I have a few friends on Facebook on the opposite side of the Afghanistan War so I get several links that pass around. This one caught my eye.<\/p>\n
The Unforgivable Horror of Village Razing<\/a><\/p>\n Long story short is that the author is upset that we dealt the Taliban that kicked out the villagers and used their homes as weapons. But at a glance the article implies that we are randomly destroying villages to not “lose momentum”. <\/p>\n Of course when people have mentioned that the town was a bomb they just started the insults.<\/p>\n The point of these razing is not to hurt the people or even influence them \u2013 the purpose is to make safe the area for the civilians in the most effective and efficient manner possible.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t raze a harmless village. The village was turned into a massive bomb by the Taliban. The US forces destroyed a Taliban stronghold that just happened to have been a civilian town before. The Taliban are the enemy of the people here, not the US Soldiers. If the Taliban hadn\u2019t filled the place with bombs, after kicking out the civilians, it wouldn\u2019t have had to have been destroyed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here is another good one that the author does not consider.<\/p>\n \nYes, the explosives imbedded in the village would have made it difficult for the soldiers to \u201cclear it\u201d safely \u2013 without assistance from the villagers, that is. You have to wonder, if the village was turned into a \u201cmassive bomb,\u201d how were the villagers able to live in it? Surely a little effort at diplomacy would have yielded the neccessary information, building friendships instead of hostility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have seen it myself in Iraq in 2008. They drive out the local population and use the houses for House borne IEDs<\/a>. <\/p>\n But since people will just look at the photos make a false assumption about what is going on in Afghanistan<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"