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, September 30, 2013

War News for Monday, September 30, 2013


Car bombs kill 54 in Shi'ite districts of Baghdad

12 car bombs explode across Baghdad during rush hour; 33 killed

Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence


Reported security incidents
#1 Afghan police say Taliban insurgents killed two officers and three civilians in an attack on a checkpoint in the western part of the country. Police Lt. Sher Agha Alokozai says four insurgents were also killed in the gunbattle early Monday in Herat province's Obey district.

#2 A US drone strike targeting a militant compound on Monday killed three militants in Pakistan's troubled tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said. The attack took place in the Boya area of the North Waziristan region, of which Miranshah is the main town.

#3: update: The death toll from a deadly car bomb that struck the city on Sunday rose to 42, a local hospital said Monday. The Lady Reading Hospital said 107 people were brought to the hospital for treatment with multiple injuries.

#4: Afghan police have killed 25 Taliban fighters in Nawzad district of the southern Helmand province 555 km south of Kabul during operations which lasted 17 hours, a local official said Monday. "The operations which launched Sunday evening in Nawzad district and concluded after 17 hours Monday afternoon, had left 25 Taliban rebels dead," a police official Ghulam Sakhi Ghafori told Xinhua.

#5: Ten militants were killed earlier on Monday in an airstrike in the country's eastern province of Ghazni, an army source said. "On an intelligence tip, the warplanes of the NATO-led coalition forces pounded a militant hideout in Koh-Band area of Muqur district, killing 10 militants at wee hours of Monday," an army spokesman in the region Nazifullah Sultani told Xinhua.

Posted by whisker at 4:30 AM

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