As our air war against terrorists accelerates — with strikes by pilotless drone planes, helicopters, et al. — unintentional civilian deaths and serious injuries mount. A Feb. 22 Wall Street Journal report from Kabul begins: “U.S. Special Operations Forces (hunting down Taliban) ordered an air strike that killed at least 27 civilians, and the soldiers may not have satisfied rules of engagement designed to avoid the killing of innocents, Afghan and coalitions officials said.”

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

After seeing the gruesome aftermath of that rocket strike, survivors of the NATO attack told McClatchy Newspapers, women jumped from the second car and frantically waved their head scarves to try to stop the attack.

Pentagon originally said Marine killed in combat

The Pentagon confirmed late Tuesday that it is investigating the death of a 24-year-old Indiana Marine after he was shot to death in Afghanistan, allegedly by several US-paid private security contractors.

The contractors, according to a fellow Marine in Afghanistan who communicated with an investigative reporter in Chicago, were Afghanis who were found with "copious amounts of opium" and had been paid by the United States as guards.

Remember when Sarah Palin said that "the surge principles that have worked in Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan." Well...as Ms. Palin would say, many Afghans working for the Afghan security forces are now switching sides and are now defecting to the Taliban.

Guess who trained many of them? Blackwater!

Among the worst Orwellian deceptions being exposed by the Pentagon’s Marjah offensive is the ludicrous notion that we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan in order to protect Afghan civilians. The recent U.S. Special Forces air strike in the Marjah area that killed 27 or more civilians, including four women and a child, is a prime example of a cognitive disconnect that has been endemic in U.S. military operations throughout our misnamed war on terrorism.

When NATO began its invasion of the Marjah farming region, the general consensus among analysts was that the offensive, the single largest operation since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan against a relatively anonymous little town in the middle of nowhere, was mostly a “PR” invasion to sell the continued to an increasingly skeptical Western public.

But it is increasingly clear that wasn’t the whole story. Officials are now making it very plain that the invasion of Marjah was a “test” of a new strategy, that will be put into practice on a much larger scale with the invasion of Kandahar.

"Afghanistan announced a ban on news coverage of Taliban strikes on Monday, saying such coverage only emboldened the Islamist militants..."

Germany's Left Party was expelled from the Bundestag yesterday after its members held up signs bearing the names of Afghan civilians killed in a German-ordered airstrike last September.

The protest came in the middle of a parliamentary debate on extending Germany’s nine-year military mission to Afghanistan by a further year.

Some 429 MPs voted for and 111 against the new mandate – 16 fewer votes in favour than last time – allowing troop numbers to be increased by 850 to 5,350.

The opposition Green Party abstained and, after being re-admitted, the Left Party MPs contributed to the 111 votes against the mandate.

The head of Russia's federal drug control agency has lambasted the US-led forces for failing to stamp out drug production in Afghanistan.

Victor Ivanov blamed US President Barack Obama's administration for not doing enough to destroy opium poppy crops and curb the production of heroin in Afghanistan, the BBC reported on Saturday.

I want you to look very closely at this picture and try and keep it in your minds eye. This was a perfectly healthy twenty two-year-old young man who in the service of his country got half of his head blown off. I think that’s important, I think that’s newsworthy. Let me tell you how newsworthy I think it is. I think that it’s more important than chocolate cake recipes and far more important than comic book reviews. It is more important than who fell and who's swell at the winter Olympic games.

With the ongoing attack on Marjah, the US military began its first major assault on a Taliban controlled town in Afghanistan and simultaneously entered a new and expanded phase of the war. The resulting military victory was predictable but the side effects of civilian casualties and property destruction won't allow the coalition forces to win any local "hearts and minds," nor increase the acceptability of the Karzai regime. ''

Reiterating previous comments, several officials in the Obama Administration say that they will soon launch a massive offensive against Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province.

While the agricultural community of Marjah had some value to the Taliban, it was mostly by virtue of it being entirely out of the Karzai government’s control since the 2001 US invasion. Kandahar, on the other hand, is the Taliban’s “heartland,” and resistance is likely to be enormous.

Explosions and gunfire in the centre of the Afghan capital, Kabul, have left at least 17 people dead, officials say.

The attack took place in an area of hotels and guesthouses popular with foreigners. Up to nine Indians, a Frenchman and an Italian were killed.

Blackwater set up a shell company to "defraud the government" by leading it to believe it wasn't contracting with the notorious security contractor, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill says.

"In Afghanistan, they set up this shell company, Paravant, in collaboration with mammoth war giant Raytheon, which held the prime contract" for training Afghan security forces, Scahill told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military.

A night-time raid in eastern Afghanistan in which eight schoolboys from one family were killed was carried out on the basis of faulty intelligence and should never have been authorised, a Times investigation has found.

Ten children and teenagers died when troops stormed a remote mountain compound near the border with Pakistan in December.

At the time, Nato claimed that the assault force was targeting a “known insurgent group responsible for a series of violent attacks”. Officials said that the victims were involved in making and smuggling improvised explosive devices. But Western sources close to the case now agree that the victims were all aged 12 to 18 and were not involved in insurgent activity.

