BartSimpson BartSimpson:
andyt andyt:
Canadian too, eh. Apparently not too popular in the White House and Pentagon after his Vietnam reporting showing Marines torching villages.
If the village provided support to the VC it got burned.
In SWA if the village supported the Taliban then ground forces (and the embedded media) were pulled back to avoid the media painting the village as a bunch of poor victims and then the village would be reduced by artillery or airstrikes.
That was on odd-numbered days of the week. On even-numbered, days, a parade of soldiers and trailing media entourage would hand out food and candy and medical supplies to show they were "winning the hearts and minds" of locals.
That said, I don't actually think any villages in Afghanistan were levelled simply because the Taliban used them...yes, they bombed Taliban fighters almost anywhere they found the fighters, often with civilian casualties...but I don't think they bombed a village full of civilians just because it was stashing food or supplies for the Taliban.
Everyone knows the Taliban, like the NVA, Viet Cong, and most other guerilla armies, would force villages to store their supplies and there was little the villages could do about it. Americans in Vietnam didn't care about that, but we've evolved into intelligent beings since then. So the same policy wasn't followed in Afghanistan, even though US pilots and officers still have broad leeway to interpret the ROE as it pleases them and still kill way more friendlies and civilians than any other western nation.
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