From today's New York Times:

Dozens of Afghan civilians were killed in American air raids in western Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday. But Afghan officials gave far higher death tolls, ranging from 100 to 130 or more.

The reports offered a grim backdrop to talks coming Wednesday afternoon in Washington between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose office called the civilian deaths “unjustifiable and unacceptable” and said a government team had been sent to investigate. If the deaths are confirmed to have been from American bombing raid, this would be the largest case of civilian death in Afghanistan since Mr. Obama took office.

The continuing toll in civilian casualties has been a principal factor in turning many Afghans against the war to defeat the Taliban.

The governor of Farah Province, where the strikes occurred overnight Monday, told the national Parliament in a phone call played on a loudspeaker that about 100 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi.

Mr. Farahi said that there might be even more deaths. He said he gathered accounts from villagers, tribal elders and officials and calculated that 130 people, including many women and children, had been killed.

On Tuesday, enraged villagers took between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show them to officials. Villagers’ accounts then put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said.

For some reason, Stalin and the White Sea Canal came to mind when I read this article. OK, OK, that's a little out there, but, just as Stalin worked thousands to death in his effort to construct socialism in one country, Obama appears equally willing to kill Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis in order to construct a new progressive order in America.

Oops! I forgot about the bailout. I'm getting older, you know, and sometimes I space out on these things, and accidentally incorporate the liberal orthodoxy into my analysis. It would be more accurate to say that Obama is, if anything, intensifying his effort to achieve his maximalist objectives of exploiting the recession to reconfigure the global economy even more to the advantage of finance capital, while extending the US military to the limit in order to establish hegemony over Central Asia. These are the defining characteristics of the Obama presidency, and, to quote Tariq Ali, it can only end badly.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama