Text Fwd: U.S. Prepares For New Decade Of War In Asia

Rick Rozoff blog
Stop NATO
December 16, 2010
U.S. Prepares For New Decade Of War In Asia
Rick Rozoff


The United States is engaged in the longest war in its 234-year history in Afghanistan, one that will begin its eleventh calendar year in two weeks. Like the war that had been America's longest before now, that in Indochina, the current one is in the Asian continent.



With repeatedly extended projected withdrawal dates, the latest is 2014, although even that has been characterized by Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell as merely "aspirational," the campaign in Afghanistan and over the past two years in neighboring Pakistan has marked Asia as the center of U.S. global military strategy and operations.



Roughly 100,000 U.S. troops and over half as many more from Washington's North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and partners are waging an armed conflict that this year has resulted in an increasing number of civilian casualties and the most deaths among belligerents on both sides since it began on October 7, 2001. U.S. and NATO war dead this year are approaching the 700 mark, nearly a third of the total for the over nine-year-old war.



Since the U.S. invasion in 2001 opium production has grown by 40,000 percent (according to Russian estimates), with Afghanistan accounting for 92 percent of the world's cultivation of the narcotic. In addition to the killing of Afghan civilians by U.S. and NATO air and night raids, bomb attacks against civilians, including suicide bombings, are regular occurrences in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan and Iran.



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