Thread: More friendly fire

^ I've got friends similar to yours. They're everywhere.

Originally Posted by astasinim

He said the general had told him US forces were deeply dismayed at the outcome

Not as dismayed as she was...bloody dangerous thing's grenades especially in the hands of any Yank!

that's what happens when you let dumb Americans conducting wars,

the Brits have all themselves to blame for being so stupid and believing the American were anything better than brainless hot heads

Originally Posted by The Bold Rodney

Originally Posted by astasinim

He said the general had told him US forces were deeply dismayed at the outcome

Not as dismayed as she was...bloody dangerous thing's grenades especially in the hands of any Yank!

The best and the brightest are not exactly lining up at the military recruiters these days. They are pretty much the employer of last resort.

Another self righteous douchebag who was going to teach the brown people how to live, sadly there are millions more like her chomping at the bit.

Originally Posted by dirtydog

I think a friend of mine

i too am shocked...you have friends?

Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs

Another self righteous douchebag who was going to teach the brown people how to live, sadly there are millions more like her chomping at the bit.

Mr Gribbs , I sympathise with you to some degree but it's time to give it a rest and change horses, you've flogged that one to death.

Originally Posted by Thaiguy

Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs

Another self righteous douchebag who was going to teach the brown people how to live, sadly there are millions more like her chomping at the bit.

Mr Gribbs , I sympathise with you to some degree but it's time to give it a rest and change horses, you've flogged that one to death.

It is true, and people need it rubbed in their faces. Stupidity should always be exposed. When a women forgoes the opportunity of having her own family or changing things in her own country to go to another country/culture is beyond stupid. She is a dupe, she probably thought she was cool and worldly to her wine sipping friends as she chatted about the power of Afghanistani women. She was raised in an enviorment where she was taught egalitarianism, while the people she was "helping" were taught the virtues of family and tribe above all. She died because liberalism is stupid, she brought a knife to a gun fight.

^ I have to concur with Mr Gibbs. Why the fcuk didn't she just stay at home and make life better in her home country. It might not have been as exciting as being in Afghanistan, but at least she'd be alive.

I dunno what motivates these people to feel the need to go 'help' shit people in shit countries.
The road to hell is paved with the good intentions of daft liberals.

Another self righteous douchebag who was going to teach the brown people how to live, sadly there are millions more like her chomping at the bit.

Ironic how some young bird shows more balls than every single one of the people so gleefully sneering at her.

There might be a fine line between courage and stupidity, but there's no hiding the cowering, simpering keyboard warriors that come out from under their rocks to post comments like this, before slithering back under them, presumably with a stupid, smug grin on their faces.

Ms Norgrove had been based in Jalalabad where she supervised US-funded reconstruction programmes in the eastern region of Afghanistan.

Frankly, quite why anyone would be so stupid as to place themselves voluntarily in such a dangerous place beats me. I imagine it must be some sort of arrogance, a conceit immunising the selfless from the consequences of their actions - " I'll be Ok because I'm such a nice person doing such nice things nobody could possibly want to hurt me " sort of thinking.

you dont half spout some stupid shit sometimes. but at least mr gribbs agrees with you.



As the death of Linda Norgrove, a British aid worker in Afghanistan, is investigated, what drives women to risk their lives in war zones, asks Geraldine Bedell



by Geraldine Bedell

Published: 7:00AM BST 13 Oct 2010


Linda Norgrove on a trek in the Wakhan Corridor, in Badakhshan, North Eastern Afghanistan


How would you feel if your daughter came home and said she wanted to be an aid worker in some remote and dangerous part of the world? Thrilled, because there couldn’t be anything more worthwhile? Or horrified by the danger, and perplexed and troubled by her motives?


What makes a young woman want to move from a remote Scottish island 4,000 miles across the globe to the wide plains and treacherous mountains of Afghanistan?

