On Monday, September 10th, 2001, Pentagon Chief Donald Rumsfeld announced that 2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon. The oddest thing about this announcement, besides the gargantuan sum, was its timing. It was the first and last time that any significant political figure has ever chosen to announce major bad news on a Monday. Reveal a scandal on Monday, and the media will have all week to “give it legs.” Reveal it on Friday, and it will get lost over the weekend. That’s why all self-damaging revelations are aired on Fridays.
NEO – Why America Loses Wars
by Gordon Duff, VT Sr. Editor … with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
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Gordon – a tall, but skinny target in Vietnam due to the starvation-level, 10-day patrol rations
[ Editor’s Note: Gordon has set the barn on fire one more time. VT readers are quite used to his retrospectives on the US military going back to Vietnam, a story and history where the official version is the Alice in Wonderland variety. Gordon is not very popular in certain military circles for his writing material like this, but those people never challenge any of it publicly.
For those who prefer to slough this topic off via the “why beat a dead horse to death” (the Vietnam War), the answer to that is: “It is not dead and it is not over.” The corruption disease still exists, even though it has morphed into a new modern form.
I will add my little vignette of a Marine Colonel here in Atlanta who set up a 501(c)3 to send little care packages, toiletry items to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the shipping alone was way over the cost of the tooth brushes and other personal items.
Then there was the not insignificant issue that the troops already had such items, so blowing donated money to send them totally superfluous items was a waste of donated funds.
But is was not to the corrupted make work, do it just for show attitude that Gordon describes below. The pitch was that it was a way of “saying thank you”, and “supporting the troops” — the hustle being that if you did not, then you were not supporting them, a slimy way to fund raise.
There were more smiles in the beginning, than at the end
Unmentioned of course is how the US taxpayer was already supporting the troops via the $25 cost of having their laundry done by the contracting service, or that the breakfast cost was $25 per soldier every morning. The list of these astronomical logistical costs is beyond the pale, as is the hard cold fact that this was all paid for with national debt.
The attitude of many of these people is that the public exists to support the military industrial complex, and there is never “enough” that they can do. The public is constantly dunned to do more, and to never question anything, as such would be undermining the morale of the troops, and “hurting the military”.
These are the standard hustle tools of con men, and this subject gets you treated like a leper as soon as you bring it up, turning it around on the hustlers, that what they are doing is “hurting the troops”, by being mooches themselves.
At the end of this is why none of the major vet org leaderships have ever spoken out on the 911 hoax, false flag terror, or any number of totally exposed hoaxes, where the military might have been the perpetrator, or victim, or both.
One does not “serve their country” by sitting by and just watching this all happen, like it was a make-believe soap opera. It is as real as hell — including how somebody someday is going to have to pay for it all, and others have to be held accountable in order for the national torment to end… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … August 02, 2016 –
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General Herman Nickerson
America’s military isn’t just bloated, it suffers from so many diseases they are countless. At the heart of the problem is a system based on a corrupt military culture.
Many things can be blamed, certainly the Christian fundamentalism that rules the military, the hatred of education, inherent racism, political ignorance, extremism and “toadyism” are prominent.
For those who know real combat and real war, watching American units today makes our heads hurt. After Vietnam, combat veterans fled military service while the Pentagon embraced what they believed to be the new very highly paid “professional military.” The failure of Vietnam was blamed on those who fought.
The military expunged all combat veterans at the end of the war, as it was explained to me by I Corps commander, General Herman Nickerson, who indicated he was willing to make an exception for me.
Today’s military is built out of those who served in Vietnam’s luxury real eschelon retreats, fine food, air conditioning, sexual deviance and cowardice, the building blocks of what Colonel David Hackworth called “the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon.”
Background
Back during the early days of World War II, generalized corruption and typical “military culture” forced US Army Chief of Staff General Marshall to clean out the army, firing thousands of officers and promoting an obscure Lt. Colonel named Eisenhower to overall command in Europe. Today there is no General Marshall though General Dempsey began the task before being forced out along with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, himself a Vietnam combat veteran.
War today is learned at school, taught to officers by other officers who read about war in books, saw it on television or who gained minutes or hours of combat experience during short lived staged theatrical “operations” or under the auspices of the phony War on Terror. Those who have done so have been proven useless, worthless, a danger to themselves and others, delusional in thought, fabricators of events, morally flexible war criminals who have been universally unrepentant. Am I being too harsh? I don’t think so.
War today is driven by glamour, mercenaries and profit. When it isn’t torture and drone assassination, it is special operations, where highly paid units following impossibly false intelligence generally either kill civilians or freedom fighters, now often as not, on behalf of terrorist operations of al Qaeda or ISIS.
Despite trillions spent and a bloated reserve of working weapons along with many, like the F35, that are useless “black hole” money-pits, America loses wars because it has no warrior spirit. By “losing wars” I am referring to Iraq 1, the “walk away” and the entirety of the fraudulent Bush-Blair phony war on terror.
The Forgotten Lesson of Vietnam
Guess who this is, and when?
