In another recent operation in the Zhari district, U.S. soldiers fired more than a dozen mine-clearing line charges in a day. Each one creates a clear path that is 100 yards long and wide enough for a truck. Anything that is in the way - trees, crops, huts - is demolished.So, by Army logic, if they destroy the homes of ten thousand Afghan families, that will bring them all closer to our side because they will all file for compensation.
"Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?" a farmer from the Arghandab district asked a top NATO general at a recent community meeting.
Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor's office to submit a claim for damaged property, "in effect, you're connecting the government to the people," the senior officer said.
That's bullshit, of course. What it does is swell the ranks of Taliban sympathizers. Every one of those families whose homes and fields are blown up the by Army will become a family with people who will cheer when they hear of an American soldier dying.
4 comments:
The NY Times had this quote when they reported on the house destruction,
"We had to destroy them to make them safe."
If you are old enough to remember Vietnam, it has a familiar ring.
I do remember that line.
Same shit, different war.
The military is in the business of killing. Or stopping killing. By killing. People or things, it's the same concept. If we want to actually solve the problems over there we have to send in the state dept, the peace corp.
We can't beat them we have to win them over. The military does not do that. That's not to say the military would not have a place to support winning efforts during this, just that it is not the right tool for the real job at hand.
It's always the same shit different war. Until that gets changed from the top we will always be imperialistic, even if we don't mean it to be. In the case of the ME it was meant to be an imperialistic war. And it turned out exactly that way.
You know, I can almost believe that the army's policy would work. It would depend of course on how much they were paying in compensation. Give an Afghan ten thousand dollars for his mud hut and he might start looking for other suspicious mud huts for the army to blow up. Hey! Army man! Blow up my cousins house! He needs the money.
But they are probably paying them more like ten dollars, and quibbling about it to boot.
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