Skip to main content

It's not like he's in charge or anything....

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has discovered (surprise! surprise!) that we're killing large numbers of civilians with our bombing campaign in Afghanistan:

Two weeks ago, a US air strike in Afghainstan’s Farah Province killed around 140 civilians, making it by far the deadliest single incident since the 2001 American invasion. Such incidents, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen today conceded, are putting America’s strategy in the seemingly endless war in jeopardy.

“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan or anywhere else, but let’s talk specifically about Afghanistan, by killing Afghan civilians,” Admiral Mullen declared today at a talk at the Brookings Institution. “We can’t keep going through incidents like this and expect the strategy to work.”

The toll sparked protests from local civilians, and a demand from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to end all US air strikes inside the nation. Admiral Mullen insisted that rules had been in place for months to avoid civilian casualties, and offered no new solutions in the wake of the Farah killings, except to say “we can’t tie our troops’ hands behind their backs.” Yet, it seems, not doing so is a recipe for continued civilians deaths.


So, to sum up the professional head of America's miitary establishment: (1) indiscriminate bombing is bad and may cost us the war, (2) but he can't come up with anything better.

Even shorter Admiral Mullen: Change. Ain't. Gonna. Happen
Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Right, Steve, and we're triggering what one critic said is the worst humanitarian crisis since Rwanda. There are up to a million refugees fleeing the Swat Valley, dislodged by the warfare activities in the region. Perhaps logistically we and the Pakistanis have no other alternatives, but I wonder. The current tactics are only making the situation worse, as mentioned, and politically as well, since this will certainly enrage the victims and their allies, and expand the influence of the Taliban and al Qaeda driven insurgents.

Perry Hood
May 19, 2009 at 11:23 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more