Should be the motto for the last twenty years of US military involvement in Afghanistan.
Followed by
“And then the generals got cushy jobs at defense contractors.”
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I had no idea you were involved in Afghanistan. That’s very interesting and much respect to you.
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ISIS targeted US Marines; Biden wanted to strike back.
Three possibilities:
- The US military was right; it was a good attack on an ISIS operative-
The mission “was based on good intelligence” against a target that “prevented an imminent threat,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters on September 2. A statement from US Central Command said there were “no indications” civilians were harmed in the attack and said “significant secondary explosions…indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material” in the car.
- After Biden demanded action, the US military picked a wrong target based on bad intelligence-
Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired, but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an ISIS safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car.
Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.
- Biden said he wanted somebody killed to cover up, and the military agreed to pick somebody who they could plausibly blame. Even though they knew he was innocent, they were too cowardly to stand up to the commander-in-chief.
So either
- The Pentagon made a good call and a valid hit.
- The Pentagon demonstrated incompetence in Afghanistan again.
3)The top generals in the US are guilty of war crimes in deliberately killing an innocent civilian, who they knew was not involved. This goes all the way up to Biden, but certainly includes everybody in the chain of command, and they should all go on trial. “I was just following orders” is no longer a valid excuse.
I go for Door #2; you accuse the US military of #3.
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I agree, going back to the exact time at which it happened, which was while the US intelligence and State dept. was spinning the tale as some precision hit on ISIS k (which it wasn’t) and the family killed as a result of a secondary explosion (they weren’t) the immediate question to those that questioned this story was “where did you get this intelligence?”.
Which is a fair question, the implication was (although unsupported by any facts yet) that they may have relied on Taliban intelligence.
In other words, to those who doubted the original story on day one, what looked like what happened after the bomb at Kabul airport was the US went to the Taliban and said "hey you guys hate ISIS, we hate ISIS, ISIS just did this, give us an ISIS target) and they gave them a name of a US friendly which the US precision bombed into oblivion at which point the Taliban are like “Buhahahaha”.
That’s what it looked like, so far they are right about it not being an ISIS target and there not being a secondary bomb, who knows about where the information came from.
It’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention the last fifteen years that drone lynchings are never going to be precision operations.
Man, I’d like to get an idea of the distance and relative positioning of the gate and that car. Hellfires generally carry a (small) shape charge, and you don’t generally get a whole lot of extra damage from hellfires (this is a platform I’ve specifically supported).
That’s not a conclusion we can really draw at this time. Or are you just agreeing with whatever agrees with your biases, even if you generally disregard the source (nyt in this case)?
The info released says it’s a pattern of life attack coupled with preexisting intel. It’s a common scenario, and certainly plausible - that’s probably how the majority of hellfires were launched in theatre.
Oh, they’re precise…
Not at all, it was a suspicion, the quoted material notes they examined the blast site and concluded there was no secondary explosion, that’s not proof, but it lends weight to the original suspicion.
I was quite impressed with the precision of bombing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, although like everyone else had the general thought “jesus, you just bombed the General of Iran”, fortunately not too much became of that incident. Iranians blew up their own passenger jet which made them seem even more inept and foolish.
It was more like a flying meat grinder than explosive warhead:
The Defense Department reportedly employed a specialized missile that’s best described as a meteor full of swords to take out an ISIS-K leader in retaliation for the group’s brutal bombing of Kabul’s airport amid the ongoing U.S.-led evacuation efforts there.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the Pentagon had used the R9X variant of the notorious AGM-114 Hellfire missile fired from an MQ-9 Reaper drone to kill two militants associated with ISIS’s Afghanistan branch in the country’s Nangarhar province.
Colloquially referred to as a “ninja bomb” or “flying Ginsu” and first publicized by the Wall Street Journal back in 2019, the joint CIA/DoD R9X does not use an explosive warhead. Rather, the missile comes packed with a halo of blades that deploy moments before impact to effectively eviscerate a target, a lethal update to the inert “Lazy Dog” bombs of the U.S. campaigns in Korea and Vietnam.
That’s like calling a lynching a precision operation because somebody was hung and it went off without a hitch.
Deleted as irrelevant.
1978?
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Yeah, you’re right, not really relevant, so I deleted it the content of the post.
Reading about Mr. Ahmadi triggered a memory, so I Googled “Don’t shoot my plumber.”
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No worries.
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You are right, Wtf indeed. Beijing doesn’t need to sell its citizen anything.
China is the main reason why the Taliban could make their comeback, and China has many great reasons to support the Taliban. It’s always great for them to spite the US, and spite they did. They wanted a passage for their belt and road project, now they have one. They wanted exclusive access to mining rights, now they have it. They want Afghanistan to stop harboring Uyghur political leaders and resistance fighters, now the Taliban leaders openly promised to kick them out. Finally, the Taliban is closely tied with Pakistan, which has been working closely with China for close to a decade.
It’s all win for China, and they clearly came out on top this time. They are also using this as a propaganda piece against Taiwan, saying that the US isn’t reliable.
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3/4 of the people they got out weren’t the people who we were supposed to get out?
Uhmso, who were they?
They’re heeeere: