In India, the West Bengal state government has banned the Maoist rebels, whose movement has been declared a terrorist organization. The West Bengal government came under pressure to ban the Maoists after security forces had to be deployed to evict the rebels from a rural district.

The Chief Minister of West Bengal state, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee says his government will implement a ban ordered a day earlier by the federal government on the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of India.

The Pakistani army is preparing to launch an offensive against Taliban fighters under Mehsud's command, who are blamed for a number of deadly attacks.

But Zainuddin's killing is being seen as a setback for the government in its efforts to isolate Mehsud ahead of the security forces' next phase of their anti-Taliban offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, says the BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad.

At least 45 people have been killed and dozens wounded in a series of missile raids by US drones in northwest Pakistan, Pakistani intelligence officials have said.

The first missile attack early on Tuesday hit what authorities said was a "Taliban training centre" in the South Waziristan tribal region that borders Afghanistan.

Several hours later a second attack was carried out during a funeral procession for those killed in the first raid.

MOSCOW — The Russian government has agreed to let American troops and weapons bound for Afghanistan fly over Russian territory, officials on both sides said Friday. The arrangement will provide an important new corridor for the United States military as it escalates efforts to win the eight-year war.

The agreement, to be announced when President Obama visits here on Monday and Tuesday, represents one of the most concrete achievements in the administration’s effort to ease relations with Russia after years of tension. But the two sides failed to make a trade deal or resolve differences o

Originally posted by Regensturm
Simple answer to a simple question, and that is because inflating the death toll of "the enemy" is done as a means of propaganda to the consuming masses, giving the impression "the enemy" is hurting and in order to boost the morale of the troops fighting "the enemy", that they are killing multitudes of "the enemy."

I'd hardly call a story about a few dozen Taliban being killed a "killing multitudes of the enemy." It's a war. people die. Both sides. get it.

It's an old trick, and anyone looking for a realistic death toll of "the enemy" in any war should knock off around half, or three quarters, off the numbers that the government/military/media gives.

Well since you seem so knowledgeable on the topic. Please provide us links and your proof to this hypothesis otherwise it's nothing but speculation.

Of course, if civillians are killed, the opposite happens, in that either their deaths are denied, or the numbers of dead and wounded are greatly understated as opposed to the reality of the true number.

Civilians have always been killed in conflicts. Nobody has never denied any of that. Dresden comes to mind. Pull any conflict out of any history book you can find and read about the millions killed through out history. Your point is?

Civillian deaths? Bad for morale militarily, and the masses back home don't like it.

Yeah we know...
Some of us have had our sons actually over there fighting we get the first hand experiences of the real situation when they come home. Like my son

The lesson? Don't take what your government/military tells you about a war as face value truth.

DUH! Yeah we know...
Some of us have had our sons actually over there fighting we get the first hand experiences of the real situation when they come home. Like my son

Don't believe the rubbish spouted that it's just the 'Taliban and Al-Qaeda' fighting the occupation. Afghans have a famed history of fighting against occupying and invading foreign armies, and it's fair to say that there are Afghans out there taking up arms against the occupation who are not 'Taliban' or 'Al Qaeda' but are labelled as such to avoid the fact that there are Afghans fighting against the occupation, just like how any Iraqi fighting against the occupation of Iraq is labelled as an 'Al Qaeda terrorist'.

Well it seems that most of the Afghans now a days want their I-pods and cell phone coverage more than they want to fight.

GARMSIR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The DJs of Radio Garmsir in Afghanistan's lower Helmand River valley knew their station had touched a nerve when the letters started pouring in.

First a few, then more, and pretty soon 20 to 30 letters per day, hand delivered to a box outside the NATO base where they broadcast deep into Taliban territory from a desk in a tiny bunker.

Most are requests for songs. Some are complaints -- about police driving too fast through the bazaar, about the continuing failure of mobile phone companies to bring reception to the valley.

The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. The Soviets sent more troops in than NATO and still lost.

The Afghan 'Government' is corrupt and are made up of crooked businessmen, Drug Lords, War Lords and Opportunistic Taliban, and who are opposed by the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ordinary Afghans, and other Drug and War Lords. The West will try to cut a deal, to get what they want: Gas and Opium and if possible military bases for geopolitical and geostrategical reasons. Whoever is the best partners will suit, whether the current Afghan government, or any opposition to the Afghan government that will sell it.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
I still say this has very little to do with actually winning against the "Taliban" and has everything to do with staying in the region so we can be future players in Central Asia and it's HUGE oil reserves. Russia just wants stability in the region. They have tried to gain that control by force in the 80s they didn't get very far. They know that contrary to pop culture opinion the US can get that stability. It will cost a few thousand lives but I think the Taliban are done for. IMO.

I could be wrong but they really just want to go home and grow poppies we wont let them have their peace. So they try to hang with some relatives across the border in Pakistan and because of pressure from the States the Pakistani Gov wont let them have a small territory to call their own.

Ahh...

