US skates on thin ice in Afghanistan

Some advice for Congress: GET OUT NOW - before it's too late.

Violent anti-foreigner protests raged across the capital Monday after a U.S. military truck crashed into traffic, touching off the worst rioting since the Taliban's ouster. At least eight people died and 107 were injured before Kabul's streets calmed.

Others put the number dead at much higher.

By the end of the day at least 14 people were dead and more than 90 injured, hospital officials said. It was the bloodiest day in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

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Chanting "Death to America," rioters stoned the U.S. convoy involved in the accident then headed to the center of town, ransacking offices of international aid groups and searching for foreigners in a display of rising resentment over civilian deaths in the war against insurgents.

Gunfire, at times intense, rang out across Kabul as hundreds of young men looted shops and set fire to police cars and station houses. Some people said U.S. and Afghan troops fired on the crowds. Officials said they couldn't say whether that happened.

In other words, they did.

The U.S.-backed Afghan government decreed a nighttime curfew and the city quieted before sunset. Yousuf Stanezai, an Interior Ministry spokesman, warned that anyone found outside between 10 p.m and 4 a.m. would suffer "serious measures."

Spreading freedom and democracy, alright - at the barrel of a gun.

President Hamzid Karzai went on television Monday night to decry the outburst, branding the rioters as troublemakers who should be resisted and linking their violence to the long years of conflict that wrecked Afghanistan.

"We will recognize as the enemy of Afghanistan these people who do these things," Karzai said. "You should stand up against these agitators and not let them to destroy our country again."

Who does this joker think he's kidding?

He expects ordinary Afghanis to recognize ordinary Afghanis as the enemy of Afghanistan?

Of course, that would leave only foreigners as friends. But then technically, once every Afghani is eliminated and only foreigners remain, what's left really isn't Afghanistan - is it now?

Patience with the 23,000 U.S. soldiers and other foreign troops in Afghanistan is fraying over recent deaths of civilians, including at least 16 people killed by an airstrike targeting Taliban fighters in a village last week.

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"We don't want Americans in our country. They don't care about poor people. [NOT EVEN AMERICA'S POOR] They killed innocent people today and this is not the first time," said Abdul Shakoor, a 28-year-old who joined in the protests after Monday's traffic accident. "They do it all the time and in the end they say it was a mistake. It's not acceptable to us anymore."

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"This was a tragic incident and we deeply regret any deaths or injuries resulting from this incident," a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Thomas Collins, said in a statement.

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The rioting spread from the accident site in northern Kabul to the center of the city, where hundreds of Afghan soldiers and NATO peacekeepers in tanks deployed.

Chanting protesters marched on the presidential palace and rioters smashed police guard boxes, set fire to police cars and ransacked buildings, including the compound of the aid group CARE International.

An AP reporter saw demonstrators pull a man who appeared to be a Westerner from a civilian vehicle and beat him. The man escaped and ran to a line of police, who fired gunshots over the heads of the demonstrators.

Some protesters said they were targeting non-Afghans.

"Today's demonstration is because Americans killed innocent people. We will not stop until foreigners leave the city. We are looking for foreigners to kill," said one protester, Gulam Ghaus.

"Recent attacks on civilians in southern Afghanistan and today's firing on people in Kabul show that Americans consider the whole Afghan nation as their enemies," said Mohammed Hanif, who contacted an AP reporter in Pakistan by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

That basically echoes Karzai the Clown's statement.

Things are going to get very ugly in Afghanistan. Congress better pull our troops out before what happened to Russia, happens to US.