I fought in Vietnam, a war America won for a while after years of devastating casualties. Here is a key difference between Vietnam, the real war with real people, rather than the media version 50 years later, and the current debacles:
Those who went to Vietnam, initially at least, faced a draft. Those who fought in Vietnam were highly educated, compared to those in the military today. The key word here is “fought.” You see, the military trains and retains those who need institutional protections to live, who seek structure, subservience to authority and typically can’t make it in the real world.
Today they run the Pentagon, the War Colleges and service academies.
Those who came into the military as two-year draftees or as reservists with two years active duty, and I was one of those, don’t qualify for training programs and are, no matter qualifications, invariably assigned to combat roles.
For a 4 year enlistee with sub-normal intelligence, there was an equal chance of being assigned jobs of truck driver, cook, radar technician or intelligence analyst. As American humorist Jim W. Dean so often says, “You just can’t make stuff like this up.”
Moreover, with Vietnam, only those in top physical condition, acclimatized for extreme physical stress in jungle conditions, could survive in Vietnam combat. The only place this could occur was in Vietnam with a line unit, as I learned myself. Top athletic condition meant nothing in the real world of daily combat with the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army, fighters that lived on a cup of rice a day who could go days without sleep.
The 200 pound 9000 calorie a day American “Playstation army” type would drop dead rather quickly. You see, the high level of military corruption in the US kept food, supplies and even ammunition from troops, making Marine units, the “tip of the spear” in Vietnam, live off the land like the Viet Cong.
Real Leaders
A non mortal wound could be a life saver
There was a reason that worked, though Marines lost more killed and wounded in Vietnam than in World War II with casualty levels between 300-400% of levels from that war.
Here was the trick, one learned from the Wehrmacht in World War II: Because of conditioning requirements, only low level enlisted ranks, the ones with the education and high IQs, spent enough time in the field to be able to survive the heat and lack of food and water.
When an officer or senior enlisted went into the field with line personnel, they would get sick quickly. Typical operations with ranking personnel stayed close to home bases with air conditioning and good food “for the few” or quickly turned back.
When reports were written of these failed missions, however, medals were given out by the bucket, to “the few,” wild stories of heroism and fictional confrontations with an enemy busy elsewhere.
The result was a lean military of self-sufficient troops who chose their own leaders, as the Germans did, operating in small units. These units were made of seasoned veterans and replacements, always a mix, where “on the job” training assured real world skills and not the saluting and “behind kissing” of America’s service academies.
Eventually, as tens of thousands died and selling the war became impossible, America began drafting the incredibly unqualified which led to incidents like My Lai and a series of racially driven military mutinies which were never reported and are erased from the history books.
Commanding these units were officers from ROTC units from rural community colleges. The numbers relieved of command for having total meltdowns is one of the biggest secrets of the war, that and the number killed by their own men.
One more point about Vietnam, and this one is important. With educated draftees prominent in combat units, the political “bent” of these organizations wasn’t just “liberal” but often not only socialist but highly sympathetic to the enemy. Educated soldiers knew America had violated the Geneva Accords, and any idiot could see the corruption and evil of the Saigon government. The Vietnamese people hated them.
Culture of Failure
Clearing operations
Let’s move this on to today then. The military today is a trap. I was paid $200 a month in Vietnam as a Marine enlisted and later non-commissioned officer in a rifle squad that was part of a Special Landing Team, a “tip of the spear” unit. The pay was 20% of typical entry level civilian employment at the time.
Today, a non-commissioned officer serving in Afghanistan can be paid over $120,000 per year, 500% of the equivalent pay here in the US for the skill levels needed to protect narcotics production and delivery, which is the primary role America serves in Afghanistan, as pretty much everyone knows.
The military uses this high pay, considerably higher than civilian pay, to recruit and retain, but there is no kindness there. Those recruited and “trained” – and even overfed, and irradiated, who drink poised water – are experimented on with dangerous vaccines; yes there is a dark side too, as they are likely to spend years “deployed” in support of American foreign policy.
American policy is permanent war, permanent occupation in support of narcotics, human trafficking and terrorism, truth be told. Saying anything else is giving voice to lies too long exposed.
The trap is this, yes the pay is high and the chances of being killed in combat are low. The problem is this, nobody survives. Families that fall into the trap, addicted to military life and military pay, become unwilling slaves to paternalism and control and continual deployment. They exist – and by they, I mean military families – to support endless war and their own destruction. Few military families survive.
In the process, a style of what America calls “war” is embedded in the American soul, glamorous special operations for the media but never against an enemy that represents a legitimate threat against America.
The real threat is and has been what the military represents, de facto martial law for nearly two decades, total surveillance, controlled press, plunging standards of living, hopeless and idiot political theatre and a culture of unreality, even fantasy, replacing coherent thought.
In May 2011, a team of US Navy Seals allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden, then dumped a bearded body in the ocean before it could be identified. The American people were told that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been “taken out.” Revenge had been exacted; justice had been served. Right?
