10/12 early: AWACS coverage

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by leif
I was unaware the Taliban had bombed our country. Could you elaborate? Also, I'd love to see some background on joe's claim that they are, as Iraq did in the Gulf War, using civilians as a shield. I don't know if thats true; I certainly hadn't heard that.

I'm not going to bother responding to leif after this posting, because he doesn't seem to have heard much about what's going on, and there's only so much cluelessness I can tolerate. Perhaps he missed the explosions in New York City back on 9/11. Stolen aircraft loaded with jet fuel were used as kamikaze bombs to attack US civilians.

The man financing and directing the operation was described back in August by the Pakistanis and the Russians as the Taliban's de facto defense minister. The Taliban has been on bin Laden's payroll to the tune of $100 million over the last ten years while the Taliban has been under UN embargo for refusing to extradite him. bin Laden countersigns orders issued by Omar. Basically, the spoiled little rich boy has bought himself a country to play commando in.

As for using civilans as a shield, after the ammo dumps in tunnels outside of Faram were bombed, causing secondary explosions for three hours afterward, the Taliban toured the world press though the town, showed them 30 graves and told them 270 civilians had died there.

Although now that the Taliban has almost no aircraft left, we probably won't see many more stoies like these:
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August 15, 2000

Taliban Jets Raid Taloqan, Kill Six Children, Injure Twelve other Civilians

(August 15)-Two Taliban jet fighters carried out air sorties today on Taloqan City at 6:40 pm (Afghanistan Standard Time), dropping a total of four bombs.

Two bombs struck a civilian neighborhood within the city, killing six children and wounding twelve civilians while destroying one house and partially damaging two more. Among those injured, eight were local commuters. Two other bombs landed outside the city.

It is believed that the indiscriminate aerial bombardment, one day after the latest Taliban-Pakistani-bin Laden failure of a military advance on Taloqan, marks a sign of frustration as the enemy has sought to take its revenge by randomly targeting civilian neighborhoods..
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One comment on JuJu's posting:

This fanatical army, from what I understand, is a distributed one. Like as in peer to peer and gnutella. Many different cells or 'nodes' operate independently. There is no central server.

Not quite true. While the cells are semiautonomous after being dispatched for a mission, their training, command and control and finance are a bit more centralized than that. It's not so much like Gnutella but more like Napster.