Afghanistan: He Who Lives by the Sword …

In Afghanistan, U.S. special operations forces are waging a war against the Taliban insurgency in which any tactic is allowed, complemented by the impersonal operation of drones, whose bombings leave dozens of victims without any trace of human perpetrators.

For the U.S. military the advantage has been a 10-year war in which casualties have been minimal. But on the night of Aug. 5, 2011, it encountered the second half of the refrain that “[h]e who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

The United States suffered the largest loss in a single action of the war in Afghanistan, when insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter in Wardak province, west of Kabul, killing 31 American troops (mostly Navy SEAL operators) and seven Afghan soldiers.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced the loss of the helicopter and the human toll, and U.S. President Barack Obama added a dramatic statement on the supposed values for which the soldiers sacrificed their lives, for the goal of “a more peaceful and hopeful future” for Afghanistan.

The war against that nation is carried out based on this propaganda, to the extent that one of the new widows of this unnecessary war reaffirmed its character as an anti-Islamic crusade. According to the British newspaper The Independent, in her understandable pain the woman stated that her husband was “a warrior for Christ” and “a warrior for our country.” The cold analysis of that classification reveals how the citizenry has been manipulated and the true reasons for war obscured. Afghanistan is a substantial waypoint for the world’s oil and a strategic Central Asian location adjacent to Eastern powers like China, Russia, India and Pakistan.

The newspaper also warned that the coalition’s attacks, especially by air, leave a trail of dead civilians, including children, whose families no one meets with to convey condolences, and cites the example of nine Afghan children killed last week by a British attack helicopter. Numbers tallied by the U.N. mission in Afghanistan are striking: From January to June of this year, even after the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it had redesigned its tactics to minimize collateral damage, attacks have killed 1,462.

The SEALs in the Chinook that was destroyed by the rocket-propelled grenade ran into worse luck than their comrades who executed Osama bin Laden, and had a secret mission of their own: to capture a Taliban leader in the district of Saidabad, where the ISAF says it has been fighting insurgent forces.

There is an ironic element to the location of the incident, not in the south of Afghanistan (which is the major operational theater for occupying forces), but in Wardak province, which is not supposed to be a war zone. So, the insurgency is expanding its area of operations, something normal in a country of tribes that have always been a bulwark against foreign armies. The British and Russians know this well, and the U.S. and NATO will know it just as well … he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.