No 'Happy ever after'

 

The Killing Season is under way in Afghanistan. It's bloody, hideous and pointless. But there is worse news. The Coalition's dream of a 'Happy ever after' conclusion is based on criminal lethal optimism.

In the year 2015, the dreamers believe that a retrained Afghan Police and Army will behave with Western European decorum and probity. They are trying the theory out in Kandahar. Residents and officials warn that the rush to recruit local defence forces has created poorly-controlled armed gangs.

They listed armed robberies, thefts and assaults by the militias, saying the groups had become the main worry of many residents in the province's rural districts.

Raising local defence forces, or Arbakai, in time of need in an old Afghan tradition. It's reminiscent of past American training and arming of the Mujahedin. They soon grew out of control and attacked the West.

All previous recent attempts to arm local militias have been abandoned amid fears the militias were ungovernable and were empowering local strongmen against the government. So far 6,200 officers have been recruited with a target of 30,000 by the end of the year. The ALP are chosen and commanded by Afghan authorities, but paid for and trained by the United States.

Arzomand Sab, a 55-year-old farmer from Arghandab district of Kandahar, told the Daily Telegraph a militia of 55 men had been recruited in January to patrol his village, and three others.

"Their main job is to prevent the insurgents from entering the area, but they don't do their job, they just beat people and insult people and make problems for us," he said.

He said the ALP had been recruited along tribal lines by Kandahar's former police chief and had recently beaten up a trader and mullah from other tribes, causing villagers to protest at their brutality.

Many Afghans view the forces as a throwback to the civil war when warlords maintained their own marauding private armies. They are also a reminder of Russian-backed militias which operated around Kandahar in the late 1980s.

The accounts of police abuse are identical to past experience. Gul Mohammad, a 47-year-old farmer from Lako Kheyl in western Zhari district, said a trader in livestock had been arrested nearby by the force a month ago.

"They put him in their custody. They killed him and his body was found in a stream. He was going to Helmand to buy sheep. He had $10,000 dollars (£6,250) on him and they took it.

"If there were no Americans in the area, these people would steal our turbans."

Shortly after 2015, there will be no Americans or other Nato forces in the area. We can then look back on two wars of vanity and waste. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, 100,000s of lives have been wasted in replacing one rotten Government with another.

 

Comments

[HuwOS]

Hmm, displace Taliban and end up with an Afghanistan is back to the warlord days.
If only that had been predictable beforehand.
Oh darn, it was predictable.

But then we had a really good reason to invade, if only we could remember what that was.
On the other hand, we really did the illegal international drugs trade a favour,
became responsible for the deaths of over 3 thousand Afghans a year for a decade.

And now that we tire of it as we seek to shift focus to new relatively unbombed countries like Libya, we will slope off ensuring that we loudly blame the Afghans for everything that went "wrong".

History will not be kind to us, nor should it be.

[Ad]

They all support eachother, each branch of government and the media. They encourage eachother.

I don't accept this covenant where a cloak of anger and war is at the expense of poor and needy people who look for water but die of thirst.

Good on you Paul, this government are clearly lacking any sincerity and much less are they able to convince that they know what they are doing and what the outcome of this occupation of Afghanistan will be.

They are in fact nobodys, only amounting to zero.

[KD]

Governments may change but unfortunately our foreign policy remains the same,we continue to read out of the American hymn book.The Afghanistan debacle continues with more loss of life and no sign of any satisfactory end product.
We innvade or interfere in other countries behind the banner of the war against terrorism or alternatively for humanitarian reasons as in Libya.Can anyone really believe our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan has done anything to reduce the threat from terrorism in fact the opposite is probably true.
The humanitarian argument is also very flawed because we cherry pick those countries where we choose to intervine,Libya is acceptable while Syria is not while we sat on our hands while thousands were slaughtered in Rwanda,a crime against humanity.
We live in a country governed by a Democratic dictatorship where far too much power is held by the Prime Minister and his coterie of advisors,while the sheep in Parliament who are meant to act as a check on the process are bullied into compliance by Party loyalty and the Whips.

[HuwOS]

I see our wonderful money saving government has spent over two hundred million pounds on the gratuitous and unnecessary killing of Libyans and destruction of Libyan infrastructure.

FTW

[Ad]

forkinell

Sticking to your principles, that is all there is. Fu*k all the horrific that think they can have a joke or scheme.

Their bands are snares of the wicked. But we cannot ever give up because of solidarity.

Don't take any notice of the lies which these bast*rds are intent on forging.

Let those who who have dealt perversely without cause suck their own medicine.

Fuckem.