Sigh, and one wonders why "they hate us"?
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.
The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.
Wow, I feel a lot safer knowing that we're killing boys gathering fire wood in Afghanistan to fight the
50-100 Al Qaeda members there. After all
it's only cost us $382 billion dollars so far. Let's see what we could have done instead with the proposed $107 billion dollars for Afghanistan in 2011:
55.0 million Children Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR
1.6 million Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
1.9 million Firefighters for One Year OR
14.1 million Head Start Slots for Children for One Year OR
24.3 million Households with Renewable Electricity - Solar Photovoltaic for One Year OR
64.8 million Households with Renewable Electricity-Wind Power for One Year OR
13.8 million Military Veterans Receiving VA Medical Care for One Year OR
22.1 million People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR
1.6 million Police or Sheriff's Patrol Officers for One Year OR
13.6 million Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR
19.3 million Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550
So we could have powered
over half of United States households with Wind Energy this year. Instead we're killing boys to
safeguard the rigged election of a corrupt regime:
The appalling regime of Hamid Karzai is western leaders' grubby little secret. Mr Karzai, who boasts of being Washington's (and thus Britain's) man, presides over the fifth most corrupt government in the world. As well as turning a blind eye to last year's alleged loss, through abuse, of two thirds of his country's annual revenue amounting to $1.6 billion, Mr Karzai has failed the vulnerable and the trusting.
Naturally, Western leaders cannot impose an alternative placeman to sort out his narco-state. But, in a field of around 40 challengers, two credible candidates stand out. One, Abdullah Abdullah, is the former foreign secretary; the other, Ashraf Ghani, is the one-time finance minister and former chancellor of Kabul University.
Disgracefully, neither Washington nor London has publicly demanded a level playing field or complained that the election for which British soldiers are dying is effectively rigged. Meanwhile, Dr Ghani, who has no official protection, is making a swift transition from Washington technocrat to politician. His billboards in Mr Karzai's home town of Kandahar have been vandalized with acid and removed; supporters in Britain say he is putting his life at risk.
This is what we're killing boys for?
This is what we're running huge deficits for?
Top officials in President Hamid Karzai's government have repeatedly derailed corruption investigations of politically connected Afghans, according to U.S. officials who have provided Afghanistan's authorities with wiretapping technology and other assistance in efforts to crack down on endemic graft.
In recent months, the U.S. officials said, Afghan prosecutors and investigators have been ordered to cross names off case files, prevent senior officials from being placed under arrest and disregard evidence against executives of a major financial firm suspected of helping the nation's elite move millions of dollars overseas.
As a result, U.S. advisers sent to Kabul by the Justice Department, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration have come to see Afghanistan's corruption problem in increasingly stark terms.
This is what our soldiers are dying for?
A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young "dancing boys" to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and "quash" the story, according to one of the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.
In a meeting with the assistant US ambassador, a panicked Hanif Atmar, the interior minister at the time of the episode last June, warned that the story would "endanger lives" and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public.
The episode helped to fuel Afghan demands that contractors and private security companies be brought under much tighter government control. However, the US embassy was legally incapable of honouring a request by Atmar that the US military should assume authority over training centres managed by DynCorp, the US company whose employees were involved in the incident in the northern province of Kunduz.
There is a long tradition of young boys dressing up as girls and dancing for men in Afghanistan, an activity that sometimes crosses the line into child abuse with Afghans keeping boys as possessions.