The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Friday, April 13, 2012

War News for Friday, April 13, 2012

Angry Afghans chop off ears of roadside bomb suspect

Pakistan Parliament Allows non-Lethal Supplies to NATO

Pakistan Gives U.S. a List of Demands, Including an End to C.I.A. Drone Strikes


Reported security incidents
#1: Gunship helicopters on Thursday heavily pounded militants’ positions near Afghan border, killing 15 militants and destroyed four hideouts in central Kurram Agency.Official sources in the local administration said that the choppers targeted the militants’ hideouts in Joki Zaranna areas, killing fifteen extremists. The dead included militants from Waziristan, Kurram, Orakzai, and Khyber tribal agencies, Kohat division and some foreigners. The forces initiated the operation in the area after frequents attacks on the security forces by the extremists.

#2: At least five people, including three civilians, were killed late on Thursday when a suicide bomber struck in northern Afghanistan, police said. The attack in Kunduz city was the latest in a wave of violence recently that has left dozens of Afghan civilians as well as Afghan and foreign security forces dead or injured.

#3: A motorbike bomb rocked Sangin town in the southern Helmand province 555 km south of capital Kabul on Friday, injuring 11 people, an official said. "The terrorists planted explosive in the cavities of a motorcycle and detonated it by remote control in the bazaar of Sangin district at around 08:00 a.m. local time as a result 11 people were injured," spokesman for provincial administration Daud Ahmadi told Xinhua.


DoD: Lance Cpl. Ramon T. Kaipat

1 comments:

Dancewater said...

The Baghdad Street of Books

Saad Tahr Hussein rushes me through the narrow alleyway towards Mutanabbi Street, where the concrete wall in front of the central bank hems in the pedestrians. About a thousand Iraqis briefly see – or don't notice – the sly shade of a Brit as he stumbles down the alley. Then, in the square where the statue of old Marouf al-Rasafi, poet and history-debunker under British colonial rule, glares at the crowds, we turn left into the street of books.

Everyone goes to Mutanabbi Street, its new statue of the Abbasid poet and king-praiser towering at the Tigris end. Here you get a feeling of what is going on in the mind of an educated Baghdadi, who still walks a road that you could get killed on five years ago.

There are chadored ladies and bare-headed girls and a bearded sayed with a black turban and a glorious green sash draped over his shoulders. There are pictures aplenty of Ali and Hussein – Iraq is, after all, a Shia country – and texts of religious jurisprudence and newly-bound Korans and, a reflection of the old Iraq, a mass of history books on Arab nationalism. They are all second-hand, laid out on cardboard on the pavement.

Last time I came here, there were no bare-headed girls, precious few divines. It's middle-aged men, secular, who bend over the history books. A young Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, confidant of Nasser, the doyen of Egyptian journalists (upon my word still alive, since he offered me a cigar in Cairo a year ago), smiles from a front cover. Many booksellers are communists.

++++++++++++

Baghdad is surviving all the evil the US visited on them. This is a definite sign of hope!