24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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The Afghan killing fields
There has been no official count of the number of civilians killed in the first eight and a half weeks of US bombing on Afghanistan, and the Pentagon has falsified the facts about its war. But one American academic is setting the record straight, writes Faiza Rady
When US warplanes strafed the farming village of Chowkar- Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar, on 22-23 October, killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official said, "The people are dead because we wanted them dead." The reason? They sympathised with the Taliban. When asked about the Chowkar incident, Rumsfeld replied, "I cannot deal with that particular village."
"I wish God destroys their cities," said a 16-year-old bombing victim from Torkham, Afghanistan.
Professor of Economics Marc W. Herold, University of New Hampshire.
When they launched "Operation Enduring Freedom" in the dawn hours of 7 October, the Bush administration and the Pentagon decreed, in effect, that life was cheap in Afghanistan. This, at least, is the conclusion reached by Professor Marc Herold after surveying all available accounts of civilian casualties in the "war against terrorism" between 7 October and 6 December 2001.
"Why have there been so many documented civilian casualties -- 3,767 civilian deaths in eight and a half weeks -- in the US air war on Afghanistan?" asks Herold. After researching the topic, he concludes that "the critical element remains the very low value put upon Afghan civilian lives by US military planners and the political elite."
A thorough and accomplished scholar and researcher, Herold methodically compiled and compared official Pentagon and US State Department press briefings on civilian casualties with Taliban statements, mainstream Western media reports, alternative and South Asian regional press accounts, eyewitness testimonies and health workers' reports.
Expecting the corporate-owned media and the political and military establishments to dismiss his research as faulty and inaccurate, Professor Herold went to great lengths to explain his methodology.
Herold cross-referenced all of his data and sought to corroborate reports whenever possible. His idea was that if a number of major news agencies reported an event with similar casualty figures, he would regard the report as more accurate. The greater the level of specific detail supplied about a bombing attack, the more credibility Herold accorded it. So his final tally of casualty figures was based on the most reliable sources available.
Herold has published his findings in a study entitled "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: a Comprehensive Accounting."
An example serves to illustrate Herold's method. For 31 October, Herold concluded that 15 civilians died in a bomb attack on a Red Crescent hospital in Kandahar by using four different and conflicting versions of the event.
The Taliban themselves said that an F-18 plane had dropped a 2,000 LB JDAM bomb on the hospital, reducing it to a mangled mess of iron and concrete. According to the Taliban statement, the raid had killed 11 people.
The Pentagon's response was to deny that the hospital was hit at all. They claimed they had hit a military installation instead -- "a legitimate terrorist target, intentionally struck." As for the Red Crescent hospital, the Pentagon claimed it was hundreds of metres away from the "terrorist" target and "undamaged."
In spite of the Pentagon's claims, however, journalists at the scene reported a large crater in the centre of the clinic and hospital vehicles crushed by collapsed masonry.
A local doctor from the hospital reported that 15 were dead and 25 were seriously injured.
In response to the Pentagon's allegations, the British daily The Independent printed a story on 4 November with the headline "Who is winning the war of lies?" The attack was reported by British dailies The Independent and The Times, press agencies AP, AFP and Reuters and Pakistan's leading English-language daily Dawn. In addition, photographs of the bombed Red Crescent Hospital are available on AP files and on the Internet.
In this case, therefore, Herold found it easy to dismiss the Pentagon report as a transparent lie. Left with the choice between the Taliban's claim of 11 casualties and the physician's report of 15 deaths, Herold chose the latter as the more credible source because the same figure was also confirmed in reports by The Independent, The Times, Dawn, Reuters and AFP.
Such instances of the Pentagon's disinformation campaign and outright denial of documented bombings on populated civilian centres abound in Herold's account.
At 3 am on 1 December, US B-52 bombers made four passes over Kama Ado, a mountain village 50 kilometres southwest of Jalalabad, as part of the intense bombing of "terrorist" Al-Qa'eda bases in Tora Bora. Journalists who visited the village later in the day reported huge bomb craters and the debris of houses spread over two hillsides. Another nearby village, Khan-e-Mairjuddin, had been bombed a few days earlier with 50 confirmed deaths and a likely death toll of 100-200 people.
The official US response was telling. "It just did not happen," said Marine Corps Major Brad Powell, spokesman for US Central Command in Tampa, Florida. Powell's statement came 15 hours after the complete destruction of Kama Ado, according to a report in US daily The Boston Globe.
Herold's dossier provides many further illustrations of the Pentagon's bizarre campaign of denials and lies in the face of material evidence to the contrary.
Undaunted by the presence of investigative reporters and Afghan eyewitnesses to the carnage, the Pentagon went all the way in its efforts to win the propaganda war. US officials even falsified official reports. In an October Pentagon intelligence report obtained by the British weekly The Sunday Telegraph, the Pentagon casually dismisses Taliban claims about indiscriminate US bombing of heavily populated towns and villages as "falsehoods" and "propaganda."
The Taliban, for example, claimed that the US bombed Karam village on 11 October killing 200 civilians. "A predictably exaggerated claim," was the response of the Pentagon and the US State Department. Claiming that they only hit a hillside military base, the Pentagon only admitted to "possible" civilian loss of life -- an inevitable "collateral damage" of war.
In the real world -- as reported by Dawn, The Guardian, The Independent, The International Herald Tribune, the Scotsman, the Observer, and BBC News -- the evening of 11 October saw two jets bombing the mountain village of Karam. The village itself consisted of nothing more than 60 mud houses. Between 100 and 160 villagers were killed.
On 21 October, the Taliban announced that the US had bombed a hospital in Herat, killing more than 100 civilians. The Pentagon admitted it had missed its intended target, a military barracks, but denied hitting the hospital. Asserting that the hospital was at a "considerable distance" from where the bomb landed, the bomb blast was "unlikely to have caused civilian deaths," said the Pentagon.
Nevertheless, the Afghan Islamic Press, the Pakistan News Service, the Frontier Post, The Guardian, the Times of India, AFP and the UN all reported that an F-18 jet had dropped a 1,000 lb cluster bomb on the 200-bed military hospital and a neighbouring mosque, missing the military barrack by 500-1,000 metres. Based on these sources, Herold estimates that the Pentagon's "unlikely" civilian death toll was in fact 100 people.
Besides the indiscriminate bombing of towns and villages which resulted in the deaths of at least 3,767 people in eight and a half weeks of war, the US also destroyed Afghanistan's infrastructure. "The US bombing campaign has also directly targeted civilian facilities deemed hostile to its war success," writes Herold.
As part of this targeting of infrastructure, American bombs destroyed Kabul's main telephone exchange on 15 October, killing 12 people. In late October, warplanes bombed the electrical grid in Kandahar knocking out all power. On 31 October, bombers launched seven air strikes against Afghanistan's largest hydro- electric power station.
On 12 November, a guided bomb hit the Kabul office of Al- Jazeera television station, which Washington described as being hostile to its pursuit of "Operation Enduring Freedom." On 18 November, warplanes bombed religious schools in the Khost and Shamshad areas. "Electricity, telephones, news and spirituality are 'fair' targets," notes Herold, adding that the "bombing of Afghan civilian infrastructure parallels that of the Afghan civilians."
The wanton and indiscriminate bombing of population centres along with the targeted and willful destruction of an entire country's civilian infrastructure can only be explained in terms of a racist disregard for the value of human life and property in the South, says Herold. He believes race to be a determining factor in the US equation. To use his words: "If the 'other' is non-white, the scale of violence used by the US government to achieve its objectives at minimum cost knows no limits."
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