1.54 miles. That's the world's longest recorded sniper strike. It's the distance at which British Corporal Craig Harrison eliminated a Taliban machine gun team in Afghanistan in 2009. This is the gun he used: the L115A3 rifle.
Dubbed the Arctic Warfare Super Magnum, it uses a .338 Magnum caliber shell that combines the power and range of the traditional .50 BMG round with the maneuverability of the smaller 7.62 x 51 mm NATO cartridge. While the AWSM's rounds lack the overwhelming impact of their .50 cal brethren, they produce less recoil, report, and muzzle flash when fired (keeping the sniper better concealed) and are still strong enough to penetrate armored glass. They come in FMJ, hollow point, Armor Piercing and Armor Piercing Incendiary varieties.
The bolt-action AWSM has a 27-inch barrel constructed of a proprietary blend of stainless steel with an aluminum chassis and polymer stocksides. Its detachable steel magazine holds five rounds. The rifle is designed for accuracy up to 1,600 yards—wait, so how did Cpl Harrison eliminate the Taliban machine gun team with consecutive shots at nearly that double that distance?
As he described to the Times Online, while providing cover for providing covering fire for an Afghan national army patrol south of Musa Qala in Helmand Province, Afghanistan,
We saw two insurgents running through its [the Taliban compound's] courtyard, one in a black dishdasha, one in green...They came forward carrying a PKM machinegun, set it up and opened fire on the commander's wagon...Conditions were perfect, no wind, mild weather, clear visibility. I rested the bipod of my weapon on a compound wall and aimed for the gunner firing the machine gun.
The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright. He went straight down and didn't move...The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too.
At that distance, the rounds took nearly three seconds to hit their targets despite exiting the barrel at three times the speed of sound. The official range per GPS measurement: 2,475 meters, or roughly 27 football fields.
The AWSM has also been credited with another incredible long-distance shot as well. British Corporal Christopher Reynolds killed an Afghan warlord suspected of coordinating attacks against British and American troops at a distance of 1.15 miles (1856 meters) in 2009. It was the previous longest sniper kill in the Afghanistan conflict.
Before departing for a tour in Afghanistan, First Lieutenant Todd Weaver left a note to his 9 month year old daughter. Todd Weaver was killed on September 9, 2010 by an improvised explosive device. The letter to his daughter reads:
Dear Kiley, My Sweetie:
Although you may not remember me, I want you to know how very much your Daddy loves you. I left for Afghanistan when you were 9 months old. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. You are so very special to me sweetie – you are truly a gift from God. The best day of my life was the day you were born. Every time I saw you smile my heart would just melt. You were my sweetie – my life was not complete until you were born.
I am so sorry I will not be able to see you grow up. But remember, your Daddy is not gone. I am in heaven now smiling down on you every day. You are so very lucky to have such a wonderful Mom to take care of you. Make sure you are good for her and help her out whenever you can. Always remember to say your prayers at night and be thankful for all your many blessings. Never forget how important and special you are to so many people. We love you so very much. When you get older and start school, do your best and try to learn as much as you can about the world you live in. Always be nice and caring to others and you will discover that the world will be nice to you. But when things aren’t going your way, never forget that God knows what is best for you and everything will work out in the end.
You have such a bright and beautiful future ahead of you. Have fun. Enjoy it. And remember, your Daddy will always be proud of you and will always love you. You are and will always be my sweetie.
With very much love,
Your Daddy
It's good to see that our men and women overseas can let loose from time to time. Even if it is lip-syncing to Britney Spears. Not exactly the song you'd expect America's finest to perform, but we won't fault them. Maybe they are in the middle of "Operation Britney?" The plan is to play her music incredibly loud, in order to smoke Bin Laden out of that cave for just long enough to put one lousy bullet in that motherless bastard's head. The video is below:
QALAI BOST VILLAGE, Afghanistan -- The Obama administration is overhauling its strategy for eliminating Afghanistan's flourishing drug trade, a key source of funds for the Taliban. Its plan hinges on persuading farmers like Mohammed Walid to grow something other than poppies.
A Marine in a dried-up poppy field during a mission in Dahaneh, Helmand province, on Thursday. The U.S. has been pushing farmers to switch to other crops.
Mr. Walid's tidy fields here in southern Afghanistan once were full of poppy bulbs, the core ingredient in opium. He replaced the poppy with wheat and corn after receiving free seed from a U.S. government program, starting about two years ago. Today, he grows enough of both crops to feed his family and sell the remainder at a nearby bazaar.
"I tell my friends that I've gone into a different business," he says, looking out at his farm. "It's the same fields, but everything else has changed."
Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living.
The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.
"We're trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and poverty," says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the drive. "The idea is to make it easier for farmers to make the right choice."
