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The human cost of the war
American media, in connivance with the administration, black out the
unjustifiably huge civilian casualties in the war against Afghanistan.
MARC W. HEROLD
THE air attack on Afghanistan began at 8-57 p.m. local time on October
7. The following day, Reuters carried an interview with a 16-year-old
ice-cream vendor from Jalalabad, who said that he had lost his leg and
two fingers in a cruise missile strike on an airfield near his home.
"There was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was
in a hospital," said Assadullah, who had been taken across the border
to Peshawar in Pakistan for medical help. "I lost my leg and two
fingers. There were other people hurt. People were running all over
the place."
Multiply this scene by two or three hundred and you begin to
approximate the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. A reality that
is blithely dismissed by the Pentagon and the compliant United States'
corporate media with the statement that "the claims could not be
independently verified".
On November 24, 2001, seven weeks into the war, Los Angeles Times
reporter M.H. Paul Richter could write without shame, "...although
estimates are still largely guesses, some experts believe that more
than 1,000 Taliban and opposition troops have probably died in the
fighting, along with at least dozens of civilians".
Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands, as we shall document.
In fact, a careful analysis of published reports shows that
Afghanistan has been subjected to barbarous aerial bombardment, which
has killed an average of 60 to 65 civilians a day since October 7.
When the sun set on November 23, at least 3,006 Afghan civilians had
died in the U.S. bombing attacks.
In tabulating the totals I have relied upon Indian daily newspapers
(especially The Times of India), three Pakistani dailies, The
Singapore News, British, Canadian, and Australian (Sydney Morning
Press and Herald Sun) newspapers, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) based
in Peshawar, the Agence France Press (AFP), Pakistan News Service
(PNS), Reuters, BBC News Online, Al-Jazeera, and a variety of other
reputable sources.
Apparently, the only casualty reports considered "real" by the
mainstream U.S. press are those either issued by a Western enterprise
or organisation, or "independently verified" by Western individuals
and/or organisations. In other words, the high levels of civilian
casualties reported elsewhere (for example, reports by Robert Fisk,
Justin Huggler and Richard Lloyd Parry of The Independent and Tayseer
Allouni of Al-Jazeera) are written off as "enemy propaganda".
For a typical example of minimisation, consider "Truth and Lies About
Taliban Death Claims", published in a major British newspaper (The
Sunday Telegraph, November 4, 2001). Authors Macer Hall and David
Wastell solemnly declare that "far fewer Afghan civilians have been
killed by American bombs than is claimed by Taliban propaganda".
Citing "an intelligence report obtained by The Sunday Telegraph",
which purportedly employed data gathered by satellite and unmanned
reconnaissance aircraft, they allege that most Taliban claims are
falsehoods and propaganda. They then present a list of Taliban claims
and counter them with "the Truth", as per the intelligence report, not
their own independent research.
I give below both the Taliban claims and the "truth" as per the
intelligence report, followed by my own assessment in the last column.
Five bombing incidents that occurred during October 2001 were
examined, showing a civilian death roll of at least 239.
TO make the war on Afghanistan appear 'just', it becomes imperative to
block completely access to information on the true human costs, and
the actions of Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice speak eloquently to this effort. For
example, calling in all the major U.S. news networks to give them
their marching orders, buying up all commercial satellite imagery
available to the general public, sending Secretary of State Collin
Powell to Qatar to persuade the independent Al-Jazeera news network,
and, when that fails, targeting the Kabul office of Al-Jazeera for a
direct missile hit. For the most part, the major U.S. corporate media
appear to have obeyed the Pentagon directives and given sparse
coverage to the topic of civilian casualties.
When faced with the indisputable "fact" of a civilian hit, the Bush
team's standard response was that a nearby military facility was the
real target. In almost every case we can document, this turned out to
be a long-abandoned military facility. For instance, in the incident
where four night watchmen were killed at the offices of a United
Nations de-mining agency in Kabul, the Pentagon claimed it was near a
military radio tower. U.N. officials, however, say that the tower was
a defunct medium- and short-wave radio station, situated 900 feet (270
metres) away from the bombed building, and had not been in operation
for over a decade.
On October 19, U.S. planes circled over Tarin Kot in Uruzgan early in
the evening. They returned after everyone had gone to bed and bombed a
residential area, some three kilometers away from the nearest Taliban
base. Mud houses were flattened and families destroyed. The first
round of bombs killed 20, and as some of the villagers were pulling
their neighbours out of the rubble, more bombs fell, killing 10 more
people. One of the villagers recalled: "We pulled the baby out, the
others were buried in the rubble. Children were decapitated. There
were bodies with no legs. We could do nothing. We just fled" (Richard
Lloyd Parry, "Families Blown Apart, Infants Dying. The Terrible Truth
of This 'Just War'," The Independent, October 25, 2001).
