In 30 days, 150+ civilians killed in Af-Pak conflict

[Robb]

In 30 days, 150+ civilians killed in Af-Pak conflict



KANDAHAR -- The death of a Pakistani laborer Sunday tops off what could be the bloodiest 30 days in terms of civilian casualties in recent memory.

The attack came 12 hours after multiple suicide bombings and explosions in the city, which have left at least 27 dead and dozens of others wounded. The Pakistani nationals were hit as their vehicle drove over a bomb on a road close to Pakistan's consulate in Kandahar city.

More than 150 civilians, fully one third of them children, have died instantly or from wounds sustained in the past month by a military campaign spanning two countries. Four times as many were wounded and disfigured.

Yet outrage levels at Democratic Underground remained startlingly low when it was revealed that the 150+ civilians in question were killed by the Taliban.

Jingoistic posters were quick to pile on when NATO bombs or Afghan forces killed civilians, decrying all forms of war and declaring how awful the ISAF is. Yet three times as many civilians are killed deliberately by the Taliban right now, and nary a peep. Legitimate anti-war arguments are drowned out by the insincere anti-US ranting.

All war is bad. All deaths are lamentable. These are obvious truths that are not held to heart by many here. Leap to defend your record if you can.

14 civilians killed. No outrage. Zero replies. 8 civilians killed. No outrage. Zero replies. 12 civilians killed. No outrage (although an interesting discussion on Sharia Law). 6 civilians killed. No outrage. Two replies.

Five. Five more. 11. 53. 30.

Crickets. And these are only those that one might think DUers might be interested in. There are hundreds of smaller stories every single day, every single month. It is terrible right now. It was worse in the 1990s. And it may get better if the Taliban don't return to power. If they do, however, it absolutely will not.

The unnamed Pakistani laborer, who in passing garners nary a whisper? Turns out he has a name, and I know people in his home town.

I make noise today, for him. If you want to call that "war mongering," so be it. If my noise makes you uncomfortable, that's rather the idea.

"The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense." —Joseph Conrad

[NJmaverick]

1. Robb, considering the opposition to HCR it's clear there are many

that have little interest in saving lives. Lives are just political pawns to them. NATO accidentally kills one civilian and there all sorts of angry outrage (not to say it isn't tragic, but the anger and outrage is out of proportion). However let the Taliban deliberately murder 150 civilians and those same people remain silent indicating a disingenuous attitude toward the civilian casualties.

On a side note, I really wonder what the heck the Taliban is thinking. They are not following the tenants of insurgent warfare. The key is to bleed the other side's military dry, disrupt your enemies society and infrastructure and MOST IMPORTANTLY win the support of the people in the region they are operating in.

Just as it's true that killing terrorists and insurgents and the civilian accidents all create more enemies for the counter insurgency forces, it's also true that indiscriminate killing of civilians by insurgents will result in loss of support (that they need to operate). Piss off people by killing their families and they will turn you in a heart beat or even attack or kill you.

A good example would be the James gang after the Civil War. As long as the gang was operating in the sympathetic south they were doing great. However their undoing came when they traveled north and tried to operate in an area with a hostile civilian population.

[Forkboy]

8. "Lives are just political pawns to them."

I hope you didn't type that with a straight face.

[bigtree]

9. boy, we sure 'saved a lot of lives' in Afghanistan this month

Violence, killings, maiming increasing along with our own escalation of force . . . We're really not very good at this (if our aim is to prevent more of these resistant attacks).

I think the folks cheering this travesty on should consider that the escalation of force did NOTHING to prevent this tragedy. In fact, a convincing argument can be made that America's blundering, blustering militarism in Afghanistan and the region has 'fueled and fostered' much of the resistant violence. Do you care?

[NJmaverick]

10. Do you appreciate how many lives would be lost if the Taliban were to take control?

It's not as simple as walk away and the killing suddenly stops.

[bigtree]

11. And if Spartacus had a Piper Cub . . .

Tell us again how increasing the violence is supposed to end the violence.

