Bloodthirsty Liberal

Not that we want it, but after the investment of blood and money, every American has a right to claim any acreage in Afghanistan, including Rodeo Drive, Kabul:

If Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, an influential member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is looking for a country to visit as a member of a congressional delegation, he can cross Afghanistan off his list.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Rohrabacher have been at loggerheads over the congressman’s push for a more decentralized Afghan government. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the disagreement, Karzai said he is against letting Rohrabacher into the country.

“Until he changes his tongue, until he shows respect to the Afghan people, to our way of life and to our constitution … No foreigner has a place asking another people, another country to change their constitution. Have we ever asked the United States to change its constitution?”

Well, there have been some issues around who declares war and how, but we’ll let that pass for now. What’s the problem with Rep. Rohrbacher?

Rohrabacher went on to call the mercurial Afghan leader a “corrupt prima donna” in the same interview.

…

Rohrabacher later released a statement through his office saying he would not “apologize to Karzai or any other corrupt leader.

“Afghanistan is failing because Karzai and his corrupt clique are incompetent leaders, not because the U.S. hasn’t pumped enough money or blood to help the brave people of Afghanistan … Right now, I’m more concerned with getting American troops out of that country so they won’t continue to needlessly die than I am getting myself into Afghanistan to meet with officials like Karzai,” Rohrabacher said in the statement.

Hmm, he’s not wrong. Let the record show that his contempt is not for the people of Afghanistan, as Karzai alleges, but for Karzai himself. That makes Rep. Rohrbacher more generous than I, but who isn’t?

You know what would make the world a better place? More Taliban poetry. Even any Taliban poetry.

Ask and ye shall receive:

“Poetry of the Taliban” – edited by a group of London researchers – has already been released in the U.K. and the liberal media are praising the collection as “important” and “original,” remarking how the Taliban’s verse “humanizes” murderers.

Dr. James Caron of the University of Pennsylvania gushed, “In providing such a picture, the ‘insurgent’ is restored a sense of humanity and agency.”

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for “The New Yorker” fawned over the terrorist composition in similar fashion. “It’s a remarkable and important book that reveals a hitherto concealed side to the harshly perceived Afghan Taliban,” he wrote.

Obviously, Americans have been too hung up on IEDs, suicide bombers and bloody riots over books to get to know the Taliban’s sensitive side.

No more. Now we’re going to be rooting for those plucky underdogs. Wall Street Journal Istanbul bureau chief Hugh Pope wrote, “Thanks to a clear and emphatic translation, Western readers will find here a rare door to the emotions and motivations of Afghans trapped in bloody events beyond their control, and will soon forget which side they are supposed to be on.”

I particularly liked this bit of verse that shows how like us the Taliban are:

A journalist by the name Pearl
Had the habit of making me hurl.
I cut off his head
To make sure he was dead,
And then—oh look, it’s a squirrel!

Taliban Attention Deficit Disorder! What a sense of “humanity and agency”! No longer will I perceive them “harshly”!

That the Taliban write poetry is hardly a surprise; that someone might see fit to compile it is hardly more so. But that liberal Western journalists would praise it is disgusting. I might expect such sewage from that scourge of old growth timber, The New Yorker—but the Wall Street [bleeping] Journal? “Afghans trapped in bloody events beyond their control”? I would say the “bloody events” perpetrated by the Taliban are very much in their control.

As “Jawed” wrote:

Hot, hot trenches are full of joy;
Attacks on the enemy are full of joy.
Guns in our hands and magazine belts over my shoulders;
Grenades on my chest are full of joy.

How about a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone up your a**, Jawed. That fill you with joy? Harshly perceived my a**.

Not an oxymoron, you just have to see things from their perspective:

A key figure in Afghanistan’s efforts to bring the Taliban to peace negotiations was assassinated Sunday in Kabul, authorities said.

Gunmen killed Moulavi Arsala Rahmani while he was on his way to work Sunday morning, the Afghan interior ministry said.

Rahmani was a senator and Cabinet minister during the Taliban government. In recent years, he was a senior member of the High Peace Council, established by President Hamid Karzai to ignite peace talks with the Taliban.

Very funny, Mullah Omar. It is to laugh. It’s a pity your single eye is such a jaundiced one.

Well okay, if you say so:

The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan’s Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse’s severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.

Don’t get me wrong: I would do it. But then I’m not over there seeing with my own eyes the evil that the Taliban and their ilk do. If I were, I too might celebrate their demise.