Wrong. The real perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are still at large. And what’s worse, they control most of the United States Federal Court system and mainstream media, and are running the campaign of presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Romney’s top foreign policy advisor is Rabbi Dov Zakheim, one of the leading suspected hands-on designers and controllers of the Israeli-instigated 9/11 false-flag operation. On May 4th, 2001, Zakheim was appointed Comptroller of the Pentagon, where he proceeded to “lose” at least 2.3 trillion dollars – a sum amounting to more than five times the Pentagon’s annual budget. (CIA whistleblower Susan Lindauer says the actual sum is 9.1 trillion dollars.)
On Monday, September 10th, 2001, Pentagon Chief Donald Rumsfeld announced that 2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon. The oddest thing about this announcement, besides the gargantuan sum, was its timing. It was the first and last time that any significant political figure has ever chosen to announce major bad news on a Monday. Reveal a scandal on Monday, and the media will have all week to “give it legs.” Reveal it on Friday, and it will get lost over the weekend. That’s why all self-damaging revelations are aired on Fridays.
Rumsfeld, unlike most of us, apparently knew in advance that a huge news story, even larger than the Pentagon losing five times its annual budget, would break on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, and make everyone forget about the missing 2.3 trillion.
So what happened to the Pentagon’s missing 2.3 trillion dollars (or 9.1 trillion dollars if you believe Susan Lindauer)? The one thing we know for sure is that it has never been found…at least not officially. Lindauer says insiders know it was embezzled by agents of Israel. Interestingly, the Comptroller of the Pentagon – the man who was running the Pentagon’s finances – was a known Israeli agent, Rabbi Dov Zakheim. (Yes, he really is a rabbi!)
Conveniently for Zakheim and Rumsfeld, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon targeted the accountants who were on the trail of the missing trillions. According to Barbara Honegger, recently-retired Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, those accountants were killed in precise, surgical bombings carried out under cover of a nonexistent “hijacked 757 crash” at the Pentagon.
Rabbi Dov Zakheim, top advisor to Romney, did not merely help embezzle trillions of dollars from US taxpayers to pay for the 9/11 operation. Before becoming Pentagon Comptroller, Zakheim ran System Planning Corporation (SPC), which developed a Flight Termination System or FTS. As article on the subject states:
“This highly sophisticated war-game technology allows the control of several ‘drones’ from a remote location, on varying frequencies, and has a range of several hundred miles. This technology can be used on many different types of aircraft, including large passenger jets.”
Zakheim’s FTS system was apparently used to remote-hijack passenger aircraft, and stage a military attack disguised as a hijacking incident, under cover of the 46 military drills happening on and around September 11th, 2001. (One of those drills, a live fly hijacked-plane-into-building exercise, apparently “went live,” while the others provided distractions and excuses.)
Zakheim’s company SPC also had detailed knowledge of the blueprints and architecture of the World Trade Center. An SPC subsidiary, Tridata Corporation, oversaw the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The knowledge thereby gained was presumably used in the controlled demolitions of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.
Rabbi Dov Zakheim is not the only 9/11 suspect associated with Romney’s presidential campaign. Another is Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas mafia kingpin, who gave 100 million dollars to Romney, thereby buying Romney’s eternal enslavement to the looney-tunes Likud faction in Israel. Adelson is reputedly linked to the same Likudnik crime mob that includes most of the key perpetrators of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, including “Lucky Larry” Silverstein, Frank Lowy, and Lewis Eisenberg – the mobsters who stepped forward to take the money-hemmoraging, asbestos-ridden Twin Towers off of New York City’s hands, and set up an extralegal demolition, “urban renewal by other means,” to be blamed on Israel’s enemies.
The mass-murderers of 9/11 are not only running Romney’s campaign, they’re also in control of the US federal courts. The latest example: Yesterday US Federal Judge George Daniels ordered Iran and other innocent parties to pay six billion dollars in damages to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Why Iran, a long-time adversary of Bin Laden and the Taliban? Because Iran is Israel’s enemy du jour, and the Likudnik 9/11 criminals own the US court system. Daniels’ ruling is only one of a long series of US Federal Court outrages in which the innocent are blamed, and the guilty rewarded, for 9/11.
The Likud crime mob that orchestrated and carried out 9/11 owns not only the Romney campaign and the US federal courts, but most of the big US and global media as well. It isn’t just that the people who own and run the media tend to be Jewish and pro-Zionist, as CNN’s Rick Sanchez observed shortly before he was fired. (The well-known Jewish journalist Philip Weiss has estimates that “more than half” of the people he worked beside, and for, in the US media are Jewish, and that most of them are consciously propagandizing for Israel in their media work.)
The problem is that only six corporations control 90% of the media in America. And whether or not those six corporations are entirely owned by the Rothschilds, the founding family and true owners of Israel, they are obviously owned and controlled by Zionists, as anyone who follows media coverage of the Middle East can see. By far the single most powerful force behind the 9/11 cover-up is the complicity of big media, which have taken every available opportunity to hide the true facts of 9/11, and trumpet the genocidal myth that Muslims were responsible.
Fortunately the mainstream media is losing influence and going broke as internet-based alternatives steal market share. As people learn the facts about 9/11 from internet-based alternative media, such as Press TV, VeteransToday.com, AmericanFreedomRadio.com, and NoLiesRadio.org, they increasingly see big media for what it is: pro-corporate, pro-Israeli propaganda.
It is not surprising that Americans’ trust in big media has reached a new low according to the latest Gallup poll. If this trend continues, a “tipping point” will eventually arrive when a sufficient number of Americans demand 9/11 justice. When that day comes, the 9/11 criminals running Romney’s campaign, the federal courts, and the mainstream media will quickly fall from their current positions of power, and find themselves twisting slowly in the breeze.
Let us hope and pray that that day arrives soon.
 
