Posted on 10/03/2009 8:04:09 AM PDT by flowerplough
Subhead: Deadly 4-hour firefight becomes template for how not to win the war.
The paratroopers of Chosen Company had plenty to worry about as they began digging in at their new outpost on the fringe of a hostile frontier village in eastern Afghanistan.
Intelligence reports were warning of militants massing in the area. As the paratroopers looked around, the only villagers they could see were men of fighting age idling in the bazaar. There were no women and children, and some houses looked abandoned. Through their night scopes they could see furtive figures on the surrounding mountainsides.
A few days later, they were almost overrun by 200 insurgents.
That firefight, a debacle that cost nine American lives in July 2008, has become the new template for how not to win in Afghanistan. The calamity and its roots have been described in bitter, painstaking detail in an unreleased Army history, a devastating narrative that has begun to circulate in an initial form even as the military opened a formal review this week of decisions made up and down the chain of command.
The 248-page draft history, obtained by The New York Times, helps explain why the new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is pressing so hard for a full-fledged commitment to a style of counterinsurgency that rests on winning over the people of Afghanistan even more than killing militants. The military has already incorporated lessons from the battle in the new doctrine for war in Afghanistan
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
From Snopes, it is indeterminate if Pershing himself ordered this done, but similar practices were committed by his subordinates:
“It was Colonel Alexander Rodgers (*Governor of Jolo) of the 6th Cavalry who accomplished by taking advantage of religious prejudice what the bayonets and Krags had been unable to accomplish. Rodgers inaugurated a system of burying all dead juramentados in a common grave with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs.
“The Mohammedan religion forbids contact with pork; and this relatively simple device resulted in the withdrawal of juramentados to sections not containing Rodgers. Other officers took up the principle, adding new refinements to make it additionally unattractive to the Moros.
“In some sections the Moro juramentado was beheaded after death and the head sewn inside the carcass of a pig. And so the rite of running juramentado, at least semi-religious in character, ceased to be in Sulu. The last cases of this religious mania occurred in the early decades of the century. The juramentados were replaced by the amucks. .. who were simply homicidal maniacs with no religious significance attaching to their acts.”
I would like to add that the idea of sewing Muslims inside of pig skins was originally devised, or at least credited to the British in India.
“(After the massacre at Cawnpore) The British responded with mechanistic fury and re-established order with brute force. In Kanpur, Indians were rounded up and made to lick up the blood on the Bibighar floor where the Europeans had been killed; then they were stuffed with pork and beef and sewn into pigskins. Finally they were blown from cannons, having been told that the Brahmins would be buried and the Muslims burned to endure their eternal damnation. In Allahabad the sadistic Brigadier-General James Neill slaughtered 6,000 Indians, announcing that ‘the Word of God gives no authority for the modern tenderness for human life’...”
LOL My apologies
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.