[NJmaverick]

14. Just like violence against the Nazis and Imperial Japan saved millions of lives

sometimes war is the best choice

[bigtree]

15. so you think the militarized Taliban resistance is just like the Nazis and Imperial Japan?

unfrickinbelievable

[NJmaverick]

17. What's unbelievable is that you think the Taliban is benign

[Robb]

18. "Cheering" isn't accurate, although it does provoke a response.

And, if you wish accuracy, you're incorrect that escalation of force "did nothing." Despite, or perhaps even due to, dramatic escalation of force, "the number of civilians killed by pro-government forces, including U.S. airstrikes, decreased by 28% over the previous year, per the UN. This is a difficult statistic to wrap one's brain around, but it is so.

Now, if you wish to argue that the overall number of civilians killed in Afghanistan has risen, you're correct. 2009 was the most deadly for civilians -- until you look pre-2001. Our "blundering, blustering militarism" hadn't arrived yet*, and killing was amazingly more rampant. If you doubt this, http://www.rawa.org/recent4.htm">do some easy math at the RAWA archives or a more difficult search with Reuters, BBC or NYT.

1997 was particularly bloody -- and it wasn't all the Taliban shedding the blood, either. We have yet to match the numbers for many months in that year by a factor of 10.







* Or, if you're particular, had been gone since 1989.

[bigtree]

22. it was 'deadly for civilians because NATO accounted for a great deal of civilians killed

It's just sickening seeing how you twist the figures to discount those we've killed 'protecting' Afghans from themselves. Higher numbers if you refuse to accept that all the 'insurgents' and 'Taliban' reported killed were in fact combatant (as I do). This is counterproductive folly with no discernible outcome except for the protection of a corrupt regime and the repression of Afghans resisting that corrupt regime. This keeps being described as keeping the Taliban out of power, but they really have no way of regaining power, at least not through the violence you posted. But I can't see what the central government is doing for these Afghans outside of our line of offense except to impose their corrupt, U.S. military-enabled rule. The killings we're participating in are more provoking than they are defeating any insurgency. It's no secret that the bulk of the resistance fighters have gone into hiding and will continue to strike at will. These have been folks who have taken their own lives, so I don't see any influence on them at all by our own military aggression. You may well point to a scale where where we reduce some statistic, but our escalated forces are mostly aggravating and escalating the violence, both politically and materially, with little evidence of the political progress outside of feathering a corrupt regime. I don't see how you can deny that. It looks like folly to me.

[Robb]

25. I point to what statistics there are, and you guess.

On what basis, other than a hunch, do you claim the numbers are incorrect? Or that the magical militants "have gone into hiding and will continue to strike at will?" Or, frankly, that the "escalated forces are mostly aggravating and escalating the violence?"

This is what you think should be happening?? Or do you have sources on the ground or elsewhere that contradict the numbers?

[bigtree]

26. Robb, we're unnecessarily killing Afghans, calling all of them Taliban

. . . or insurgent, until it's proven otherwise. Is that a standard of proof that you would demand for your own country, for your own neighborhood? I think your disconnect from the reality of this folly is amazing. I don't know how you or anyone can accurately track the effect of our military activity to measure the political 'progress' the President indicated was his goal in all of this offensive violence from our escalated force. "Violence for violence sake" has been rejected (rhetorically) by the President as a justification. Building schools and other humanitarian assistance and aid is ancillary to the escalation of force. What's been the goal of the military has been the suppression of the militarized resistance to give the Karzai regime 'room' to extend their influence throughout Afghanistan, but it appears that all we have been able to do in spreading that central government influence is impose that U.S. military-enabled authority on resisting Afghans.

I can't accept that you are willing to push past the numbers killed unnecessarily by our opportunistic forces (certainly not defending American 'security' in any concrete manner, in my view) by pointing to a statistical decrease. It's like 'let's move on', but the folly is still in play; as evidenced by the tragic killings in the past few weeks by Afghans who deliberately took their own lives in the process.

I do remember when the Bush administration used to describe this type of resistant violence as 'progress' (showed we were getting to them, the narrative went).

[Robb]

29. Pointing out a decrease is NOT "pushing past" the problem.

I'm on record here numerous times as saying the numbers are still too high in that regard. But given the escalation of force the reduction of civilian casualties by that force is too significant to go unremarked.

