Fighting Works

He blowed up real good:

NATO strike kills Taliban commander behind Afghan town takeover
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - A NATO air strike has killed a Taliban commander behind an insurgent takeover of a small southern Afghanistan town, as a US general took command of the 35,000-strong NATO-led force.

A Taliban spokesman said meanwhile the fighters were ready to "hand over" the town of of Musa Qala, which they captured overnight Friday, if the government and foreign forces agreed "they won't bomb again."

Imagine that, big bombs make them sue for peace!

The previous approach hadn't been keeping them out of the area:

Under a controversial deal reached in September, British forces that cover Helmand province agreed to keep outside of a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius around Musa Qala after tribal leaders said they would handle the Taliban.

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said meanwhile he had been suspicious of the deal "from the beginning."

"We cannot have fundamentalist and terrorist reserves and islands. This is not at the interests of establishing a strong, powerful government," he said in Kabul.

Duh! Good thing it's becoming obvious.

Now isn't this an odd way to frame overwhelming victory by NATO forces?

The unrest was its deadliest last year with more than 4,000 people killed

Ooo, sounds bad, doesn't it? But the sentence continues, almost as an afterthought,

-- most of them rebels.

Kind of a strange way to look at it, isn't it? Reporting in a kind of neutral to pessimistic tone about "deadly" "unrest" when in reality it's jihadists getting pulped by the bucketsfull!

Not surprising, though, since wire service news is really a propaganda arm of the enemy; this article quotes, without skepticism, statements directly from a "Taliban spokesman":

A Taliban spokesman confirmed that some of the movement's fighters were hit but said "no famous and big Taliban commander was killed in the strike."

"There has been some casualties among civilians because it was close to a village," Yousuf Ahmadi said, but this was not confirmed.

Yeah, right. This is given equal weight with to NATO statements.

Even feigned neutrality by the media in this fight would, in the analysis of George Orwell, be "objectively pro-fascist" -- but they've actually chosen to support the other side.