Ignorance of Afghan Society Led to Botched Raids

Ignorance of Afghan Society Led to Botched Raids
Monday 12 April 2010
by: Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service

Washington - A Special Operations Forces raid on Feb. 12 on what was supposed to be the compound of a Taliban leader but that killed three women and two Afghan government officials demonstrated a fatal weakness of the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan: after eight years of operating there, the U.S. military still has no understanding of the personal, tribal and other local socio-political conflicts.

In targeting the suspected Taliban in such raids, therefore, the U.S. military command has been forced to rely on informants of unknown reliability - and motives.

~snip~

In an interview with National Public Radio Aug. 13, Flynn (McChrystal's chief of intelligence) admitted, "What we really have not done to the degree that we need to is really truly understand the population: the tribal dynamics, the tribal networks, the ethnicity…."

Such dynamics are different "from valley to valley", Flynn observed.

And in an unusual paper published by the Centre for a New American Security last October, Flynn was even more frank, saying, "I don't want to say we're clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail deep in our understanding the environment."


Rest of article at: http://www.truthout.org/ignorance-afghan-society-led-botched-raids58517



unhappycamper comment: Nine fucking years in this quagmire and we still don't understand the population. This is Vietnam all over again.

I knew how to kill them many different ways but I had no Idea how to say hello, or have a good day or anything that would lesson the tensions. This is an invasion of Afghanistan by our supposedly self-righteous invader country. We are being lied to about the reasons for being there just as we were in 'Nam. I'm not too up on Korea but I suspect our occupation of their country is the biggest reason the north is like they are today. America has gone off course somewhere along the way.

We have spent the last sixty plus years building the biggest and baddest hammer in the world and we have a great many hammer makers whose political and economic power is tied up with using the hammer, of course we aren't going to learn how to use any other tool.

Ike tied to warn us