Further, your claim that ISAF forces are somehow killing everyone and calling them Taliban unless challenged is wholly unsupported. You have only a gut instinct, from thousands of miles away. You want to point to the Bush administration, point to its insistence on using "gut" over fact. Not useful.

Finally, you apparently continue to buy into the fiction that the Obama administration is following the Bush lead and embracing Karzai. Very few of the political moves of the last year could reasonably be interpreted to support that idea. I recommend this editorial from the Asia Times, which makes the case far more effectively than I could that Karzai is on the ropes, and is being pushed away by this President. I maintain my belief Karzai will be "writing his book" by the end of the summer if not sooner.

[bigtree]

32. It's a weak straw

If we're not engaged against the Afghanistan Taliban with the expectation that we're defending the Karzai regime, I don't know what we're doing there. The 9-11 fugitives are in Pakistan. Our troops are fighting and dying in defense of the establishment and expansion of the Karzai regime. Fiction? Hardly.

The administration can cluck their tongues at the corruption all they want, but I heard the President define our goals there as getting Afghans to embrace the central government through a combination of the application of military force against the Taliban resistance (to NATO, who is defending the regime) and the influx of the aid and development assistance you referred to. That's SUPPORT for a regime THEY admit is corrupt. They've winked off that corruption by accepting promises of reform from the regime which haven't materialized.

Meanwhile, our military is, nonetheless, pressing forward with their campaign to IMPOSE the corrupt regime on the resisting population. Those who our military stages their offensives against (as in Marjah) are normally and routinely referred to as 'Taliban'. That just stretches credulity. We saw a population of almost 80,000 Afghans in Marjah routed from their land and homes, labeled as 'drug dealers', and set out to nowhere without any provision at all for their safety in flight or their welfare. No food, no shelter . . . then we bombed their homes and land, as sparsely developed as it was in the first place, and declared 'success' when the criminal from the criminal Karzai regime was installed in whatever building they left standing.

Those who were killed in the process of the U.S.-led takeover of Marjah were sacrificed for the IMPOSITION of the corrupt Karzai regime. There's no dodging around that. That assault was intended to represent what our forces are doing in Afghanistan and serve as a basis for the rest of the military expansion planned in the Helmand province. It's folly Robb. It's just more killing and more violence for a dubious strategy. Typical American arrogance to assume that there is some end to the killing already done that can brush it all away.

[Robb]

34. If the strategy were as you've chosen to define it, you'd be correct

...but it's not, and your belief as to what it is just isn't what's going on. I've tried to make that clear but apparently I'm failing, because you're still not seeing the broader picture: Karzai is not the endgame here, he's at best a stopgap and every signal is that he's out. And I still feel you're mischaracterizing the military strategy as well, and still without any facts to back it up. I don't think we're going to get anywhere because you don't seem to budge on your opinions when given contradicting news.

[bigtree]

35. I listened to the President

. . . and Karzai is the corruption in the government that most folks can see. The rest is ingrained throughout the Afghan government. And, in a country which is used to tribal or regional authority, the central government isn't exactly welcome.

I didn't misrepresent the operation in Marjah at all. Sorry you missed the generals asserting that Marjah would serve as a blueprint for further operations in Helmand province. The mission? Run the existing 'Taliban' authority away and replace it with representatives from the central government. All of that nation-building in support of the Karzai regime is being done behind the sacrifices and violence of our nation's defenders. Deny it all you want, but the government is corrupt all the way through. I'm sure if you admitted it you'd be hard pressed to find any reason at all for staying there.

Oh, and by the way I'm not going to grace this thread with my precious time including links and administration statements and policy declarations just to prove my points. All of the documentation and corroboration of my view is contained in complete articles I've written and graciously posted in my journal. I bother to research the facts and, interestingly enough, you haven't really provided anything which refutes my view, in my opinion.

[Robb]

36. You hear what you want to hear

...perhaps I do too. Time will of course tell.

[wtmusic]

2. We have no power over the actions of the Taliban

but we do, in theory, over NATO forces.

Taliban atrocities do not justify our own. So I'm not sure what your point is.

