AFTER nearly a week of denials and counter accusations, an anonymous U.S. military official admitted today that their airstrikes Monday in Afghanistan killed at least 50 civilians. Despite that conclusion, local authorities still insist that as many as 140 innocent civilians were savagely bombed in their own homes as they took refuge from an unraveling battle between Taliban and Afghan/coalition forces.
Initially, the U.S. military gave their standard (infuriating) denial that civilians were killed, as they have in all of the many instances where civilians have been killed by the collateral effects of U.S. dominated raids and bombings (several deliberately targeted, only to find later that 'faulty intelligence' led them to kill the wrong people). Later, when local police and other Afghan officials protested loudly and produced bodies of the women and children who had been caught in the way of the deliberate bombing, Pentagon officials immediately strained to find some way to blame the Taliban - by the weekend settling on claiming that it was actually the Taliban who had killed the civilians in an effort to generate protests from the Afghan population.
The anatomy of this latest in a string of collateral and bad intelligence-driven killings of Afghan civilians provides a perfect view of the state of the military mission there and its predictable effects on the population, and on the level of acceptance of our presence by Afghans. The airstrikes which destroyed a community of homes was preceded by a typically fierce firefight between Afghan/coalition forces and Taliban combatants who had gotten the better of the skirmish, managed to destroy some vehicles, and had killed a number of soldiers, including one American. It's at that point that reports say that U.S. airstrikes were called in to help in the pursuit of the fighters.
According to Patrick Cockburn,
reporting from Herat for The Independent, the airstrikes were neither pinpoint nor brief:
A claim by American officials, which was repeated by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday in Kabul, that the Taliban might have killed people with grenades because they did not pay an opium tax is not supported by any eyewitnesses and is disproved by pictures of deep bomb craters, one of which is filled with water. Mr Gates expressed regret for the incident but did not go so far as to accept blame.
The US admits that it did conduct an air strike at the time and place, but it is becoming clear, going by the account of survivors, that the air raid was not a brief attack by several aircraft acting on mistaken intelligence, but a sustained bombardment in which three villages were pounded to pieces. Farouq Faizy, an Afghan radio reporter who was one of the first to reach the district of Bala Baluk, says villagers told him that bombs suddenly, "began to fall at 8pm on Monday and went on until 10pm though some believe there were still bombs falling later". A prolonged bombing attack would explain why there are so many dead, but only 14 wounded received at Farah City hospital.
After reports from the
Red Cross and others confirmed that civilians had been slaughtered in the three villages - Gerani, Gangabad and Koujaha - which sustained the brunt of the hours of bombardments, Mr. Gates (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well, in a statement with Karzai in D.C.) did indeed express 'regret' over the deaths. However, his comments implicating the Taliban suggest a new tactic from the Pentagon which would deflect from criticism and stifle the growing movement among Afganis who are insisting that the U.S. dominated forces stand down from these reckless and deadly raids and airstrikes.
"We regret any, even one, Afghan ... innocent civilian casualty. And we will make whatever amends are necessary," Gates
said in Afghanistan Thursday. "We all know that the Taliban use civilian casualties and sometimes create them to create problems for ... the United States and our coalition partners. We will have to wait and see what happened in this particular case."
His subordinates at the Pentagon didn't wait, however, to float to the press what they admitted were "loosely sourced" rumors which suggested the combatants had taken the time during the hours of bombings to stage the killings of villagers in the Taliban stronghold to make it appear as a result of the U.S. airstrikes.
Despite admitting that, "This is not looking good," (referencing the tension between the U.S. and Karzai's Afghan regime) a 'senior military official
told CNN that, the U.S. military believed the insurgents were holding people in the homes as a means of causing civilian casualties.
Tech Sergeant Chuck Marsh repeated the accusation to
VOA: "The investigation suggests that villagers had taken refuge in a number of houses in each village," he said. "Reports also indicate that Taliban fighters deliberately forced villagers into houses from which they then attacked ANSF and Coalition forces."
However, other reports show that civilians took refuge in the homes after news of the 12 hour battle between Taliban and government forces. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," the ICRC's head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker
said.
