The Mound of Sound

More dead Afghans – women and children – taken out by an allied airstrike. The good news – this time it’s only 18, maybe nine more buried under the rubble. From BBC News:

“A BBC reporter in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah saw the bodies – three women and the rest children – ranging in age from six months to 15.
The families brought the bodies from their village in the Nad Ali district, where they say the air strike occurred.

A further nine bodies are said to be trapped under destroyed buildings.
Nato-led forces say they are investigating the incident in an area where the British military are known to operate.”

What is wrong with us? This plays straight into the Taliban’s hands. It’s the perfect way for us to lose the “hearts and minds” struggle of a guerrilla war.

And don’t give me any of that garbage about these deaths being accidental. There’s nothing accidental about them. We know that massive civilian deaths are inevitable when we rely on aerial bombs to make up for our deliberate choice not to field even a fraction of the number of troops this war demands. We know these civilian deaths are the logical consequence of our dependency on airstrikes and so there can be no argument that, in calling in these airstrikes, we are morally and legally intending to cause these deaths.

I wasn’t going to get into this today but I’ve changed my mind. Here’s an enlightening perspective from Seumas Milne in today’s Guardian:

…The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to “talk about a political settlement”, that was “precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this”. The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship.

This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain.

In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July – US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.

…over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of Nato forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement.
But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. “Close air support” bomb attacks called in by ground forces – which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice – are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the occupation forces.

But while 242 US and Nato ground troops have died in the war with the Taliban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and Nato reliance on air attacks minimises their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers.

It is that equation that makes a nonsense of US and British claims that their civilian victims are accidental “collateral damage”, while the Taliban’s use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and classic guerrilla operations from civilian areas are a sign of their moral depravity. In real life, the escalating civilian death toll is not a mistake, but the result of a clear decision to put the lives of occupation troops before civilians; westerners before Afghans.

Dependence on air power is also a reflection of US imperial overstretch and the reluctance of Nato states to put more boots on the ground. But however much the nominal Afghan president Hamid Karzai rails against Nato’s recklessness with Afghan blood, the indiscriminate air war carries on regardless. Given that the US government spent 10 times more on every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill than it does in “condolence payments” to Afghans for the killing of a family member, perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But nor should it be that the occupation’s cruelty is a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban. As Aga Lalai, who lost both grandparents, his wife, father, three brothers and four sisters in a US bombing in Helmand last summer, put it: “So long as there is just one 40-day-old boy remaining alive, Afghans will fight against the people who do this to us.”

There’s nothing left that’s noble in our war in Afghanistan. There is nothing noble in butchering Afghan civilians in order that we can wage “war on the cheap.” It’s no wonder the Taliban are resurgent, no surprise that they’re now closing in on Kabul. We just keep recruiting more and more insurgents with every civilian we slaughter.

But this war isn’t going to end anytime soon. NATO states might just drift away but American forces aren’t leaving. I recently wrote about the Baloch insurrection in southern Pakistan and America’s strategic and energy interests there. That said, there’s no reason at all, none whatsoever, to continue soldiering on in Afghanistan as America’s Foreign Legion either.

It could just be that no one has more at stake in the November 4th presidential election that Sarah Palin. If Obama wins, it’s very much a lose-lose proposition for Ms. Palin, both in Washington and back home in Juneau.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Palin’s campaign blunders and excesses haven’t gone down well at home and she faces a much different reality if she has to go back to the governor’s mansion:

Palin has always attracted controversy, but she is now a far more polarizing figure, both in Alaska as well as nationally, than before her nomination. If she returns, the Republican governor will face former Democratic allies furious at her campaign attacks.

She will also face lawmakers from both parties ticked off at her handling of the so-called ‘troopergate’ investigation and her recent false assertions that the investigator’s report cleared her, according to interviews with a number of lawmakers and others who watch Alaska politics.

“We’ve seen her do and say things that are shocking to us, so it’s going to be different, to put it mildly,” said Juneau Democratic Rep. Beth Kerttula, the House minority leader. “We have a whole different way of looking at her.”