[Robb]

20. The likelihood of ISAF leaders perusing DU for policy ideas

is about the same as Taliban leadership doing the same thing. We are accountable to ourselves.

[asdjrocky]

3. Why are they killing each other?

Why are they angry at us? Do they hate us for our freedom?

We are a super power, the only super power, they are some guys with some homemade bombs. Our responsibility is far greater.

[Robb]

4. For once I agree with you, at least in part.

However the bombs which are not homemade, and even the parts of those which are, exist in that country because we put them there.

...What of our responsibility in that regard? The atrocities of the Taliban would never have come to pass -- how many thousands of lives ended or ruined? -- had we been responsible for our actions in the 1980s. Do we now leave them to kill, main, oppress as they did in the 1990s? Do you truly believe fewer people would die if we left immediately? Because that is not the lesson of history, I think.

[asdjrocky]

5. Obviously killing more people hasn't worked so far.

Maybe we could try listening. Maybe would could begin a wholesale change in our country's foreign policies that bring this on. More education, more aid, more understanding and less money for the mic.

All the the problems in the middle-east and beyond into that part of Asia can be directly traced back to us, or England. It's not a rubic cube of a problem, it's a fact. If we change, the situation will change. It really is that simple.

[Robb]

19. We're actually killing *fewer*

...see my above post. Aid is flowing quite freely, and hundreds of schools have reopened in the past 18 months.

[bigtree]

24. we didn't escalate this occupation to 'open schools' in Afghanistan

It's a diversion to point to the aid and humanitarian relief which barely covers the damage from the upheaval we're causing on the offensive side of our military line of defense of Kabul. It has been said repeatedly by the military and the administration that the goal is a political one. That enterprise is corrupted from the start. It appears, like in Marjah, the only way the Karzai regime can spread their influence and control is through American-led military force. That makes all of the talk of progress contradictory to the president's stated goal of establishing a government there which Afghans outside of our protected line of defense can trust enough to make it their own (on their own).

[branders seine]

6. mission being accomplished

:thumbsup:

[bigtree]

7. you're bashing us for not condemning the Taliban here? You can't be serious.

Most of the discussion of the occupation correctly centers on what OUR country and OUR military is doing in Afghanistan. Myriads of discussions here have centered on what effect or consequence our military involvement there can or should have on the outcome of the unrest and upheaval generated by our initial invasion and 9-year occupation. THAT"S the subject that we should be concerned with. What effect and consequence will our military forces have on the violence. Are they fueling it and fostering even more resistant violence? Are they escalating the violence in relation to their escalated presence? Is the availability of U.S. targets and the closeness of our military forces to the Karzai government generating that violent resistance?

The violence there is more than opportunistic. It's positively personal as most of these bombers deliberately gave up their own lives in the attacks. That would suggest something more than just some political motive like our own justifications center on in our nation-building cause.

The narrative for this U.S. aggression always suggests that the Taliban threatened the U.S. or attacked the U.S. by allowing the fugitive terror suspects 'refuge' in the huge country. But it has been my contention that if we accept the administration's contention that over 80% of the Taliban are non-combatant, then we are needlessly fostering a NEW enemy other then 'al-Qaeda' by continuing to feed a self-perpetuating cycle of attacks and reprisals.

Why would we expect Taliban who had nothing at all to do with 9-11 or any al-Qaeda to willingly relinquish their homeland to America's opportunistic advance on their homeland? Do you really expect them to buy the argument that they should be relegated to some second-class existence just because the U.S. has a grudge match going with a fugitive band of thugs next-door? Such arrogance from Americans and our vengeful occupation.

There will always be violent resistance to our violent defense of the corrupt Karzai regime. I doubt Afghanistan could produce a central government that Americans could proudly support and defend. Yet, we insist on waging violent war against what amounts to the resistance to that corrupt government and expect that we can control the blowback. How ignorant of history; recent history. How completely arrogant.

And, correctly, someone cries out for concern when Afghans in the middle of our forces and the Afghans we choose to attack get killed and maimed. WHAT THE HELL DID SUPPORTERS OF THIS TRAVESTY THINK WE WERE WARNING ABOUT WHEN THE PRESIDENT DECIDED TO ESCALATE THIS 'POLLYANDISH MISADVENTURE'?

