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Taliban Kills Two U.S. Soldiers
An attack in Afghanistan's easter Paktika province, near the Pakistan border, resulted in two American soldiers' deaths on July 4. The Associated Press reports that Taliban militants fired rockets and mortar shells at an American base and a suicide bomber drove a truck bomb towards the base's entrance. American troops resorted to airstrikes and blew up the truck before it reached the compound. An American military spokesman said that, in addition to the two deaths, seven American soldiers and two Afghan soldiers were wounded. The number of Taliban dead remains contested: NATO, which the American forces were fighting under, said at least 10 insurgent died, whereas an official for the Afghan province's governor said more than 30 insurgents were killed. The attack occurs in the midst of the U.S. military's biggest operation in Afghanistan since 2001, a 4000-marine surge in the southern region of the nation.
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Obama lied soldiers died. Bring home our troops now as promised..
God except there souls into your arms.And protect those fighting for the FREEDOM others and us.May there battle be victorious and God speed for there safety home.Protect them with angels camp out around them. Let them fill you with them to show there not alone.God bless the familys and let them turn to you in this time of mourning."They may ask why", but they are in a better place than we.May they rest in peace ..!
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America has no business being in Afghanistan and should remove its troops as soon as possible. Future 911's can be prevented by locked cockpit doors, stringent visa requirements, and appropriate security at our ports. It does not need a Viet Nam like engagement to be properly managed...yet that is what the US is getting itself into.
The question that never comes up is: if the US is threatened by terrorists (as it has been and perhaps still is), then what is the cause of that hostility?
Would it be impossible for America to make the appropriate adjustments to its policies and practices that have engendered so much hatred? Or will it just keep on keeping on, and sending more of its youth to unnecessary and untimely death?
America seems to be the little boy at the dike: stop all the terrorists (leaks) in order to preserve its...no, not freedom, and no, not liberty. Its INTERESTS.
Sanity isn't much appreciated nowadays. Best of luck with it.
Why did we invade Afghanistan ? Bin Laden is in Pakistan, everybody knows that except the Obama administration. Just ask Gibbs..
"Why did we invade Afghanistan ?"
That's a good question MaliciousDisorder. Here's the whole reason the U.S. is in Afghanistan in the first place: It's all about building natural gas pipelines from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan and an L.N.G. port, in other words to get central Asian gas to western markets by a route that bypasses Russia and Iran. The project was originally a Unocal scheme, in competition against the Argentine firm Bridas. Unocal had to bow out of the idea in 1998 after Clinton had cruise missiles fired into Afghanistan and the idea was put on hold. Here's a timeline up to 1999.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/119.html
http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm
But the Bush (Cheney) regime re-started/intensified the pipeline negotiations:
"The Bush White House stepped up negotiations with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush administration representative threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands."
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/06/05/memo/index.html
And wouldn't you know it, Bush "just happened" to have warplans for the invasion of Afghanistan on his desk and ready to be signed two days before 9/11:
"President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News. The document, a formal National Security Presidential Directive, amounted to a "game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the earth," one of the sources told NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski. The plan dealt with all aspects of a war against al-Qaida, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan, the sources said on condition of anonymity. In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf," Miklaszewski said... Officials did not believe that Bush had had the opportunity to closely review the document in the two days between its submission and the Sept. 11 attacks. But it had been submitted to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the officials said Bush knew about it and had been expected to sign it. The couching of the plans as a formal security directive is significant, Miklaszewski reported, because it indicates that the United States intended a full-scale assault on al-Qaida even if the Sept. 11 attacks had not occurred."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4587368/
But bear in mind that as USA Today admits, without 9/11 an invasion of Afghanistan wouldn't have been politically possible:
"In retrospect, it seems obvious: President Clinton or President Bush could have gotten a head start in the war on terror and might even have averted the 9/11 attacks by acting sooner to invade Afghanistan, depose the Taliban regime and hunt down the al-Qaeda terrorists based there. But Democrats and Republicans alike told a bipartisan commission Tuesday that neither U.S. nor world opinion would have stood for such aggression before the fall of 2001. It was only after the Sept. 11 attacks that public opinion here and abroad changed enough to make an invasion politically possible."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-23-war-analysis_x.htm
Tony Blair: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq
So we have Bush with warplans on his desk for an invasion two days BEFORE the event that would be needed to make such an invasion politically possible. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together, even aside from the fact that the official myth of 9/11 is more full of holes than a colander including some physical impossibilities and a long string of "coincidences" too convenient and too numerous to be actual coincidences.
