Marty's Barking Up the Wrong Tree... Again

There's nothing like vindication to brighten your day

The perpetually intellectually dishonest Marty Rayner was at it again yesterday, taking issue with a post here at the Nexus noting the successful detection and prevention of two Kandahar bomb attacks.

One should recall that the post in question noted that the revisionist crowd would be dismissive of the recent success. And Marty, god bless his intellectually dishonest soul, just had to take it upon himself to prove it:

"It takes a special kind of stupid to take yesterday’s report that Afghan security forces foiled two improvised explosive attacks in the province of Kandahar and declare this “Another Sign of Success in Afghanistan” when you consider that over 920 police officers were killed by militants in 2007 and that on the very same day as the “sign of success” in question, Afghan police killed a protester and wounded three others who were demonstrating the earlier killing of three civilians by coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan."

Which would certainly be awful if it were all as simple as that.

Unfortunately for Marty, he declines -- as he so often does -- to fully address the news story he sites as proof that those Afghan police are just awful:

"Dozens of protesters blocked a road Saturday in eastern Afghanistan, claiming U.S.-led coalition forces killed three civilians, and a local official said police fatally shot one of the protesters and injured three of them.

Villagers from the area carried three bodies to a major highway during the protest. Police allegedly opened fire, killing one and wounding three.

The coalition said its troops were attacked Friday while searching compounds in the Shinwar district of Nangarhar province.

"Several militants were killed" and nine insurgents were arrested, the coalition said in a statement Saturday.

The coalition said the operation was targeting a "foreign fighter network" and that militants in the area had recently attacked coalition forces. The troops destroyed several automatic rifles, grenades and ammunition discovered in the compounds.

Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the government is investigating the villagers' claims.

"The coalition claimed they were fired upon from a house and the enemy were gathered there, but the villagers claim those people who were killed were innocent civilians," said Mohammad Hashem Ghamsharik, spokesman for the Nangarhar governor.

The head of the Nangarhar provincial council, Fazel Hadi Muslimyar, said police opened fire on the protesters, killing one and wounding three. Police refused to comment.

The Afghan government has pleaded with coalition forces to coordinate more closely to avoid civilian casualties, but foreign troops says insurgents hide in villages, using civilians as human shields."

The video, in particular, that Marty cites, is entirely in a foreign language. A grand total of one line in the entire minute-and-a-half long video is translated via subtitle, noting the claim that those killed and detained by US troops were civilians.

A claim that Rayner has decided to take at face value, despite the weapons cache discovered and destroyed.

Against this particular backdrop of deliberate misinformation, one is led to take with a grain of salt the claims that protesters were fired upon -- or at least wonders if, as is so often the case, these protesters were actually armed.

Rayner also notes the casualties taken by Afghan Police over the past several weeks -- once again, indulging himself in overlooking the fact that the casualty rates were addressed in the original post, and noted for what they are: evidence that, despite numerous examples of success, plenty of work still needs to be done.

Marty engages in all of this fanciful argumentation to underscore an argument that, somehow, the discovery and aversion of two bomb attacks isn't a success. The implicit stupidity of that particular argument need not be addressed here.

But what does need to be addressed here is the efforts of Rayner, and many of those who think like him -- to obscure the public record in regards to all things pertaining to Afghanistan. It will be addressed further in the future.