CNN also reported that 'U.S. officials' told them there is 'some information' that some civilians were beheaded by insurgents in the area during the several hours of heavy fighting." But, investigations into the killings have not supported any of the accusations that the Taliban combatants targeted members in their own villages as they fled. The investigations have, however, found many Afghans who have reported the deaths of family members and neighbors as a result of the sustained bombing numbering over 140 in total. Riots broke out Thursday after the bodies of more than a dozen of the civilians killed were brought by protesters to Farah City, with angry Afghans throwing stones at police__ who, in return, opened fire on the crowd, wounding several.
from Patrick Cockburn:
The riot started when people from three villages struck by US bombers in the early hours of Tuesday, brought 15 newly-discovered bodies in a truck to the house of the provincial governor. As the crowd pressed forward in Farah, police opened fire, wounding four protesters. Traders in the rest of Farah city, the capital of the province of the same name where the bombing took place, closed their shops, vowing they would not reopen them until there is an investigation.
A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over US operations. (Reuters also reported that Farah Province deputy governor Yunus Rasooli said residents of two villages hit this week by U.S. warplanes had produced lists with the names of 147 people killed in the attacks.)
The protests were elevated by the reaction of the Afghan government to the deadly airstrikes. INN
reportedthat Afghanistan Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, Mohammad Younus Qanoni warned the Afghan government to submit the ’legalisation plan’ of foreign military presence within a week to the parliament. Some MPs were said to suggest 'sealing off' the parliament as a protest.
Afghan President Karzai on Friday finally put some substance behind his repeated demands the U.S. end the bungling raids and check the collateral killings of his countryfolk. "We believe strongly that air strikes are not an effective way in fighting terrorism. That's not good for the US, that's not good for Afghanistan, that's not good for the conducting of the war," Mr. Karzai
told CNN in an interview.
"We demand the proper conduction of operations. We demand an end to these operations," Karzai said. "We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban or for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians," he said.
Karzai, upbraiding the entirety of tactics that the escalated NATO forces have been employing in their presumed 'defense' of Kabul, complained that, "the air strikes, especially, and sudden bursts into homes at night are not in any way good for this war."
Silly puppet . . . the U.S. military doesn't give a damn about what you want.
"If there's one lesson I draw from the past, it is the importance of our staying engaged," Defense Secretary Robert Gates
told reporters Friday at Forward Operating Base Airborne in northern Afghanistan. "And if there's a lesson for Americans and the international community, it's that we don't dare turn our backs on Afghanistan. This will work if we stay engaged."
That was basically the attitude back at the Pentagon today as U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias disputed the 140-plus that the Afghans are insisting were killed in the airstrikes. She told reporters that, "The investigators and the folks on the ground think that those numbers are extremely over-exaggerated." "We are definitely nowhere near those estimates."
The Pentagon responded with their own over-exaggeration, trotting out an 'anonymous' military official to insist the airstrikes were done in broad daylight and were actually for the Afghan's own good. "This was not a night raid, this was not a scheduled operation, we came to their assistance," the official said on condition of anonymity. "We were supporting our Afghan partners," anonymous
told AFP.
If this is the best our forces have to offer in 'defense' of the Afghan regime, it's understandable why the protected head is looking to pull the plug on the military forces' most destructive tactics. Mr. Karzai has to realize, though, that the defense of his precarious regime is not the primary mission of the U.S. dominated NATO force. America is engaged in a war on an ideology in the Middle East which the leadership at the Pentagon believes can and should be 'won' in Afghanistan.
Mr. Gates last May, cast the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same kind of 'ideological' battle that Bush had promoted in defense of his unbridled military aggression across sovereign borders:
"Afghanistan and Iraq are the most important battlefields in the fight today, Gates said, and his priority has been “getting us to a point where our strategic objectives are within reach in those two countries . . . America’s best opportunity to discredit and deflate the extremist ideology is in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates
said.
“Just as the hollowness of communism was laid bare by the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too would success in those countries strike a decisive blow against the ideological underpinnings of extremist movements,” Gates argued.
The best evidence, so far, has not pointed to any 'collapse' of the ideology of resistance to U.S. aggression and expansionism across sovereign borders. If anything, the self-perpetuating cycle of attacks and reprisals has provided text and substance for the militarized resistance and their recruiting of Afghans driven to violent expressions of self-determination and liberty. Is anyone at the White House paying attention?
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