A dog's breakfast of decisions

Afghanistan. Not that we need any further evidence of Bush administration strategic and foreign policy blunders, but here it is anyway. It seems the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn't have a whole lot of optimism when it comes to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.

US Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen has warned time was running out to defeat an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and said he was "not convinced we're winning" in the country.

Mullen, the top military advisor to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said he has commissioned "a new, more comprehensive military strategy for the region that covers both sides of that border" between Afghanistan and Pakistan, an area the United States says is being used as an insurgent safe haven.

He called the recent decision by US President George W. Bush to send 4,500 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan "a good and important start" even though it fell short of commanders' requests for three more brigades or about 10,000 troops.

"Frankly, I judge the risk of not sending them too great a risk to ignore," he said at a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.

"I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan. I am convinced we can," he said.

Of course he's convinced they can. If he gets the resources in people and equipment that he knows it's going to take. And even if he wasn't convinced, he had to say it anyway. To do otherwise would have meant walking straight back to his office, putting on a striped tie and purple shirt and applying for work at someplace like Raytheon in the household batteries division.

Of course, winning in Afghanistan is going to be tough when the casualties are the same people you're there to protect. And then, after being told that you whacked a bunch of defenceless civilians, and you refused to believe it, it took a British newspaper to produce eight minutes of video evidence which flew in the face of your previous claims.

[T]he Pentagon announced that it was reopening the investigation in the light of “emerging evidence” and was sending an officer to Nawabad to review its previous inquiry. Villagers and the UN insist that 92 were killed, including as many as 60 children. Locals say that the US and Afghan troops who came into the village looking for a Taleban commander, with US air support, used excessive force.

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

However, US commanders and Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that seven civilians died alongside 35 Taleban militants during a legitimate combat operation, the target of which was a meeting of Taleban leaders.

The villagers’ accounts have been supported by separate investigations conducted by the UN, by Afghanistan’s leading human rights organisation and by an Afghan government delegation. Two Afghan army officers involved in the operation have been dismissed.

So, what's actually happening is that the Pentagon is now reopening an investigation they recently closed. All done! It's Miller Time! Oops! Not so fast. Gee, after all that corroborating testimony too.

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Actually, North was a US Marine colonel, but Jeebus! Fox News? Oliver North?! Are you guys fucking insane?!!

Does anybody have any idea what they're doing?

Yeah. I'm confused too.