US Refuses Karzai’s Latest Plea to End Deadly Night Raids

------------

---

Obama has more than tripled the incidence of night raids, which very often kill civilians, and which a study from back in September found fuel resentment and undermine the mission in Afghanistan.

“An estimated 12 to 20 night raids now occur per night,” according to the report, “resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” And many of the associated tactics, like “mass detention operations, holding entire villages for questioning on site for prolonged periods of time,” may violate international law, the report found.

Civilians bear the brunt of these hardline tactics. As one man from Nangarhar, interviewed in the report said, “They claim to be against terrorists, but what they are doing is terrorism. It spreads terror. It creates more violence.”

According to senior commanders in the Joint Special Operations Command, these various nightly raids get the wrong person 50 percent of the time. For a war-torn population living through a decade of US military occupation, ninety-two percent of whom have never even heard of 9/11, these are counterproductive indeed.

-------------

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/12/19/us-refuses-karzais-latest-plea-to-end-deadly-night-raids/

History of U.S. Intervention in Iran - 1953 Until Present