What a tangled web we weave....

The Great Game is afoot.

US, Russia Focus on Military Issues

President Obama expressed appreciation for a Kremlin agreement to allow the transport of U.S. weapons across Russian territory for the NATO effort in Afghanistan.

President Medvedev said that without U.S.-Russian cooperation, there is little likelihood of success against threats emanating from Afghanistan, which include terrorism and drug trafficking.

Analyst Alexander Konovalov says the agreement is a breakthrough.

Enemy death tolls have been a feature of war ever since armies stuck heads on pikes. They appear in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and in the Old Testament, which enumerates the casualties of King David’s wars, including 360 Benjamites, 18,000 Edomites and 22,000 Arameans of Damascus.


In modern warfare, combatants have usually measured success by territory held. German progress during World War II was marked by front lines that advanced east and west across Europe. Allied progress was marked by pushing those lines back toward Berlin from the beaches of Normandy and the suburbs of Moscow.

That changed when the U.S. found itself mired in a guerrilla war in Vietnam, where front lines were blurred and villages taken or lost didn’t indicate who was winning, says Dale Andrade, senior historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. “Vietnam was the first war in which the body count became the one and only statistic on which victory was measured,” he says.

Some battlefield commanders inflated body counts to appear more successful than they were. The American public “kept hearing these stories about how two of our soldiers were killed and 100 Viet Cong were killed,” says Mr. Andrade. He says that eventually Americans wondered: “If we’re killing so many people, why aren’t we winning?”

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Civilians have always been killed in conflicts. Nobody has never denied any of that. Dresden comes to mind. Pull any conflict out of any history book you can find and read about the millions killed through out history. Your point is?

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Yeah we know...
Some of us have had our sons actually over there fighting we get the first hand experiences of the real situation when they come home. Like my son

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Well it seems that most of the Afghans now a days want their I-pods and cell phone coverage more than they want to fight.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
The Soviets lost becuase of two main reasons.

A. We in the west were supporting and arming the Mujaheddin freedom fighter fight against an atheistic regime and puppet of the old Soviet Union.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
B. The Russians were no longer willing to take those losses. The Soviet Union was already showing signs of coming apart at the seems. It was only a matter of a few years later that it did.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Didn't you even bother reading the entire thread or are you just trolling through to vent your version of the events.



[edit on 14-7-2009 by SLAYER69]

Tears of soldier's girlfriend as eight killed in Afghanistan repatriated - Clutching a bunch of flowers and weeping, the pain on the face of Sasha Buckley captured the mood in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, as the bodies of eight British soldiers killed in Afghanistan were brought home.

Sasha, the 20 year-old girlfriend of fallen Rifleman Daniel Hume, was joined by thousands of mourners who lined the streets of the town to to pay their respects to the men killed during the bloodiest 24 hours for British front line troops since the Falklands.

Criticism of Afghan War is on Rise in Britain.

In a brilliant essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books ("The Irresistible Illusion, July 9), Rory Stewart, the Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard, writes that "Afghanistan..is the graveyard of predictions." I'd add that is is also the graveyard of empires. Stewart is critical of President Obama's "new policy," which he explains "has a very narrow focus--counter-terrorism--and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state."

Afghanistan: Italian govt expresses 'deep sorrow' for slain soldier

Fifteen British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan in the past 30 days in the latest military offensive aimed at quelling a Taliban resurgence.

Afghanistan has shown us the true horror of war

It’s probably true that the recent escalation in the death toll among British troops in Afghanistan has brought home to a new generation the true cost of war. But the flurry of deaths in recent weeks — 15 soldiers in 10 days in southern Afghanistan, taking the number of British troops killed since the start of operations in October 2001 to 184, surpassing the total who died in the Iraq war — has certainly brought the horror of it all home.

We are at war. And this is what it looks like.

Until recently, Afghanistan was The Nice War. Though there was unease among US-haters (who still haven't come to terms with the uncomfortable fact Obama is an American), one didn't find liberal ranters quite so vociferous about the multinational effort to oust the Taliban and restore democracy to a country ravaged by retarded, misogynistic, pseudo-religious tribalism.

They didn't like it; but Iraq was easier to bleat about and, as they’ve difficulty with issues too complicated to be summed up on a placard, they left Afghanistan alone.

Now, though, with the hated US-inspired strategy of the Surge having been successful in Iraq, the consequent upping of the stakes in Afghanistan has led to the Lib Dems breaking the consensus among political parties. And the mood has arisen that something is wrong in the way the war is being handled simply because British soldiers are dying in it.

Bracing for war's hidden fallout - Canadian Forces expects mental toll of damage from roadside blasts to surface in years ahead.

OTTAWA – Coalition troops in Afghanistan are being attacked by roadside bombs at record levels, leaving Canadian soldiers with a legacy of traumatic brain injuries that health experts are grappling to understand.

And the mental toll of having to patrol bomb-seeded roads is expected to show itself in the years ahead in a spike in the number of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, military officials say.