And sure enough, once the U.S. toppled the Taliban and got its puppet government in place under Hamid Karzai, answering at the time to U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad (a Unocal consultant),
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4736394.stm
the "Afghan" government accepted the U.S. terms for the pipeline project.
"Afghanistan hopes to strike a deal later this month to build a $2bn pipeline through the country to take gas from energy-rich Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India." May 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1984459.stm
"Central Asian pipeline deal signed" December 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.stm
Unfortunately for the Cheneyites their Afghanistan scheme hasn't worked out in the long run nearly as they had wanted as their puppet Hamid Karzai's government has little authority outside of the capital city and is propped up by U.S. and N.A.T.O. military forces occupying his country or at least occupying PARTS of his country. The Taliban controls vast swathes of territory in the south and east of Afghanistan and over across the border into Pakistan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As Petraeus noted, the Taliban has been gaining significantly these last couple years and regardless the U.S. has never been able to pacify anywhere near enough of the country to be able to begin construction of its pipeline project. It would have to run right through territory controlled by the Taliban and even if they decided to build the entire length of it underground so as to make it harder for them to locate and blow up, like I said the security situation has been far too unstable to be able to begin building it.
So every day that Karzai sits in his compound in Kabul guarded by the U.S. military but with no pipeline construction is another day wasted and more money wasted for no return on the U.S. government's investment. What Obama is doing is he's just trying to salvage the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline project, hence the deployment by dribs and drabs (because that's the best the U.S. can do at this point) of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
The so-called "War on Terror" is just a thinly-veiled series of wars for energy resource dominance. It's just couched in terms of being a "War on Terror" because the American public wouldn't really get behind the idea of launching wars for the real purposes they are launched so it's put in neat little "War on Terror" packaging and sold to the unsuspecting public as something that's for their collective safety.
*By now increased to 21,000 additional troops as noted by Rapierwits.
Whoops! You missed the real history of that pipeline!
http://www.ca-c.org/dataeng/oxford.shtml
"The idea of using the Afghan route to carry Turkmen raw materials to Pakistan and further on to world markets was born in May 1992, in the course of business consultations between President Niyazov and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at a working meeting of ECO heads of state in Ashghabad. The outcome of the meeting was an agreement to build a gas pipeline and a highway connecting the two countries, via Afghan territory. Subsequently, similar meetings were held on 6-7 February 1993 in Quetta and on 28 November 1993 in Islamabad.
[...]
"All accords reached between Turkmenistan and Pakistan relied on the use of Afghan territory to promote bilateral cooperation. However, representatives of Afghanistan itself were not parties to these accords. Moreover, on 5 March 1995, the then President of Afghanistan, Burhanutdin Rabbani, speaking on Kabul Radio, sharply criticized the agreements that had been reached between Pakistan and Turkmenistan and the intentions behind them. In particular he described these plans as 'attempts by the Pakistani leadership to help the opposition Taliban movement.'
"[...] It is noteworthy that the emergence of the Taliban movement on the Afghan military-political scene was directly related to an active phase in this Pakistani-Turkmen cooperation. In the late autumn of 1994 a group of Afghan Mujahideen seized a caravan moving from Pakistan to Turkmenistan. To secure its release, the Pakistani Interior Ministry tapped a small and little-known religious sect, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, based in the south of Afghanistan. Before long that sect rapidly evolved into the Taliban movement, which subsequently began its triumphant march across Afghan territory, turning around the entire military-political situation in the country."
"Whoops! You missed the real history of that pipeline!"
