75% of attacks on US troops within bases by Afghan 'partners' have occurred in past 2 years.
3/14/12, "Afghan Soldiers Told to Come Unarmed to Panetta Meeting," Bloomberg, V. Gienger
"When Afghan troops gathered today for a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan, they were told to leave their weapons behind.
A commander ordered all the soldiers with weapons to go and stack them outside the canvas-covered hangar before Panetta arrived to speak to about 200 troops from 11 countries and their Afghan partners....
Marine Major General Charles “Mark” Gurganus, the new NATO International Security and Assistance Force commander for the area that covers Helmand Province, said he ordered the American and other coalition soldiers to turn in their weapons to avoid signaling that their Afghan allies can’t be trusted.
“Somebody had said we were going to have the Afghans leave their weapons outside,” said Gurganus. “I wanted the Marines to look just like our Afghan partners.”
The gesture couldn’t mask the tension between the Obama administration’s claims of progress training Afghan forces to take over the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and persistent doubts about the loyalty and competence of the Afghan army and police.
Those doubts have grown since Afghan troops killed six Americans in so-called green-on-blue attacks in the two weeks after U.S. troops burned copies of the Koran in a garbage pit on February 22. Data released by the Pentagon indicate that there have been more than 45 such attacks on coalition forces since 2007, 75 percent of them in the last two years."... via caller to Mark Levin show
.
No comments:
Post a Comment