A riot policeman keeps watch during a demonstration in Kabul, on September 21, 2012. Hundreds of Afghans protested against a U.S.-made film they say insults the Prophet Mohammad. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani) #
 
16th BC French unit soldiers unload their vehicles before their return to France as part of French disengagement at Warehouse base in Kabul, on September 23, 2012. France is the fifth largest contributor to NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is due to pull out the vast majority of its 130,000 troops by the end of 2014. (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
US Army soldiers attached to the 2nd platoon, C-Coy. 1-23 Infantry based at Zangabad forward operating base in Panjwai district deploy an Anti Personnel Obstacle Breaching System (A-POBS), which are charges fired by rocket used to trigger a safe detonation of IEDs. Photo taken during a dawn operation at Naja-bien village, on September 23, 2012. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan woman carries her child through the Kati Sakhi cemetery in Kabul, on September 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic) #
 
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Afghan policemen investigate at the site of suicide attack in Kabul, on September 8, 2012. A suicide bomber detonated explosives near the heavily barricaded NATO headquarters in the Afghan capital, killing four civilians, NATO and local officials said. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani) #
 
Pigeons fly above dwellings in the hillside neighborhood of Jamal Mina and the Abdul Rahman Khan mosque in Kabul, on September 27, 2012. It is estimated that about 20 percent of the city's more less than 5 million residents live on houses built on steep hills that surround the city. Running water was recently installed on some homes in this neighborhood but open sewers run down hill. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A soldier from the 1st Platoon, 1-64 Armoured Battalion, US Army, walks through a marijuana field during a security patrol near Morghan-Kecha village in Daman district, Kandahar, on September 6, 2012 near the Kandahar Air Field. The Taliban are involved in a quarter of Afghan security personnel attacks on NATO colleagues, according to a military commander. The surge of assaults, unprecedented in modern warfare, have seen Afghan troops opening fire on their NATO colleagues more than 30 times this year, killing at least 45 foreign troops -- most of them Americans. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
U.S. Marines with the fiscal development team, C-9, Regional Command (Southwest), distribute hero payments, financial compensation given to families of fallen Afghan Local Police killed in the line of duty in Zarghun Kalay, Helmand province, on September 10, 2012. (USMC/Lance Cpl. Robert J. Reeves) #
 
An Afghan girl from the local Pashtun tribe peers from behind a mud perimeter wall to watch US Army soldiers from the 1st Platoon, Delta Coy, 1-64 ARS army at Nevay-deh village, a short distance from the Lindsey forward operating base on September 13, 2012. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
Members of 455th Expeditionary Communications Squadron prepare to connect tower sections as a civilian contractor helicopter lowers sections into place. A specialized team from several Air National Guard Engineering Installation Squadrons deployed to Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, combined their efforts to build and set up the 170-foot communications tower, greatly increasing radio communication range. (USAF/1st Lt. Bruce Champion) #
 