Not really. You're just focusing on one small part of the picture. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan natural gas pipeline plan was actually a competition between a U.S./U.S.-friendly consortium led by Unocal versus the Argentine firm Bridas. See the extensive timeline provided:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/119.html
http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm
The idea is to get Turkmen gas to western markets but by a route that bypasses Russia and Iran. Same principle as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline to get Azeri crude to western markets but bypassing Russia, Iran and the Russian satellite Armenia (as an aside, you should look up the Georgia Train & Equip Program also known as "Operation: Enduring Freedom -- Pankisi Gorge", closed down since the recent Russo-Georgian war. It was the tiny part of the "War on Terror" that involved assisting the development of Georgian military forces -- remember that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline runs right through Georgia so security of that pipeline against attacks by separatists/Chechan militants/whoever is a critical responsibility for the Georgians.) Picture a region stretching from the Caspian Sea basin to central Asia that used to be under Moscow's control but now is full of independent countries privatizing their individual energy resource wealth with western oil and gas firms playing the dominant role but with not enough "straws" to suck the energy resources out fast enough and a limited number of options for politically-suitable routes for them to be built. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline is one of those routes and is the reason the U.S. is in Afghanistan, as their Taliban government wanted terms the U.S. wouldn't agree to and though the U.S. threatened them they remained unyielding so the Cheneyites felt the only option was to depose the Taliban government and install a puppet government that will agree to the American terms. And that's precisely what happened, the fly in the ointment being the Taliban which refuses to go away and for some reason doesn't like their country being occupied which has made the security situation too unstable to begin construction of it. Obama is trying to salvage this pipeline project, hence the escalation of the war in Afghanistan with another 21,000 troops.
It's worth also noting that a neo-conservative think tank called the Project for the New American Century (P.N.A.C.) published a report called "Rebuilding America's Defenses" one year to the month before 9/11; in this report they advocated a much more aggressive U.S. foreign policy (especially in regard to Iraq which I will cover in a moment), greatly increased defense spending and an expanded military but acknowledged that none of this would be possible in the existing political climate without some large, catalyzing event "like a new Pearl Harbor."
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
A few months later key P.N.A.C. members (like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Armitage) were ensconced in the new Bush (Cheney) administration and Cheney would be assembling his energy task force. A few months after that, when the pipeline negotiations reached an impasse, they would have their "new Pearl Harbor" right on schedule that would provide the pretext for their energy resource wars starting in Afghanistan. As noted above, Bush already had the warplans for this invasion on his desk, ready for his signature, two days before 9/11 in spite of the fact that without 9/11 there would have been no way in the world he could have sold an invasion of Afghanistan to the American public or the world at large.
Regarding Iraq, the reason the Cheneyites just had to have their invasion is the same reason the P.N.A.C. had been agitating for an invasion of Iraq since the late 1990s: Because it was understood that Iraq is going to be the center of gravity of the 21st Century's remaining oil production and it looked almost certain that Saddam was going to privatize Iraq's state-owned oil industry and resources but with the catch being that France's Total and Russia's LukOil would be the main beneficiaries. The U.S., having lousy relations with Saddam's government, would be given the cold shoulder. The only way to prevent this scenario is for the U.S. to invade Iraq, depose the Ba'ath Party government and emplace a puppet government. The U.S. would then have the upper hand in the oil privatization as it's militarily occupying the country, Iraq's massive oil assets would get sold to American and U.S.-friendly oil multinationals and the U.S. would be in a dominating position regarding the world's remaining oil production, in the course of this they hoped fatally undermining O.P.E.C.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/0 3/21/ING0H5LTDA1.DTL
(Also see this article originally appearing in Harper's Weekly)
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12726
It didn't work out as planned of course but because this mentioned above was the reasoning behind the invasion of Iraq most all of the documents pertaining to the Cheney energy task force are still classified and the Cheneyites have fought tooth and nail to prevent disclosure of them. But what about the Somali theater of the so-called "War on Terror"? The Ethiopian invasion with American air support and intelligence assistance to depose the nascent Islamic Courts Union government and install a puppet government. Somalia is believed to be sitting on a considerable amount of unexploited oil. The country's just been so damned unstable since 1991 that it isn't safe to explore for it. This is what made George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush care about Somalia. It sure isn't the starving Somalis.
http://www.somaliawatch.org/archivejuly/000922601.htm
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/nta53713.htm
This has been a failure so far as well, since the Ethiopians have now been forced to withdraw from the country as holding Somalia was a lot harder than they anticipated. The so-called "War on Terror" is nothing but thinly-disguised energy resource wars as the world enters the late phase of the Oil Age.
Thank you.
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