Holy crap! They wiped out the entire village…literally

US Military-led unit wipes out an Afghan village off the map. Whatever happened to winning “hearts and minds” strategy

Imagine coming home from an out-of-town trip and find that not only your house but your entire village doesn’t exist anymore. That’s one of the side-effects if the American Army decides to drop 25 tons of explosives on your village.

It happened kind of like this. In October, 2010 a US-military led unit came under attack near a village in southern Afghanistan named Tarok Kolache. So to keep the causalities down and take out the insurgents from afar, the unit decided to bomb the crap out of the village. Over the next two days they kept on bombing the place with rocket-propelled explosives and planes until it stopped existing. Officially, there were no civilian causalities, but since army never went inside the village and now there is nothing left, we will never know.

Three months later, as in on 13 January 2011, an ex-army researcher in the area wrote a post about it in The Best of Defense blog. The post was kind of military gibberish that didn’t focus on the fact that the American Army pulverized a village but how it is awesome that the army is rebuilding the village (ahem…after they blew it away). Seven days later, Wired blog Danger Room got around to understanding what actually the key of the whole story was and started blogging about it. Now it seems everyone has picked it up.

Now, I hate to repeat what everyone (including Nazi ghosts, Martians and my cat) has been saying, but you can’t win an insurgency by blowing up villages. I mean you can, but only after you have killed everyone. The War in Afghanistan, which is fuelled by local support, is getting worse precisely because the Afghans don’t like the American way of blowing their houses from very far away.

The war has become a much deadlier affair this year, since the appointment of General David Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan who has doubled the air strikes and rolled in tanks into villages. (If you don’t know how booze and volcanoes got Petraeus his appointment, read about it here).

I won’t go on about why not to kill everyone to win insurgency. Now that this story is out, I am sure everyone will be going on about it. I will just take this opportunity to remind you of the Reuters reporter that was shot from the sky in Iraq because he was carrying a camera that looked like a rocket launcher. See that video clip here:

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