Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Mecello afghano

NATO has announced the death of an eighth soldier in a day of concentrated 
violence in war-torn Afghanistan.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement on 
Tuesday that an eighth soldier was killed on Monday in a bomb attack in 
southern Afghanistan.
The soldier was killed in a day that seven US troops lost their lives in two 
separate bomb attacks in the south.
ISAF did not reveal the nationality of the troop.
The death brings the number of US-led troops killed in Afghanistan so far in 
2010 to 480. Among the dead 315 are Americans.
According to a previous AFP tally, a total of 521 foreign soldiers were 
killed in Afghanistan in 2009.
Based on official figures, more than 2,000 US-led soldiers have been killed 
in Afghanistan since the start of the war in 2001.
The rising casualties of the US-led forces have increased opposition to the 
Afghan war in the US and other countries contributing troops to the mission.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/140674.html
.Fourteen more US troops killed in Afghanistan: What are they dying for?
31 August 2010
Another 14 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Saturday, with 
the death toll so far this year already rising to the level reached for all 
of 2010.
A pair of roadside bombings took the lives of seven soldiers on Monday, five 
of them dying in a blast that tore apart a Humvee in which they were riding. 
Bomb blasts took the lives of four others in southern Afghanistan over the 
weekend, while three were killed in clashes with armed groups resisting the 
US-led occupation.
These latest deaths bring US fatalities for the month to nearly 50, after 
the record 65 killed in July.
NATO has announced that it is investigating yet another report of civilians 
killed in a US bombing. The air strike last Thursday hit children who were 
collecting scrap metal on a mountain in the province of Kunar, which borders 
Pakistan. A local police commander said that the six children killed by the 
US bombs were aged six to 12. Another child was seriously wounded.
After a much-reported decline in US air strikes, attributed to orders from 
sacked US senior commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal that were 
designed to reduce civilian casualties, such strikes are back up again. 
According to figures released by the Air Force, US warplanes flew 5,500 
"close air support" missions in June and July of 2010, compared to 4,600 in 
the same months last year.
With the Obama administration's Afghanistan surge having brought US troops 
up to the full strength of nearly 100,000, together with another 40,000 
troops from NATO and other allied countries, fighting has intensified and 
casualties among both US troops and Afghan civilians are up sharply. New 
revelations of rampant corruption and CIA payoffs to the US-backed Kabul 
government raise the inescapable question: What are they dying for?
Among the bodies shipped back to the US through Dover Air Base in 
flag-draped coffins this past week was that of a 20-year-old from Elizabeth, 
New Jersey, Army Specialist Pedro Millet, who was killed by an improvised 
explosive device in southern Afghanistan.
"I feel like someone ripped my heart out. I have no heart. My baby is gone," 
the soldier's mother, Denise Meletiche, told reporters outside her home 
after making the painful journey from the base in Delaware. She said that 
her son had joined the Army without telling her, explaining only afterwards 
that he did it to get money to go to college. "I was against the Army," she 
said. "I'm against war."
The soldier's stepfather said that Army recruiters had been allowed into 
Pedro's high school and enticed him into joining the military. "We're losing 
kids in a war, and what are they doing about it?" he said. "This is 
ridiculous."
What can justify such human sacrifices? Obama, like Bush before him, has 
tried to frighten the American people into supporting this brutal war by 
claiming it is necessary to defeat terrorism. This is just as much a lie 
coming out of the Democratic president's mouth as it was when uttered by his 
Republican predecessor.
US military and intelligence officials have repeatedly acknowledged that 
there are less than 100 Al Qaeda members in all of Afghanistan-compared to 
100,000 US troops. Moreover, the 91,000 classified documents released by 
WikiLeaks, most of them battlefield reports, make virtually no mention of 
American troops pursuing terrorists. On the contrary, they are fighting to 
suppress resistance to foreign occupation, a resistance that enjoys broad 
support from the Afghan people.
A recent poll taken in Helmand and Kandahar provinces by the International 
Council on Security and Development, a London-based think tank, bears this 