On October 21, planes, apparently targeting a long-abandoned Taliban
military base, released their deadly cargo on the residential area of
Khair Khana, in Kabul, killing eight members of a family who had just
sat down to breakfast (Sayed Salahuddin, "Eight Die From One Family in
Kabul Raid", at XTRAMSN, October 22, 2001).
On the following day, planes dropped BLU-97 cluster bombs (made by
Aerojet/Honeywell) on the village of Shakar Qala near Herat,
completely missing the Taliban encampments located 450 to 650 metres
away and destroying or badly damaging 20 of the village's 45 houses
("Cluster Bombs Are New Danger to Mine Clearers," The Times, October
26, 2001). Fourteen people were killed immediately and a 15th died
after picking up the parachute attached to one of the 202 bomblets
dispersed by the BLU-97.
Officials of the United Nations' mine-clearing unit in the region have
noted that 10 to 30 per cent of the missiles and bombs dropped on
Afghanistan have not exploded, posing a lasting danger (Pakistan News
Service, October 20, 2001; and Amy Waldman, "Bomb Remnants Increase
War Toll," The New York Times, November 23, 2001). On November 26,
following days of heavy bombing of Shamshad village in Nangarhar
province, there were reports of up to three Afghan children being
blown up and at least seven wounded by a cluster bomb while they were
collecting firewood and scrap ("Afghan Children Killed Amassing Scrap
of American Bombs", Pakistan News Service, November 26, 2001); "One
dies, six injured as cluster bomb explodes", The Frontier Post,
November 27, 2001).
There were several instances of bombs being dropped on areas of no
military significance. On October 25, a bomb hit a fully loaded city
bus at Kabul Gate, in Kandahar, incinerating between 10 and 20
passengers (Owen Brown, "'Bus Hit' Claim as War of Words Hots Up", The
Guardian, October 26, 2001). Then, on November 18 and 19, U.S. planes
bombed the mountain village of Gluco - located on the Khyber Pass and
far away from any military facility - killing seven villagers (Phillip
Smucker, "Village of Death Casts Doubts over U.S. Intelligence", The
Telegraph, November 21, 2001). A reporter for The Telegraph, who
visited Gluco, noted: "Their wooden homes looked like piles of charred
matchsticks. Injured mules lay braying in the road along the mountain
pass that stank of sulphur and dead animals..."
Noor Mohamed, a wheat trader who travels the highway from Chaman to
Ghazni on business, recalled seeing the bombed-out, twisted, and still
smoking remains of a 15-lorry fuel convoy just north of Kandahar in
the last week of November. He said that he was sickened by the sight
of the charred remains of the drivers and all the dozens of
unfortunate souls who had bargained for a ride to Chaman (Paul Harris,
"Warlords Bring New Terror", The Observer, December 2, 2001).
Upon arriving at a refugee camp on the Pakistan border, Abdul Nabi
told the AFP on October 24 that he had seen two groups of bodies - of
13 and 15 corpses - of civilians near bombed-out trucks on the road
between Herat and Kandahar ("U.N. Says Bombs Struck Mosques, Village
as Civilian Casualties Mount", AFP in Kabul, cited in The Singapore
News, October 24, 2001). Our data revealed that this attack was
carried out on October 22, against four trucks that carried fuel oil.
The U.S. Air Force's use of weapons with enormous destructive
capability - including fuel air bombs, B-52 carpet bombs, BLU-82s, and
CBU-87 cluster bombs (shown to be so effective at killing and maiming
civilians who happen to come upon the unexploded "bomblets") - reveals
the emptiness of its claim that the U.S. has been trying to avoid
Afghan civilian casualties. "Even though civilian deaths have not been
the deliberate goal of the current bombing - as they were for the
attackers of September 11 - the end result has been a distinction
without a difference. Dead is dead, and when one's actions have
entirely foreseeable consequences, it is little more than a precious
and empty platitude to argue that those consequences were merely
accidental" (Tim Wise, "Consistently Inconsistent: Rhetoric Meets
Reality in the War on Terrorism" at ZNET, November 15, 2001).
The U.S. bombing campaign has also directly targeted certain civilian
facilities deemed hostile to its war success:
* On October 13, bombs destroyed Kabul's main telephone exchange.
(Civilian casualties unreported.)
* On October 15, bombs destroyed Kabul's power station, killing 12.
Mentioned in BBC News Online (October 23, 2001).
* In late October, U.S. warplanes bombed the electrical grid in
Kandahar, knocking out all power, but the Taliban was able to divert
some electricity to the city from a generating plant in Helmand
province, which too, was bombed later. (From "Bombing Alters Afghans'
Views of U.S.," Pakistan News Service, November 7, 2001).