Still, building a viable alternative to Afghanistan's opium economy will be challenging. Corn and wheat can be less profitable than opium. Taliban fighters, who are closely allied with the traffickers, have threatened farmers who drop poppies for other crops. When U.S. officials opened a new distribution center for the seed program last year, Taliban militants promptly rocketed it.
Afghans go to the polls on Thursday to decide if President Hamid Karzai deserves a second term. National security reporter Peter Spiegel says the election comes at a time of increasing security concerns in the troubled region.
The new U.S. push comes alongside a stepped-up military effort to crack down on Afghanistan's drug lords. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report this week disclosed that the Pentagon had begun hunting 50 drug traffickers suspected of ties to the Taliban. The military is trying to capture or kill each of the men, according to the report.
On Thursday, U.S. aircraft and missiles pounded Taliban mountainside positions around Dahaneh, in Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan's drug trade, according to the Associated Press.
Senior Obama administration officials say bluntly that earlier U.S. efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppy fields have failed. The Bush administration initially envisioned spraying herbicide on the poppies from planes or tractors, but that was vetoed by the Afghan government. Instead, Washington paid American contractors and Afghan security personnel hundreds of millions of dollars to slash and burn individual poppy fields.
The eradication effort has been widely unpopular in Afghanistan and hasn't discernibly hurt the drug industry here. Afghanistan accounted for 12% of the world's opium production in 2001, according to the United Nations. By 2008, it accounted for 93%.
Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington late last month that the U.S. "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars" on eradication. "All we did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into the hands of the Taliban."
Michèle Flournoy, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for policy, said in a recent interview that the U.S. was focusing on crop substitution as a way of taking advantage of Afghanistan's fertile soil and long history of growing fruit, wheat and other exportable crops.
U.S. officials note that a similar USAID program in eastern Nangarhar province has helped that region go poppy-free. According to U.N. figures, Nangarhar had 18,731 hectares, or about 46,000 acres, of poppy fields in 2007. In 2008, it had none.
U.S. and Afghan officials also argue that the plunging price of opium -- which has dropped from $225 per kilogram of dried opium in January 2005 to $75 per kilo in April -- means many farmers could make more money selling wheat or corn.
"The farmers don't get rich on poppy," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, in a recent interview. "If you can protect the farmer and give him the ability to get to market he's going to do fine with other crops."
It's easy for poppy farmers to earn a living: Opium traffickers show up at their farms and pay cash for entire harvests. Wheat and corn farmers have to process and store their crops, drive the harvest to the nearest market, and find their own buyers. Local corn and wheat prices have fluctuated wildly in recent months, whipsawing many farmers.
Mr. Walid says converting his fields to corn and wheat has required significant expenditures on equipment, field laborers, and fertilizer. The current price for corn is so low that he is barely covering his costs, he says.
Mr. Walid owns his own tractor, so he can ferry crops to nearby towns. But most of his neighbors have no way of bringing their wares to the markets, he says, adding "With poppy, the buyers come to you."
Mr. Donohoe of USAID sees the antidrug push in both economic and moral terms. "The narcotics industry has completely distorted the local economy," he says.
Mr. Donohoe travels around Helmand province with a notebook full of statistics detailing the potential financial benefits of converting farms to corn and wheat from poppy. At the same time, he says, his work is fueled by the knowledge that drug proceeds help fund an insurgency that is regularly killing U.S. and British soldiers stationed at his small base in nearby Lashkar Gah. "I want to see the drug trade here go down to zero," he says flatly.
Helmand long grew more wheat than any other part of Afghanistan. The widespread cultivation of poppy fields is a relatively recent innovation, and Mr. Donohoe believes the change can be reversed. "The idea that farmers here don't know how to grow wheat is absurd," he says. "They did it for decades."
Still, the extra money in this year's $300 million effort may not be enough to turn the tide in Helmand, where Afghanistan's drug trade has deep roots. In Lashkar Gah, Helmand's most populous city, many of the biggest houses belong to narco-traffickers and poppy farmers.
For many farmers, the question of what to grow comes down to cold economics. According to a recent U.N. report, the average poppy farmer in southern Afghanistan earned $6,194 in 2008. Farmers in the south who grew other crops earned just $3,382. The U.N. and U.S. estimate that $500 million of opium is grown each year in Helmand alone.
Mr. Walid supports 23 people with his agricultural earnings. Corn and wheat prices are so low he will have to plow over his fields and replace them with poppy if market conditions don't improve: "I won't have a choice," he says.
As he spoke, he took a small bag of hashish and a thin box of rolling paper out of his front pocket and began making himself a cigarette.