It was only 15-years ago. The Tories were led by Kim Campbell and she called an election she looked likely to win. When it was over there were but two Tories standing. They’re certainly back, after a decade in the desert and a humiliating capitulation to the Reform/Alliance movement of Stephen “Uncle Joe” Harper.

So the Libs need to take heart in that the Dion loss, bad as it was, is still about 35 times better than the drubbing the Tories took way back when. We don’t have nearly as much to do to rebuild. The core support of Canadians hasn’t been lost, just temporarily displaced. Find the right chord that resonates with the electorate, start making Harper own his gaffes and excesses, and the Liberals will be back.

We have to face hard facts. We need a significantly different leadership than what we had during the first Harper administration, one that doesn’t back down from him (or flee the Commons on tough votes), one that pins him to his own record. We need someone who connects with the Canadian public, a communicator and a fighter.

I can’t entirely blame the Tories for smirking. They got cleanly away with so very much. Imagine Harper, who sat mute during the campaign, announcing less than one day after the polls had closed, plans to stack the Senate in order to force his notion of reform through the upper house. The guy was too cowardly, too craven, to seek a mandate from the voters on that one. He just pulled the wool over their eyes and he couldn’t wait to make that plain, not even for 24-hours. Breathtaking.

No it’s time to find a leader who’ll put the boots to this scoundrel at every turn, time to form another rat pack to hound Harper relentlessly until everyone sees this character for what he is. It’s time.

Heather Mallick, writing in The Guardian, filed this post-mortem on our election and, if nothing else, it should lift your spirits:

There are three wings to Canadian political life. Harper, the Conservative PM, is a rightwing extremist, although he doesn’t suck up like Cameron. He is an anti-choice, pro-prison, poverty-ignoring, food-safety-privatising, arts-ridiculing, Afghanistan war-loving, cowboy hat-wearing guy.

The Liberals, the nation’s natural rulers, are in the middle of the road like an expiring woodchuck. They are sensible people without passion; they own just the one house; they’re New Labour without the ratlike cunning, without the Cherie, shall we say. The New Democratic party is old Labour.

Harper began passing laws making Canada more like the States. His most complimentary adjective was “CEO-like”. He wants life sentences for 14-year-old murderers, of whom we have maybe three in a nation of 33 million citizens. He wants to build more prisons, ban safe-injection sites for heroin addicts, privatise universal healthcare, make the foetus not just a person, but someone who can dress for success – you know the drill.

…So we voted. As in the movie Groundhog Day, where the post-election morning was the same as the last one, with the result being another minority government born of a quiet desperation that won’t be soothed until the Liberals get a new leader, not a sweet smart guy like Stéphane Dion, but someone with claws like Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian you Brits took to your bosom some years ago.

Thanks for sending him back. It’s getting hot here, our trees are sawdust and our ice is melting. Canada needs a smart decisive cynic. Anything to haul that crushed woodchuck off the road.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/canada-georgebush

I realize this is from al Jazeera but you can find plenty of similar stuff from concerned Americans on the web. This one shows a segment of the crowd that’s flocking to Sarah Palin.

The Great Wall Street Caper crash has spread around the world and in some troubling spots the locals are getting decidedly anti-American. One of them is Pakistan.

There’s some speculation that China is about to capitalize on America’s fiscal blunders to extend its own sphere of influence while its rival is in disarray.

Pakistan is said to be on the verge of debt default, a crisis that has sent President Zardari off, not to Washington, but to Beijing looking for a rescue in the form of a $6-billion bailout. In a world where trillion dollar bailouts are now a fact of life, $6-billion doesn’t sound like much but it can sure buy an awful lot of influence with a country such as Pakistan.

From the Washington Post:

“The Pakistanis like to call the Chinese their all-weather ally, and the U.S. their fair-weather friends,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This kind of loan could be seen as self-serving by the Chinese, and continue that impression.”

The paper reports that, in Pakistan, “the climate of crisis and public anger over domestic bailouts in the United States and Western Europe have made even a modest infusion from its Western allies politically difficult.”

With American intelligence agencies calling Afghanistan a “downward spiral,” a move by Pakistan away from the West and toward China’s sphere of influence cannot help but jeopardize America’s position in the region.