"Two Taliban leaders caught in Pakistan; Arrests follow capture of two top officials" by Dexter Filkins, New York Times | February 19, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan - American, Afghan, and British forces continue to press ahead with their largest military operation to date, in the Afghan agricultural town of Marja. Earlier this month, on the eve of the invasion, Afghan officials detained Marja’s shadow governor as he tried to flee the country.
Related: AmeriKa's Afghan Offensive Has Begun
AmeriKa's Afghan Offensive Has Begun
AmeriKa Letting the Missiles Fly in Marjah
They still are, too.
US-led forces now control the main roads and markets, a Marine general said yesterday, even as fighting raged elsewhere in the southern farming town.
Do you believe AmeriKa's MSM or military anymore?
I'm sick of the contradictions and qualifiers in every PoS paragraphs, folks.
Marines and Afghan soldiers encountered better-fortified Taliban positions and more skilled marksmen on the sixth day of the assault.
This as we are killing them and their numbers allegedly dip below 200.
A British general said he expected it would take another month to secure the town.
They told us it was going to be a COUPLE of DAYS!!
NATO said six international service members died yesterday, bringing the number of allied troops killed in the offensive to 11 NATO troops and one Afghan soldier. The international coalition did not disclose their nationalities, but Britain’s Defense Ministry said two British soldiers were among the dead.
No precise figures on Taliban deaths have been released, but senior Marine officers say intelligence reports suggest more than 120 have died. The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information.
Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commander of US Marines in Marja, said that allied forces have taken control of the main roads, bridges, and government centers in the town....
“I’d say we control the spine’’ of the town, he said as he inspected the Marines’ front line in the north of the dusty, mud-brick town. “We’re where we want to be.’’
--more--"Okay, operation going great.
"Suspected US strike kills militant’s brother; Missiles hit car in remote area of Pakistan" by Haq Nawaz Khan and Karin Brulliard, Washington Post | February 20, 2010
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - In Afghanistan yesterday, US Marines seized a strongly defended compound that appears to have been a Taliban headquarters - complete with photos of fighters posing with their weapons, dozens of Taliban-issued ID cards, and graduation diplomas from a training camp in Pakistan - after a fierce gunfight.
Can you say AmeriKan psy-ops propaganda, readers?
Insurgents who had been using the field office just south of Marja’s town center abandoned it by the end of the day’s fighting, as Marines converged on them from all sides....
Marines from Lima Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines fought their way south from the town center yesterday after residents told them that several dozen insurgent fighters had regrouped in the area.
And they are holding of thousands and thousands of troops, etc, huh?
Throughout the day, small groups of Taliban marksmen tried to slow the advance with rifle fire as they slowly fell back in face of the Marine assault.
“They know that they are outnumbered . . . and that in the end they don’t have the firepower to compete with us conventionally,’’ said Captain Joshua Winfrey of Tulsa, Okla., commander of Lima Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines....
Yeah, occupations are easy!
Meanwhile....
--more--"And the Globe didn't even bother to pick this up:
"Fighting rages as Karzai urges restraint from NATO
MARJAH, Afghanistan – U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers advanced through poppy fields of Marjah on Saturday under withering gunfire from Taliban fighters shooting from mudbrick homes and compounds where families huddled in terror....
They didn't destroy the poppies as the Afghans huddled in terror, huh?
On Saturday, the alliance said its troops killed another civilian in the Marjah area, bringing the civilian death toll from the operation to at least 16....
Yeah, that is winning over the people -- that and the air strikes!!!!
As the assault entered its second week, Marines and Afghan soldiers faced hours of sporadic but intense gunfights from insurgent snipers — often firing from compounds where families could be seen taking shelter.
Yeah, when you butcher people with mass-murdering assaults you must infer it was the other guy's fault. Sick of that MSM tactic, too, especially since we call CIA agents civilians all over the planet as part of their non-official or official cover.
Troops crouched for cover in muddy ditches, firing rifles, machine guns, and grenades as Taliban bullets whizzed by.
"We've been hurling lead all day," said Lt. Carl Quist, who commands a platoon in the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.
U.S.-led troops have been pushing south from the town center against a pocket of Taliban fighters.
