor of Kunar, said a group of girls had been collecting firewood near an insurgent hideout and were struck when ISAF troops that had come under attack returned fire. A 10-year-old girl was killed, and four others wounded.

 

That's three times in the past four days that NATO forces have accidentally killed Afghan children while fighting insurgents, and this kind of thing has happened all too frequently for almost an entire decade now.  Is whatever we're able to accomplish military in Afghanistan enough to offset the damage done to our security by the sheer fury and demands for vengeance that these kind of incidents generate?  We may largely ignore these stories here, but they're broadcast all over Afghanistan and the Middle East.  What is even our mission in Afghanistan anymore?  Supporting a corrupt regime and getting rid of everyone who hates us?  We'll never get rid of our enemies because as long as we're there we're creating new ones all the time, which of course becomes the reason why we have to stay longer, which creates more enemies, which means we have to stay longer, and on and on forever, or at least until we're completely broke.  How many more years of this before we finally decide that it's time to stop the madness?

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True, the airbase in Bagram is huge.  However, its not a permanent base.  I've seen permanent bases in Germany, the Phillipines, Belgium, South Korea, Japan, and other nations, we've abandoned.

 

Remember Pogo claimed there were many permanent bases in Iraq, but couldn't state where they were.  I didn't see them when I was there. Now, we're on track to leave by the end of 2011. And, Afghanistan in 2012.  Ditzy,  Afghanistan is not on any list of strategic nations the US would need to permanently occupy.  The supposed gas or oil pipelines aren't a good reason.  Rare earth minerals, perhaps,  But, the US has plenty if we were allowed to develop them.

 

 

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