During a burial service for U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Thalia S. Ramirez, Brigadier Gen. Charles Flynn (left) presents the American flag that covered her casket to Ramirez's husband, U.S. Army Sgt. Jesse Belbeck at Arlington National Cemetery, on September 26, 2012 in Arlington, Virginia. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) #
 
Afghan boys play football on a hill in Kabul, on September 11, 2012. (Reuters/Mohammad Ismail) #
 
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Injured Afghan men arrive at a hospital in the back of a truck, along with the dead bodies of other victims, after a suicide attack on a funeral in Durbaba district of Jalalabad, on September 4, 2012. Afghan officials say a suicide bomber killed several civilians and wounded dozens more at a funeral for a village elder in a remote part of eastern Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul) #
 
A man smokes hashish in a backstreet of a market in Kabul, on September 23, 2012. There is a growing unease for the future of the Afghan economy, mainly supported by foreign aid, after the expected pullout of NATO troops from the country in 2014. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
French soldiers secure a perimeter at a forward observing post near the National Police Training Center (NPTC) in Wardak province, on on September 26, 2012. (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A U.S. Army soldier from C-Coy. 1st platoon, 1-23 infantry points to a monitor showing video from a remote controlled vehicle displaying an image of a pressure plate type commonly used by Taliban insurgents to trigger IED explosions. Photo taken during a patrol in the village of Gerandai in Panjway district, Kandahar Province, on September 21, 2012. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
U.S. Marines with Marine Attack Squadron (VMA) 211, Marine Aircraft Group 13, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward) relocate six AV-8B Harriers to continue conducting counter-insurgency operations, Camp Bastion, Helmand province, Afghanistan, on September 26, 2012. The six AV-8B Harriers were relocated to Camp Bastion to increase the overall readiness level after the base was attacked on September 14, 2012. (USMC/Sgt. Keonaona C. Paulo) #
 
Spc. Sarah Sutphin removes her new body armor after training on a firing range on September 18, 2012, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Female soldiers from 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division are field testing the first Army body armor designed to fit women's physiques in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan this fall. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) #
 
An Afghan rides a horse at sunset in Kabul, on September 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic) #
 
Modest buildings crowd the side of a hill overlooking Kabul on September 27, 2012. According to the World Bank more than a third of the population of Afghanistan live below the poverty line, more than half are vulnerable and at serious risk of falling into poverty. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A newborn baby girl, discovered abandoned on the road during an armored patrol of Polish sappers in southern Afghanistan, receives attention in Waghez, Afghanistan, on September 20, 2012. Named "Pola" by the troops, for Poland, the baby girl has been examined by military doctors and was to be handed over to Afghan pediatricians and authorities. (AP Photo/Marcin Gil/Poland's Defense Ministry) #
 
French soldiers sit in their vehicle as they drive to an operation in Warehouse base in Kabul, on September 24, 2012. (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan villager holds up a blood-stained hand to US military soldiers from the 3rd platoon, C-company, 1-23 infantry, before they use a ballistics kit to test for explosive residue on his hands. The man was shot because he was suspected of being an insurgent and planting a roadside bomb, in Genrandai village at Panjwai district, Kandahar, on September 24, 2012. The wounded man denied being Taliban, an association with which consequently leads to incarceration for the suspect and his family, saying he had been working at a grapevine when he was shot. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan hound stands on the roof of a house during a patrol by US Army soldiers from Delta Company at Qalacha village in Kandahar, on September 10, 2012. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A bundle of leaflets disperses in the wind after being thrown from an MV-22 Osprey aircraft by a U.S. Army member, above Gereshk, Helmand Province, on September 19, 2012. The leaflets are intended to inform Afghan farmers about Peace and National Unity Week. (USAF/Senior Master Sgt. Dennis Martin) #
 
Haley Leonard holds on to her father, SFC Kyle Leonard, after he arrived at a homecoming ceremony with his unit, the 713th Engineer Company of the Indiana Army National Guard, at the Army Aviation Support Facility in Gary, Indiana, on September 26, 2012. The 713th Engineers were returning from a deployment in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Six soldiers from the unit were killed during the deployment. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) #
 
A crowd gathers at an open air market where farmers sell their produce in Herat, on September 25, 2012. (Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
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A man raises arms, looking at a victim lying on the ground among wreckage, at the site of a suicide attack in Kabul, on September 18, 2012. A suicide bomber blew himself up alongside a minivan carrying foreigners on a major highway leading to the international airport in the Afghan capital, police said, killing at least 10 people, including nine foreigners. (Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
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An Afghan policeman takes photos as he stands over bodies at the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, on September 18, 2012. Afghan insurgent group Hezb-e-Islami claimed responsibility on Tuesday for the suicide bomb attack on a minivan carrying foreign workers that killed 12 people saying it was retaliation for a film mocking the Prophet Mohammad. Most of the foreigners killed were reportedly South Africans, employed by an aviation charter company working under contract for USAID. (Reuters/Mohammad Ismail) #
 
