. I suspect that the whole campaign was || designed to
|| discipline Rahman.
Then Hakki:
>I totally agree, and thanks for the info. >Don't have time to dig up
the>sources but US military have again >performed miserably at
Shah-e-kot.>Canadian snipers got most of the kills and >_they_ were almost
wiped out by>friendly fire from a US Apache. Now US >central command is
calling in 1700
>British commandos as its own troops >have proven useless.
>Hakki
The BBC reported the UK troops with high altitude training are on the way and it showed them showing off for the camera on board a ship on the way to , well, I know it's not an Afghan port.
On CNN Int'l the US troops look like Borgs from Star Trek with a bad case of altitude sickness--and, as always, overloaded with equipment. There was an earlier post to the list in which an Afghan commander was quoted as saying something like: the US troops are worthless here; they only thing they can do is call in airstrikes. My men will handle the fighting.
Maybe a pep talk from Brother Bennett might cheer them up. I might add that, as old as their tanks were, the troops were getting their T-55s pretty far up the mountain passes--nothing you could do with a US M1A2 MBT (which the US can't even get to the theatre of operations, let alone up a mountain pass).
I caught some video of those fresh 'Afghan' troops and they looked like Tajik troops from outside Afghanistan to me.
I always wondered about the wisdom of putting the US 10th Mountain Division in low altitude Watertown, NY. It does get a lot of wintry weather (having frozen my ass off in June there ), but there is more to operating at high elevations than cold.
Charles Jannuzi