Oh, and by the way, Afghanistan is going to hell too

ugly, ugly, ugly...

Monday's riots in Kabul, in which altogether 14 died and over 100 were wounded and during which thousands thronged the streets chanting "Death to America", also produced violent attacks and gunfire throughout the city, with hotel windows being sprayed with machine gun fire. The protests were sparked by a traffic accident. But they have other roots.

The US military presence in Afghanistan has quietly been pumped up from 19,000 to 23,000 troops.

A fresh US airstrike in Helmand killed some 50 Afghans on Monday Over 400 Afghans have been killed by US bombing and military actions in only the past two weeks. While most of these are Pushtun nativist guerrillas (coded by the US as "Taliban"), some have demonstrably been innocent civilians. (Taliban are, properly speaking, mostly Afghan orphans and displaced youths who got their education in neo-Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan and were backed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. It is not clear that those now fighting the US in southern Afghanistan are actually in the main Taliban in this technical sense.)

Whoever they are, the Pushtun guerrillas have been waging a very effective terror campaign in the countryside around Qandahar, and have launched a fierce series of spring offensives. They wounded 5 Canadian troops on Monday, something US mass media anchors somehow have trouble getting past their lips. (Another 5 had been wounded last week, and several Canadian and French troops have been killed, not to mention US troops.)

A recent US airstrike that killed 16 children, women and noncombatant men provoked an enormous outcry in Afghanistan, and sparked President Hamid Karzai to begin a presidential inquiry into it.

ALL the chickens are coming home to roost...

(thanks to juan cole...)

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