Skybird
09-06-09, 06:17 AM
Since days German newspaper lob shells at suspected positions of opposing opinions, so do politicians in and outside Germany. The event causes such a stirr becasue too many people run around with misled ideas about what the Afghanistan thing is - a war. Having thought of it for too long as anything but that, demonstrations of the harsh reality catches them off guard. And then the lies to the public - result in a bizarr separation between reality, and calls for consequences that have little to do with it, but adress fantasies. In other words: more lies for the public.
The German newspapers leave much to be desired so far, almost all reports indeed are comments and run a politically motivated agenda (we are in election campaign). The most detailed and objective report, which also makes a lot of sense, has been given by - the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/05/AR2009090502832_pf.html
Surprising it is that local Afghan authorities praise the attack.
At midday Saturday, after visiting the hospital and flying over the bombing site in a helicopter, the team met with two local officials. The NATO officers were expecting anger and calls for compensation. What they received was a totally unanticipated sort of criticism.
"I don't agree with the rumor that there were a lot of civilian casualties," said one key local official, who said he did not want to be named because he fears Taliban retribution. "Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation."
A few hours later, McChrystal arrived at the reconstruction team's base in Kunduz. A group of leaders from the area, including the chairman of the provincial council and the police chief, were there to meet him. So, too, were members of an investigative team dispatched by President Hamid Karzai.
McChrystal began expressing sympathy "for anyone who has been hurt or killed."
The council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak, cut him off. He wanted to talk about the deteriorating security situation in Kunduz, where Taliban activity has increased significantly in recent months. NATO forces in the area, he told the fact-finding team before McChrystal arrived, need to be acting "more strongly" in the area.
His concern is shared by some officials at the NATO mission headquarters, who contend that German troops in Kunduz have not been confronting the rise in Taliban activity with enough ground patrols and comprehensive counterinsurgency tactics.
"If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz," Wardak told McChrystal. "If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that's not our fault."
McChrystal seemed to be caught off guard.
"We've been too nice to the thugs," Wardak continued.
As McChrystal drove to the bombing site -- defying German suggestions that the area was too dangerous -- one senior NATO official noted that the lack of opposition from local officials, despite relatively clear evidence that some civilians were killed, could help to de-escalate tensions.
"We got real lucky here," the official said.
But McChrystal still had a message to deliver. Even if the Afghan officials were not angry, he certainly did not seem pleased.
I just add that the German intel services and Bundeswehr claim to have information tnat the Taliban plan terror attacks directed against Germany/Germans in order to influence the upcoming federal elections in Germany, and that the hijacking of two rolling liquid explosive bombs (=fuel trucks) have to be seen in this light also.
IMO it was a valid strike at a taregt of military interest, wehre unfortunately civilians got killed, too, but it were miliutants and their means of support and their ressources that were targetted. This was no intended killing of civilians, as some political nutheads over already have claimed. the proposed scale of the attack, that the US bomber pilot recommended to be carried out by using 2000 pound bombs, had been reduced by the German Colonel giving the commands to the use of one 500 pound bomb per truck.
If the German colonel made any mistake, then that he trusted a local informant as the deciding source of info. He could as well have been a Taliban provoking civilian losses to score in the propaganda war.
But the briefings proved to be more valuable -- and alarming -- than the team had expected.
Klein told the team, led by British Air Commodore Paddy Teakle, the NATO mission's director of air operations, that he had asked a U.S. B-1B bomber flying over northern Afghanistan to search for two fuel trucks that had been hijacked Thursday evening. The bomber located the trucks, which by then were stuck on a small island in the middle of the Kunduz River, shortly after midnight Friday. The B-1 crew reported seeing rocket-propelled grenades and small arms among some of the people at the site, Klein said.
After 10 minutes over the site, the bomber left to refuel. Klein summoned a new warplane, declaring the incident an imminent threat.
"My feeling was that if we let them get away with these tankers, they will prepare them to attack police stations or even the PRT," or provincial reconstruction team, he said.
Twenty minutes later, two F-15E Strike Eagles arrived. A video camera pod beamed live images to Klein's command center. He and his troops could see the trucks -- and scores of people around them.
His intelligence chief had spoken to an Afghan source who insisted that everyone at the site was an insurgent. The description of the scene the source provided was similar to what Klein was seeing beamed from the F-15.
"The whole story matched 100 percent," Klein said.
But there was no way to tell whether the dots on the screen were insurgents, as the source maintained.
"We heard there was a tanker and everyone was going to collect free fuel, so I went with them," said Mohammed Shafiullah, the 10-year-old with the leg wound. He rode a donkey from his village and took in the scene from the western riverbank.
He probably would not have been alive had the airstrike coordinator at Klein's command center not rejected the F-15 pilot's recommendation to use 2,000-pound bombs on the trucks, which would have created far wider devastation. Instead, the coordinator demanded that 500-pound GBU-38 bombs be used.
Klein ordered the strike about 2:30 a.m. Two minutes later, the bombs had hit their targets.