Shocked . . . shocked, I tell ya. Who'd of thought there would be resistant violence of this magnitude?

[Ozymanithrax]

12. That anger of the Taliban should be aimed at legal military targets...

not at their own civilians citizens.

Why would we expect Taliban who had nothing at all to do with 9-11 or any al-Qaeda to willingly relinquish their homeland to America's opportunistic advance on their homeland? Do you really expect them to buy the argument that they should be relegated to some second-class existence just because the U.S. has a grudge match going with a fugitive band of thugs next-door? Such arrogance from Americans and our vengeful occupation.

Also, you are wrong about having nothing to do with any al-Qaeda, though like Iraq, they had no link to 9/11.

[bigtree]

13. I don't think the Taliban should be attacking anybody

. . . but what did supporters of this escalated occupation expect to happen? And the suggestion in the op is that we should 'express outrage'. We did express outrage. The expression of outrage is in our opposition to our own nation's militarism in Afghanistan as counter-productive and antithetical to the very justifications the President outlined in his presentation of his plan.

[Ozymanithrax]

16. I may not agree with what they think is good government...

but it is their people, and if the people of Afghanistan feel they need to fight for what they define as freedom, then they should do it. But I don't agree with the tactic of setting bombs to blow up your own citizens. I hope President Obama will really start pulling troops out when he says he will.

The U.S. should have fought the Afghan war correctly instead of using the Northern Alliance and then allowing the Pakistan secret service to help the Taliban escape, and allowing Bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. The orignial Afghan war was fought stupidly by Bush, a mistake he repeated in Iraq.

It was almost like he wanted a forever war. If the military took or killed Bin Laden at Tora Bora, there would have been no other wars.

[anigbrowl]

27. The Taliban were killing fellow Afghans long before we invaded Afghanistan

Head over to google News and click on the 'archives' link, where you can peruse stuff going back to the 1990s, or look into it at your local library. There was significant violence and repression taking place before any US troops appeared in the area. Regardless of how you feel about the war, the fact is that they have been inflicting their violent brand of fundamentalism on the Afghan people for a long time, even when the country was free.

It's not like they put their weapons in mothballs or that Afghinstan was a land of peace and freedom after the soviets withdrew. So I cannot agree with your implication that Taliban violence is solely the result of US imperialism. They're fundamentally opposed to things like education and basic civil rights for women, and apparently men who choose not to practice their ultra-strict form of Islam.

More than 12 years passed between the USSR departing Afghanistan and the US military arriving there after the events of September 11 2001. Civil war took place between different groups in Afghanistan after the Russians left, with >10,000 people killed in 1994. The Taliban basically won that war and ruled the country for about 7 years.

Please take a look at this report from 1998 about the plight of women in Afghanistan; note in particular the Taliban's own rules reprinted therein, as issued in 1997. Women are not allowed to be seen uncovered or wash clothes in public. It is illegal for anyone to do business with a woman who is not fully covered. Music, portrait pictures, and kite-flying are banned. Male shaving or trimming of beards is punishable by imprisonment. And so on. The way these rules were actually imlpmented was horrifying, to say the very least.

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents/reports/talibans-war-on-women.pdf

Remember, this is how they were behaving when they were the uncontested government and before they were hit with any sanctions. These are not the policies of a government that believes in freedom. Taliban rule was an unmitigated disaster for the people of Afghanistan. It is one thing to acknowledge that the US has repeatedly made awful policy decisions and helped to bring about this situation. It is quite another to blow off the fact that the Taliban regime was among the most oppressive in human history.

[bigtree]

28. so, we just jumped right in

. . . expecting that the Afghans we killed would cause them to reconsider killing each other. I can't believe the disconnect from the counterproductive effects of our own opportunistic militarism, shown by folks expressing support for this enterprise.

This was supposed to be about our 'national security'. It doesn't appear to have had any positive effect on all of that.

[anigbrowl]

30. No Bigtree, that is simply untrue

We largely left them alone, both through the Clinton and early parts of the Bush administration, doing little more than expressing out disapproval and hoping they would ease up a bit. The last war before 2000 that the US was involved in was in Bosnia, where we were defending the Muslim population against Serbian genocide.