* On October 31, the U.S. launched seven air strikes against
Afghanistan's largest hydroelectric power station adjacent to the huge
Kajakai dam, 90 km northwest of Kandahar, raising fears that the dam
might break (Richard L. Parry, "U.N Fears 'Disaster' Over Strikes Near
Hydro Dam," The Independent, November 8, 2001).
* On November 12, a guided bomb scored a direct hit on the Kabul
office of the Al-Jazeera news agency, which had been reporting from
Afghanistan in a manner deemed hostile by Washington (See "U.S
Targeting Journalists Not Portraying Her Viewpoint," The Frontier
Post, November 20, 2001, at: www.frontierpost.com.pk).
* On November 18, planes bombed religious schools (madrassas) in the
Khost and Shamshad areas.
Utilities, news organisations, educational institutions - all seem to
be "fair" targets in this war.
Afghan civilians who lived close to alleged military installations
will die - must die - and are part of the "collateral damage" in the
U.S. efforts to conduct military operations in the sky and on the
ground without U.S. military casualties. From the point of view of
U.S. policy-makers and their mainstream media lackeys, the "cost" of a
dead Afghan civilian is zero (as long as these civilian deaths are
hidden from the public) but the "benefits" of preserving U.S. military
lives is enormous, given the U.S. public's aversion to body bags that
return in this post-Vietnam era. The absolute need to avoid U.S.
military casualties requires flying high up in the sky, greatly
increasing the probability of killing civilians.
As John MacLachlen Gray of The Globe & Mail writes: "...Better stand
clear and fire away. Given this implicit decision, the slaughter of
innocent people, as a statistical eventuality is not an accident but a
priority - in which Afghan civilian casualties are substituted for
American military casualties" ("Working the Dark Side", October 31,
2001).
It is clear that the military strategists intentionally target
missiles and drop bombs upon heavily populated areas of Afghanistan. A
legacy of Afghanistan's 10 years of civil war in the 1980s is that
many military facilities are located in urban areas where the
Soviet-backed government had placed them for better protection from
attacks by the largely rural mujahideen. Successor Afghan governments
inherited these facilities. To suggest that the Taliban used "human
shields" is more revealing of the historical amnesia and racism of
those who make such claims, than of Taliban deeds.
Any heavy bombing of these military emplacements must necessarily
result in substantial civilian casualties, a reality exacerbated by
the admitted occasional poor targeting, human error, equipment
malfunction, and irresponsible use of outdated Soviet maps. The most
notable element here, however, is the very low value put upon Afghan
civilian lives by military planners and the political elite. Why? I
believe that race has something to do with it.
The Afghans are not "white", whereas the overwhelming majority of U.S.
pilots and elite ground troops are. This "fact" serves to amplify the
positive benefit-cost ratio of sacrificing the darker-skinned Afghans
today (like the Indochinese and Iraqis in former wars) so that "white"
American soldiers may be saved tomorrow. In other words, when the
"enemy" is non-white, the scale of violence used by the U.S.
government to achieve its state objectives at minimum cost knows no
limits.
One may point out that the mass bombing of Serbia just a couple of
years ago contradicts this view. But the Serbs, it should be noted,
were tainted (read "darkened") by their Communist past - at least, in
the views of U.S. policy-makers and the corporate media - hence were
fair game. Otherwise, there is no instance (except during Second World
War) of a foreign Caucasian state being targeted by the U.S.
government.
THE Afghan War is anything but a "just war", as James Carroll has
adroitly pointed out in an essay in The Boston Globe (November 27,
2001). First, the disproportionate nature of a response that makes an
entire other nation and people "pay" for the crimes of a few is
obvious to anyone who seeks out the real "costs" exacted upon the
people of Afghanistan. Secondly, this war does little to impede the
cycle of violence, of which the World Trade Centre (WTC) attacks are
merely one manifestation. The massive firepower unleashed by the
Americans will no doubt invite similar indiscriminate carnage in the
future. Injustices will flower. Thirdly, calling the U.S. attacks a
war, rather than a police action, without providing a justification
for war, renders the action unjust. As Carroll writes, "...the
criminals, not an impoverished nation, should be on the receiving end
of punishment."
It is simply unacceptable for civilians to be slaughtered as a
side-effect of an intentional strike against a specified target. There
is no difference between the attacks upon the WTC, whose primary goal
was the destruction of a symbol, and the U.S.-U.K. coalition's revenge
bombing of military targets in populated urban areas. Both are
criminal. Killing civilians, even if unintentional, is criminal.
Marc W. Herold is a Professor at the Departments of Economics and
Women's Studies, University of New Hampshire, Durham.
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