The Donkey Had It Coming

I had promised a couple of weeks ago to write about a situation which shows how ISAF is pretty much beating itself here in Afghanistan. Well I got busy with work and approving people to get whacked by hellfires as well as a couple of other projects so I didn't have much time to write a post. I'm still pretty busy but screw it, I'll take some time to blog...and this is why we'll lose the war. This and Facebook.

Anyway, a few weeks back the SOF guys (special forces) were tracking an individual moving rockets and other bad stuff through the mountains on his donkey. Because this indivdual wasn't on our "kill list" they had to do up a packet real quick like and submit him to get on the list. It should be a quick process, but on this day it wasn't because the Regional Command (RC...think division headquarters) had some issues with the target and dragged their feet on it.

We had learned about the target and the situation early in the day and my first comment about the whole thing was, "why not just shoot the donkey?"

Shooting the donkey would probably start a blood feud with the donkey's relatives though...

 

There is nothing saying we can't fire a hellfire at a donkey loaded with weapons. If the guy leading the donkey accidently gets killed, well he shouldn't have been near a donkey loaded with weapons. Even the lawyers agreed with me.

It took several hours for the RC to finally give concurrence to go after the target but by that time the target was no longer targetable and the donkey had run off. I'm not going to say that by removing this individual (or his donkey) from the battlefield would win the war or anything, but at the very least removing the rockets would prevent some future attack that would be rather annoying for somebody in the near future. We're so hung up on legalities and fear of doing something wrong that we're tying our own hands behind our back.

Of course now PETA is going to see this and start some stupid protest campain.