The Final Firewall.

Conditions: Decidedly Spring-ier.


Memo To The Americans: Please Stop Bombing Your Friends.

We've been here before. Afghani officials, including President Karzai himself, have been expressing much outrage over a bombing incident this week where American airstrikes claimed something in the region of 80 civilian deaths. We can grudgingly assume they didn't do it on purpose, but the American military certainly have taken their sweet time in either confirming the incident or expressing any kind of human emotion over it. And when you're trying to work with these people to improve safety, this kind of shit doesn't help.

The Karzai government has expressed outrage over recent airstrikes that have led to civilian deaths, as popular support for the coalition presence in Afghanistan dwindles. The tension comes at a delicate time for the American-led coalition, which is facing a resurgent Taliban with a perceived shortage of troops, leading it to rely more on air power to battle militants.
[...]

Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said civilians, including children, were brought to a provincial hospital in the town of Jalalabad. The American military is still investigating that attack; it has not acknowledged that civilians had been killed.

Mr. Hamidzada said civilian casualties had been declining over the past several months but that the recent airstrikes had reversed that trend. He said requests to American forces for greater care concerning civilian casualties had had little effect. The coalition has said it does all it can to prevent civilian deaths.

“This puts us in a very difficult position,” said a government official, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the matter. “It provides propaganda to the Taliban, and if they don’t take responsibility, it actually helps the Taliban.”

The Afghan official said the government would demand broader, strategic-level cooperation on military operations. There have also been calls among members of the Afghan Parliament and Western analysts to put Special Forces, which often call in airstrikes, under stricter constraints.

I find it interesting that the fabled special forces, long enthused over for their preciseness and, well, "specialty", are now coming across as, frankly, a bunch of oafs with clubs strapped to their fists. Not only is American prestige taken a hammering, it seems the sheen is coming off the hammer as well.

The account of Friday’s airstrike by Afghan officials conflicted with that of the United States military, which said that coalition forces had come under attack in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand District of Herat Province, and had called in an airstrike that killed 25 militants, including a Taliban leader, Mullah Sadiq, and five civilians.

After the Afghan government said Friday that more than 70 civilians had been killed, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, the commander of coalition forces, ordered an investigation into the episode, the public affairs officer, First Lt. Richard K. Ulsh, said.

“Coalition forces are aware of allegations that the engagement in the Shindand District of Herat Province Friday may have resulted in civilian casualties,” a statement issued from Bagram air base said. “All allegations of civilian casualties are taken very seriously. Coalition forces make every effort to prevent the injury or loss of innocent lives. An investigation has been directed.”

Col. Rauf Ahmadi, a spokesman for the police chief of the western region, denied that there were any Taliban in the village at the time of the strikes. “There were no Taliban,” he said by telephone. “There is no evidence to show there were Taliban there that night,” he said.

The dead included 50 children, 19 women and 26 men, Colonel Ahmadi said.

- nytimes.com/

That's not a misprint, that is a representation of enormous failure and idiocy. Fifty children killed and because of what? Bad information? Bad follow up? Bad intel? Bad decision making? How in the hell do the official military chain of command make decisions that end up with 50 dead children?

It's worth noting the U.S military dispute the figures. An official review says that only five civilians were killed. That's a hell of a difference

A U.S. military review of an airstrike last week in western Afghanistan maintains that only five civilians were killed, Pentagon officials said yesterday, a finding that starkly contradicts reports by the United Nations and Afghan officials that the civilian death toll from the bombing was at least 90.

The completed review corroborates an initial assessment by the military of the operation Friday by U.S. and Afghan forces in a village in Herat province. The review determined that 25 militants, including a Taliban commander, and five civilians had been killed, the officials said.

"We did not kill up to 90 civilians as has been alleged," one U.S. military official said. The review "comports with our operational understanding" of the events, said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

- washingtonpost.com/

So, anonymously, we know we didn't kill 90 civilians because of our operational understanding of the events. What does that mean, exactly? That because it was understood that the operation wasn't meant to kill 90 civilians, then there's no way it could have?

As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the indiscriminate use of airstrikes, including Friday's, which took place in the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province. The airstrike was carried out after Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a known Taliban commander in Herat, the U.S. military said. Hundreds of Afghans, shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street protests on Saturday in Azizabad to protest the killings, and Karzai condemned the airstrike.

