We chose to bomb large sections of a country that had been through decades of hell already, knowing full well that civilians would die, because their leaders had allowed people whose terrorist acts we disapproved of (as opposed to all those terrorists whose acts we in the West have either approved of or at least tolerated) to set up camp there.
We bombed people who might have been terrorists - but weren't. We bombed people who happened to live near terrorists - or near where we thought terrorists might be. And sometimes we bombed all sorts of other things, like Al-Jazeera and the International Red Cross.
Hell, we've even bombed each other - at least five Canadian soldiers have died from American bombs. Wouldn't surprise me if members of other national forces have died in the bombing, too.
Why did we do it? We had the time to explore other options, up to and including assassination attempts. WE could have negotiated with the Taliban - they sent out fellers of being willing to deal. We could have treated the whole thing at a police/intelligence level - and maybe gotten better results with less damage.
But no, we wanted to bomb Afghanistan. And in doing so, we killed a lot of innocent Afghans. And you know, I don't really care if we have actually killed fewer innocent civilians that we usually do when we bomb countries and people.
Because we didn't even make an attempt to see if we could do something about the situation without killing any civilians at all.
no subject
We chose to bomb large sections of a country that had been through decades of hell already, knowing full well that civilians would die, because their leaders had allowed people whose terrorist acts we disapproved of (as opposed to all those terrorists whose acts we in the West have either approved of or at least tolerated) to set up camp there.
We bombed people who might have been terrorists - but weren't. We bombed people who happened to live near terrorists - or near where we thought terrorists might be. And sometimes we bombed all sorts of other things, like Al-Jazeera and the International Red Cross.
Hell, we've even bombed each other - at least five Canadian soldiers have died from American bombs. Wouldn't surprise me if members of other national forces have died in the bombing, too.
Why did we do it? We had the time to explore other options, up to and including assassination attempts. WE could have negotiated with the Taliban - they sent out fellers of being willing to deal. We could have treated the whole thing at a police/intelligence level - and maybe gotten better results with less damage.
But no, we wanted to bomb Afghanistan. And in doing so, we killed a lot of innocent Afghans. And you know, I don't really care if we have actually killed fewer innocent civilians that we usually do when we bomb countries and people.
Because we didn't even make an attempt to see if we could do something about the situation without killing any civilians at all.