Brain injury the 'signature wound' of Afghan war

Analysts say the decade-long Afghanistan war will be remembered not only for its deadly cost to civilians and soldiers, but its legacy of enduring medical issues for serving troops.

Ten years after US-led military operations began, Afghanistan remains a desperately poor nation battling insurgency.

Coalition forces have lost more than 2,700 soldiers in the war and a further 10,000 Afghan security forces have been killed.

But behind the numbers, there are serious long-term medical issues for those who have fought on the front line.

Security analyst Richard Tanter from the Nautilus Institute says there is a horrific "signature wound" of this war.

"What are called traumatic brain injuries, the blast effects on the head," he said.

"One of the results of the development of Kevlar armour, which troops wear on their upper body, is that the thoracic injuries [that] used to be so dreadful from grenades and artillery in previous wars are much less common and of course the limbs are exposed.

"But from the blast effects themselves, from IEDs, the injuries to the head and brain are very, very serious and are taking up a lot of space in hospitals."

The estimated civilian casualty rate swings wildly between 14,000 and 34,000 and people killed.

Professor Tanter says Afghans face a double whammy.

"It's not just from Taliban IEDs, but it's actually from the much larger blast effects from allied bombs, for example American 2,000-pound bombs, which are principally, blast weapons not shrapnel type weapons," he said.

Said Dileri has experienced the effect of these weapons.

He was a program director for a non-government organisation in Kabul, working on community based health, education and peace building initiatives.

"You cannot win hearts and minds [when] from one side you kill [and] from the other side you just come and say, 'well we are here to help you, we are hear to bring you a project if you want us to go to school'," he said.

"And in the evening we come and raid you and bomb civilians, and kill people in a wedding ceremony, then later say 'sorry, it was a mistake, it was an error'."

Mr Dileri says civilians struggle to see a difference between the military raids and the NGO work.

He says this leaves many aid workers at risk and five of his eight colleagues were killed while working in Afghanistan.

"Being an NGO worker implementing some of the national programs, like national solidarity programs, basic package of health services," he said.

"These all were putting us in a situation where automatically think we are promoting this whole agenda that is out there in the government and among the international community."

Professor Tanter says it is difficult to find any positives from the decade long war.

"I can understand how deeply frustrating it must be, for example, for an Australian reconstruction troops to build clinics and schools to then see them destroyed by opposition forces," he said.

"But overall, the effects on Afghanistan have been largely catastrophic."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-08/brain-injury-in-afghan-war/3381420

Heavy drinking can cause brain injury.



...as he approached 40, an age when Al Gore was already a senator running for president, George W. Bush was just a heavy-drinking, fun-loving oilman struggling to control his temper, salvage his business and hold on to his marriage...
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/29/us/how-bush-came-to-tame-his-inner-scamp.html

Bush acknowledges 1976 DUI charge

Texas Gov. George W. Bush acknowledged Thursday that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine.Bush, who was 30 at the time, pleaded guilty, paid a $150 fine and his driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine.

...Bush--with his wife, Laura, at his side -- told reporters news accounts of the incident were accurate, that he had been drinking in a bar with Australian tennis pro John Newcombe and others.
http://articles.cnn.com/2000-11-02/politics/bush.dui_1_arrest-from-news-reports-george-w-bush-kennebunkport-police?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS



The first time that George W. Bush was arrested, he had just stolen a Christmas wreath.

Mr. Bush, then a 20-year-old junior at Yale, was head of a notoriously rambunctious fraternity...Mr. Bush later recalled that he and his friends had perhaps had a few beers and were loud and boisterous...The police arrested Mr. Bush and charged him with disorderly conduct.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/061900wh-bush.html



Bush's past drinking problem was no secret
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=218




On July 28, 1986, George W. Bush woke up with a hangover. It had been a loud, liquid night at the venerable Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs as he and friends from Texas celebrated their collective 40th birthdays. Now, as he embarked on his ritual morning run through a spectacular Rockies landscape, Bush felt lousy...his personal life was clouded by drinking...

...A charismatic partier since his school days, Bush liked to drink what he called the four Bs – beer, bourbon and B&B; But he had begun to realize that his drinking was jeopardizing his relationships, his career and his health...

even those closest to him acknowledge privately that if not clinically an alcoholic, Bush sometimes came close to the line. Sometimes he would embarrass himself; more often, he didn't know how to stop.

"Once he got started, he couldn't, didn't shut it off," said Bush's friend Don Evans. "He didn't have the discipline."

Bush himself acknowledged in a recent interview: "I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people. . . . When you're drinking, it can be an incredibly selfish act."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072599.htm



He’s the one who opened the conference of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation ( apec ) by thanking Australian prime minister John Howard “for being such a fine host for the opec summit”— opec being the cartel of mostly Middle Eastern oil producers. This president then thanked Howard for the presence of his “Austrian” troops in Iraq and marched confidently offstage in the wrong direction. A few weeks later the same president attended an elementary school in New York in order to crow about higher national test scores. “Childrens do learn!” he proclaimed, creating a Norm Crosby–ish bookend for his infamous “Is our children learning?” anguish of a few years ago.

...In The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair, and the Intoxication of Power, Owen recalls the time in 2002 when the commander in chief collapsed while sitting on a sofa watching a football game. (Official cause: he’d choked on a pretzel.) The presidential head hit a table on the way to the floor, he suffered an abrasion on the left side of his face, and a blood sample was rushed to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Owen says he was told by a British doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins that lab technicians there found that the blood contained significant amounts of alcohol—this in the body of a man who claims he hasn’t had a drop in more than 20 years.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2008/01/graydon200801

Evidence of Bush's Brain Damage:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3156/2719299039_04840d8907.jpgv=0

"Operation Enduring Freedom"


Ironically, the first time I read that, I read it as: "Operation Ending Freedom" - which seems more apt!

BatteriesNotIncluded wrote on Oct 10^th, 2011 at 1:11am:


Go stand in the corner.