"I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn't mean I'm criticizing the people who are executing. I'm just giving you perspective. We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."As if on cue, we admit to a situation where not only did we mistakenly shoot two innocent men, a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager, but we then tried to frame the men as insurgents who had murdered the women in an honor killing, going so far as to dig bullets out of the bodies to further perpetrate the story. All because of the issues McChrystal outlines above.
So not only are we killing hundreds of innocent people, some of which we openly and brazenly frame or concoct false narratives about after the fact, but our standards an practices ensure that this will continue to happen and out top General in the area admits this. Oh, by the way, we're also expected to win the hearts and minds of Afghans and keep them from joining with/supporting the Taliban while all of this goes on and we get the added bonus of the intensely crooked Hamid Karzai threatening to legitimize the Taliban and join the insurgency if we don't back off the whole getting him to reform, not be so corrupt, stop rigging elections thing.
Can we dump a couple hundred billion dollars more and another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, toot sweet? It just looks like such a great idea.
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