News Dump Friday: Latest Afghanistan Surge Edition

Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 09/15/2017 - 9:35pm

6,000 more troops

Adding on to the 3,500 troop escalation already announced for the Afghan War, officials are now reporting that another 6,000-plus ground troops from Fort Carson are also slated for a future deployment to the country.

B-52s carpet bombing again

The U.S. Air Force’s iconic B-52 Stratofortress bomber has been flying continuous missions over Afghanistan for months, as the American aerial campaign in the country expands in the face of resurgent and emerging threats, including Taliban insurgents and ISIS-linked terrorists. The flights have been part of an existing surge in air support as the service says it is still looking at how best to contribute to President Donald Trump’s new U.S. strategy for the region.
Since March 2017, the B-52s, or BUFFs, have dropped more than 800 individual weapons on Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS-K targets in support of U.S. forces and the NATO-led coalition, U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT), the top Air Force command for operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, told The War Zone in an Email. This works out to an average of approximately 150 bombs dropped every month.

CIA want to do their own drone strikes

The C.I.A. is pushing for expanded powers to carry out covert drone strikes in Afghanistan and other active war zones, a proposal that the White House appears to favor despite the misgivings of some at the Pentagon, according to current and former intelligence and military officials.
If approved by President Trump, it would mark the first time the C.I.A. has had such powers in Afghanistan, expanding beyond its existing authority to carry out covert strikes against Al Qaeda and other terrorist targets across the border in Pakistan.
The changes are being weighed as part of a broader push inside the Trump White House to loosen Obama-era restraints on how the C.I.A. and the military fight Islamist militants around the world. The Obama administration imposed the restrictions in part to limit civilian casualties, and the proposed shift has raised concerns among critics that the Trump administration would open the way for broader C.I.A. strikes in such countries as Libya, Somalia and Yemen, where the United States is fighting the Islamic State, Al Qaeda or both.

Sounds familiar

The Afghan government should reject proposals to create a new militia with inadequate training and oversight, Human Rights Watch said today. Western diplomatic sources in Kabul told Human Rights Watch that President Ashraf Ghani is considering establishing a defense unit modelled on the Indian Territorial Army, an auxiliary force comprising personnel who serve on a short-term contract basis with the regular armed forces. The NATO Resolute Support Mission is believed to support such a local security force in Afghanistan.
An Afghan Territorial Army with reduced training and potentially less oversight risks being yet another abusive militia operating outside the military’s chain of command, Human Rights Watch said
Tags: 
Open Thread
Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

Submitted by Betty Clermont on Sat, 09/16/2017 - 4:27am

up
0 users have voted.
—

Betty Clermont

Submitted by QMS on Sat, 09/16/2017 - 6:22am
QMS's picture

to have another one of those "peace with honor" moments, as at the end of our SE Asian adventure.

up
0 users have voted.
—

question everything

Submitted by dkmich on Sat, 09/16/2017 - 8:15am

War is always possible and afforded.

up
0 users have voted.
—

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Submitted by TheOtherMaven on Sat, 09/16/2017 - 9:41am
TheOtherMaven's picture

And why do we need yet ANOTHER unrestrained military (or paramilitary) organization?

Maybe they really run things around here and everyone else dances on their marionette strings? (Horrid but increasingly credible thought!)

up
0 users have voted.
—

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Submitted by dervish on Sat, 09/16/2017 - 11:03pm
dervish's picture

What would getting out look like?

up
0 users have voted.
—

"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

Submitted by Ellen North on Mon, 09/18/2017 - 2:47pm

@dervish

This, and the article following it, needs to be read in full at source, if at all possible:

https://geopolitics.co/2017/08/23/war-worth-waging-afghanistans-vast-res...

War Worth Waging: Afghanistan’s Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas

Natural Gas
August 23, 2017 Covert Geopolitics 11 Comments

US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan almost 16 years ago in October 2001. It has been a continuous war marked by US military occupation.

The justification is “counterterrorism”. Afghanistan is defined as a state sponsor of terrorism, allegedly responsible for attacking America on September 11, 2001.

The war on Afghanistan continues to be heralded as a war of retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. US troops are still present and deployed in Afghanistan.

The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade and occupy Afghanistan under “the doctrine of collective security” was that the September 11 2001 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, namely Afghanistan.

Yet there were no Afghan fighter planes in the skies of New York on the morning of September 11, 2001.

This article, first published in June 2010, points to the “real economic reasons” why US-NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

Under the Afghan-US security pact, established under Obama’s Asian pivot, Washington and its NATO partners have established a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, with military facilities located within proximity of China’s Western frontier. The pact was intended to allow the US to maintain their nine permanent military bases, strategically located on the borders of China, Pakistan and Iran as well as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

In recent developments, President Trump in his February 28, 2017 address to a joint session of Congress vowed to “demolish and destroy” terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq as well as in Afghanistan under a fake counter-terrorism mandate.

According to Foreign Affairs, “there are more U.S. military forces deployed there [Afghanistan] than to any other active combat zone” and their mandate is to go after the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS (which are supported covertly by US intelligence).

There is both a geopolitical as well as an economic agenda in Afghanistan requiring the permanent presence of US troops. ...

Therefore the US PTB and lackeys benefit from also having military set up in Afghanistan to attack Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran, among others, these some of the next countries on the long-standing and murderously venal hit list of The Psychopaths That Be.

And, of course, there's the narcotics trade and the war profiteering and endlessly on...

Any citizens surviving are to be left dispossessed within their poisoned land as their wealth is stolen and stripped by force, leaving them with not only the destruction of the attack but the unlimited industrial pollution, much as is planned for the rest of the world, in this global looting-to-destruction-of-life phase.

The inmates aren't just running the asylum anymore...

up
0 users have voted.
—

Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.