When one wants to get a sense of how people on the Afghan-Pakistan border feel about something, Pakistan’s Frontier Post, based in Quetta, Pakistan, is a good place to look.
In this indignant editorial reaction to yesterday’s ill-fated NATO attack in Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province, the Frontier Post equates NATO forces with Taliban fighters, attacks the sincerity of the West’s stance on the value of human life and questions U.S. justification for the war. Another irony – according to the editorial, one of America’s most wanted terrorists, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, has directed his forces to avoid civilian casualties!
The Frontier Post editorial says in part:
“As American and European big wigs harp about fighting in Afghanistan to secure their own streets, Afghans pay the price with rivers of innocent blood – the blood of civilians, their children and their women. The latest in this incessant bloodbath was Friday’s NATO air strike in Kunduz Province. The attack claimed at least 90 lives, mostly civilian, which the NATO command is reluctant to own up to.
“This deadly strike negates the directive of NATO’s new commander in Afghanistan, who recently ordered his forces to call off assaults when civilian lives are at risk – an implicit acknowledgment of the massive civilian killings that result from coalition operations. The directive was issued primarily to shuck off the negative consequences of these massacres on NATO’s war in Afghanistan, as was the recently issued order of Taliban leader Mullah Omar to his own forces. Because although Taliban actions are directed mostly at military targets, their roadside bombs, suicide bombings, ambushes and frontal attacks nevertheless exact a heavy toll on civilian lives as well.
“But the saddest part of this colossal massacre of Afghan civilians is the lack of tears welling up in Western eyes. They seem to keep a meticulous tab of their casualties of their own soldiers, but don’t venture the vaguest calculation of how many Afghan civilians are being killed.”
EDITORIAL
September 6, 2009
Pakistan – The Frontier Post – Home Page (English)
As American and European big wigs harp about fighting in Afghanistan to secure their own streets, Afghans pay the price with rivers of innocent blood – the blood of civilians, their children and their women. The latest in this incessant bloodbath was Friday’s NATO air strike in Kunduz Province. The attack claimed at least 90 lives, mostly civilian, which the NATO Alliance command is reluctant to own up.
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