Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, has this article posted on Sott,net.
The US has lost the plot in many areas and in many ways, including Afghanistan where it has lost its war on terror and its war of terror, neither of them winnable in the long run. This article is interesting in that it indicates a strengthening of Russian – Chinese ties encompassing other important Middle East and sub-continent players.
Here is the article for your assessment:
Leon Panetta, the over-his-head US secretary of defense, is in Afghanistan today after a day on which the greatest number of civilians were killed so far in 2012. But Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, isn’t there. He’s in Beijing, meeting with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an all-Asian bloc led by China and Russia. The SCO, not surprisingly, is expressing a greater interest in building ties with Afghanistan as the United States begins its long, drawn-out drawdown to 2014. And Panetta, it seems, is trying to interest India, a rival to China, which is taking a greater interest in Afghanistan too. It’s the Afghan endgame.
First, the civilian dead.
Karzai is charging that a NATO airstrike killed eighteen Afghan civilians, including woman and children, as part of a US-led ground operation in Logar province. Reported the AP: “Villagers displayed 18 bodies at the provincial capital on Wednesday, including five women, seven children and six men….”
“This is unacceptable. It cannot be tolerated,” President Hamid Karzai said in a statement condemning the strike in Logar. He criticized NATO for not being able to provide an explanation for the vans piled with bodies of women and children that villagers displayed to reporters.
What’s especially sad about the slaughter in Logar is that it occurred immediately following a suicide bomb attack blamed on the Taliban in which three suicide bombers killed twenty-two innocent civilians at a marketplace in Kandahar. Taken together, the two incidents represent the worst day of violence in Afghanistan so far this year, providing further evidence – if any was needed – that that idea that the United States is making things better in that war-battered nation is a sick joke.
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