The AP seeks to provide cover for Obama's recent gaffe when he said:
"We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there," Obama said.
Okay, I don't know that Obama meant it the way it came out but that sure as hell never bothered the Democrats who attack Bush's every misstatement. That's just politics.
Instead of recognizing that Obama's thoughts were ill spoken, the AP launches a disturbing attack upon the efforts of our military to fight the same al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists who attacked us on 9/11:
A check of the facts shows that Western forces have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents.
The U.S. and NATO say they don't have civilian casualty figures, but The Associated Press has been keeping count based on figures from Afghan and international officials. Tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify.
As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can't be attributed to one party.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his concern about the civilian deaths during a meeting last week with President Bush.
Bush said he understands the agony that Afghans feel over the loss of innocent lives and that he is doing everything he can to protect them. He said the Taliban are using civilians as human shields and have no regard for their lives.
"The president rightly expressed his concerns about civilian casualty," Bush said of Karzai. "And I assured him that we share those concerns."
A fact check shows US troops are killing more civilians than the Taliban? The Taliban has engaged in the systematic destruction of girls schools including bombing full classrooms in Afghanistan for years! To see a news writer, especially a woman chose to portray the US effort as more hideous than what the Taliban does to little school girls on purpose shows how far our media will go to prop up Democrats. Can there be any doubt they would let another 9/11 happen if it would put Dems on the White House? Nedra Pickler, writing for the AP doesn't even have the integrity to call these "insurgents" Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists which everybody else in the free world knows is the enemy in Afghanistan. Ooooohhhh but they used an AP body count and anonymous sources....well then! Nedra, I don't stoop to name calling specific individuals very often here, but you are a lowlife, taliban "girl school bombing" supporting scumbag.
Agence France Presse -- English
February 26, 2006
463 words
A policeman and a civilian were wounded when a bomb exploded as it was being defused in eastern Afghanistan while suspected Taliban rebels bombed a girls' school, officials said Sunday. The roadside device, planted on the main highway between the capital Kabul and the eastern town of Khost,...
Schoolgirls checked for suicide bombs
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul
The long queue of six-year-old girls snakes past the gates of the Maleka Suraya school in Kabul, as teachers, guards and a few of the oldest pupils check their bags and rigorously pat down their tunics and head scarves. There is little to suggest the queue includes any would-be terrorists. But in recent weeks schools across the Afghan capital have been ordered to treat their pupils as potential suicide bombers. The city's school authority has ordered that all 650,000 schoolchildren in Kabul must be searched for concealed bombs every morning, amid fears that schools are becoming the latest battlefront in a Taliban terrorism campaign that has moved from the rural south to the heart of Kabul. |
British-led Nato force takes on hazardous Afghan role
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul
Published: 01 August 2006
Yesterday, a rocket attack on a girls' school in the south of the country injured one student and a bomb attack in the east killed eight people, including three children.
Fears of a lost generation of Afghan pupils as Taliban targets schools
Arson attacks and death threats have turned playgrounds into battlegrounds in Helmand
Declan Walsh in Sarkh Doz
Thursday March 16, 2006
Playground has become battleground in the Afghan south, where the resurgent Taliban have launched a fierce campaign of arson, intimidation and assassination that has closed 200 schools in recent months and left 100,000 students at home.
Teachers are in the front line. In December assassins dragged a man who defied warnings to stop teaching girls from his classroom in Nad Ali, another Helmand district, and shot him at the school gate. Four other teachers have been killed and hundreds more threatened with "night letters" - handwritten notices delivered in the dark, ordering them to stop teaching or die.
Afghan Girls, Back in the Shadows
Home Classes Proliferate as Anti-Government Insurgents Step Up Attacks on Schools
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 23, 2006; Page A10
According to UNICEF, 106 attacks or threats against schools occurred from January to August, with incidents in 31 Afghan provinces. They included one missile attack, 11 explosions, 50 burnings and 37 threats. In the four southern provinces under serious assault by Taliban forces, UNICEF said, nearly half of the 748 schools have stopped operating.
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