In a move that will further cement his long-term hold on power, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree earlier this month giving him unilateral control over appointing the entire Electoral Complaints Commission, eliminating all UN oversight over future elections.

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.

A perception of European weakness, he warned, could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers.

U.S. Special Operations Forces ordered an airstrike that killed at least 27 civilians in southern Afghanistan and the soldiers may not have satisfied rules of engagement designed to avoid the killing of innocents, Afghan and coalition officials said Monday.

A bomb strapped to a bicycle exploded near a busy bus terminal in Afghanistan, killing eight people Tuesday as the death toll of US troops in the Afghan war surpassed the grim milestone of 1,000.

McChrystal went on television to apologise for a mistaken NATO air strike on Sunday that killed 27 civilians.

In the video he expresses "extreme sadness" and says foreign forces are in Afghanistan "to protect the Afghan people".

Glenn Greenwald of Salon uncovers a brutal mindfuck of gruesome pro-civilian bombing positive influence in the pages of the New York Times. A defence corporation employee demands the US blow more money terror bombing the civilian populace of Afghanistan.

US and NATO forces are all set to roll out an "intensive 18-month" ground campaign in Afghanistan to stamp out Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, top US generals have said warning the insurgents that Marjah offensive was just the start.

After weeks of training you will make your debut dancing before a crowd of men. Many are former warlords who helped the Karzai Government make its way to power. Others might be powerful businessmen.

Senior US officials, who spoke to various media outlets on the condition that they are not identified, said the Americans were not satisfied with the interrogation and wanted to take charge.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Friday that once Pakistani agencies completed their investigation, Mullah Baradar could be handed over to his country of origin, which is Afghanistan, but not to the US.

t was so uplifting to see the Government of the Netherlands make a decision to pull out of Afghanistan. This is the first major NATO partner to make such a decision and hopefully this will paint a very clear picture to the other EU members that this war has nothing to do with democracy or terrorism.

The people have a last seen what hides behind this unnecessary war and realize that its basis was formed on a pack of lies. We again see that the true reason for going to war was greed for economic growth and to get their hands on the oil and gas reserves in the Middle East Region.

According to sources quoted today by McClatchy newspapers, two field commanders warned Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal repeatedly about a worthless Afghanistan outpost that was too costly to defend.

The field commanders are now facing penalties after two high-level military investigations.

While this was the first time Pakistan had acted against the Taliban leadership, Afghans involved in western-backed attempts to start talks with the Taliban to end the war were furious, warning that the arrest might have ruined chances of negotiations.

“It’s a spectacular own goal [for the US],” said one official. “They want to wreck talks,” said a close aide to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.

“Mullah Baradar was independently in contact with the Afghan government to find a way for reconciliation and the Pakistanis knew that from their secret agents.”

"I don’t think this district is strategically very important for bringing peace and security to the whole country," she told me. "The Taliban are very scattered, it’s not an organized war. It’s not going to work with such a massive military operation."

Out on the streets of Kabul, there is, at best, cautious optimism. Jaweed, a university student, told me he hopes the Taliban are defeated, but worries about what will happen when the fighting stops. "I am not one hundred percent sure about this offensive, because our security forces aren’t up to defending the country properly."

His concern is that, despite the coalition’s pledge to hold on to Marjah, the Taliban will simply re-emerge when attention turns elsewhere.

Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media has snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases.

The truth is, most of the few hundred Taliban fighters in Marjah vanished well before the much touted offensive began, not being stupid enough to face up to 15,000 of the most heavily armed troops on the planet.

Much of what we've seen on the TV screens looks like random firing into empty space to give the cameras footage for the evening news bulletins.

The biggest offensive undertaken by US-led forces in the nine-year war involves 15,000 troops. It is also the first big test for US President Barack Obama's new "surge" strategy for Afghanistan.

A fresh dispatch from the imperial satrapy of Bactria brings word that the Pentagon has ended the eyeblink-brief "suspension" of one of its super-duper missile systems following the "unfortunate" slaughter of 12 civilians, including five children, in the opening hours of the all-out media blitz -- sorry, the "largest military operation of the Afghan war" -- now being inflicted on the city of Marja.

Some Taliban leaders are initiating third-party talks that could lay the groundwork for progress between the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban insurgents. In the video below, Charles Sennott of international news site GlobalPost.com reports on how moderate Taliban leaders are engaged in shuttle negotiations, and have been in contact with Mullah Mohammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban.

The Afghan authorities confirmed on Tuesday reports that the Taliban’s second-in-command, Mullah Baradar, has been arrested in Pakistan. But while the West considers the capture of such a ‘big fish’ a strategic victory, our correspondent points out that he was also the key to a possible diplomatic solution to the conflict.

The Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was captured near Pakistan’s biggest city of Karachi in what may be the most significant blow to the eight-year insurgency.

US forces continue to press forward in the Marjah region of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, put are said to be struggling mightily with home-made bombs and sniper fire, and were able to advance only 500 yards yesterday.