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


Monday, December 17, 2012

War News for Monday, December 17, 2012

The DoD is reporting the death of a soldier previously unreported by the military. Sgt. 1st Class Kevin E. Lipari died from unreported reasons in Logar province, Afghanistan on Friday, December 14th.
 
The DoD is reporting another death of a soldier previously unreported by the military. Staff Sgt. Nicholas J. Reid died in the Landstuhl medical hospital, Germany on Thursday, December 13th. He was wounded in an IED blast in Sperwan Village, Kandahar province, Afghanistan on Sunday, December 9th.


Reported security incidents
#1: Three civilians were injured Monday in a bomb blast in Afghan northern city of Kunduz, 260 km north of Kabul, police said. "It was a remote-controlled bomb designed to target local police officer Abdul Shakor but targeted a civilian car at 03:30 p. m. local time. The bombing badly wounded three commuters including a man, a woman and a child," police spokesman Sayed Sarwar Hussaini told Xinhua.

#2: A car bomb exploded outside of a compound housing a U.S. military contractor in the Afghan capital Monday, blowing apart an exterior wall and wounding dozens inside, company representatives and police said. The blast on the outskirts of Kabul sent a plume of smoke up in the air and shook windows more than a mile (two kilometers) away in the city center. The security officer for Contrack, a McLean, Va.-based company that builds facilities for military bases, said a suicide attacker drove a vehicle packed with explosives up to the exterior wall of the compound and detonated the bomb. Afghan police said they could not confirm if it was a suicide attack or a remotely detonated bomb that had been placed in a parked vehicle. Deputy Interior Ministry spokesman Najibullah Danish said that at least one person was killed in the attack. It was not immediately clear if this could have been the attacker. Contrack security officer Baryalai, who like many Afghans only goes by one name, said he could only confirm wounded. He said the injured employees included Americans, Afghans and South Africans. An American official of the company was seriously wounded, he said.

Five foreigners including Americans and South Africans were among the wounded, a security source at the company told AFP.

#3: Police said they believed that the device was an unexploded mine that had been laid years ago and was triggered somehow as the girls walked through the open field. At least one other old mine was found nearby, provincial police spokesman Hazrat Hussain Mashreqiwal said. He also noted that the blast did not occur next to a road or any obvious target. The girls who died ranged in age from 9 to 13 years old and all came from different families in Dawlatzai village, said Mohammad Seddiq, the government administrator Nangarhar province's Chaperhar district, which includes the village. Two more girls were seriously wounded and are in critical condition at a hospital, Seddiq said. He spoke to The Associated Press by phone from the site of the blast.

#4: A blast in a market in northwest Pakistan on Monday killed at least 15 people, a security official said. The official said at least 20 people had been wounded in the blast in the market in the Khyber region, near the border with Afghanistan, and the death toll could rise. The attack occurred near the office of a senior government official but it was unclear if he was the target of the attack, the news channels reported.

#5: Hungarian troops have come under attack in Khilagay, Baghlan province, north Afghanistan, the defence ministry told MTI on Saturday. No service personnel were hurt in the attack, the ministry said in a statement. The statement said that 21 members of the Hungarian-US Military Advisory Team (MAT) and two companies of the Afghan National Army (ANA) were caught up in the attack. Under fire, the MAT called in air support. In the run-up to the attack on Friday night, the MAT camp came under rocket fire. During an assessment of the damage, members of the team and their Afghan colleagues came under attack.

#6: At least four people including one official and three policemen were killed in two separate firing incidents in Pakistan's southwest city of Quetta on Monday morning, reported local media Samaa. According to the report, the killed official is Khadim Hussain, Director of Public Relations of Balochistan Province with Quetta as its capital. He got killed outside a district court in the city. In another incident, unknown gunmen coming in on motorbikes opened fire at a police vehicle near a taxi stand in the Liaquat Park area of the city, leaving three cops dead. The killed include an inspector and a sub-inspector, said the report.


DoD: Staff Sgt. Nelson D. Trent

DoD: Sgt. Michael J. Guillory

DoD: Staff Sgt. Nicholas J. Reid

DoD: Sgt. 1st Class Kevin E. Lipari

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

My god, and America is violent?

Dancewater said...

Nine girls killed by landmine

not sure who left the landmine - US or Russia.

Dancewater said...

Over two dozen dead in second day of violence in Iraq

Dancewater said...

actually, the story about the nine girls killed is on the front page - just does not say how many were killed (early reports said 10, later reports said 9)

Dancewater said...

America is an unusually violent country, but not as violent as we used to be

No doubt in my mind that we could ramp it up again to even higher levels.... and having a war in the US would make Afghanistan look like a Sunday School picnic.

Anonymous said...

The Taliban has kidnapped Afghanistan and rains terror and violence on the people. Afghanistan seems powerless against them. Why is that? What does the Taliban offer that allows The Afghan people to tolerate them? Will ISAF leaving make the Taliban kinder to Afghanis? I hope ISAF pulls out as soon as possible and take forces and support money. Maybe then Afghanistan can go back to being the peaceful, well-run country it used to be.