U.S. soldier kills 16 civilians in Afghanistan, Karzai says

Hey this happens in war. Just another reason why we should get out. Neo-cons with their do war first philosophy killed these Afghans.

Well we call this guy mentally ill, but a Taliban member who has never even heard of 9/11 and may very well be fighting in the town where he has grown up and has relatives is just a dirty terrorist because he is fighting invaders from the United States.

Time to get out. Why wait till 2014?

The Afghans were in a civil war before we got there and will be in a civil war after we leave. It has been proven over and over again the Afghan army likes our money, practically the only job for most of them, but will turn on us whenever.

Like used to be said about Vietnam, just declare victory over Al Qaeda, "mission accomplished" have a glorious ticker tape parade for the surviving troops who did their duty, whether worthwhile or not, and on to more important things.

 

[bigtexxx] How do we know the little brown kids weren't getting aggressive? [/bigtexxx]

 

I'm going to guess very little happens to this guy after a show-trial of sorts.

After all, he did not release any documents to wikileaks, he just killed unarmed civilians.

 

Well, we know they have access to the Rush Limbaugh show, access that is provided by the American taxpayer.

 

Time to leave....

 

This whole thing sucks. To apply the famous Jefferson quote to this situation, we have a wolf by the ears. the current situation is untenable yet if we do anything different who knows what comes about (but you can bet it will be tragic).

It is long past time we left but if we do, we're essentially condemning women and ethnic minorities. So we need to stay and prevent that, but the longer we do, the more we become hated by the populace and the more difficult it is to build support for the vision we have of Afghanistan.

What a cluster. I think when the history of this is written, the date where the failure became certain will be the day the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq. Until then, and if we had been serious about Afghanistan (meaning a realistic strategy, getting the best people for the job and not drawing down troops and expertise for Iraq), we had a chance.

 

Ridiculous. We need to get out of there. Now.

Burning their holy book, slaughtering citizens (women/children), urinating on corpses... and that was just in the last few weeks, no? People actually wonder why they hate us? People actually think they hate us because of our "freedom"?

We'll never know what truly happened, either. There have been conflicting reports of a single crazy guy doing it versus a group of drunk soldiers. There have been reports of every victim killed with a single bullet to the head and reports of massive carnage and using acid to dispose of bodies. The only common vein is this: American soldiers killed civilians, including women and children. That alone is reprehensible, regardless of how it was done.

 

Fox news commenters cheering the massacre.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/art...ghan_Killings-_A_Dead_Muslim_Is_a_Good_Muslim

 

This is the scariest part about all of this and the whole political climate as a whole. It's one thing for a guy to go crazy and slaughter innocent civilians -- it has happened before -- but it's clearly another to have people support that crazy guy.

On a similar vein, it's one thing to have an odd presidential candidate that doesn't support birth control or one who supports attacking Iran. It's much more scary that they have such huge support.

 

actually, the case that you and greenwald b**** about did go to trial. but you're too good to admit you were wrong again

 

You're really not worth the time, but here's a link to help cure your ignorance. It's greenwald too. You'll love it.

 

so the guy went to trial, thanks

 

ya Karzai's gotta stop saying **** like this.

in other news... Americans don't give a **** that 16 Muslims were killed.

 

What is Obama's STRATEGY over there?

 

It's a long but good read.

 

How much different is having US soldiers in Afghanistan than the Brits stationed in the the American colonies several hundreds of years ago?

This entire foreign policy is bullcrap, every dollar we spend we essentially get nothing back, and you wonder why our economy is ****

 

I just heard Santorum's response to this incident: "People in the Middle East hate us for our freedoms, they don't hate us for what we're doing over there"

 

I am not sure even if we stay we can fully protect women and ethnic minorities. It seems pretty clear to me that we have lost the battle for Hearts and Minds and any willingness for the Afghans to support the moderate democratic society that we would like to see there is undermined by incidents such as this, fear of the Taliban, and corruption of the Karzai Admin.. History has shown that the only way to defeat an insurgency is to win over the population it is in. We are losing that and I don't know how us staying much longer can change things.

That might be the case but I think the situation with Afghanistan was always more complicated than just a question of how many resources we could put in. For example if we had kept our focus on Afghanistan would that have meant the Karza government was less corrupt? Would it have made the Afghan populace more willing to accept us?

Afghanistan is called the graveyard for empires with good reason and it was always going to be difficult to control.

 

Eventually Americans will have to recognize the injustice in front of our faces, but we can't. We can't because the truth is hard to bear. We can't because there is little money to be made by news sources or journalists and individuals speaking about such uncomfortable truth. Instead, we sate ourselves on other lesser evils; evils that are obvious and unequivocal. Evils that are convenient and make us feel good about ourselves, like Kony, or the organization who presents a skewed viewpoint of the complex crisis in which Kony is involved, or the evils of some dictator somewhere, anywhere. Sure, these are things we should worry about, but there are other greater situations at hand. Greater situations in which we theoretically should be able to make more of an impact. Instead we will be treated to and feast on the convenient, the comforting, the understanding that this was just an incident caused by a deranged individual acting alone. An individual influenced by nothing other than his own demons. And that it was these demons, not hateful rhetoric at home or the horrors of war, that lead him by the hand house to house as he murdered 16 Afghani civilians, including 9 children. But let's face it, this was a lone depraved individual. There was nothing we could have done and nothing we can do. We should just forget about it.

 

You don't get nothing back. Your massive corporations always make tons of money during a war and post-war. Oil fields, mining, weapons, defense, unprotected retail market and labor market access, etc.

But yes you are right that YOU probably don't get anything back for it.