Willlkommen zum Krieg, Herr Jung (German defence minister who still rejects that there is a war happening in Afghanistan, so does the German foreign minister and the chancellor and all the government as well).
Since Germany has been running a political ghost flight regarding it's Afghanistan policies from the very beginning on, I want those troops out of there.
The German newspapers leave much to be desired so far, almost all reports indeed are comments and run a politically motivated agenda (we are in election campaign). The most detailed and objective report, which also makes a lot of sense, has been given by - the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/05/AR2009090502832_pf.html
Surprising it is that local Afghan authorities praise the attack.
At midday Saturday, after visiting the hospital and flying over the bombing site in a helicopter, the team met with two local officials. The NATO officers were expecting anger and calls for compensation. What they received was a totally unanticipated sort of criticism.
"I don't agree with the rumor that there were a lot of civilian casualties," said one key local official, who said he did not want to be named because he fears Taliban retribution. "Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation."
A few hours later, McChrystal arrived at the reconstruction team's base in Kunduz. A group of leaders from the area, including the chairman of the provincial council and the police chief, were there to meet him. So, too, were members of an investigative team dispatched by President Hamid Karzai.
McChrystal began expressing sympathy "for anyone who has been hurt or killed."
The council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak, cut him off. He wanted to talk about the deteriorating security situation in Kunduz, where Taliban activity has increased significantly in recent months. NATO forces in the area, he told the fact-finding team before McChrystal arrived, need to be acting "more strongly" in the area.
His concern is shared by some officials at the NATO mission headquarters, who contend that German troops in Kunduz have not been confronting the rise in Taliban activity with enough ground patrols and comprehensive counterinsurgency tactics.
"If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz," Wardak told McChrystal. "If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that's not our fault."
McChrystal seemed to be caught off guard.
"We've been too nice to the thugs," Wardak continued.
As McChrystal drove to the bombing site -- defying German suggestions that the area was too dangerous -- one senior NATO official noted that the lack of opposition from local officials, despite relatively clear evidence that some civilians were killed, could help to de-escalate tensions.
"We got real lucky here," the official said.
But McChrystal still had a message to deliver. Even if the Afghan officials were not angry, he certainly did not seem pleased.
I just add that the German intel services and Bundeswehr claim to have information tnat the Taliban plan terror attacks directed against Germany/Germans in order to influence the upcoming federal elections in Germany, and that the hijacking of two rolling liquid explosive bombs (=fuel trucks) have to be seen in this light also.
IMO it was a valid strike at a taregt of military interest, wehre unfortunately civilians got killed, too, but it were miliutants and their means of support and their ressources that were targetted. This was no intended killing of civilians, as some political nutheads over already have claimed. the proposed scale of the attack, that the US bomber pilot recommended to be carried out by using 2000 pound bombs, had been reduced by the German Colonel giving the commands to the use of one 500 pound bomb per truck.
If the German colonel made any mistake, then that he trusted a local informant as the deciding source of info. He could as well have been a Taliban provoking civilian losses to score in the propaganda war.
But the briefings proved to be more valuable -- and alarming -- than the team had expected.
Klein told the team, led by British Air Commodore Paddy Teakle, the NATO mission's director of air operations, that he had asked a U.S. B-1B bomber flying over northern Afghanistan to search for two fuel trucks that had been hijacked Thursday evening. The bomber located the trucks, which by then were stuck on a small island in the middle of the Kunduz River, shortly after midnight Friday. The B-1 crew reported seeing rocket-propelled grenades and small arms among some of the people at the site, Klein said.
After 10 minutes over the site, the bomber left to refuel. Klein summoned a new warplane, declaring the incident an imminent threat.
"My feeling was that if we let them get away with these tankers, they will prepare them to attack police stations or even the PRT," or provincial reconstruction team, he said.
Twenty minutes later, two F-15E Strike Eagles arrived. A video camera pod beamed live images to Klein's command center. He and his troops could see the trucks -- and scores of people around them.
His intelligence chief had spoken to an Afghan source who insisted that everyone at the site was an insurgent. The description of the scene the source provided was similar to what Klein was seeing beamed from the F-15.
"The whole story matched 100 percent," Klein said.
But there was no way to tell whether the dots on the screen were insurgents, as the source maintained.
"We heard there was a tanker and everyone was going to collect free fuel, so I went with them," said Mohammed Shafiullah, the 10-year-old with the leg wound. He rode a donkey from his village and took in the scene from the western riverbank.
He probably would not have been alive had the airstrike coordinator at Klein's command center not rejected the F-15 pilot's recommendation to use 2,000-pound bombs on the trucks, which would have created far wider devastation. Instead, the coordinator demanded that 500-pound GBU-38 bombs be used.
Klein ordered the strike about 2:30 a.m. Two minutes later, the bombs had hit their targets.
Willlkommen zum Krieg, Herr Jung (German defence minister who still rejects that there is a war happening in Afghanistan, so does the German foreign minister and the chancellor and all the government as well).
Since Germany has been running a political ghost flight regarding it's Afghanistan policies from the very beginning on, I want those troops out of there.