"They are running out of space now, that's why they gotta fight and stand their ground," Sgt. Melvin Adair, 28, of Clinton, Maryland, said of the Taliban.
That is where my Sunday local cut it.
A NATO statement said fighting was raging in the northeast and west of the town "but insurgent activity is not limited to those areas."
A Marine spokesman, Capt. Abe Sipe, said Taliban fighters seemed to be running low on supplies and ammunition "but at the same time we do expect them to be putting up resistance for some time."
*******************
Mamad Jan, a terrified farmer who huddled in one room of his home with his ailing wife and children: "I can't leave. My wife just gave birth," Jan told the Marines, some of whom handed out their food rations to his hungry family before taking cover from sniper fire.
The offensive had been moving slowly due to stubborn Taliban resistance....
The civilian was killed Friday after he dropped a box which soldiers feared contained a bomb and began running toward a coalition position, NATO said. The box contained materials that could be used to make a bomb but no explosives NATO said....
Do you believe NATO? I sure as hell do not.
In a cemetery marked by green and white flags in Helmand's provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, 20 miles northeast of Marjah, men buried one Marjah resident who died of his injuries suffered in what his brother said was coalition bombing three days ago.
"I buried him here, because I couldn't take him back to my village," the brother, Sayed Wali, a thin man in a faded blue tunic, told Associated Press Television.
Yup, the newspapers of AmeriKa wouldn't want you to know such things, readers.
"Outgunned Taliban put up stiff fight in Marja; US, Afghan forces focusing attack on pocket of militants" by Alfred de Montesquiou, Associated Press | February 22, 2010
Afghans walked in front of US Marines in Marja yesterday, where Taliban fighters remained in the western part of town. (Reuters/ Goran Tomasevic)
To think that some of those absolutely beautiful people in the background are getting mowed down by our mass murder is breaking my heart, folks.
MARJA, Afghanistan - Outnumbered and outgunned, Taliban fighters are mounting a tougher fight than expected in Marja, Afghan officials said yesterday, as US-led forces converged on a pocket of militants in a western section of the town....
Ever notice our government and media is ALWAYS CAUGHT being WRONG about SO MANY THINGS, readers?
With fighter jets, drones, and attack helicopters roaring overhead, Marine and Afghan companies advanced yesterday on a 2-square-mile area where more than 40 insurgents were believed holed up....
That is IT? We have 15,000 troops there!!!
General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, said the United States and its allies had expected the Taliban to leave behind thousands of hidden explosives, which it did. But they were surprised to find that so many militants stayed to fight.
“We predicted it would take many days. But our prediction was that the insurgency would not resist that way,’’ Azimi said in Kabul.
In a statement yesterday, NATO acknowledged that insurgents were putting up a “determined resistance’’ in various parts of Marja, although the overall offensive is “on track.’’
I can't take the BS anymore, readers.
General David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press’’ that Marja was the opening salvo in a campaign to turn back the Taliban that could last 12 to 18 months.
In a setback to that strategy, the Dutch prime minister said yesterday that his country’s 1,600 troops would probably leave Afghanistan this year. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende spoke a day after his government collapsed when a coalition partner insisted that Dutch troops leave in August as planned.
As many have pointed out, that is because Europeans actually have governments that listen to their people sometimes -- unlike AmeriKa!
Most Dutch troops are stationed in Uruzgan Province, which borders Helmand to the north. Afghan officials expressed concern that Taliban fighters driven out of Helmand could regroup in Uruzgan without a robust NATO presence.
Lieutenant Josh Diddams, a Marine spokesman, said yesterday that Marines and Afghan troops were continuing to run into “pockets of stiff resistance’’ though they were making progress.
How many times have we been fed that BS over the last eight years, huh, America?
Diddams said no area is completely calm yet.
Before the assault, US officers said they believed 400 to 1,000 insurgents were in Marja, 360 miles southwest of Kabul. About 7,500 US and Afghan troops attacked the town.
