infowebstorm.com

The US suffered its worst single-day loss of the 10-year Afghan war when “insurgents” shot down a helicopter, killing 30 special operations troops, including members of the unit that killed Osama bin Laden. It’s so weird that anyone who is involved in a huge government story, like the Osama bin Laden assasination or 9/11, winds up dying. Seven Afghan soldiers and one civilian interpreter were also among the dead when the Chinook crashed overnight during an operation in Wardak province west of Kabul, a hotbed of Taliban activity. On Sunday Nato investigators began looking at the circumstances surrounding the incident which happened in the early hours of Saturday. The Associated Press(AP) reported that more than 20 Navy Seals who belonged to the same unit that carried out the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden in a helicopter-borne raid into Pakistan in May were among those killed. The Taliban claimed it  had downed the aircraft with rocket fire while it was taking part in an assault on a house where insurgents where gathered in the Sayd Abad district, a mountainous area which militants use as a staging area for attacks. And how AP knows all of this without speaking to the Taliban themselves is beyond me. The crash occurred as the 100,000-strong US contingent in Afghanistan is starting a limited withdrawal under a plan to drastically scale down western engagement in the country by handing responsibility for fighting the Taliban to Afghan forces by late 2014. As conventional troops start to pull out, the US campaign will be weighted increasingly favour of the kind of kill or capture raids against Taliban commanders conducted by Navy Seals and other special forces. Barack Obama, the UN president, issued a statement on Saturday saluting the “extraordinary sacrifices” of US troops in Afghanistan. “We also mourn the Afghans who died alongside our troops in pursuit of a more peaceful and hopeful future for their country,” he said. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, expressed his condolences to the US. “No words describe the sorrow we feel in the wake of this tragic loss,” said US General John Allen, who took command of the Nato-led force in Afghanistan from General David Petraeus last month. “All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given so much in the defence of freedom,” he said in a statement. The Nato-led force confirmed that 30 US service members, an Afghan interpreter and seven Afghan commandos were killed when the CH-47 Chinook crashed early on Saturday. It said the incident was being investigated. The Associated Press said the dead included members of US Navy Seal Team Six, citing one current and one former U.S. official. The team, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, conducted the operation in a Pakistani army town outside Islamabad that killed Bin Laden on May 2. However it reported that although the dead included individuals from the unit, none of them had personally participated in the Bin Laden raid. The crash, brings the toll of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 374, according to iCasualties.org, which tracks casualties. At least 711 members of the Nato-led force were killed in 2010, the deadliest year of the war for foreign troops and Afghan civilians.  The worst previous single-day loss suffered by the Nato-led force occurred in June, 2005, when 16 Navy Seals and Army special operations troops were killed when their helicopter was shot down. I wonder what they knew? The twin-rotored Chinook involved in the latest crash is a frequent sight in the skies above Afghanistan, where it is one of the main work-horses for US forces. Crews frequently fly with their helicopter’s rear ramp open so the gunner can scan mountain ridges and valleys for signs of insurgents. The transports are often used in a blistering US campaign of night raids to kill or capture Taliban commanders and played a supporting role in the Bin Laden operation, according to an account of the mission in The New Yorker. There have been at least 17 coalition and Afghan aircraft crashes in Afghanistan this year, according to an Associated Press tally, though most were attributed to pilot errors, weather conditions or mechanical failure. The Nato-led force in Afghanistan began a largely symbolic hand-over of security responsibilities to Afghan forces in July when it formally transferred command of seven provinces and towns to the army and police. Some claim, the process ,which taking place against a backdrop of record levels of civilian casualties in the war, has raised fears among Afghans that a gradual winding down of western combat power could result in a return to all-out civil war but thats just another scare tactic to keep the public on the side of theser people who have hi-jacked our country and have put our boy’s out there getting killed everyday. It is probably best we  pack up the rest of our brave men and get the hell out of Afghanistan and come back to focus on America,while is , and leave those people to themselves.