MDDM Westering

[Doug Millison]

...it's west of California, moving across the Pacific
and Asia, out there in what US GIs still call "Indian
country"...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=324164


[...] As a British NGO worker put it with devastating
frankness in Kandahar: "When there is a backlash
against the Americans, we want a clear definition
between us and them." You hear that phrase all the
time in Afghanistan. "When the backlash comes..."

It is already coming. The Americans are being attacked
almost every night. There have been three shootings in
Kandahar, with an American officer wounded in the neck
near the airport two weeks ago. American troops can no
longer dine out in Kandahar's cafés. Today, US forces
are under attack in Khost province. Two Afghan
auxiliaries were killed and five American soldiers
wounded near the Pakistan border at the end of July.
[...] 
\After the Americans bombed a wedding party in Uruzgan
on 30 June – the death toll reliably stands at 55
after several more wounded died – Pashtuns were
outraged at eyewitness accounts of US troops
preventing survivors helping the wounded. They were
especially infuriated by a report that the Americans
had taken photographs of the naked bodies of dead
Afghan women.

An explanation is not difficult to find. For their own
investigation, US forces may well have taken pictures
of the dead after the Uruzgan raid and, since bombs
generally blast the clothes off their victims, dead
female Afghans would be naked. But the story has
become legend. Americans take pictures of naked Afghan
women. It's easy to see how this can turn potential
Afghan friends into enemies.

Now guerrilla attacks are increasingly targeting
Afghan forces loyal to the government or loyal to
local drug-dealers who are friendly with the
Americans. Just as the first mujahedin assaults on the
Russians after the 1980 Soviet invasion tended to
focus on Moscow's local Afghan communist allies, so
the new attacks are being directed at America's Afghan
allies.

Even in the Panjshir valley, in Molla, the closest
village to the tomb of Ahmed Shah Masood, the Northern
Alliance commander murdered by two Arab suicide
bombers posing as journalists just two days before 11
September, the local Muslim cleric has been preaching
against the Americans.

One Friday last month, Imam Mohamed Sayed told his
worshippers he had a dream and he had seen the dead
Masood wearing a sad face. "He was not happy," Imam
Sayed told his largely pro-American congregation. "He
said the Americans are like the Russians and that we
must wage 'holy war' against them."

Mercifully for the Americans – for this is largely
friendly, Tajik territory for the United States – Imam
Sayed's audience was largely unmoved. For the moment,
at least. "

...Ah yes, winning hearts and minds, left and right,
on that westering way...



=====
<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com