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Coalition: More than 100 Taliban die in south Afghanistan (Roundup)
Aug 28, 2008, 14:01 GMT
Kabul - US-led coalition and Afghan forces killed more than 100 suspected Taliban militants in four days of fighting and airstrikes in the southern province of Helmand, the coalition said Thursday.
The fighting occurred from Monday through Thursday when Afghan and coalition forces were attacked by insurgents 'multiple times,' sparking several engagements, a coalition statement said.
'The patrols returned fire and called in close-air support against the insurgents,' it said, adding that no Afghan or coalition forces or civilian casualties were reported.
The Afghan Defence Ministry also said Thursday that its troops, backed by international forces, killed around 10 militants in Helmand's Nad Ali district. It said the fighting in Nad Ali was ongoing.
Earlier this month, the Taliban claimed to have overrun Nad Ali, but Afghan police rejected its claims and said they withdrew from two security posts but the rest of the district was in government hands.
Helmand province is the main hotbed for Taliban militants. Its governor recently said that hundreds of foreign fighters have penetrated the province to help the Taliban insurgents based in the region.
The Defence Ministry also said its forces killed and wounded 18 suspected Taliban militants in a clash Wednesday in the Arghandab district of the southern province of Zabul.
Due to the remoteness of the area, it is often difficult to independently verify the claimed death tolls.
Meanwhile, a soldier from the US-led coalition was killed when attacked while on patrol in southern Afghanistan, a statement issued by the US military said Thursday.
The statement did not disclose the nationality of the soldier or provide details about the location of the incident.
Most of the soldiers serving under the coalition banner are from the United States.
More than 3,500 people - mostly insurgents but also including more than 180 international soldiers - have been killed in violence in Afghanistan so far this year, according to figures provided by Afghan and foreign military sources.
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Older Talkback
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The 'body count' was devised by McNamara who believed he'd invented a mathematical formula for success in the war (i.e., 'winning'). Sound familiar? This is the type of thing that McCain falls for.
www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9528510
The U.S. military fought against the North Vietnamese by heavily bombing important targets in the north. It also fought the Viet Cong, a communist militant group supported by the North Vietnamese. Westmoreland's military strategy has widely been described as a war of attrition, quickly diminishing the number of opposing troops before replacements could be found. As a result, success in the conflict was often measured by the number of enemy troops killed. But over time, the public became skeptical of the U.S. Army’s reports regarding the Vietcong body count. Many were also concerned about the growing number of American casualties. Westmoreland was called back to the United States in 1967 to report on the war before Congress. He told Congress that with enough support “we will prevail . . . over the Communist aggressor,” according to a Time magazine article published at the time. But support for the war and Westmoreland on the home front was already waning.
affairsofstate.blogspot.com/2005/09/war-mcnamara-style.html
The Post article may be read to imply that the U.S. military has just lately begun to use body count as a yardstick in the WAT. However, according to Julian Barnes at USNews.com (7/18/05) “The body count has returned. It started slowly, but now it has become a regular occurrence. On June 21 [2005], for instance, American military officials in Afghanistan reported killing ‘approximately 40 enemies’ southwest of Deh Chopan. On June 30, Marines reported killing a single insurgent during ‘Operation Sword’ in western Iraq. On July 2, the military reported that a patrol northeast of Kandahar ‘killed two enemies, wounded another, and captured two.’ On Independence Day, the military command in Baghdad reported detaining 100 ‘suspected terrorists.’”
From the very nature of the insurgency, to use of such phrases as “Iraqification” and “Winning the hearts and minds,” to the absence of a viable exit strategy for U.S. forces, it is difficult to view the war in Iraq as anything but another Vietnam.
Even, it appears, employing body count as a means of measuring success has been dusted off for use in the War Against Terror (WAT) - something the Pentagon said early on, and in no uncertain terms, it would not do. ('We don't do body counts” asserted CENTCOM General Tommy Franks, in response to a journalist’s question about the war in Afghanistan. You can’t get any clearer than that.)
The use of body count in Vietnam, a “metric” dreamed up by “whiz-kid” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, eventually became a weapon wrested from the hand of its owner and turned against him. With the advent of body counts as a yardstick, Vietnamese, both young and old, male and female became targets of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, particularly in free-fire (read: anything goes) zones. Anybody killed, either by accident or by design, became an insurgent for the purposes of cooking the books. Then, of course, came the phantom VC, where a body count of 10 or 100 in reality became 100 or 1,000 in after-action reports (the numbers were often inflated by commanders looking for promotions).
However, soon the “embellishment” got the best of them and reports of battlefield successes by senior commanders began to be used as ammunition against the White House by opponents of the war. After Vietnam, use of body count became verboten, not to be used even during the Gulf War (probably because coalition forces killed a disproportionately high number of Iraqi soldiers and the slaughter wouldn’t have made good PR).
But body count, it appears, is back with a vengeance.
According to the Washington Post September 19 (U.S. Claims Success in Iraq Despite Onslaught): “After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west. [Maj. Gen. Rick] Lynch, the [top U.S.] military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region. The fact that the number of insurgents killed or captured in the northern city of Tall Afar was roughly equal to advance estimates of their strength, he said, was proof that insurgents weren't simply escaping to fight another day -- and that U.S. forces were doing more than razing infrastructure. ‘Zarqawi is on the ropes,’ Lynch told reporters.”
Lynch’s remarks are reminiscent of promises made to the White House by senior commanders in the field, the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary McNamara, that once “the lines intersect' (i.e. the number of killed or captured VC meets, then exceeds the number of insurgents flowing across the border from the North) victory will be imminent. The promises proved to be hollow and victory was not to be, as it became evident that field commanders did not have a handle on the true number of insurgents coming down from the North or of those already in the South.
John McCain has said or done nothing of the sort. Body counts reporting has come from others higher up the chain of (his) command years ago and now, in the war on Terrorism. McCain has insisted on using diplomacy when it is warranted. He will use diplomacy wisely in the future if he is elected President. But the democratic contender for president is obviously prone to 'meeting others (including our known enemies) without preconditions.' This was the mistake Neville Chamberlain made in answering Hitler a few years back. If Chamberlain had represented what the people of Great Britain really wanted, his opposition to Hitler would have alarmed many more people in the era of the second world war, delayed Hitler somewhat and saved more lives.
You can trust John McCain will be exactly what our country needs to finish the job that no other country on Earth seems to have the guts for....and that is ENDING the very existence of terror supporting countries, and al qaeda and taliban murderers.
We should Nuke every single Muslim country plus Russia, Israel should get our allies in the West to start this, the Russians are bunch of Scum in any case, their women folks are only good for sex trade
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It sounds....Aug 28th, 2008 - 14:41:29
just like Vietnam, where the US killed the entire population of North Vietnam 2-1/2 times over. Body counts are for bean counters, who have no concept of reality.
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