Afghan civilians are being killed all the time by Nato; it only gets reported when they kill a lot at once, and even then it doesn’t exactly hit the front pages. In the latest incident 21 people have been wiped out from the air – families fleeing the NATO destruction of their homes
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61L1A920100222
Those who have just heard Murder in Samarkand will be sickened to hear that the United States is yet again being complicit with the Uzbeks in faking evidence of al-Qaeda presence in Uzbekistan to justofy the US/Uzbek alliance:
Al Qaeda aims to infiltrate Central Asia to train militants and turn the ex-Soviet region into a zone of unrest, a U.S. envoy said on Saturday.
…In Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous and ethnically diverse nation, President Islam Karimov told Holbrooke he was eager to work closer with the United States over Afghanistan.
“The leader of our nation … expressed Uzbekistan’s firm determination to further develop U.S.-Uzbek relations in a constructive way in light of efforts to bring lasting peace and stability to Afghanistan,” the official UzA news agency said.
Relations between Uzbekistan, long under fire over human rights violations, and the United States have improved in recent years as Washington has shifted focus more to security issues in its contacts with Tashkent, diplomats say.
Uzbekistan is now part of the new NATO supply route and Western nations rarely criticise its rights record. Last year the European Union angered international human rights groups by lifting sanctions it imposed on Uzbekistan after a violent crackdown by Uzbek troops on protesters in 2005.
The “violent crackdown” was the murder of at least 700 demonstrators in Andijan. There is no evidence of IMU fighters returning to Uzbekistan, but doubtless we will soon see another spate of flase flag “Bombings” like the ones I investigated in detail on the spot as British Ambassador and outline in Murder in Samarkand.
Hat tip to Mary