POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Your headline on this story is dishonest, as is so often the case with stories about America's endless colonial wars.
It wasn't NATO that shot up these troops.
It was the United States.
But the U.S. is always so cowardly that it attributes all its ugly actions to NATO.
The fact is that NATO is only in Afghanistan with what, by all reasonable standards, is a token force: seven hundred here, two thousand there, etc - and almost all in non-combat roles.
Only the U.S. keeps 100,000 heavily armed troops and a large air force in Afghanistan.
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"Forty million Pashtuns have been freely moving across the British-imposed border for hundreds of years..."
Precisely.
Despite American question-begging of the matter, there is not and never has been a true border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Durand Line was set by colonial Britain as a temporary measure, one to be reviewed and changed if appropriate a hundred years later. But that has never happened.
The Pushtu people have every right by ancient practices to move about the way they do.
The United States, today's great bully to the world, insists there is something evil in their movement.
The only thing evil there is the United States' occupation and continued abuse of a people who have done nothing but live their hardscrabble lives and defend themselves against the army that a few decades back bombed and napalmed an estimated three million Vietnamese for the sin of embracing the wrong political party.
The entire business is insanity, and how very sad that United States' politics are so corrupt and venomous that smiling peace-prize winner Obama has become every bit the mass killer George Bush was.
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"US has quite a history of mistakes - in addtion to the mistake in killing Canadians in Afghanistan one should also recall the Reuters incident in Iraq..."
Yes, and there's so much more. U.S. soldiers on a number of occasions murdered al Jazeerah correspondents in Iraq, almost the only press trying to tell the truth.
U.S. troops also murdered a brave Italian intelligence officer who had managed to free a captive Italian journalist, one not liked by the American military because her tendency to be truthful.
It is only a quiet history because the press cooperates with the Pentagon to consistently play events down and avoid the hard language which is appropriate.
Yes, there was the killing of Canadians, but there has been so very, very much more stupid, pointless killing by American forces.
Whole families wiped out.
Wedding parties attacked.
Trucks full of village officials bombed.
Not to say anything of the endless assaults by special forces troops banging on house doors, tossing in stun grenades, and holding women and children at gunpoint while they march off husbands and brothers for torture .
And never forget the disappearance of 3,000 American prisoners early in the war: they were taken out in sealed truckloads by an American warlord-ally and allowed to suffocate in the desert, their bodies dumped into mass graves in the middle of nowhere.
And that atrocity came within a very short time of Rumsfeld yelling about all the Taleban prisoners ought to be walled away for life or executed.
The Afghanistan war is the work of a well-armed bully, and it has nothing whatever to do with rights or freedoms or democracy.
The bully was determined for revenge on a crime that Taleban were not even responsible for. The bully as humiliated because some desperate men succeeded in a large suicide assault on America's precious soil.
And the bully ignorantly thinks he can remake a society of 30 million people living under ancient customs and a poor economy.
It will never happen, but so long as the bully insists on trying, lots of innocent people will die for nothing.
I'm not even sure that that is true: the bully actually just doesn't know what to do with Afghanistan, apart from killing, killing, and more killing.
There is no justification for the entire ugly business.
Your headline on this story is dishonest, as is so often the case with stories about America's endless colonial wars.
It wasn't NATO that shot up these troops.
It was the United States.
But the U.S. is always so cowardly that it attributes all its ugly actions to NATO.
The fact is that NATO is only in Afghanistan with what, by all reasonable standards, is a token force: seven hundred here, two thousand there, etc - and almost all in non-combat roles.
Only the U.S. keeps 100,000 heavily armed troops and a large air force in Afghanistan.
___________________________________________________
"Forty million Pashtuns have been freely moving across the British-imposed border for hundreds of years..."
Precisely.
Despite American question-begging of the matter, there is not and never has been a true border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Durand Line was set by colonial Britain as a temporary measure, one to be reviewed and changed if appropriate a hundred years later. But that has never happened.
The Pushtu people have every right by ancient practices to move about the way they do.
The United States, today's great bully to the world, insists there is something evil in their movement.
The only thing evil there is the United States' occupation and continued abuse of a people who have done nothing but live their hardscrabble lives and defend themselves against the army that a few decades back bombed and napalmed an estimated three million Vietnamese for the sin of embracing the wrong political party.
The entire business is insanity, and how very sad that United States' politics are so corrupt and venomous that smiling peace-prize winner Obama has become every bit the mass killer George Bush was.
_______________________________________________
"US has quite a history of mistakes - in addtion to the mistake in killing Canadians in Afghanistan one should also recall the Reuters incident in Iraq..."
Yes, and there's so much more. U.S. soldiers on a number of occasions murdered al Jazeerah correspondents in Iraq, almost the only press trying to tell the truth.
U.S. troops also murdered a brave Italian intelligence officer who had managed to free a captive Italian journalist, one not liked by the American military because her tendency to be truthful.
It is only a quiet history because the press cooperates with the Pentagon to consistently play events down and avoid the hard language which is appropriate.
Yes, there was the killing of Canadians, but there has been so very, very much more stupid, pointless killing by American forces.
Whole families wiped out.
Wedding parties attacked.
Trucks full of village officials bombed.
Not to say anything of the endless assaults by special forces troops banging on house doors, tossing in stun grenades, and holding women and children at gunpoint while they march off husbands and brothers for torture .
And never forget the disappearance of 3,000 American prisoners early in the war: they were taken out in sealed truckloads by an American warlord-ally and allowed to suffocate in the desert, their bodies dumped into mass graves in the middle of nowhere.
And that atrocity came within a very short time of Rumsfeld yelling about all the Taleban prisoners ought to be walled away for life or executed.
The Afghanistan war is the work of a well-armed bully, and it has nothing whatever to do with rights or freedoms or democracy.
The bully was determined for revenge on a crime that Taleban were not even responsible for. The bully as humiliated because some desperate men succeeded in a large suicide assault on America's precious soil.
And the bully ignorantly thinks he can remake a society of 30 million people living under ancient customs and a poor economy.
It will never happen, but so long as the bully insists on trying, lots of innocent people will die for nothing.
I'm not even sure that that is true: the bully actually just doesn't know what to do with Afghanistan, apart from killing, killing, and more killing.
There is no justification for the entire ugly business.