The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian deaths in fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan and international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting between insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by two-thirds in the first half of this year.

Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies after the bombing.

"We put the bodies in the main mosque,'' he told the Associated Press by phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. "Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them."

Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who arrived and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.

"The people were very angry," he said. "They told the soldiers, 'We don't need your food, we don't need your clothes. We want our children. We want our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You cannot, so go away.' "

We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to fight the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban assaults, funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly sophisticated and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a rising toll on coalition troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at a faster rate in Afghanistan than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30 miles from the capital, Kabul, the French army lost 10 and had 21 wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants, aided by six suicide bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the country. A week before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and their Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited access.

- alternet.org/

Are we going to fight this war forever? Certainly both candidates for U.S President are committed to increasing troop numbers in Afghanistan should they come to office. As has been noted, this harsh mountainous country has never really been conquered by anyone. The Bush administration dodged getting bogged down in Afghanistan by bombing it from the air and equipping a mercenary army to do the mopping up. And yet even that hasn't really worked. Can't invade it. Can't bomb it. Is Afghanistan too wild to tame? And if so are the Americans smart enough to think of something else?



Do Hidden Features Technically Exist?

It's a fact that the more complex something is, the less it's understood. This topic is struggled over in any industry, including the computer software industry, where people have to figure out not only how to do complicated things, but also how to allow other people to access those things. This is best illustrated this week by the head of the British Cartographic Society, Mary Spence, who complained this week that Google Maps were concentrating on roads and ignoring other important things like old churches and historical places.

Churches, cathedrals, stately homes, battlefields, ancient woodlands, rivers, eccentric landmarks and many more features which make up the tapestry of the British landscape are not being represented in online maps, which focus on merely providing driving directions, said Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographical Society.

As a result, such monuments could fade from public consciousness, she told a session on the Future of the Map at the annual conference in London of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers.

"Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history, not to mention Britain's geography, at a stroke, by not including them on maps," she said. "We're in danger of losing what makes maps unique; giving us a feel for a place."

Ms Spence is particularly critical of the maps from the internet giant Google: she accused the company of using poor, inadequate and incorrect data.
[...]
Yesterday morning, she said, she had walked to the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington in London along Exhibition Road, home to the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum; none were shown on the Google map of the area.

There were even worse examples abroad, she said, citing as one of the worst the Google map of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, which is 40 years out of date.

"The public need to know that what they're getting on Google is not accurate and isn't up to date," Ms Spence said.

On the surface it's a valid claim. Is Google knocking important things off the map so that the most popular things, like roads and streets, are better accessible? Well, yes and no.

Ed Parsons, a Google geospatial technologist, accepted the map of the Aral Sea was inaccurate. "We put our hands up to that one," he said. However, he did not accept the company was "wiping features off the map" in Britain – they were hidden but could be accessed. It was possible, he said, to find Tewkesbury Abbey and the Battle of Tewkesbury site by searching Google Maps.

- independent.co.uk

So it's two things. Better knowledge of how the technology works reveals that the data is there, hidden away. But technically Mary still has a point. By hiding the extra features in the first place you are featuring a map devoid of certain details. The map is copied into versions so to say. And that function needs to be made clear, as Mary has demonstrated, so that a map like Google's can still be termed an actual map and not simply an overview, or a filter.



Viruses In Space.



Well, not in the traditional sense, but this week NASA admitted that laptops carried up to the International Space Station were infected with a virus.

And according to NASA, this wasn't the first infection.

"This is not the first time we have had a worm or a virus," NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries said. "It's not a frequent occurrence, but this isn't the first time."

That suggests that even in the future where space travel becomes an experience to complain about, rather than get dressed up for, computer viruses will still be tagging along uninvited.

NASA downplayed the news, calling the virus mainly a "nuisance" that was on non-critical space station laptops used for things like e-mail and nutritional experiments.

NASA and its partners in the space station are now trying to figure out how the virus made it onboard and how to prevent that in the future, according to Humphries.

- abcnews.go.com/

That doesn't really add up, you know. The virus isn't dangerous. In fact it's so non-dangerous we're releasing an official press release and conducting an investigation into how it happened. Uh, okay. Good luck with that.


- Peace out.