Linda Norgrove’s tragic death reminds us that development workers in war zones are at risk of their lives on a daily basis. When they succeed in their work, as Norgrove did in encouraging farmers to grow crops other than opium poppies, they assuage our collective conscience. We’re grateful to them for doing what we aren’t prepared to do: leaving our homes in Britain and living in difficult places to make the world a little less bad.

When things go wrong, it’s difficult to understand what could have taken a brilliant young woman to such a place.
We are discomfited by what aid workers have been asked to do on our behalf and by an uneasy sense of the parallels with missionaries, and between modern 'improvements’ to the third world and colonialism.


We are additionally troubled because we know that a young western woman is a controversial figure in Afghanistan, confronting local people not only with her race and politics, but also with her gender and sexuality. Are we sure we have the right to barge into someone else’s culture with our western notions of right and wrong, good and bad, insisting we can help?

Yet if, for us, it is a fundamental truth that men and women were created free and equal, why shouldn’t a 36 year-old woman be a regional director of reconstruction in Afghanistan? Especially if she happens to be highly qualified for the job.

It’s not actually that difficult to see how Linda Norgrove ended up in Kunar Province. Her parents took her on five-week trips to India every second year when she and her sister were small; the family raised money for Water Aid and organised beach clean-ups.

In 1994, Linda cycled more than 4,000 miles across the United States and, later, she cycled for three and a half months through China, and from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu in Nepal. She had a First in environmental sciences from Aberdeen University, a distinction in her Masters’ degree from London University, and a PhD in land management in Uganda.

Having worked for the United Nations in Peru, she went to Afghanistan and Laos and, during the latter job, took her holiday back in Afghanistan. She spoke fluent Spanish and had taught herself Dari to speak to the Afghans with whom she worked.

You could hardly construct a better background and CV for someone engaged in reconstruction; and yet a mystery remains: what on earth were the emotions and moral imperatives that made her want to take on such risky work?

Sharon Truelove, a British Red Cross worker who is based in Britain but on call for disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake, describes her work as 'a calling’.

You would need a calling to go to Afghanistan; Linda Norgrove is not the first British woman to have been killed there this year. Dr Karen Woo was shot in an ambush by the Taliban, after delivering aid in a remote area of the northeast in August. Increasingly, development workers are not merely being caught in crossfire; they are seen as targets in their own right, and soft ones at that. Humanitarian aid workers worldwide are four times more likely to be killed now than they were in the 1990s.

Laying claim to a calling can, however, mask the mix of motives that comes with pretty much any career choice. It can also be a bit misleading, because it sounds religious and, in contrast to nineteenth-century missionaries who were waving the flag for Christian optimism, present-day versions are more likely to be promoting human rights. (That said, the Taliban justified its shooting of Dr Woo by saying that the International Assistance Mission with which she was working was proselytising for Christianity.)

In perhaps the best examination of what makes a female aid worker, Emma’s War, the journalist Deborah Scroggins sets out to dissect this mix of motives. The subject of her book, Emma McCune, went to Sudan with Street Kids International, where she set up schools and ended up marrying one of the Southern guerrilla leaders before dying in a car crash at the age of 29. In Scroggins’ book, later made into a film, Emma was idealistic, adventurous and unskilled, part of a cadre of aid workers who were hired less for their familiarity with Sudan and its complex politics than with women’s rights and 'grassroots development’. Instinctively campaigning and partisan, she soon found herself taking sides.

Scroggins describes Africans’ incomprehension at why someone like Emma, or she herself, would want to be in their country when they themselves would much rather be in London. 'Aid makes itself out to be a practical enterprise,’ she writes, 'but in Africa at least, it’s romantics who do most of the work.’ Many of them, in her account, are fuelled both by a deep care for others and a lust for adrenaline.
There is a long tradition, in literature as well as in life, of westerners trying to find themselves by going to foreign countries: in Joseph Conrad, EM Forster; Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky; The English Patient; Olivia Manning’s The Levant Trilogy. Often the subtext, as in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, is that straightforward innocence and romantic simplicity can lead westerners blundering into moral quagmires.

