I noted a report on the Ares blog of Aviation Week this morning. Apparently 'a senior air force officer (non U.S.) who recently returned from Afghanistan' gave his impressions of the situation there to an AW reporter. One of his observations was:
... the Taliban are trying to not just kill NATO troops, but mutilate them, with some of the most egregious violence done to bodies or those injured still not realized in western countries.
Why am I not surprised?
Remember Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, 'The Young British Soldier'? The last verse goes:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
That poem was published in Kipling's anthology 'Barrack-Room Ballads' in 1892. Looks like not much has changed in Afghanistan during the intervening one hundred and eighteen years . . .
*Sigh*
Peter
Ya know, if we erased Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan from the map, no one would complain. Not even the remaining Paks.
ReplyDelete'Course the UN would have a crying fit. Maybe we should include them as well. Nobody'd miss them either.