However:

The soldier who provided The Times with a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with corpses did so on condition of anonymity. He served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne’s 4th Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Bragg, N.C. He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.

He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated.

Well, that sounds reasonable: a fellow soldier outs his own, whom he thinks have lost discipline. I have no complaint.

But can we put our outrage in perspective?

More than 100 schoolgirls in northeastern Afghanistan are in hospital suffering from suspected poisoning.

The health director of Takhar province said the girls fell ill shortly after drinking water at their school.

An education official in Kabul said preliminary investigations suggested the water had been poisoned.

A local official in Takhar suggested that people opposed to education for girls were responsible.

Our soldiers poisoned no one, peed on no one, even killed no one. So, keep things in perspective.

What was I just saying about girls in Afghan culture (see comments in post below)?

For economic and social reasons, many Afghan parents want to have a son. This preference has led to some of them practising the long-standing tradition of Bacha Posh – disguising girls as boys.

When Azita Rafhat, a former member of the Afghan parliament, gets her daughters ready for school, she dresses one of the girls differently.

Three of her daughters are clothed in white garments and their heads covered with white scarves, but a fourth girl, Mehrnoush, is dressed in a suit and tie. When they get outside, Mehrnoush is no longer a girl but a boy named Mehran.

Azita Rafhat didn’t have a son, and to fill the gap and avoid people’s taunts for not having a son, she opted for this radical decision. It was very simple, thanks to a haircut and some boyish clothes.

There is even a name for this tradition in Afghanistan – Bacha Posh, or disguising girls as boys.

Isn’t that cute?

Hey, didn’t Victorians (or Edwardians, or whoever) dress boys up in dresses and put bows in their long, wavy locks? What’s the difference?

So, when do the riots start?

An Army sergeant and father of three from Rhode Island who gave his life to save an Afghan child from being run over by a 16-ton armored fighting vehicle is being flown back to the U.S. and will be buried Monday.

Sgt. Dennis Weichel, 29, died in Afghanistan last week after he dashed into the path of an armored fighting vehicle to scoop up the little girl, who had darted back into the roadway to pick up shell casings, according to the Army. Weichel, a Rhode Island National Guardsman, was riding in the convoy in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan when he jumped out to save the girl, who was unhurt.

This image, obtained from WPRI.com, shows 29-year-old Sgt. Dennis Weichel.

“He would have done it for anybody,” Staff Sgt. Ronald Corbett, who deployed with Weichel to Iraq in 2005, said in a quote posted on the U.S. Army website. “That was the way he was. He would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He was that type of guy.”

A father of three isn’t coming back from Afghanistan because he saved an Afghan girl. That was how he was brought up, how he was trained; he didn’t think, he just acted. The girl lived, and three children in Rhode Island don’t have a dad.

And people write plays about, and name streets after, Rachel Corrie, who died playing olé with a Caterpillar front-loader in order to save illegal Arab settlements. I’m going to be sick.

The terrorist, of course. But the United States of America aided and abetted in all seven of these murders.

Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old man described by French authorities as a self-styled al Qaeda jihadist, has been named as the chief suspect in a series of shootings that have left seven people dead.

A picture is emerging of a man who was already known to the police and had apparently sought out Islamist jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“He claims to be a jihadist and says he belongs to al Qaeda,” Interior Minister Claude Gueant told reporters in Toulouse. “He wanted to avenge the Palestinian children and take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions.”

A French national of Algerian origin, he had been under surveillance by French intelligence for a couple of years, having “already committed certain infractions, some with violence,” Gueant told CNN affiliate BFM-TV.

Merah has spent considerable time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gueant said. Merah was sent back from Afghanistan to France by the U.S. Army, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said in Toulouse Wednesday. He said Afghan police had checked Merah’s identification during a traffic stop, and as a result he was handed over to the U.S. Army, which then put him on board the first plane heading to France.

But a senior U.S. military official gave a different version from the French prosecutor about what happened to the suspect in Afghanistan.

The senior U.S. military official told the CNN contributor Fran Townsend that the French shooting suspect was stopped by Afghan forces who tried to turn him over to the U.S. military. The U.S. directed them to hand Merah to French forces since he was a citizen of their country. He was given over the French military by the Afghans and the French military decided to return him to France, according to the source.

And that last bit, gentle readers, is what you call A Distinction Without A Difference. Thanks, US. Heckuva job, Barry.

