Forum on U.S. Afghanistan Policy

joining up, say, with Chevron and the U.S. Would the Taliban accept him back? I'm not sure, I'm not God, omniscient, ..., but if the Taliban are true to their words and actions, then I believe that they wouldn't accept him returning to their ranks. They'd surely see and treat him as a traitor, and they don't treat traitors kindly. But neither of the RawStory.com nor Antiwar.com articles you linked to say that Karzai said he might re-join the Taliban; only saying that he said he might join the Afgan "insurgency", which doesn't really exist, for what does exist is "resistance", instead. And the Afghan resistance hasn't been conducted by only the Taliban. There are two or three different groups of Afghans in the whole resistance.

As for Karzai taking over the role of electoral watchdog, BUNK; but it's also not good to leave the UN in control. The UN, due to the UNSC, is highly complicit in wars of aggression and what these evolve into.

Neither of the two articles are particularly informative; just producing or publishing more yawning reporting. This is not always true of the two websites, but I find these two articles you linked to to be rather worthless, though maybe Disney would like ot use them for story ideas. After all, the articles report nothing important. It's just more political bla bla bla and possibly stage show, which we get ... too much of from politicians.

Re. the TIMES, UK, article by Jerome Starkey

It's a weird report about the Feb. 12th massacre, cold-blooded murder of several innocent Afghans, and this April 5th article is weird in one or more respects; and I don't trust either NATO or the U.S. military commanders.

What kind of alcohol was used to clean the area of evidence, booze, or rubbing, medical alcohol? If booze, then how did it get there, since Afghans aren't known to be boozers, say? The Taliban had a strict law meaning or often meaning death for boozers, but then they're no longer in control of the gov't there.

I'll excerpt from the article.

The official, who asked not to be named until the results of the investigation have been made public, said that the assault force sealed off the compound from 4am, when the raid started, to 11am, when Afghan officials from Gardez were finally allowed access to the house.

At least 11 bullets were fired during the raid, the investigator said, and the shooting was carried out by two American gunmen positioned on the roof of the compound. Only seven bullets were recovered from the scene.

How is it that two U.S. or NATO gunmen on rooftops could shoot and kill several people [inside] of a house and during the process of a U.S. or NATO raid on the people in the house without accidentally hitting one of the raid members? The gunfire was very precise, deadly precise from what I've read about this event, so far, and it's been little, but a video was posted last week about this raid, showing the raid, some of it anyway, as it occurred; and if I recall what this video shows correctly, then it was some of the troops entering the house who cold-bloodedly shot the people inside, not gunners on a rooftop. It's surprising that anyone would've filmed the raid when they were members of the raiding party, but we had U.S. soldiers who've photographed actual abuse going on in U.S. "GWoT" prisons, like at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and there are soldiers with small devices that permit capturing scenes on film.

Anyway, I don't believe it's very plausible that two gunmen, even if they were marksmen, on a rooftop could've killed the several Afghans [inside] of the house unless these victims were all near windows, which the victims probably weren't. As far as I've seen, which isn't much, but still some, Afghan houses don't have much for windows; and the several victims surely weren't all standing in the doorway. After all, they were [inside] the house and the story is not about only one or two victims.

Or did the rooftop sickos have very high-powered rifles, and special lenses that permitted seeing through walls, while bullets traveling through walls when fired by such rifles would maintain a straight line? Or maybe the bullets didn't maintain a perfectly straight path, but the gunners were capable of knowing how the bullets would change trajectories and could therefore [guess] where to hit the house so that the bullets penetrating the walls would produce these "kills"? Or, what other mystery idea can we think of for expalanation?

It's a good article by Jerome Starkey, but I don't believe NATO or U.S. commanders. If they told me or us what they had for breakfast, then I might believe them; however, they might even lie about this to try to make it look like they don't get better food than "grunt soldiers". When I was in the USN, bootcamp, officers certainly didn't eat what the rest of us had to eat, and I worked in the kitchen during a work week and some foul food was passed as good. It was easy to do and rather harmless, but some of the food was still rotting, before it was "dressed up" to look and taste okay. Moldy, including very moldy, bread, f.e., no problem; just use it to make "French toast". (I wonder if it's what the French use to make this.) Nothing poisonous, as far as I was aware anyway, was served as if it was good, but rotting food that could be "dressed up" to look and taste okay was served. No one getting this could detect, because the bad taste of foul food was hidden with the "dressing up". I ate at this cafetaria like everyone else of recruits and whoever else ate in our section, and never noticed any foul tastes, but they're easy to hide and no officers ever ate in our section, where we were around 8,000 recruits being served for every meal. Some recruits got sick from eating the food there, but I didn't learn that this was due to having eaten foul food; it might've just been allergies.

Soldiers will be fed like dogs going through garbage bins. Officers get fine dining, comparatively speaking. It wasn't exquisite fine dining in bootcamp facilities for them, but they got much finer than recruits did and if anyone working the kitchen was caught serving foul food to officers, then these kitchen workers would've surely be nailed, say.

So I'm not sure that I'd even believe war-time military officers about what they have for food, meals; but also wouldn't make a fuss about it. Whatever they eat, the wars are dead wrong, criminal.

But we've had basically nothing but lies about the MANY war crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies, esp. the U.S. and NATO, over the past roughly nine years, though also over a much longer period, so there's no reason to believe that the commanders have suddenly become honest. If they were honest, then they'd oppose the continuation of these wars; but they don't do that. Honesty and real intelligence are not of their policies.

Mike Corbeil