Inglourious Indeed

Conditions: Tense.


Still Making The Same Mistakes.

So guess what happened in a small Afghani village once NATO forces located two fuel tankers there that had just been hijacked by the Taliban? If you guessed something sensible like local law enforcement being contacted to watch the truck and identify the hijackers, you'd be wrong. Instead, the exact opposite happened.

The hijacking, on Thursday night, was reported to the German Nato soldiers garrisoned nearby, who spotted the lorries this morning. At some point the German commander called in an air strike to deal with the problem. Estimates differ as to how many people were killed in the fireball, but they range from a few score to more than a hundred.
[...]

Nato's International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) initially discounted reports that civilians were among the dead. "After assessing that only insurgents were in the area, the local Isaf commander ordered an air strike, which destroyed the fuel trucks, and a large number of insurgents were reportedly killed and injured," the first Isaf statement said.

That line was amended when the badly burned survivors started turning up at the local hospital.

Brigadier General Eric Tremblay told Reuters news agency: "It would appear that many civilian casualties are being evacuated and treated in the local hospitals. There is perhaps a direct link with the incident that has occurred around the two fuel trucks."

An investigation was launched into the incident which will focus on the decision by the German commander to call in the air strike. It happened in the same week the American commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal delivered a strategic assessment on the state of the war to Rasmussen and to Washington. It is known that one of its main thrusts was a change of emphasis from killing the Taliban to protecting civilians. Nato officers have been told that if they have Taliban fighters in their sights but there is a risk of civilian casualties they are to hold fire.

Now, what we have here is, failure to communicate. Sadly, it's all been said before. Bad calls by commanders faced with difficult situations resulting in massive and random loss of life. How can we still be doing this? And it gets worse.

The site of the incident is also likely to be a cause for concern. Until recently, Kunduz province was considered relatively tranquil. events have demonstrated there are Taliban-controlled zones on the outskirts of the main city.

Alongside a Taliban resurgence, there have also been reports of Uzbek groups operating in affiliation with al-Qaida. Security on the roads connecting Afghanistan to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is crucial to the Nato war effort after the route through the Khyber pass was crippled last year.

- guardian.co.uk/

Well, that's just great. The bad guys kill a few people and steal a truck. The good guys blow everyone up. Same shit. Different day.




Film Review: Inglourious Basterds.

Every Quentin Tarantino film lives in a special version of the world, one that's based on reality but is slightly twisted, slightly fantastical. Here we've returned to World War 2, for a glorious romp through occupied France with a tale that's only partly about a bunch of American Jewish Nazi-hunting soldiers, weaved together with a tale about a Jewish girl running a movie theater in Paris who's presented with a chance of revenge for her murdered family. It's a bit of an odd duck of a film. A western in theme and style, with a lot of subtitles, and featuring Hitler and Goebbels, it has moments of light-heartedness as well as moments of vicious brutality. It's a war film where you have a 30-minute scene in a French pub where a bunch of Nazi's sit around playing that game with the famous name on a card that you stick on your forehead, that ends in a short, brutal gunfight. Tarantino has a great focus on building characters, and an almost childish glee in tearing his worlds apart.

But violence against Nazis is kind of different than normal violence, or at least that's the idea. There's definitely a large meta subtext going on here, when you have the audience whooping it up over a massacre in a movie theater carried out by the "good guys". Having a dirty-dozen kind of scenario, headed up by Brad Pitt, hamming it up big time, who are tasked to terrorize the Germans by killing and scalping Nazis, is much more fun than it should really be. The other plot about Shoshanna, who has a chance to kill off the entire Nazi high command, has a bit more dramatic meat about it. It's also interesting to contemplate how far from reality this film strays, emphasizing just how much of a romp this is. Quentin wants this film to be a fun what-if scenario, a chance to excercise the true power of the cinema and story telling to craft a new version of history so we can just sit back and enjoy.

It's certainly been crafted well. Quentin makes a good film, there's no shaky camera or shoddy choices here, and the music is pretty great as well. Ok, some of the scenes might drag on a little, which personally I think is more a deliberate choice rather than bloat that a famous director can get away with. As characters sit around firing dialog back and forth, the undercurrent of tension and violence gets stronger and stronger. Despite it's almost cartoonish premise, the major characters are all shaded in quite well. All in all, it's a brash, bold and fun experiment in alternate history story telling. Four Scalps out of Five.



- Peace out