Fresh US-led military offensives have completely destroyed a town in Afganistan

Accocrding to the original Daily Mail article - and the photos here - it was a tiny village, held at the time by Taliban and heavily mined.

The impact of coalition operations in Afghanistan is often bogged down in statistics and political manoeuvring.

But these photos of a devastated village in the Arghandad River Valley show the horror of war in stark reality.

Tarok Kolache, a small settlement in Kandahar, has been completely erased from the map after an offensive by the U.S. army.

Before and aftermath: The picture on the left shows the village of Tarok Kolache in the Arghandab River Valley. The picture on the right is the same location following allied air strikes, which completely obliterated the village

Before and aftermath: The picture on the left shows the village of Tarok Kolache in the Arghandab River Valley. The picture on the right is the same location following allied air strikes, which completely obliterated the village

Taliban militants had taken control of the village and battered the coalition task force with homemade bombs and improvised explosive devices.

And after two attempts at clearing the village led to casualties on both sides, Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th gave the order to pulverise the village.

His men were ‘terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death’, writes West Point graduate Paula Broadwell on the Foreign Policy blog.

Instead of continuing to clear the tiny village, the commander approved a mine-clearing line charge, which hammered a route into the centre of Tarok Kolache using rocket-propelled explosives.

The destruction only escalated, however, with ’49,200lbs of ordnance’ dropped on the village via air strikes and ground-launched rockets, which saw it swiftly blown off the face of the earth.

The results of the battery were adjudged to have left ‘NO CIVCAS’ - no civilians killed.

But with Tarok Kolache bombarded with close to 25 tons of explosives, assuming some collateral damage does not seem unjustified.

Outside analysts have not been able to assess the impact of the bombing on civilians due to security concerns.

However, it has been agreed that 'extreme' operations such as the destruction of an entire village are likely to have a negative impact on attempts to improve coalition-Afghan relations.

Erica Gaston, an Open Society Institute researcher based in Afghanistan, told Wired the erasure of Tarok Kolache was exactly the type of behaviour that would deal a body blow to Afghan acceptance of the presence of the International Security Assistance Force.

'But for this, I think [NATO] would have started to get some credit for improved conduct,' Ms Gaston wrote in an email.

'Some Kandahar elders (and I stress ’some,’ not ‘all’ or even ‘most’) who had initially opposed the Kandahar operations were in the last few months expressing more appreciation for ISAF conduct during these operations, saying they had driven out the Taliban and shown restraint in not harming civilians.

'I think this property destruction has likely reset the clock on any nascent positive impressions.'

However, astonishing pictures like those above could become a regular feature of coalition operations in Afghanistan, with ISAF commander General David Petraeus approving both construction and destruction projects.

According to Ms Broadwell's post on Foreign Policy, General Petraeus has approved $1million worth of reconstruction projects but also told his commanders in the south of Afghanistan to 'take a similar approach to what 1-320th was doing on a grander scale as it applies to the districts north of Arghandab'.

Miss Broadwell, who has served as a major in the U.S. Army, was educated at Harvard University before completing a PhD at London University's War Studies Department.
Her Linkedin profile page states that she also graduated from the U.S. military academy West Point, and has worked for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1348915/Tarok-Kolache-Afghan-village-wiped-map-25-tons-coalition-bombs.html#ixzz1BngoB8Ho

fact checker & Daily mail............. titter

Colonel Erik Gunhus, the spokesman for Petraeus, described Tarok Kolache as both a town and a city when he described it's destruction, not once as a village. It's a bit of a moot point given it is now just dust and unexploded ordinance- not all of the 49,000 pounds of bombs dropped on the place will have gone off, a lot will still lie buried in rubble waiting to kill Afghans in future. Protecting Afghans obviously wasn't the aim here, and fiscal prudence obviously wasn't a priority either. This was a petulant show of force against an undefended civilian target.

Nor is it an isolated incident according to Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, the district governor of Arghandab District, who reported all the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow were flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, and that another 120 to 130 houses in Arghandab had been similarly demolished this winter.

This is becoming very reminiscent of the Nixon/Kissenger carpet bombing of Cambodia that brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

NUREMBURG TRIALS: (1945-1946)

Chaired by U.S. Judge Jackson wrote into international world law that the planning and doing of Aggressive war is the supreme international crime on the planet earth, as it actuates all other crimes high, low, big and small. He further says that it is the supreme international crime whether Germany does it or the U.S.A. does it.

The U.S. Constitution says that all international treaties signed on to by the U.S.A. are to be treated as the supreme laws of the land. This proves that internationally and nationally the U.S. Imperialist military are guilty of breaking world law, and committing the supreme worst sort of war crimes on the planet earth, and as the world leader of the Imperialist Camp, they are organizing all that is lawless and wrecking as their weapon of choice.

There is nothing political in this event as in the U.S.A. political discourse is not a political process, as they use the political word to disinform the Polity of America and world people. And if the Tuson Killing spree was done, as the U.S. Imperialists say, by a mentally-ill madman, what then is their excuse for doing it one a worldwide basis. Mentally-ill killing of the peoples goes on by U.S. Imperialism, and how can the worlds' people find justification for the U.S.A. when it violates the national and international laws of the anti-fascist covenants to which the vast majority of the worlds' people are signed on to as de facto world law. Re-tool to the renewables and end the fossil fuel wars, before they end the oxygen they burn out of the atmosphere. Nature cannot replace the oxygen with the present burn out policies of the present Imperialist Camp.