War Glance
There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central government at any point in their history.
To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable – but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.
The U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan recently changed its media embed rules to ban pictures of troops killed in the war.
Just over 85,000 Iraqis were killed in Iraq between 2004 and 2008, according to the first estimate from the Iraqi government since the war began.It counts violent deaths of military, police and civilians, but does not include foreigners or insurgents.
Doctors in Iraq are recording a sharp rise in the number of cancer victims south of Baghdad. Sufferers in the province of Babil have risen almost tenfold in just three years.
British soldiers in Iraq were involved in hundreds of incidents in which civilians died or were seriously injured but which were covered up or inadequately investigated, a former military police officer claimed today.
An Afghan wearing a police uniform shot and killed two American soldiers and wounded two others during a joint patrol in eastern Afghanistan on Friday, Afghan officials said. The man later escaped.
The men of Bravo Company have a bitter description for the irrigated swath of land along the Arghandab River where 10 members of their battalion have been killed and 30 have been wounded since the beginning of August. "Like Vietnam without the napalm," said Spc. Nicholas Gojekian, 21, of Katy, Texas.