From the safety of our comfortable homes in the west, it is easier not to think about the compromises aid workers may have to make on the ground. One recent European survey found that aid workers were the most admired of any professionals; yet, in Sudan, the refugee camps are controlled by warlords, who eat first and best. If the rest of the refugees are not to starve, the aid workers have to feed the men with guns: a painful daily dilemma of how to do least harm. Aid workers also have to recognise that they may be creating a culture of dependency, or being used politically (sent to some places, being prevented from getting to others).

So if you would be ambivalent about your daughter announcing she wanted to be an aid worker, that’s probably because we’re all rather ambivalent about aid. At one level, young women who work in development seem like something between Florence Nightingale, one of those Victorian lady travellers who supposedly controlled whole tribes with a tilt of their chins, and highly-trained technicians.

At another, we know western governments rarely go to war for reasons of realpolitik; nowadays they need a humanitarian justification for intervention. Humanitarian workers can find themselves pawns in a dangerous war – as in Afghanistan – in which they have to rely on military protection and so become, however reluctantly, perceived as part of the war effort.

Yet we don’t want to watch people starving. It is dismaying that there is suffering for lack of investment in poor countries when money is available and all that is needed is organisation and drive.

For most of us in the west, violent death, chronic hunger and denial of our rights is nearly unimaginable – and yet we feel that we are partly responsible when other people have to face these things in countries where we once ruled, or where we have 'intervened.’ We don’t want to turn our backs. The one thing we can say for sure about the workers who go and face poverty, war and distress on our behalf – whatever may inspire them – is that they are very, very brave.

telegraph uk

Originally Posted by taxexile

Frankly, quite why anyone would be so stupid as to place themselves voluntarily in such a dangerous place beats me. I imagine it must be some sort of arrogance, a conceit immunising the selfless from the consequences of their actions - " I'll be Ok because I'm such a nice person doing such nice things nobody could possibly want to hurt me " sort of thinking.

you dont half spout some stupid shit sometimes. but at least mr gribbs agrees with you.

Oh dear, Tax, I don't think you are in any fear of being described an intellectual, are you?

Regardless of this aid worker's motivation the fact remains is that she died an innocent in circumstances most with an ounce of intelligence would have recognised as not only being utterly futile but also fraught with danger. Now, to have placed oneself in such a situation out of altruism might well seem brave and laudable to some ( presumably yourself ) but to others it is merely foolish in the extreme. Obviously, I am in the latter camp but why should you take such issue with that?

Afghanistan is a geographical expression which has never enjoyed a coherent political unity. Attempts to impose one have inevitably failed but throughout its existence there has been a constant factor - poppy cultivation and opium production. No one is in any doubt that when the West exits Afghanistan the legacy ' government ' will quickly accommodate that cultivation again and it will be back to business for the tribal warlords as per usual.

Originally Posted by Bower

Fu*king tragic either way.
Another selfless aid worker meets a horrible death.
RIP Linda.

That's what the jewish owned media wants you to believe.

her 'aid' organization:

"US aid group DAI"?

"DAI acted as a conduit for U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (through the Office of Transition Initiatives) and National Endowment for Democracy (NED} funds to the Venezuelan opposition to president Hugo Chavez. Furthermore, it was instrumental along with NED affiliated organizations for financing black propaganda on Venezuelan private network TV during the general strike in 2002. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that DAI was required to keep certain personnel in Venezuela and had to consult with USAID about staff changes. Philip Agee, a former CIA officer, suggests that this is merely a cover for what passed for CIA operations in the past"

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...ternatives_Inc.

The caped crusader said:

Some of these people have a right to criticize because of their past experiences.

Yes....... and in case the thought didn't cross that elaborate mind of yours, so do I.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Yes....... and in case the thought didn't cross that elaborate mind of yours, so do I.

Nah, you lost me Harry.

Originally Posted by superman

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Yes....... and in case the thought didn't cross that elaborate mind of yours, so do I.

Nah, you lost me Harry.

Doesn't seem to be too difficult.