out. It found that three quarters of the male population believed it was 
wrong to collaborate with the US-led occupation forces. Roughly the same 
share said that the Afghan government officials in the area were connected 
either to drug traffickers or to the armed groups opposing the occupation.
These figures are essentially in sync with those reported by the Pentagon 
itself in the spring, indicating that less than a quarter of the people in 
the areas where US forces are battling to suppress Afghan resistance support 
the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Another study released by the United Nations last January provided a vivid 
illustration of why Karzai and his cronies are so hated. It found that 52 
percent of Afghan adults had been forced to pay at least one bribe to a 
public official in the previous 12 months, and that, collectively, Afghans 
had paid out $2.49 billion in bribes in 2009, an amount equal to nearly 
one-quarter of the country's gross domestic product.
In a television interview broadcast at the beginning of this month, Obama 
admitted to the American people that "Nobody thinks that Afghanistan is 
going to be a model Jeffersonian democracy."
What an understatement! As media revelations of the past several days have 
made clear, the US-backed regime in Afghanistan is made up of warlords, drug 
dealers and kleptocrats, most of whom are on the payroll of the US Central 
Intelligence Agency.
Figuring prominently among them is Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of 
administration for the Afghan National Security Council, who was arrested by 
a US-created Afghan anti-corruption unit in July for taking bribes and 
attempting to quash an investigation into a company that is reportedly at 
the center of money laundering for corrupt officials and heroin traffickers. 
President Karzai intervened immediately to free the aide and block the 
investigation into the company.
The New York Times, citing senior officials in both Washington and Kabul, 
established that Zia Salehi had been on the CIA payroll for "many years."
Before joining the Afghan government, the official had served as spokesman 
for the Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, also on the CIA 
payroll. Dostum earned his money in part by massacring thousands of unarmed 
Taliban prisoners in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif during the US invasion 
in the fall of 2001.
Earlier it was revealed that President Karzai's half-brother, Ahmed Wali 
Karzai, was also collecting a CIA paycheck while presiding over both drug 
trafficking and death squads in Kandahar.
During his West Point speech last December announcing his 30,000-troop 
surge, Obama insisted that "The days of providing a blank check are over. We'll 
support Afghan ministries, governors and local leaders that combat 
corruption and deliver for the people."
Indeed, the checks are not blank. They bear generous figures and are signed 
by the CIA. They are going to criminal officials who have sold their loyalty 
to Washington, but are hated by their own people.
These checks are the unmistakable hallmark of a puppet regime installed in 
the attempt to assert neo-colonial US control in Afghanistan, against the 
will of the country's population. This war is not aimed against terrorism. 
Rather, young American soldiers, drawn overwhelmingly from the working 
class, are being sent to kill and die in the interests of a US financial 
aristocracy that is determined to advance its interests by militarily 
establishing hegemony over Central Asia and its vast energy resources. 
Working people at home are forced to bear the cost of militarism as hundreds 
of billions of dollars worth of cuts are imposed on jobs and social services 
to pay for war.
What is required is the revival of a genuine movement against war, based on 
the working class and joined with the struggle to defend jobs and living 
standards against the onslaught being carried out by the banks and 
corporations and their government.
It must raise the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of 
all US and other foreign troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and for all those 
in both the Bush and Obama administrations who are responsible for these 
wars of aggression to be held accountable for war crimes.
Bill Van Auken
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a31.shtml
 


Dovresti dire al tuo amico Bill Van Auken, che questa guerra, con
tutta la violenza che ne è scaturita, è stata voluta dal miliardario
saudita Bin Laden e per raggiungere questo scopo ha organizzato gli
attentati dell'11 settembre contro l'America. 
Tu cosa avresti fatto?
Avresti detto fate un altro attentato, tanto non vi facciamo niente?


#_Strarotfl!