- Aggie

I know I’ve made the point already, but to be so perfectly validated… well, I always have bandwidth for that:

Our troops have been the target of serial sneak attacks by the Afghans with whom they are forced to “partner.” Nevertheless, our Marines were ordered to disarm before being admitted into the presence of Obama’s defense secretary, Leon Panetta. Yes, you read that correctly: Our Marines were stripped of their arms.

Panetta was at Camp Leatherneck on a “surprise” visit, hoping to calm the disastrous situation in the combat theater. Turns out not to have been much of a surprise: One of our Afghan “partners” — a contract interpreter hired to help our armed forces in deadly Helmand province — seamlessly converted to Islamist suicide assassin. His contacts clued him in on the surprise, so much so that he managed to speed a stolen truck toward the runway, just as Panetta’s hush-hush flight was about to land. He just missed smashing the contingent of Marines waiting to receive the secretary — that is to say, to whisk the secretary away to safer quarters, if there is any longer such a thing in this hell-hole, where 90,000 American troops are now stationed, compared with the 5,200 who conclusively routed al-Qaeda a decade ago, which you may recall as the mission they were sent to accomplish.

Unlike the Soviets, we actually defeated Afghanistan militarily.

Politically and culturally, however, we have met our Waterloo:

Afghans went on a murderous rampage after some Korans were accidentally burned, Korans that jihadists had used to incite each other by adding handwritten messages reaffirming hatred of Americans. Among nearly three dozen killed when the mayhem began were two American soldiers, murdered by a treacherous Afghan “soldier” they were training.

Soon after, two more U.S. officers were shot in the back of the head by Afghan “security” personnel at the interior ministry in Kabul. A few days later, two more American soldiers were killed by Afghan “soldiers” at a base in Kandahar. In fact, our “partners” have turned their guns on scores of our troops in the last five years, killing 70, wounding many more. Those are just the U.S. casualty figures. British forces and other NATO personnel are also being assassinated with regularity.

Still, our forces are expected to trust these faithless partners. Trust them and, at the premeditated cost of American lives, protect Afghan civilians — tribal Islamists rife with Taliban and other terrorist sympathizers. There is a reason al-Qaeda was so comfortable in Afghanistan: It is nigh impossible to know who is a civilian.

…

Last weekend, an unidentified U.S. Army staff sergeant snapped. He is said to have massacred 16 civilians in a small village. In this decade-long war, the burden of which has been borne exclusively by a few hundred thousand military families while the rest of the nation yawns, the staff sergeant was in his fourth combat tour.

…

Hamid Karzai, who owes not just his presidency but his continued existence on this planet to the unwavering dedication of America’s armed forces, was barely finished demanding sharia justice for the Koran burners when he started screaming for the staff sergeant to be tried in Afghan court. (The Army has moved him out of the country, and he will eventually face a U.S. court-martial.)

This was the chaos into which Secretary Panetta descended. After dodging the assassination attempt, he was to address American forces and their Afghan trainees in a tent where the only security would be the United States Marines. Yet the Marines were ordered to disarm before entering. From on high came the directive: They were to check their automatic rifles and pistols outside the tent. Only then would Panetta appear.

…

While Panetta addressed our defrocked troops, the savages were up to their usual grisly business. Tim Lynch, a retired Marine now embedded in Afghanistan, summed it up well in an e-mail to journalist Michael Yon: “The Taliban killed 13 women and children today with an IED in Uruzgan and I think they got 8 yesterday — but that’s all cool here because they’re the Taliban and we’re the big, fat, retarded kid on the block who gets bullied everyday but still shows up to fork over even more lunch money while assuming at some point everyone will like us because we’re so [deleted] generous.”

It’s a long, complicated, even emotional piece. He lumps Iraq in with Afghanistan as a failed attempt at nation-building—with which I don’t entirely agree. (I think Iraq was already “won”, then abandoned by Obama; Afghanistan was never truly won—as in hearts and minds—and never truly could be.)

We can endure tragedies and atrocities if we are pursuing a goal, but when even the concept of a goal is long-forgotten, what point is there to the loss?

Obama suggested that the soldier who shot and killed 16 Afghan civilians might face the death penalty. When Major Hassan murdered those people at Ft. Hood, did he make a similar remark?

And to be clear, I think that breaking into homes and killing people is Palestinian terrorist behavior and I have no compassion for it whatsoever. I just wonder how our fearless leader selects the incidences that speak to him?

- Aggie

Does this mean that the outreach program failed?

Thousands of people took to the streets in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday to protest the killing of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier, burning an effigy of Barack Obama and calling for the killer to be tried in Afghanistan.

