MILNEWS.ca Blog

We read in the Taliban’s propaganda that it is underwhelmed with the United Nations, both for the U.N.’s latest endorsement of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan and for siding with who it considers the bad guys.

More evidence of this in Afghanistan today:

“Six foreign UN employees have been killed and nine wounded in an attack in Kabul, the deadliest on the UN in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s fall.” (BBC Online)

More on this latest “propaganda of the deed” from Agence France-Presse and the New York Times.

And a United Nations rapporteur on extrajudicial killings has the balls to say this about the United States?

First, the Government has failed to track and make public the number of civilian casualties, or the conditions under which deaths occurred. Second, the military justice system fails to provide ordinary people, including U.S. citizens and the families of Iraqi or Afghan victims, basic information on the status of investigations into civilian casualties or prosecutions resulting therefrom. Third, the government has refused to disclose the legal basis for targeted killings conducted through drone attacks on the territory of other States, or to identify any safeguards in place to reduce collateral civilian casualties and ensure that the Government has targeted the correct person.

Translation (courtesy of the Associated Press):

A U.N. human rights investigator warned the United States Tuesday that its use of unmanned warplanes to carry out targeted executions may violate international law.

>>insert eyeroll here<<

Since the Taliban likes to make it look like they have a government in place in Afghanistan**, I eagerly await the Taliban’s “legal basis” for targetted killings assassinations incidents like this one or this one, to mention only a couple.

** – Link to Voice of Jihad English-language site  – PDF of statement also at non-terrorist site here.

UPDATE (1): The Times Online (UK) reads the tea leaves this way:

The attack, which killed 12 people including six UN staff, appears to be designed to force the UN to pull out of Afghanistan altogether – just as it did from Iraq after a truck bomb at its headquarters there killed 22 people in 2003. A complete UN withdrawal from Afghanistan would almost certainly force the cancellation, or postponement, of the November 7 vote, which the UN is funding and has hundreds of staff helping to organize.