An Afghan boy from the Pashtun tribe watches as a joint patrol between soldiers from the 1st Platoon, 1-64 Armored Battalion of the US Army walks through Morghan-Khecha village in Daman district, Kandahar province, on September 8, 2012. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
Afghan villagers raise their weapons as they vow to defend their village against the Taliban in Achen district of Nangarhar province, on September 17, 2012. Taliban fighters are being pushed out of some areas in eastern Afghanistan by local militias defending their villages, according to local leaders. (Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
Afghan workers employed by the municipality of Kabul clean the polluted Kabul river on September 27, 2012. Hundreds of workers earn the equivalent of $100 USD for a month's worth of work cleaning trash that has been dumped on the river by its inhabitants. (Jawad Jalali/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A wounded woman rests at a hospital after NATO air strikes in Laghman province, on September 16, 2012. NATO-led air strikes in southern Laghman province on Saturday night killed eight women, according to a local official. (Reuters/Parwiz) #
 
Afghan policemen take part to an exercise under the supervision of the Eurogendfor in the National Police Training Center (NPTC) in Wardak province, on September 26, 2012. (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A blind student weaves a cleaning brush at the Kabul Blind School, on September 2, 2012. The Kabul Blind School was established in 1977 and has more than 187 students. It is the only school for the blind in Afghanistan. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani) #
 
Coalition Forces attend a memorial service in honor of Lt. Col. Christopher K. Raible at Camp Bastion, Helmand province, on September 19, 2012. Raible, commanding officer of Marine Attack Squadron (VMA) 211, Marine Aircraft Group 13, 3D Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward), was killed in action while repealing an enemy attack on Camp Bastion on September 14, 2012. (USMC/Sgt. Keonaona C. Paulo) #
 
Ahmad Tazim, who makes a living as a construction worker, stands with his two sons Naim (left), 5, and Karim, 2, in front of his home in the hillside neighborhood of Jamal Mina high above Kabul, on September 27, 2012. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A view of German outpost Observation Point North in restive Baghlan province in Northern Afghanistan, on August 22, 2012. About 600 German troops are based at OP North. (Reuters/Sabine Siebold) #
 
Afghan children run to school in a village on the road to Naghlu, Afghanistan, on September 24, 2012. (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images) #
After the end of the surge, and with France accelerating its troop withdrawal, the number of NATO forces in Afghanistan is beginning to drop. Fewer than 70,000 American troops remain in the country now, and the Afghan National Army has grown to nearly 200,000 soldiers. However, the desertion and attrition rates among Afghan soldiers is extremely high, jeopardizing the future of the current government as NATO heads toward its drawdown in 2014. The current war in Afghanistan has become a political talking point in the presidential election, yet there are hundreds of thousands for whom it is part of daily life, and has been for more than a decade. These photos show just a glimpse of that experience over the past month, part of the ongoing series here on Afghanistan.
A soldier from 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment (The Vikings) stands to attention as his regiment receives their Afghanistan Operational Service Medal at Picton Barracks in Bulford, England, on November 1, 2012. The parade was the first in a series of events marking the end of their successful six-month deployment to Afghanistan as part of Task Force Helmand. The parade comes during the same week that two more British soldiers were shot dead at a checkpoint in Afghanistan by a man wearing a local police uniform.
Low income housing spreads into the hills on the outskirts of Kabul, photographed on October 4, 2012. According to the World Bank more than a third of the population of Afghanistan lives below the poverty line, and more than half are vulnerable and at serious risk of falling into poverty. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan-led security force, supported by coalition troops, detained three suspected insurgents during an operation to arrest a Haqqani leader in Khost province. (U.S. Army/Spc. Michael G. Herrero) #
 
Illuminated buildings in Kabul, on October 6, 2012. Reports state that Kabul now has an uninterrupted power supply as it imports electricity from neighboring Tajikistan. (Jawad Jalali/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan man with his cell phone in Kabul, on October 21, 2012. Mobile phones are the primary means of communication in areas of rural Afghanistan. (Jawad Jalali/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A man rides his horse near the tomb of Nadir Khan in Kabul, on October 18, 2012. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
A U.S. military surveillance drone camera prepares to land at Combat Outpost Musa-Qal-Ah after flying in Musa Qal-Ah district in Helmand province, on November 2, 2012. (Reuters/Erik De Castro) #
 
A UH-60 Blackhawk lands during a Medevac training mission at Multinational Base Tarin Kot, Afghanistan, on October 1, 2012. (U.S. Army/Spc. Nevada Jack Smith) #
 
