AUSTRALIAN soldiers have been involved in an incident in Afghanistan.

Defence Minister John Faulkner will address the media at 10.30am (AEST) in Canberra.

A statement from Defence says the next of kin of those involved in the incident have been notified.

No further information is available at this time.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/australian-soldiers-in-afghanistan-incident/story-e6frfku0-1225908073007#ixzz0xBomxTl2

____ wrote on Aug 21^st, 2010 at 9:17am:


Hear, hear!

The only good reason for us to be in Afghanistan or the Middle East at all is if we're actually taking part in a strategic attempt to secure some critical resource (namely crude oil) or to destroy some adversary who attacked us. If we are attacked, the only appropriate response is a Roman one; entire cities suspected of harboring aggressors should be denuded of their mortals, and the skulls of the dead should be piled up into an enormous pyramid, sending a warning to all others that dare cross us. Authorities responsible for lending support to our enemies should simply be boiled alive. The Muslim world should be allowed to exist as it desires, and I have no interest in "nation building" or bringing it democracy, but if we are attacked by it we should respond like with like; in the most brutal and unforgiving manner imaginable.

perceptions_now wrote on Aug 21^st, 2010 at 10:38am:


Ditto!

This is very sad news... 

mantra wrote on Aug 21^st, 2010 at 11:11am:


In the big bad world, it`s called National survival.

True democracy comes from grassroots domestic uprising - and definitely not from a foreign invasion to install a proxy regime favoured by the invaders...

freediver wrote on Aug 21^st, 2010 at 3:21pm:


Even by that definition, those waging the oxymoronic 'war on terror' do not appear to be empowering the peope nor facilitating rule by majority - nor is there much freedom of speech or press...

Certainly, Westerners are receiving a heavily pre-sanitised pro-Western propaganda version of events in the ME - and that is neither representative nor reflective of the true state of 'democracy' (or otherwise) in the ME...

I can't take your blather anymore. It makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration.

Equitist wrote on Aug 21^st, 2010 at 3:28pm:

"War on terror" is not an oxymoron... It's another way of saying "fighting fire with fire" and while that might be ironic, it ain't oymoronic... As opposed to, say, "warriors for peace burning down the village in order to save it."... Which is what the US ended up doing to Iraq... well... they burnt it down, anyway... The chances of its razing being its salvation... Pretty slim.

On the Iraq catastrophe, I was watching a recent video of Canon Andrew White... A man clearly being driven into madness by his enduring hope for Iraq and his unfailing respect for the Iraqi people in the face of the country's unprecedented destruction.

It is never pointless to stand up to oppression and brutality.  Disbursement of resources, and prioritisation though, are other matters.

freediver wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2010 at 9:56am:

True, but let's hope our coalition of the peacemakers don't inflict the same fate as has been imposed on Iraq - Burning down the village in order to save it.

Which is what? Killing them all?

How do we know which ones are the enemy and which ones are civilians?

Soren wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2010 at 8:32pm:


Ah - I see you were on the advisory board for the Vietnam war too, dear. Of course, the carpet bombing there went much further. The enemy were hiding in Cambodia and Laos, and would have been sharpening their bamboo spikes in China too, if the Chinese didn't have all those nasty nukes and a million soldiers to back them up against the US's shag piles. I guess we can't carpet bomb everywhere...

Or can we?

Can I ask though, old boy, apart from assisting the shareholders of companies like Lockhead Martin, what purpose does carpet bombing serve again?

Apart from destroying villages and crops and jungles and fostering groups like the Khmer Rouge, or encouraging the "enemy" to work in ingenious underground tunnels, or creating a resistance that will, as history has shown, become harder and stronger and more mean when you eventually leave a country, say, in 2011?

Don't get me wrong. I love a good carpet bombing as much as the next person. Guernica is one of my favourite paintings of all time. I love the sheer beauty of mass aerial destruction, the dazzling display of technological supremacy, the sight of all those backward, tinted peasants running into the jungle and, just as they get there, being felled by machine gun fire.

I like to watch it on TV.

But apart from the all the pleasure we receive from carpet bombing, what purpose does it actually serve?

Big Donger wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2010 at 11:12pm:


It's educational.

Soren wrote on Aug 23^rd, 2010 at 12:11pm:


It certainly is, old boy. The Taliban obtained a masterful education from the Russians.

hilarious! gee that one got to you, abu.

Quote:


Of course. But we're a little country with no real ability to project our power abroad. The reality of geopolitics is that many small countries are ineluctably brought under the aegis and influence of major powers; in our case, the United States.

Quote:


I see no reason from our vantage point in this situation the denziens of the Muslim world deserve their existences to be valued in any significant way. If we ever let the lives of a few people get in the way of the eradication of those that seriously our threaten our kin and the integrity of our tribe we will only find ourselves pushed aside by others that have sharper elbows and a firmer sense of their own peoplehood.

Your brothers in arms certainly aren't reluctant to apply this principle in their treatment of Westerners.

Quote:


Wouldn't he? If he started letting the other, weaker, band of apes into his territory they would probably just start complaining about how their inability to obtain as many bananas as his group of apes was directly a result of his apes discriminating against them in the banana collecting process. Then a small, effeminate subset of his apes would start sympathizing with these apes and start passing jungle laws establishing that his apes are required to relinquish 5% of their annual bananas and mangos to the weaker apes and start allowing more and more of the weaker apes in via junglegration. Eventually the weaker apes would form a majority group and start creating, without the aid of the sympathizing apes of the other group, overtly discriminatory policies in banana and mango collecting schools and the palm tree corporate workforce. The territory would then become so inefficient and poorly run that the band of monkeys from the east end of the rainforest would notice and overrun and destroy the former territory, taking it, and all of the bananas, for themselves.

Only on this forum can you read smacking Hamid Karzai fanfiction.

My thoughts are with their family & friends of the Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan yesterday.