The lowly seer

Afghanistan

Brits may be rather puzzled by what's going on in Afghanistan from the mixed reporting of how successful the mission is and how badly it's going. In fact, it might be interesting to find out why exactly why British troops are there. Eliminating the Taliban? They seem to be growing. Cracking down on opium production? Bumper harvest this year. Supporting democracy? The current regime's influence ends at Kabul's boundaries. Safeguarding the pipeline? No-one's attacked it.

On the military side, this article from some US extreme conservative site is quite revealing. On the US bombing campaign:

Of course, all this is accompanied by claims of many dead Taliban, who are conveniently interchangeable with dead locals who weren’t Taliban. Bombing from the air is the best way to drive up the body count, because you don’t even have to count bodies; you just make estimates based on the claimed effectiveness of your weapons, and feed them to ever-gullible reporters. By the time Operation Mountain Thrust is done thrusting into mountains, we should have killed the Taliban several times over.

Sorry, I haven't got the answers as to what British troops are supposed to be doing there. Other than Bush ordered it.

posted by Les the Spaceman @ 10:29 am