Americans to Afghans: Sure, kill us, we don’t care

Today’s New York Times reports:

Suicide ‘Insider’ Attack Kills Six in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan—A member of the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest Saturday, killing two Americans and four Afghan intelligence agency colleagues, Afghan and international officials said Monday….

The suicide attack on Saturday morning occurred when a delegation including American coalition members and several members of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security arrived to deliver new furniture to the intelligence office in the Maruf district, a remote area of Kandahar Province…

When Palestinian suicide bombers began regularly blowing up Israeli buses in early 1994 (four months after the signing of the Oslo “peace” accord on the White House lawn), I couldn’t understand how the Israelis could stand it, how they could keep getting on buses that could very well be blown up with themselves being turned into floating clouds of blood and flesh. How could they be that passive? How could anyone willingly board a bus where he knew that he could be instantly wiped out of existence with no chance to defend himself? I knew that I would never put myself in such a defenseless position, no matter what the cost to myself, such as losing my job because I refused to ride a commuter bus to work. If the Israelis were normal human beings, I thought, they would at the least immediately erect a wall between Israel proper and the West Bank, or simply expel all Palestinians from their country, rather than accept living with such a horror. But the Israelis lived with that horror, for many years, allowing numerous suicide mass murders of their own people, until they finally built the security fence which pretty much stopped the terrorist attacks.

Now we see the same passive, Eloi behavior being exhibited by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. They know that any of their Afghan “allies” could at any moment turn on them and kill them, yet they keep meeting with them, going into conferences with them, walking into the same offices and rooms with them, and getting killed by them. It’s not normal.

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William H. writes:

Now the sick expressions that we frequently see in crime reports from our civilian law enforcement is beginning to creep into the military, the ones you frequently bring to our attention, such as “robbery gone wrong,” “a totally random attack,” or “wrong place at wrong time.” Did you see in the article where a military official stated that the Americans “happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?” [LA replies: I didn’t. How about that.] This is a device to deflect or reduce the blame from the perpetrators. The reporter is suggesting that the bomber only intended to kill fellow Afghans and the Americans were unexpectedly present during the bombing. Who is he kidding? Does he believe that the bomber really cared if Americans were killed? He probably could not be happier. Are we going to start seeing these phrases coming to us in reports from Afghanistan? Maybe in Afghanistan we will see reports of “a random suicide-bombing”, or “a protest gone bad” when it blows up American personnel going about their usual duties? Maybe it would go bad when the bomber only intends to kill a couple Americans, but inadvertently kills dozens.

Earlier in the same article, there was a report of a coalition strike against a Taliban target in which three young Afghan children were killed. It is obvious that the coalition forces did not intend to kill the children in the attack. Shouldn’t the military have stated that the children were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Obviously they are not going to do that. No amount of blame is going to be deflected from our side for any mistake. The hypocrisy and mischief making is quite explicit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 16, 2012 09:08 AM | Send