Author: Brian Beyer

Thanks to Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama’s ramped up offensive in Afghanistan, Afghan civilian casualties are on the rise. While a bulk of the recent casualties have not been at the hands of America and the NATO coalition, one would have to believe that young boys and girls would not be stepping on bombs if there weren’t a foreign, invading force in the country.

Insurgents routinely seed roads and pathways with IEDs, or improvised explosive devices — their favored weapon against Western troops. But most often, those killed and injured by the hidden bombs are civilians.

Buried bombs killed 30 Afghans in a 48-hour span, in the latest grim illustration of the dangers faced by civilians as the season’s fighting heats up.

The latest casualties came Saturday in Zabul province, in southern Afghanistan, when a van filled with travelers struck a roadside bomb. Thirteen people were killed, including four children and four women, said a spokesman for the provincial government.

On Friday evening, two bombs planted close together killed four people in the rural Maruf district of volatile Kandahar province. One was apparently triggered by a donkey, and two people riding or leading the animal died in the explosion. Then two more people who rushed to the rescue were killed by the second bomb, police said.

The Taliban and other insurgents often plant bombs close together, in hopes of killing troops and those who try to help victims.

With the recent increases in combatant and noncombatant deaths, and a realization that the Taliban will have to take part in any meaningful reconciliation efforts, the time has come for Obama to immediately withdraw all troops from the volatile region. Neither the Taliban nor Afghanistan’s rigidly conservative brand of Islam are going anywhere anytime soon. Talk of democracy and central authority are downright antithetical to the culture and history of Afghanistan. How much more blood and treasure will Obama squander until the realization is made that this is a hopelessly futile war? We should find out by 2014, and even that’s a farfetched hope.

 

The “Audacity of Hope,” a Palestinian aid ship part of the commemorative flotilla, has been towed back to Greece. Despite the monetary and economic troubles that Greece is currently experiencing, the Mediterranean nation has enough funds to stop a peaceful group of several hundred activists to deliver much needed aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. The Greeks were more professional than their Israeli counterparts, who, in a raid last year  on the Mavi Marmara, killed 9, including an American citizen.

Greek commandos “surrounded” the Audacity of Hope with live weapons, boarded the boat, and eventually towed it back to a different port for fear of sabotage by Israelis:

The boat has not been free of sabotage attempts. On June 24, an annonymous complaint was filed against the ship’s “seaworthiness”. The Israel Law Centre (Shurat HaDin), took responsibility for the complaint in the Israeli press.

The Greek embassy in Tel Aviv put out a statement confirming that the Greek coast guard has enforced a decision by the Civil Defence to prevent all flotilla vessels from leaving Greek ports.

Greece’s Civil Protection Ministry said coast guard authorities had been ordered to take “all appropriate measures” to implement the ban.

It also said the “broader maritime area of the eastern Mediterranean will be continuously monitored by electronic means for tracking, where applicable, the movements of the ships allegedly participating” in the flotilla.

At this point, it is nonsensical for Israel to act like they are not acting to derail most, if not all, of these humanitarian flotillas. Some are even suggesting that Israel is using the fragile state of Greek finances to enforce the ban on the flotilla. To be fair, however, this cannot be corroborated until both Greece and Israel’s finances are made public record.

Contrary to the groupthink so pervasive in the military-industrial complex, there is absolutely zero evidence that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Even top intelligence officials conceded in their National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.’s) that such claims were false and unsubstantiated.  Unforunately,the lies and propaganda of the military-industrial complex are spreading, much like in the run up to the war in Iraq.

While Saudi Arabia and Iran have been foes ever since the Iranian Revolution, comments from Prince Turki al-Faisal are raising tensions between the regional powerhouses. Buying into the Iran-has-a-bomb line, Faisal said, “We [Saudi Arabia] cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t. It’s as simple as that. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”

Curiously enough, some argue that Iran attaining a nuclear bomb would set off an arms race in the Middle East and thus must be stopped from doing so. Such ill informed comments from Prince Faisal only help bolster many of the warmongers’ claims. After all, it is far too apparent that the security interests of any nation are now the concerns of the United States.

Faisal did have two important and noble points, however: the Middle East should be a nuclear weapons free zone (including Israel), and that a military strike against Iran by the United States or Israel would be self-defeating.

The United States has now expanded its (c)overt drone war to a 6th country: Somalia. Naturally, the justification was that if America just sat back and did nothing, al-Shabab, a Somali terrorist group, would attack the United States:

A common misconception of blowback is that retaliation is limited to foreign governments and citizens. If this were to be the case, Chechen terrorists would not be bombing airports and the Taliban would not be bombing hotels. The Taliban’s coordinated attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul was an attack against both foreign and domestic oppressive forces. The aim of the attack was straightforward:

“We had three main goals in attacking the hotel,” the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said after the attack. “We wanted to target as many foreign advisers as we could, as many provincial governors as we could, and bring tension to Kabul on the same day of the security-transition conference.”

Foreigners and Afghans alike were killed. This brazen attack also accomplished the third goal of bringing tension to the “transition” conference. As if the trust deficit between American and Afghanistan were not enough, this will surely widen it.

Additionally, this attack comes at a crucial time for Barack Obama who just recently announced plans to withdraw 33,000 American troops by the fall of 2012. One of Obama’s justifications for starting to withdraw troops, other than political stratagem to appease a war-weary American public, was that the Afghans are becoming increasingly capable of dealing with the Taliban and other security issues. As the Afghans were unable to stop a raid in a hotel, NATO air support was called in to ultimately finish the job.

While Obama has declared to bring home 33,000 troops by next fall, and all troops by 2014, it will be incidents like these that prolong American involvement in the “Graveyard of Empires,” despite all of the “progress” that Obama and his advisors claim to see.