NATO has adopted the Israeli policy of home destruction in Afghanistan.
Why would they do that unless they were controlled by Israel?
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The unprecedented home demolition policy and other harsh tactics used in the offensive suggest that General David Petraeus, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, has abandoned the notion that he will ever win over the population in those Taliban strongholds.
The New York Times first reported the large-scale demolition of houses in a November 16 story that said US troops in Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwaii districts had been using armored bulldozers, high explosives, missiles and airstrikes in “routinely destroying almost every unoccupied home or unused farm building in areas where they are operating”.
Neither US nor Afghan officials have offered any estimate of the actual number of homes destroyed, but a spokesman for the provincial governor told the Times that the number of houses demolished was “huge”.
Confirming the widespread demolition policy, Colonel Hans Bush, a spokesman for Petraeus, suggested that it was necessary to provide security, because so many houses were “booby-trapped” with explosives.
But Bush also acknowledged that US troops were using a wide array of “tools” to eliminate tree lines in which insurgents could hide. And the demolition policy was clearly driven primarily by International Security Assistance Force’s concerns about the improvised explosive device (IED) war that the Taliban has been winning in 2010.
The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed in a November 19 article that, in one operation in Zhari district, the military had used more than a dozen mine-clearing charges, each of which destroyed everything – houses, trees, and crops – in a 100-yard-long (91-meters-long) path wide enough for a tank.
The district governor in Arghandab, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, acknowledged that entire villages had been destroyed – a policy he defended by claiming that there were no people left in them. “[I]n some villages, like Khosrow,” he said, “that we’ve found completely empty and full of IEDs, we destroy them without agreement, because it was hard to find the people, and not just Khosrow but many villages we had to destroy to make them safe.”
But Colonel David Flynn, the battalion commander of a unit of the 101st Airborne Division responsible for a section of the district, contradicted the claim that demolition was only carried out if the people who owned the houses could not be found.
Flynn told reporters of London’s Daily Mail he had issued an ultimatum to residents of Khosrow Sofia: provide full information on the location of IEDs the Taliban had planted there or face destruction of the village, according to the account published on October 26.