NATO Airstrike Kills Eight Children in Afghanistan

Source: Daily Times Pakistan

KABUL: A NATO airstrike killed eight children in Afghanistan’s Kapisa province northeast of the capital Kabul, President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday.

The president “strongly condemned the aerial bombing by foreign troops that killed a number of children in Nejrab district” on Wednesday, said a statement from his office.

“Based on information by (the) provincial governor, as a result of an air strike conducted on February 8, eight children were killed,” the statement said.

Karzai had assigned a delegation “to launch an all-out probe into the NATO bombing in the province of Kapisa”, it added.

A NATO spokesman said he could “confirm there has been a situation. A joint assessment team went there to identify the situation”.

The Afghan president, who has a strained relationship with his Western allies, has regularly condemned NATO for civilian deaths in the decade-long war against Taliban fighting to overthrow him.

Kapisa district police chief Abdul Hamid Erkin told AFP: “Two nights ago, foreign special forces carried out a raid on a house in Geyawa village in Nejrab district.

“The next morning their plane carried out an airstrike on a house in the village as a result of which seven children and one adult were martyred.”

He said commanders of French troops who operate in the area “claimed that the target was a group of Taliban facilitators, but we checked the area and there were no Taliban.

Is U.S.-China Collision Inevitable?

Source: Daily Times
S P Seth

As part of a new resolve to play a more assertive role, the US has reinforced and strengthened its strategic ties with Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Australia and Japan.

It is pertinent to remember that wars have often been caused by miscalculation rather than deliberation. And this is even more so when an emerging power is staking its claims impinging on the existing superpower’s perceived interests and/or seen to be threatening its regional allies. This is how the two World Wars started.

Even as Iran has come centre-stage of another likely military conflict in the Middle East with the US and its western allies determined to force it to forgo its nuclear programme, the Asia-Pacific region is emerging as another potential trouble spot pitting China against the US. With the US now disengaged from Iraq, and in the process of military withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, it has dawned on Washington that China has strengthened its role in the Asia-Pacific and is slowly, but steadily, working to push it out of the region. China regards the Asia-Pacific as its strategic space and the US as an external power. The US has decided to hit back by declaring that it is not going anywhere and, indeed, will beef up its military presence in the region. Straddling both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the US considers itself a legitimate Pacific country.

Pakistan: U.S. And NATO Have Licence To Kill

Source: Daily Times (Pakistan)
Andleeb Abbas

The more corrupt the government, the weaker the economy, and greater the US control. Thus, the present PPP rule was tailor-made for a US takeover

Talk about target killing, and you think of Karachi. However, the founding member of this horrible form of inhumanity is the US. If we consider drones and the so-called target hunts for terrorists, we understand the origins of this extrajudicial atrocity. The US has traditionally been a master of this ‘art’. It actually does strategic planning sessions on this art. The vision of the US as a superpower is based on exercising its might on smaller countries and making them powerless. Grenada, Panama and Vietnam in the past, and Iraq and Afghanistan more recently, have been experimental laboratories of its war games. The fact that the US has never succeeded in these countries is immaterial, as the country’s actual objective of this war is to boost sales of its mega industrial multinationals and to get access to resources to feed its economy. The CIA and its allied departments create profiles of target countries. The profiles have qualification criteria that include political and economic prerequisites for a country to be included in the hit-list. Politically, it needs to be unstable with a government whose credibility is marred by corruption and mismanagement. The leadership of such countries is obsessed with personal gains and is ready to negotiate anything for perpetuating its power, and therefore not endangered by its lack of performance. Economically, these countries are beset with huge deficits, are dependent on US-sponsored aid and are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. An added attraction might be scarce natural resources that serve as fuel for American industries.