An Afghan man makes traditional sweets ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival, in Jalalabad province, on October 23, 2012. Muslims around the world celebrated the annual festival of Eid al-Adha or the Festival of Sacrifice, which marked the end of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca by hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. (Reuters/Parwiz) #
 
Afghan boys play on a destroyed vehicle on a hilltop in Kabul, on October 18, 2012. (Reuters/Mohammad Ismail) #
 
U.S. Army soldier SSG Norma Gonzales of 426 Civil Affairs Battalion reads a magazine next to fellow soldiers while waiting to be ferried by a helicopter to different U.S. military bases in Kandahar, on October 11, 2012. (Reuters/Erik De Castro) #
 
Soldiers of the Afghan National Army pause on October 22, 2012, in front of the Bundeswehr outpost in Hazrat-e Sultan in Samangan province. (AP Photo/Axel Heimken) #
 
A U.S. Marine Corps AH-1W Cobra attack helicopter assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 469, Marine Aircraft Group 39, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, sits at Camp Dwyer in Helmand province, on October 4, 2012. (USMC/Cpl. Gregory Moore) #
 
An Alaska Air National Guardsman embraces his son on the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson flightline after returning from Afghanistan. Thirty citizen-Airmen of the Alaska Air National Guard's 176th Wing arrived in Alaska on October 17 after deploying this May in support of combat search and rescue. (Alaska National Guard/Maj. Guy Hayes) #
 
Band-e Amir lake, on the outskirts of Bamiyan, on October 23, 2012. In a spectacular valley swept by centuries of Silk Road history, the hopes and fears of Afghanistan's only female governor capture the mood across the country as Western troops prepare to withdraw. Habiba Sarobi's hope springs from the transformation of Bamiyan province from a place of massacres and oppression of women under Taliban Islamists to one where most people live in peace and young girls flock to school. (Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan child skips rope in one of the hallways at the Balkh Orphanage on the outskirts of Mazar i Sharif, on October 7, 2012. Some 58 children, mostly boys, live here where they are fed, schooled and educated by caretakers under the direction and support of the Afghan government. According to the United Nations, violence in Afghanistan continues to inflict severe suffering for children and is undermining efforts to provide a protective and secure environment for them to thrive. A recent UN report added " Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a child". In many cases, orphans are survived by their mothers, however, in some parts of Afghanistan women are seen as incapable of independently providing for their children. (Qais Usyan/AFP/Getty Images) #
 
An Afghan instructor works with a police student shooting live ammunition at the police academy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on October 13, 2012. On October 18, 2012, President Hamid Karzai said that his military and police are prepared to take full responsibility for security if the American-led international coalition decides to speed up the handover. But international observers warn that the largely illiterate police force will disintegrate after 2014 into factional militias more loyal to local warlords than to the state. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus) #
 
This Ministry of Defence photo, made available on October 25, 2012, shows Lance Corporal Liam Tasker and his Springer spaniel mix Theo. Theo, the bomb-sniffing army dog who died in Afghanistan on the day his handler was killed, has been honored with Britain's highest award for animal bravery. Springer spaniel mix Theo was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal at a ceremony in London. (AP Photo/ MoD) #
 
Afghanistan's first female rapper, Sosan Firooz, sings in a studio in Kabul, on October 3, 2012. Firooz, 23-year-old singer is making history in her homeland where society frowns on women who take the stage. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid) #
 
Afghans offer Eid al-Adha prayers outside a mosque in the outskirt of Jalalabad, on October 26, 2012. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul) #
 
Ahmad, an Afghan man who lives in the hillside neighborhood of Jamal Mina and makes a living by making and selling wheelbarrows, watches his flock of domesticated pigeons fly at dawn in Kabul, on October 3, 2012. Ahmad, who is the sole breadwinner of the family says he owns about 20 pigeons, and that taking care of the pigeons and watching them fly is one of the few entertainments he enjoys. When talking about the uncertain future of his country when NATO troops leave Afghanistan in 2014, he says he hopes that the Taliban will not come back as that would mean a tougher existence and he would not be able to own and fly his pigeons. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/GettyImages) #
 
Claudia MacPherson and son Brayden stand at the casket of her husband, Army Ranger Sgt. Thomas R. MacPherson, as his body is brought home in what is called a Hero Mission, at the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, California, on October 25, 2012. MacPherson, who was 26, was killed October 12 during combat operations in Ghazni Province in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Nick Ut) #
 
Shepherds drive their flock of sheep near Mazar-i-Sharif, on October 26, 2012. (AP Photo/Axel Heimken) #
 
