Re: Re: Obama wants Indefinite Detention for crimes you mi...

[Guest guest]

What has been happening in Afghanistan is a failure of policy. It is complicated, but suffice it to say there are politically imposed limitations on what intelligence services can do, laziness in some of those agencies, and a lack of communication between agencies. No telling how many agencies are actually working over there, but figure between military and civilian groups, there are at least half a dozen US agencies alone.

One policy has been to pay for information. This has generated a lot of leads and tips, but reliability hasn't been that great. Now, even when no monetary gain is offered, if there is a chance to take revenge on an enemy by naming them to the authorities, some people will do so. This happened a lot under the Communist Regimes in Europe, the Nazis and even in free nations when police ask for tips regarding some crime. Maybe nothing serious happens to the victims, but the accuser still gets a measure of revenge because of the trouble and fear visited upon them.

Small surprise then that in a poor nation like Afghanistan that people are supplying bad information to get easy money. Al Quaeda is doing the same thing and it is believed that a few of the bombings of civilian targets, like weddings, have been the result of our enemies gaming the system. This would not happen if the leads were checked out, but they aren't always checked out before action is taken. So, the informant gets money, US and allied forces are put in danger, and their actions resulting from the bad tip generates hard feelings for the allies amongst the locals.

'Witch Hunt' - scary.