Frontpage Magazine


October 9, 2012 By Daniel Greenfield
Obama’s Afghanistan Surge was coupled with tightened Rules of Engagement aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the locals.
The ROE’s restricted how soldiers could fight the Taliban and cost plenty of lives, but it appears that ISAF’s Hearts and Minds project has hit a new low.

When reading this keep in mind that half of deaths in Afghanistan under Obama were caused by IEDs.

Soldiers were ordered not to open fire on Taliban fighters planting mines in case they disturb local people, it has been claimed.
U.S. military chiefs ordered troops to exercise ‘courageous constraint’ and even warned them they could be charged with murder if they shot any Taliban without permission from above.

The claims were made by a former Royal Marine who spoke out following the inquest into the death of Sergeant Peter Rayner last week.

Father-of-one Craig Smith, 36, who quit his job with 40 Commando in January and now works for a Newcastle security firm, documented the ‘outrageous’ orders issued to troops in a diary of his six-month tour of Afghanistan’s Helmand province last May, according to the Sun.


U.S. Marines carry an Afghan man, who lost both legs minutes earlier in an IED explosion, to a waiting U.S. Army Task Force Shadow rescue helicopter, west of Lashkar Gah, in southern Afghanistan on Sunday. The anti-personnel IED, which also struck a boy, had been planted to kill or maim Marines on a foot patrol, and following the explosion, Marines nearby responded quickly and applied tourniquets to stop the man from bleeding to death. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)



His notebook cites several examples and claims troops were ordered to stand and watch when they spotted a Taliban fighter as the sound of shooting would ‘wake up and upset the locals’.

He also reveals how they were told not to shoot or use mortars for illumination when they came across Taliban soldiers in an area full of hidden explosive devices.

He told the newspaper: ‘In Kajaki I saw Taliban digging in IEDs and was denied the chance to do anything about it for fear of upsetting the locals. Permission to open fire was denied as it would alarm the population.’

The real story of the 2,000 dead in Afghanistan is that the majority of those deaths happened under Obama because his surge was linked to a complete disregard for American lives and compulsive appeasement of the locals.