We did not provoke the Taliban in any significant way, nor did we force them to support bin Laden's quasi-military ambitions, nor did we force bin Laden himself to organize attacks on September 11 that killed over 3,000 people (I do not subscribe to LIHOP or MIHOP conspiracy theories). No country in the world with the military capability to respond would accept such an attack on its territory. That is not opportunistic militarism, it is simple self-defense. To believe that any country would let such an incident go by without responding is delusional.

No, you can argue all day about the degree to which our strategy in Afghanistan has been productive or not (and I'd agree that the answer is 'not' to a large degree, though not completely). but there is simply no disputing the fact that the Taliban were operating a violent oppressive regime of their own free will before we entered into any direct conflict with them. And yes, it is appropriate to compare them iwht the Nazis or any other tyrranical government through history. Their misdeeds took place on a smaller scale, but were both systematic and directed at the entire population under their control.

I can understand things like the Taliban's hunting down and killing of communists. I don't like it, but the USSR killed a lot of Afghans during and following their invasion of that country, up to 2 million by some accounts. It's understandable hat a new government would want to get rid of anyone who had supported the soviet occupation. What is not understandable is going on to crush your own population with religious extremism that didn't even have the bad excuse of being an indigenous tradition.

[bigtree]

31. I'm referring to our present escalation

The Taliban didn't 'support' the attacks on America, as much as they provided 'refuge' to the fleeing fugitives. The bulk of those Taliban fled to Pakistan. It's just not credible to suggest that when our military forces bomb the Taliban these days in Afghanistan we are killing people who had some connection to 9-11 plane crashes. It's a sure bet that the 'Taliban' we are attacking in Afghanistan today knew nothing at all about plane crashes before 9-11.

We are mostly fighting the effects of our own presumptuous militarism. We defend the Karzai regime in the expectation that it would serve as a buffer against the 9-11 fugitives, but we are merely engaged (again) as just another military aggressor against Afghans. We are imposing this admittedly corrupt regime on segments of the Afghan population with military force. It's all wrapped up under the banner of the dubious defense of our 'national security' with the expectation that Afghans will embrace the central government we've helped erect - right after we're through demonstrating our ability (as in Marjah) to bomb their homes; raze their crops; kill their livestock; kill their relatives; and deliver a representative of the U.S.-enabled, corrupt Karzai regime (the representative, a convicted felon) to lord over the scorched remnants of whatever and whoever remains.

I'm not convinced of the superiority of our own sophisticated violence in Afghanistan. I think it's folly at best; criminality outside of our own constitution, at worst.

[anigbrowl]

33. I appreciate that and respect your view although I disagree with it

Basically, I do think we were quite justified in attacking the Taliban government back in 2001. As someone else pointed out above, Bush & Rumsfeld fucked up catastrophically by allowing bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora - and don't even get me started on Iraq, which I've never thought was justifiable war.

I share your lack of enthusiasm for the Karzai regime, although I think you oversttate the impact of continuing military action there; we are not carpet-bombing the place, and the estimated ~15-30,000 civilian casualties (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)) pales in comparison to the approx. 1 million who died under soviet occupation. Any civilian death is a tragedy, but there is a really significant qualitative difference between the way these two conflicts were fought. If the US were truly engaged in an opportunistic who-gives-a-fuck occupation of Afghanistan as you suggest, casualties would be vastly higher.

Where we fundamentally disagree is that you seem to feel we should just get out of there and turn our back on it. That would be nice for us here in the USA, but very recent history suggests that we would be condemning the Afghan people to a far worse fate if we did so. The Taliban are just not a bunch of freedom fighters defending their homeland and way of life. They're power-hungry tyrants with an extensive track record of treating people like animals. They don't hate our freedoms, but rather the freedom of other Afghans, and women in particular. Despite all the lousy aspects of our occupation and the corrupt Karzai government that we are propping up, I think we are morally obliged to keep fighting the Taliban, or else we will bear the responsibility for everything that happens if they get back in power.

[Robb]

21. Kick for the evening. nt

[apocalypsehow]

23. Excellent OP. Kick, Rec. n/t.