--more--"
""Afghanistan calls attack ‘unacceptable’; NATO strike Sunday kills 27 civilians; Outrage could hamper efforts" by Joshua Partlow, Washington Post | February 23, 2010
QALAT, Afghanistan - In the Marja offensive, fighting was less intense yesterday than in previous days. At the start of that offensive, a US rocket strike killed 12 civilians in a Marja house, near a site where insurgents were firing on American troops. Karzai expressed dismay about those killings and the US military temporarily suspended the use of the rocket system used before it was determined that it hit the intended target.
So they could keep using it, of course!
Related: AmeriKa Letting the Missiles Fly in Marjah
Don't you LOVE the LIES, readers?
The International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday that it had evacuated 28 sick and injured civilians from Marja to treatment facilities outside the area since the beginning of the offensive. Most required lifesaving medical treatment, it said.
--more--"
Related: Karzai government rewrites Afghan election law
Yeah, NO MORE BATTLEFIELD REPORTS, readers, meaning the OPERATION is going VERY BADLY or the MSM would not be concealing things this way. They would be trumpeting the success with their inbeds.
And nothing proves the connection as much as a deceptive, agenda-pushing, BVoston Globe editorial:
"Pakistan’s complicated motives
THE CAPTURE in Pakistan of the Afghan Taliban’s operations chief, Mullah Baradar, looks like a victory in more ways than one. It weakens the enemy in Afghanistan and indicates that Pakistani leaders have finally decided that their interests in Afghanistan are compatible with America’s. But there is another, less encouraging explanation of why Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency suddenly decided to seize the Taliban’s number-two leader, after hosting him for years while he directed the Taliban movement officially headed by Mullah Omar.
Pakistani leaders know that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been seeking reconciliation talks with the Taliban and that Baradar approved contacts between Taliban leaders and Karzai’s brother.
Related:
"Baradar is the one guy who might have been able to create some degree of reconciliation between the Karzai government and the Taliban. It is pretty obvious the US is going to do its best to prevent that from happening." -- Wake the Flock Up
Yup.
Related: The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Karzai's Kin
The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Pakistan's Peace Probe
As usual, peace talks get brought up but NEVER GO ANYWHERE when AmeriKa is involved.
An agreement between the Taliban and the Karzai government could deprive Pakistan of influence in next-door Afghanistan. That prospect disturbs Pakistani leaders, who have long tried to maximize their power in Afghanistan to keep it from linking up with Pakistan’s rival, India....
Yeah, isn't it a good thing AmeriKa never plays that self-interested, geo-political card for motivation, huh, world?
Oh, right, this is a Globe editorial.
It’s helpful to the American cause if Pakistan now believes its best chance of maintaining influence in Afghanistan is to cooperate with US and NATO forces. But it would be deeply damaging if Pakistan were to try to block peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government.
WTF are they talking about, readers, other than just spewing s***?
Oh, right, they can't read invisible ink -- especially when it is on top of a turd paper.
US military commanders in Afghanistan have wisely insisted that the war be concluded by political means. The current troop surge is aimed at convincing insurgent factions to seek a peace deal with the Afghan government. So President Obama needs to warn Pakistan that true cooperation means helping, not hindering, such an agreement.
What agenda-peddling, anti-Pakistan garbage.
--more--"
That being the case, why is Pakistan helping us at all?
Or is it more sacrificial fooleys for the Americans?
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A top Taliban leader picked up in Pakistan as part of a recent crackdown on insurgents will be handed over to Afghanistan, an Afghan government official said yesterday. Islamabad said, however, that it had received no formal request to turn him over, and that he could be tried first in Pakistan.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is one of at least three Afghan Taliban commanders who have been captured in recent weeks in Pakistan, where militants have also sustained blows from suspected US missile strikes, including four killed yesterday in a Taliban stronghold in northwest Pakistan, officials said.
Yeah, that's deserving of no more than a sentence, huh?
Pakistan has agreed to transfer Baradar to Afghan custody, said Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, who was in Islamabad meeting with FBI and Pakistani officials....
Baradar was captured in a joint Pakistani-US operation in the southern city of Karachi early this month, and has given some useful information to Pakistani interrogators, Pakistani officials have said.Translation: HE HAS BEEN TORTURED!
It is unclear whether American officials have had direct access to Baradar.
Would the MSM tells us if they did considering how many things they don't tell us and how much s*** they shovel?
--more--"
Related: The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Top Taliban Captured