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After 20 years, the White House ban on images of American war dead ended last night. Ralph Begleiter, who fought to lift it, wonders if the photos will change hearts and minds. VIEW OUR GALLERY
Six years into the war in Iraq—and after nearly eight years of combat in Afghanistan—the U.S. government last night resumed allowing news photographers to take pictures and video of American casualties returning home, in flag-draped caskets, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The remains of 30-year-old Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Va., who was killed in Afghanistan, landed at Dover after dark Sunday night, just before the new media-coverage policy was scheduled to take effect. The Defense Department notified news organizations a few hours earlier that the deceased airman’s family had authorized media coverage. It was a bright moonlit night in Delaware as the flag-draped casket of Sgt. Myers was carried across the tarmac to the military mortuary at Dover. A small number of news photographers were on hand to record the event, which marked the reversal of a policy set in 1989 by then-president George H.W. Bush, who was embarrassed by pictures of dead American soldiers from Dover. There were no “live” pictures permitted at Dover last night under the new Pentagon policy; it was “live” coverage from Dover that triggered the media ban two decades ago.
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The Pentagon itself had continued to take pictures of the returning casualties until 2005, at the height of the Iraq war. They remain some of the most respectful images imaginable, of Honor Guards in dress uniform and aircraft crews escorting their fallen comrades home. They document the honorable way our government brings U.S. troops home from combat. The military had been documenting the return of casualties for several decades, even when the news media showed no interest.
But in 2005, when Defense Department lawyers realized they couldn’t keep those government images from becoming public, the military ordered an end to its own photography. More than 700 photos had been forced into public view by my Freedom of Information lawsuit together with the National Security Archive at George Washington University. To my knowledge, the media ban—combined with the halt to government photography—has forever hidden images the thousands of troops who passed through Dover on their way to burial from mid-2005 until today.
News organizations—especially television—have discovered that Americans don’t want to watch the war in progress. Newscast ratings actually decline when reports from Iraq and Afghanistan appear on television.
The Pentagon’s change in policy at least revives the means for a crucially important documentation of the cost of war. But that doesn’t mean Americans will see those photos.
In the wake of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier speech in 2003, U.S. news organizations—especially television—have discovered that Americans don’t want to watch news of the war. Newscast ratings actually decline when reports from Iraq and Afghanistan appear on television. Major newspapers still spend valiantly to support award-winning combat coverage and other international reporting, but they cringe when they observe readers casually tossing away the main news section, the local and international news sections and the business section before even leaving the newsstand. Most newspapers and broadcasters, including cable news channels, have been sharply trimming international journalism staffs, on-air minutes, or column inches.
As a result, when those hundreds of images of returning casualties became public in 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act, few news organizations published them. In at least one case, a Seattle newspaper’s decision to publish caused the photographer—a contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq—to lose her job for releasing the picture. I was bombarded with some of the basest attacks imaginable for merely seeking to bring the Pentagon’s own respectful photography to light.
After the media ban was ratcheted up in 2003, I was surprised that U.S. news organizations did not protest. When the National Security Archive and I sought release of the government’s own photographs, news organizations did not join in the effort, or seek to lift the media ban.
Why not? In 2001 and 2002, the nation’s post-9/11 “United We Stand” atmosphere discouraged news organizations even from asking tough questions about antiterrorism security issues, much less about an arcane photography ban at the military mortuary at Dover. By 2003, the media were busy suiting up for embedded war coverage in Iraq. During the 2004 election-year antimedia campaigns, news organizations declined to ask their lawyers to fight the ban on photography at Dover. In fact, it remained a surprise when CNN’s Ed Henry prompted President Obama in February to reveal that the media ban was already under review in the new administration. That review was apparently not prompted by media complaints.
Under the Obama administration’s lifting of the ban, families of returning casualties now wield a veto over whether the American people can pay respects to the troops who enlisted, served and died for their nation. I predict many families, like that of Sgt. Myers at Dover Sunday night, will want the return of their loved ones to be publicly honored for their immense sacrifice, rather than swept under a rug.
But after the novelty of photography at Dover wears off, don’t expect U.S. news media to return for pictures of the casualties from Iraq or Afghanistan on a regular basis.
But the new policy brings another important change: The Pentagon itself last night resumed its time-honored tradition of documenting the return of war casualties with compelling pictures taken by its own photographers. Those government images should be part of the public record of war.
Ralph Begleiter was CNN’s world-affairs correspondent from 1981-1999. He teaches journalism and political science at the University of Delaware.
army.mil —Williams feeds his 4-month-old daughter Alexandria with his wife Krystal Carde during a deployment ceremony Dec. 31 at Kieschnick Physical Fitness Center. Williams and about 450 Soldiers from the 180th deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan on Dec. 30 and 31.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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![[Afghanistan]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-EG174_AFDRUG_NS_20090813233656.gif)
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