U.S. Army soldier SPC Katie Luna of 572nd Military Intelligence Company, 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment cries while paying respects during a memorial service for platoon member, late SPC Brittany Gordon at Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar province, on October 19, 2012. Gordon was killed together with another U.S. civilian and two others, after an Afghan NDS officer exploded a suicide vest he was wearing in Kandahar province, a military officer said. (Reuters/Erik De Castro) #
 
A boy walks with his donkey along a street on the outskirts of Kabul, on October 11, 2012. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani) #
 
Bodies of victims of a suicide attack lie in a courtyard of a hospital in Maymana, Faryab province, on October 26, 2012. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a mosque in northern Afghanistan on Friday, killing dozens of people and wounding scores, government and hospital officials said.(AP Photo/Talash Suroosh) #
 
U.S. soldiers rest during an operation on a cold morning near the town of Walli Was in Paktika province, on November 2, 2012. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) #
 
U.S. Army soldier 1LT Tory Hoyt (right), platoon leader of Attack Co, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, looks at his photos on the cell phone of Afghan soldier Sgt Kehan Toonyali, of Weapons Co, 3rd/205th KDK as they celebrate the Eid al-Adha festival at Combat Outpost Makuan in Kandahar province, on October 26, 2012. (Reuters/Erik De Castro) #
 
US Army soldiers attached to 2nd platoon, C troop, 1st Squadron (Airborne), 91st U.S Cavalry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, carry a wounded colleague after he was injured in an Improvised Explosive Device blast during a patrol near Baraki Barak base in Logar Province, on October 13, 2012. The soldier, 21 year-old Private Ryan Thomas from Oklahoma suffered soft tissue damage and after surgery in Afghanistan was scheduled to be evacuated to Germany (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images) #
  30 Noorullah Hamidi, who owns a women's dress shop, poses with a photograph of his brother Hafizullha, who was killed near the shop while trying to flee street fighting during the last civil war in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, October 7, 2012. Residents fear the possible start of another civil war as NATO withdrawal approaches. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic) #   31 An Afghan man and a child ride a donkey on a road leading into the small town of Baharak in the province of Badakhshan in the late afternoon of October 6, 2012. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/GettyImages) #   32 Mourners react as a hearse carrying the body of Corporal Channing Day passes the Memorial Garden in Carterton, near Brize Norton in southern England, on October 30, 2012. Day, from 3 Medical Regiment, and Corporal David O'Connor, from 40 Commando Royal Marines, were shot dead in Afghanistan on October 24 whilst on patrol in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province. (Reuters/Kieran Doherty) #   33 Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills rides in the back of a Jeep during a Vassar, Michigan, homecoming parade, on October 4, 2012. Mills is visiting his hometown for the first time since losing all four limbs while fighting in Afghanistan. Mills, his wife, Kelsey, and their 1-year-old daughter, Chloe, were the grand marshals of Vassar High School's homecoming parade. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) #   34 Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills plays with his daughter Chloe in his boyhood home in Vassar, Michigan,on October 4, 2012. Mills is visiting his hometown for the first time since losing all four limbs while fighting in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) #   35 An Afghan circus performer rides a motorcycle on a "Wall of Death" on the third day of Eid al-Adha in Jalalabad, on October 28, 2012. (Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images) #   36 U.S. Army soldier PFC Daniel Wachira, of HHC-Mortars, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, eats local Afghan bread as he takes a break from packing at Combat Outpost Nagahan in Arghandab Valley in Kandahar province, on October 24, 2012. The U.S. military is closing down Combat Outpost Nagahan as part of a reduction in their bases in the Arghandab Valley in Kandahar province, a military officer said. (Reuters/Erik De Castro) #   37 A police officer undergoes training by the European Union's police mission in Afghanistan at the Kabul college for crime scene analysis at the Central Training Center in Kabul, on October 2, 2012. More than 800 students have passed through Kabul's school for detectives as Afghanistan's Western allies prepare to hand over full responsibility for security to the Afghan military and police by a 2014 withdrawal date. (Reuters/Mohammad Ismail) #   38 U.S. soldiers of B Troop, 1st squadron of 4th US Cavalry Regiment, fire a 120 mm mortar shell during a mortar registration exercise at COP Sar Howza in Paktika province, on October 29, 2012. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) #   39 Afghan National Police officers line up with tea cups before breakfast at the Police Academy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on October 9, 2012. NATO defense leaders gathering in Brussels Tuesday are committed to the war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and alliance officials, but there are growing signs that the Afghan political and military hostilities against the coalition are starting to wear on the coalition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus) #   40 Army Corp. Edwin Liriano kisses his wife, Lissette Liriano, of Silver Spring, Maryland, on return from a ten month deployment in Afghanistan with the D.C. Army National Guard's 273rd Military Police Company, at the National Guard Armory in Washington, on October 14, 2012. The Lirianos had been married for just two months before he was deployed. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) |
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