US Drone Strike Kills “ISIS-K Planner” According to DOD
The US Department of Defense announced a drone strike against what they referred to as an “ISIS-K Planner” in Afghanistan just hours after the bloodiest day for the American military in a decade.
The U.S. military announced Friday that it has conducted an unmanned airstrike against ISIS-K in Afghanistan, and said “initial indications” show it killed one of the group’s planners. The strike came one day after ISIS-K claimed responsibility for an attack at one of the airport’s gates that left at least 170 dead, including 13 U.S. service members.
CBS News:
“U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner,” Captain Bill Urban, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, confirmed Friday night. “The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties.”The statement did not identify the target of the attack, or what role a “planner” has in the group. It is unclear whether the planner was involved in Thursday’s attack, which also injured 18 U.S. service members and scores of Afghan citizens.
An affiliate of ISIS, the group that spread into northern Iraq from Syria six years ago and once controlled territory roughly the size of Britain, ISIS-K first emerged in Pakistan around the same time, in 2015. Its members have come from other Pakistani militant groups, including disillusioned Taliban fighters.
I’m flashing back to the times when we successfully neutralized the #3 guy in Al Qaeda.Report
And then what happens?Report
In “Fables” there was a scene where the Queen had killed 7 members of another tribe and their tribe wanted the killer handed over to them.
The King, realizing they didn’t know who did it, ordered the head cut off of someone who had unquestionably committed heinous crimes so that the head could then be sent to the other tribe.Report
This may have been a “whoopsie”.
Well, these things happen.Report
Well, ya know, if you don’t want to be collateral damage, don’t hang out near suspected terrorist bombers.
What’s that? You don’t know who the US might suspect is a terrorist bomber? So not our problem…
(end sarcasm)Report
There are lots of conflicts where the terrorists hiding in the civilian population have the support of the civilian population. We lack a lot of details for this specific case and everyone involved lies so we should withhold judgement for months.Report
We lack a lot of details for this specific case and everyone involved lies so we should withhold judgement for months.
At least until after the election.Report
I think the apologists should own their position, which is that in order to protect the rights of Afghani women, we need to periodically incinerate a few of them and their children in the fight against their oppressors. Even if it turns out the reports are wrong in this particular instance we know that after 20 years there will be collateral damage.Report
True. Absolutely true. We’re going to accidently kill innocents.
Unfortunately the alternative is to let an Fascist totalitarian theocratic state run things were innocents are murdered deliberately. Teenage girls are shot in the head for wanting to learn how to read, and to terrorize any other girl who disobeys “god” or rather the priests-with-rifles who know what god wants.
And then we have whether or not the USA needs to live with an occasional 911 because god wants that sometimes too.
What we do looks really nasty from a comfortable chair in the USA where we have rule of law and such. The hundred thousand or so people trying to get into that airport and flee have a different opinion. And that’s an amazingly high number considering it’s just the locals in one city and it involves leaving everything behind and risking your life to just get there.Report
Unfortunately the alternative is to let an Fascist totalitarian theocratic state run things were innocents are murdered deliberately. Teenage girls are shot in the head for wanting to learn how to read, and to terrorize any other girl who disobeys “god” or rather the priests-with-rifles who know what god wants.
The thing that I have had to swallow is that there are areas outside of my jurisdiction. Which means that there are areas outside of *OUR* jurisdiction.
Now we can have opinions like “we refuse to sell our goods to Afghanistan/purchase their goods” and that falls under our jurisdiction.
But “we should go over there, kick down doors, and shoot dogs in our pursuit of educational justice” is something that I’m going to need you to explain that we have as under our jurisdiction. (And I’m going to ask that you assume a level of competence in line with the last 40ish years of our competence levels rather than some theoretical level.)Report
After WW2 we and the world signed a bunch of treaties proclaiming that everyone had the responsibility to step into nasty countries and stop things before it got real bad. This is why the world largely stood behind us when we went to war with Afghanistan over 911.
It’s also why Bill Clinton thinks he’s failure to send in troops to Rwanda was one of his biggest mistakes.
Lack of power is an argument. Lack of will is an argument. Lack of jurisdiction is not.
For that matter if the issue were lack of jurisdiction were a serious issue we could hold an election in Afghanistan and find out just what the will of the people is. My expectation is fanatics with guns shooting/enslaving/whatever the general population isn’t very popular.Report
Popular enough that the populace let them roll over the country the moment we started to pull up stakes.Report
By that standard the Russians were really popular in Poland.
Far as I can tell the Taliban is deeply opposed to the idea of free and fair elections.
