KAJAKI, Afghanistan – A United States military commander in Afghanistan said yesterday that three British soldiers killed by “a friendly airstrike” on Thursday would still be alive today if “somebody hadn’t been talking on a cell phone when he shouldn’t have been.”
According to Lieutenant General Rip Redstone, “A combat patrol is no place to be calling home. When you’re out on patrol, you check your cell phone at the door.”
The British soldiers, members of the Royal Anglian Regiment, were on patrol in Helmand province when their unit was bombed by two U.S. F-15 fighter jets. Lieutenant General Redstone explained that many British troops in the field regularly call home for football scores, and one of those calls is thought to have triggered the United States attack.
“The Taliban have access to hi-tech equipment that enables them to monitor cell phone conversations and to follow troop movements,” said Lieutenant General Redstone. “Sometimes the Taliban interrupt conversations and taunt the persons back in the U.K., pretending to be holding their loved ones captive.
“Apparently members of our cell-phone counterintelligence unit intercepted one of these conversations and—thinking there was a code-red hostage crises, as any sensible person would—dispatched fighter jets to bomb the Taliban position in accordance with our strict no-negotiation-with-terrorists policy. Then, because of equipment malfunction, the jets must have mistaken the British troops for the Taliban, and that’s how these unfortunate but nevertheless preventable deaths, which you can’t really blame on the United States, occurred.”
A member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, who spoke on condition of anonymity, called Lieutenant General Redstone’s comments puzzling but heartless.
“Granted, we are dealing with an enemy with a thirteenth-century mindset and twenty-first-century technology,” he said, “but that doesn’t excuse a blame-the-messenger mentality.”
According to the unnamed source, the Taliban have stepped up their use of cell phones to disrupt the war effort.
“At first they used the U.K. phone numbers they had obtained to make prank calls telling housewives they had won free vacations in Kabul, silly stuff like that. Lately, however, the Taliban have been forwarding calls to suicide hotlines and engaging in vicious psychological warfare.”
In related news, the three British soldiers killed on Thursday are expected to be named today. According to British military custom, soldiers are not given names while they are living “so they won’t get too attached to one another.”
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