Afghanistan - The gift that keeps giving

WAR  -  Always support the troops.  But always question the intelligence of the politicians and the generals.

• 10 years later we are still "training" the Afghan military and police.
• The Afghan soldiers we "train" shoot down NATO troops in cold blood.
• NATO might be able to prop up a government for Greater Kabul, but there never was a way to control a massive country that is larger than Nazi Germany with a small NATO army.

NEWS  -  A suicide bomber blew himself up among guests at a wedding hall Saturday in northern Afghanistan, killing 23 people including a prominent ex-Uzbek warlord turned lawmaker who was the father of the bride.

Ahmad Khan Samangani, an ethnic Uzbek who commanded forces fighting the Soviets in the 1980s and later became a member of parliament, was welcoming guests to his daughter's wedding Saturday morning when the blast ripped through the building in Aybak, the capital of Samangan province.

Three Afghan security force officials also were among those killed. About 60 other people, including government officials, were wounded in the attack, which left the wedding hall's black-and-white tile floor covered with shattered glass, blood and other debris.

Six U.S. soldiers got into a truck Sunday morning and set out on patrol in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. Soldiers have a straightforward phrase for what happened to them: They got blown up.

Nearly half of the 174 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in this, the 11th year of America’s longest war, they were blown up. “You get hit, you never see the enemy,” one U.S. soldier says in “Wardak Soldiers,” a remarkable online documentary produced by the Associated Press in 2009.

Wardak is a province south of Kabul dominated by the Pashtun people, who mostly live along the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. South and east of Kabul, in rural Afghanistan, the people tend to be Pashtun. So do the Taliban.    (Duluth News Tribune)

U.S. Marines with Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, taking highly accurate IDF at Patrol Base Georgetown in Kajaki Sofla, Afghanistan on November 22, 2011. The Marines suppress the enemy with squad organic weapons, TOW missiles and .50 caliber machine guns. After 5 hours the Marines take casualties and get the wounded medevac'd.