To be fair, Afghanistan probably isn’t a state as we understand it.Report
No, it’s not, and that is kinda the point. It’s a loose conglomeration of tribes that exists mostly because other nation drew borders for them.
Honestly, we’d be better off just running a series of underground railroads to get people out who want to leave, than we would be trying to put the Taliban down and get the rest of the country to play ball.
Like North Korea, it’s not really a place where normal foreign policy works, and the cost of getting the place to a state where that would be the case is just more than anyone should bother paying, because the people there either can’t, or won’t, cooperate for the long haul.Report
…the alternative is to let an Fascist totalitarian theocratic state run things were innocents are murdered deliberately.
Yes, and we do in fact live with this alternative in about a dozen of our allied nations.
The problem for the forever war argument is that there really isn’t anything unique about the Taliban or Afghanistan that can’t also be said of dozens of other governments and nations that we somehow manage to live with.Report
IMHO saying the Taliban weren’t uniquely bad is appealing to ignorance. I’d say the biggest “unique” aspect to them was their willingness to let AQ use their country as a training ground. Without the Taliban there wouldn’t have been a 911.
Even by nasty nation standards the Taliban were (are?) really nasty. I think they had a grand total of 4 nations recognize them last time over the course of their existence.
Your argument also ignores that if we could do something about North Korea, we would.
The one serious argument against us staying is the current Taliban may not be the same as the previous one.Report
Unclear. Primary suspect killed himself.
There is a ton of armchair quarterbacking and dueling experting and it’s impossible to tell who is right. We also have a ton of conspiracy theories and sealed evidence.Report
This is why I asked, “Then what happens?”
Americans tend to brush off “collateral damage” as irrelevant, except when it happens to us.
From 2002 movie Collateral Damage:
Firefighter Gordon Brewer is plunged into the complex and dangerous world of international terrorism after he loses his wife and child in a bombing credited to Claudio “The Wolf” Perrini. Frustrated with the official investigation and haunted by the thought that the man responsible for murdering his family might never be brought to justice, Brewer takes matters into his own hands and tracks his quarry ultimately to Colombia.
Will there be reprisals here on American soil for the “collateral damage” we have inflicted on Afghanistan for 20 years?
Maybe, I don’t know.
But I know that if there is, we will pretend to be shocked, shocked, bewildered even as to why anyone would want to attack us. It must be that they hate our freedoms, yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket.Report
Their core mission is to make the world safe for their flavor of Islam and their culture. Last time they were in charge, doing that meant women shouldn’t be taught to read and gays should be very harshly punished and so on. They think beatings and/or bullets are a good way to solve cultural issues/disputes.
They are probably a minority in their own country and couldn’t win anything like a popular election. They stay in power via violence.
The US’s culture is absurdly aggressive. We have entire industries spending many Billions of dollars exporting our culture and they’re good at that. In a typical year, how many of the top 10 movies in the world will be American? How many of the top 50? How many of those will have women in non-submissive roles and/or flaunting their faces and arms? And movies is just one industry we have showcasing our culture and our values. TV, the Internet, Google, Amazon, radio, Christain outreach, and so on are all striving to be the best at expanding.
If you’re trying to teach your entire country’s worth of women (and other minorities) that god has a role for them and that’s the ONLY role possible, then the US constantly broadcasting alternatives is a big problem. From that point of view, Hollywood is the propaganda wing of the US.
American cultural dominance and aggressive exportation of the same is an issue that makes the Europeans antsy. It should be expected that it’s going to enrage those whose who want to set up mono-cultural theocratic fascist states. From their point of view they’re at war with us because of our CONSTANT attempts to undermine their way of life.Report
And here’s the NYT:
I admit to being surprised that they’re pushing back on Biden as hard as they are.Report
The Times is one of the few print outlets that can afford, either on its own or through joint efforts with UK/Australian papers, to have “feet on the ground” in foreign war zones. Forever wars are very much in their wheelhouse, and they are going to push back on stopping them.Report
Yeah the media isn’t going to forgive Biden for cutting off this spigot of food for the press.Report
Make stuff up? No, outside the right the media doesn’t typically just make stuff up.Report
We knock ’em down and set ’em up at the same time.Report
I assume everyone saw the update to this. Looks like we blew up an aid worker and his children, not an ISIS bomber.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-drone-killed-aid-worker-zemari-ahmadi-no-sign-of-isis-bomb-nyt-reportsReport
It was the bloodiest day for the military in a decade.
We had to do *SOMETHING*.Report