What's funny is how they tout this guy as a 20 year veteran of the Afghan Army/ Air Force. Yeah.....that makes him both TB and a Communist. People forget, or more likely they simply don't know, those a lot of the pilots and senior officers in the military, but especially the pilots, areleftovers from the old Communist gov't here. They're pilots who were sent to the USSR to learn how to fly and you don't score that gig without being a loyal Communist. Add to it and they are flying what they know: Russian aircraft. How does that look to the rank and file Afghan when an Mi-24/ 35 flies over? Yeah, we're from the gov't and we're here to help.....
This whole country is one bad choice after another. Not a radical Muslim? Yay! Oh, he traffics in narcotics. Boo! Our loyal ally....who switched sides when the money and political fortunes were right. Not a radical Muslim? Yay! Oh shit, his human rights record is appalling......
And the list goes on.
I agree with Teufel, this incident is a cultural thing. But our loyal Afghan allies? When the shooting started they all bailed out of the building, some jumping from the second floor. Meanwhile we have 9 dead Americans, 8 of whom will receive a hero's sendoff here shortly and one poor bastard who will be shipped home as freight.
Meanwhile, Karzai the Impotent, Mayor of Kabul, issues a brief statement comdemning the attack. The guy who owes his job to being more or less the last man standing who doesn't have some black mark against him. With Massoud gone (who we turned our backs to in the late 90's because the Northern Alliance bought weapons from Iran using money gained from drug trafficking) Karzai was vanilla enough (and Pashtun enough) to be "elevated to the purple" as Gibbon would say.
Madness.....