Demonstrators in the city of Jalalabad chanted “Death to America — Death to Obama” and blocked the main highway to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported.
“Jihad (holy war) is the only way to get the invading Americans out of Afghanistan,” one banner read, according to the newspaper.

So I thought that he was going to improve our standing in the Muslim world? No?

- Aggie

BTL here. Aggie, I wanted to see what that looked like, and I didn’t have to look far:

I suppose that’s the Obama effigy engulfed in flames. But what’s that big red thing being inserted into the conflagration? We may be doing our best to assure them that the war on terror is not another crusade, but I don’t think the message is getting through.

PS: How much longer are we going to keep secret the identity of the butcher who took out all those civilians? And why? You can’t “manage” or “spin” a massacre.

The Daily Caller makes the point that he is willing to apologize to the Afghans but not the Mexicans. What gives?

President Barack Obama has never apologized to Mexican President Felipe Calderon for the 300 civilians murdered with weapons the United States provided to Mexico’s drug cartels, but on Sunday he found time to place a call to Afghan president Hamid Karzai apologizing for deaths caused by an American soldier this weekend in Afghanistan.

The Daily Caller asked the White House why Obama hasn’t similarly apologized to Calderon for the murders that resulted from the U.S. policy of providing weapons to the Mexican cartels. Obama spokesman Eric Schultz did not answer.

The Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program — organized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and overseen by the Department of Justice — sent thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers, or people who legally purchase guns in the United States with the intention of illegally trafficking them somewhere else. This tactic is known as “gunwalking.”

At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with weapons provided by Fast and Furious, including U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown. Allegations are now surfacing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was also murdered with weapons the Obama administration allowed to “walk” into the hands of drug cartel members.

…

Schultz didn’t answer when TheDC asked him if Obama supports the same goals with regard to Fast and Furious.

The Obama administration has instead stonewalled Congress on the issue, refusing to reply to subpoenas from Issa. Out of 80,000 pages worth of documents Issa has lawfully subpoenaed, the DOJ has only provided about 6,000 or 7,000 pages to Congress. The DOJ has, however, given all of those documents to its internal investigator, the Inspector General.

Holder has not provided any legal reason as to why he’s withholding these documents from Congress and the American people, but the attorney general has claimed that he’s not covering anything up.

Classy. Just pretend it didn’t happen, right?

- Aggie

He’s made us less safe. The world hates us.

Remember the talk about how Bush made the world hate us? Lefties, I know it is early and today the time changed, but wipe the sleep from your eyes and let’s do a time travel experiment. Once we put Obama into office, our prestige was going to shoot up in the world, and the Muslim world in particular would love us.

How’s it working out so far?

Fifteen Afghan civilians were shot by an American soldier in Kandahar province Sunday, with seven of them feared dead, the provincial government said.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force confirmed that a soldier had gone off base and fired on civilians before turning himself in, but did not say how many victims there had been.

Capt. Justin Brockhoff of ISAF said there had been “multiple” casualties and that the injured Afghans were being treated in ISAF facilities.

“One of our soldiers is reported to have killed and injured a number of civilians in villages adjacent to his base,” ISAF’s deputy commander, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, said in a statement that expressed “deep regrets and sorrow at this appalling incident.”

There has been confusion about the number of casualties since the shooting outside a military base in eastern Afghanistan.

A provincial council member, Ahsan Noorzai, said earlier that 18 people were killed, but did not say where his information came from.

The Taliban claimed that 50 people had been killed, but the Islamist militia regularly exaggerates casualty figures.

I want to deconstruct the last sentence first, the one I bolded. Am I the only one who finds it interesting that the media is aware of the fact that the Taliban exaggerates their casualties? I’m surprised, because Palestinian terror groups do this too, and we never hear a word about it from the MSM. Curious.

But I digress. What it sounds like, and remember, this is coming from the media, so we can’t be certain, but it sounds as if a soldier went nuts and committed atrocities. On Obama’s watch. On Panetta’s watch. Now, in a former lifetime, I would have given our leadership some slack. How can they be responsible for the mental health and good judgement of every single soldier?

That was then. Today I note that the standard has been established. Every time someone stubs their toe, it is Bush’s, sorry, Obama’s fault. And Panetta’s. Think about the lack of discipline, the weakness of the command, and the general racism that this implies. What lousy leadership. I guess they’re in real trouble now. There will be front page headlines demanding impeachment, no doubt.

- Aggie