3 G.I.s Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a Real War?

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Thu Feb-04-10 11:09 AM
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3 G.I.s Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a Real War?

3 G.I.s Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a Real War? (Updated Once More)

Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America’s clandestine operations there would be waged solely by remote-control — with Predator and Reaper drones. “There is a red line,” said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. “And the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: No foreign troops on our soil.”

Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known “as a Taliban stronghold,” the New York Times notes. But the “Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants.”

It’s another sign that America’s once-small, once-secret war in Pakistan is growing bigger, more conventional, and busting out into the open. The U.S. Air Force now conducts flights over Pakistani soil. U.S. security contractors operate in the country. U.S. strikes are growing larger, more frequent, and more deadly; the latest attack reportedly involved 17 missiles and killed as many as 29 people. Billions of dollars in U.S. aid goes to Islamabad. And now, U.S. forces are dying in Pakistan.

Which begs the question: When are we going to start treating this conflict in Pakistan as a real war — with real oversight and real disclosure about what the hell our people are really doing there? Maybe at one point, this conflict could’ve been swept under the rug as some classified CIA op. But that was billions of dollars and hundreds of Pakistani and American lives ago.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/3-gis-killed-in-pakistan-when-do-we-start-treating-this-like-a-real-war/

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Pakistan Blast Kills U.S. Troops, Children, Say Local Officials

HAHI KOTO, Pakistan — A roadside bomb killed three U.S. soldiers and partly destroyed a girls' school in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday in an attack that drew attention to a little-publicized American military training mission in the al-Qaida and Taliban heartland.

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The blast also killed three schoolgirls and a Pakistani soldier who was traveling with the Americans. Two more U.S. soldiers were wounded, along with more than 100 other people, mostly students at the school, officials said.

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The explosion flattened much of the school, leaving books, bags and pens strewn in the rubble.

"It was a horrible situation," said Mohammad Siddiq, a 40-year-old guard at the school. "Many girls were wounded, crying for help and were trapped in the debris."

Siddiq said the death toll would have been much worse if the blast had occurred only minutes later because most of the girls were still playing in the yard and had not yet returned to classrooms, some of which collapsed.

"What was the fault of these innocent students?" said Mohammed Dawood, a resident who helped police dig the injured from the debris.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/03/pakistan-blast-kills-us-troops_n_447191.html