Pentagon blows up thousands of homes in Afghanistan Repeating the horrors of the Vietnam War

[JohnyCanuck]

Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.

As tens of thousands of U.S. troops have surged into southern Afghanistan, villagers have fled. Then the Petraeus-led occupation forces have determined which homes will be destroyed.

“In Arghandab District, for instance, every one of the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow was flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, according to the district governor, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, who estimated that 120 to 130 houses had been demolished in his district,” reported the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010.

The Pentagon asserts that they must destroy the homes because some of them may have explosive devices inside.

The Pentagon’s murderous rampage and terror campaign 40 years ago against South Vietnamese villages, in areas that were considered sympathetic to the resistance forces, used much of the same kind of explanation. In fact, the New York Times in a throw back to Vietnam quotes the Arghandab District Governor, who is working with the occupation forces: “We had to destroy them to make them safe.”

http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/pentagon-blows-up-thousands.html

[Arctic Dave]

1. Destroy it to save it.

Nothing changes

[msongs]

2. america's war criminal military acts with approval of our commanders nt

[bluedigger]

3. There is a script.

And TPTB will keep to it.

[RKP5637]

4. I guess if everyone is killed and all structures destroyed, then have we won? n/t

[sad sally]

5. There is many a boy here who looks on war as all glory,

but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice for generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror. 1880, William Sherman

and nothing has changed...just bigger bombs that destroy more, and leaders unwilling to give peace a chance.

[pinboy3niner]

7. I was one of them...

...an 18-year-old kid who volunteered for the draft during Vietnam because JFK had asked me to think of what I could do for my country.

So I learned the reality of war the hard way--up close and personal as an infantryman. Over there, your politics didn't matter. Gung-ho or anti-war, it didn't matter--people were trying to kill you and you did what you had to do to survive and to keep your friends alive.

Glory? I never saw it. Just a lot of people dying for nothing. I knew more than 60 guys who died there. There was a lot of heroism in the self-sacrifice of a soldier for his comrades, but precious little glory. Just death, quick or slow, and a lot of maiming...

Some mistakenly see PTSD as some kind of weakness or character flaw. They just don't get the fact that it's just a normal human reaction to the madness and the carnage. Those who are immune to the psychological trauma are the psychopaths and sociopaths. I guess that's kind of a cruel joke on the rest of us...

Yes, sad sally, nothing has changed. War is still hell, but boys--and now girls--still go. And we still process them--in our mortuaries and in our military and VA hospitals. And I'm still wondering, "Why?"

[Billy Burnett]

11. "people were trying to kill you and you did what you had to do"

Hold it.

You were there in someone else's homeland to do some killing, and your side did what you had to, to do it.
The people trying to kill you had no choice because your side was attacking. They were defending their own home.
It was your side that was intent on killing. Their side was intent on defending their homes.

[pinboy3niner]

12. I guess you had to be there...

[COLGATE4]

14. You ought to read the post a little more closely before attacking

what the poster said. He was drafted! Had no choice whatsoever whether or not he went to Nam, nor what branch of the Army he served in. He got to be an infantryman, the front-line soldier who had to slog through his part of the hell that was Vietnam and try and get home in one piece. 60 of his friends didn't. I don't believe it is honest or ethical to accuse him of being 'intent on killing'. Your statement is a gross oversimplification of the facts here and a slander on the person who posted it.

[Billy Burnett]

17. Just adding context to the "people were trying to kill you" part.

They wouldn't be trying to kill the veteran poster if he wasn't part of an invasion of their country. Sort of like the Native Indians wouldn't have killed Custer and his soldiers if they hadn't been occupying/invading/killing them.

There were alternatives for the poster, but, as poster noted, he was inspired to do what JFK had said, re: "what I could do for my country".

Some of us didn't volunteer for the lottery. Some of us burned our draft cards. Some of us had already figured out that the best we could do for our country was to resist military imperialism for profit that was needlessly killing our people as well as killing the people we were invading. Some of us served time in prison instead of serving imperialism by killing those who resisted.

I'm not attacking nor slandering the poster. Just indicating that the Vietnamese weren't over here trying to kill us - they were defending against the foreign invaders/killers (the US). Our gov/military were over in their land killing them. Poster's mission (as a volunteer or not) was to advance imperialism by invasion and suppressing/killing the defenders against it.

So you don't have any misunderstanding of my position - it was a horror then. And it still is. It is our government that had abused those who served, and currently serve, suffering PTSD and the myriad of other nastiness - not those who were defending against our invasion.


Cheers

[beam me up scottie]

19. "the Vietnamese weren't over here trying to kill us-they were defending against the foreign invaders

Exactly.

Most Afghani citizens have no idea why we're attacking them.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. kick n/t

[malaise]

9. Question

What's the pipeline route again?

[JohnyCanuck]

10. There's a map showing a proposed pipeline route at the link below

Worth all the blood?
The Trans Afghanistan Pipeline

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2009


President Barack Obama recently honored eighteen fallen American soldiers at a midnight ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Let us hope that none of these heroes died in order to pave the way for the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline.

Advocates of the TAP -- sometimes known as TAPI -- see it as a modern-day extension of the ancient Silk Road. Congress has passed two Silk Road Strategy Acts (1999-2006) that essentially voice strong support for projecting U.S. military and economic power into the Eurasian Corridor in Central Asia. Talk about moving natural gas on the TAP does not pass the lips of our politicians or pundits, but has been a big factor in our dealings with Afghanistan since the 1990s.

Operation Enduring Freedom was about terrorism, but much more was involved. Noam Chomsky has reminded us that the pipeline would sharply reduce the region’s dependency upon Iran for energy. There is also the matter of competition with Russia. In September, Zamir Kabulov, Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, said that the “U.S. and its allies are competing with Russia for influence in the energy-rich region… Afghanistan remains a strategic prize because of its location.”

The Clinton and Bush administrations both sought stability in Afghanistan to permit California-based construction of a planned twin pipelines -- Caspian natural gas and oil -- to take Caspian fuels through Afghanistan into Pakistan and India. TAP only briefly involved oil as well as gas; it is now a natural gas venture.

Sherman DeBrosse : Pipeline Politics and the Afghanistan War

[JackRiddler]

8. Increasingly the biggest difference is that we no longer have a draft in the US...

and thus no powerful movement to end the invasion.

[somone]

13. “We had to destroy them to make them safe”

[Karmadillo]

15. Let's elect a Democratic president & Congress in 2012 so we can stop these crimes!

nt

[Tsiyu]

16. But not until the obscenely wealthy make every last dime

off of the suffering and death of others.

C'mom! Money rocks AND trumps peace, even when a Dem is in charge!

Hope and Change!!!!

[awoke_in_2003]

18. worked so well in 2008...

meet the new boss, same as the old boss.