Here's your credibility....this garbage is being reported all the time while al Qaeda is regrouping and causing more and more trouble. Who's watching....you think Bush, Rumsfield.....they've got their hands full with the mess they've created in Europe and Iraq.
And you call this an improvement over Clinton.......not in this lifetime!
EDIT. Once again, Bush is on the tube and once again the markets are tanking. Can't anyone tell him to chill until after 4 PM EST......some of us are not independently wealthy and need to make money.
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'Friendly ire' events irritate, scare peacekeepers, GIs in Afghanistan
By Scott Baldauf
The Christian Science Monitor
KABUL, Afghanistan — It was 6:45 p.m. and Dutch peacekeepers were on high alert. Someone had just launched a rocket at their compound, and the peacekeepers were still looking for the culprit.
So when a Toyota Land Cruiser drove up — full of heavily armed men, wearing civilian clothes and bushy beards — the Dutch surrounded the vehicle, weapons drawn, and asked the strangers to identify themselves.
As it turned out, the occupants were American soldiers, who said they had lost their place on the map and then hastily withdrew. The Dutch lowered their weapons — but their irritation remains.
The incident last week shows how close U.S. forces and their allies in Afghanistan come to fighting one another, instead of their enemies. It also points to a lack of coordination between two forces with very different mandates — one keeping the peace, the other catching terrorists.
U.S. soldiers are forbidden from running military operations in Kabul under terms of the international agreement on Afghanistan signed in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001. Under that accord, Kabul is presumed to be under the control of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF).
"There is a real danger of a shootout between ISAF and U.S. forces because of a lack of coordination," says one Kabul-based European diplomat, speaking privately.
A peacekeeper, also speaking on condition of anonymity, agrees.
"In the worst case scenario, you could have blue-on-blue fighting," he says, using military jargon to indicate fighting between two friendly forces. "The Americans never call us to let us know when they are coming to town for an operation," one peacekeeper says, adding, "Our mandates are very different. We are here to maintain security in Kabul. Their mandate is to kill or capture al-Qaida. These don't always work well together."
It is in this tense environment that the new German and Dutch military commanders have taken over management of ISAF this month.
Kabul's streets are full of thousands of former Afghan soldiers who should have been disarmed months ago by ISAF.
Kabul is also an increasing target of terrorist attacks, and intelligence reports warn of a possible spree of suicide bombings and assassinations by extremists trained by al-Qaida and its allies.
Relations between U.S. forces and ISAF started out fairly strong, in part because U.S. forces kept a low profile in Kabul. Until March 2002, most U.S. troops were deployed in eastern and southern Afghanistan, routing out Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
But as the conflict became less intense, and as troubles began to brew in Kabul itself with a series of political assassinations, the U.S. troops became more high-profile. With two forces vying for position, tensions reached a peak in the early fall. U.S. commanders finally banned their troops from parts of Kabul.
"We used to see U.S. soldiers walking up and down Chicken Street like they were on patrol, fingers on the trigger, and these guys are not even supposed to be in Kabul," says a former New Zealand peacekeeper, also on condition of anonymity. "They're a bunch of cowboys. I think they are over-trained for the job they've been given, and that training makes them arrogant."
"ISAF peacekeepers try to get to know people and win their trust, and then maybe we can start to get some cooperation and information. But when an Afghan sees U.S. forces riding around with guns drawn, that reflects on all of us, and the trust is gone."
"U.S. forces and ISAF have an outstanding relationship," said Army Col. Benny Nelson, who serves as the chief liaison between U.S. forces and ISAF.
Yet coordination may or may not apply to the special operations units of the Central Intelligence Agency, Nelson acknowledges. "That's a totally separate agency and a separate command," he says.
The CIA declined to comment.
One French peacekeeper says that the tensions between U.S. forces and ISAF could be worsened by the bickering between the U.S. and Germany and France over a war in Iraq.
"It's a strange situation. We are on opposite sides on Iraq, but our lives depend on each other here in Kabul," he says. Perhaps the Iraq debate will be resolved soon, he offers, but his men worry their next fight could be with U.S. forces, rather than al-Qaida. "Coordination?" he smiles bitterly. "There's no coordination."
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company |
