AFGHANISTAN: US military massacres villagers again

BY NORM DIXON

“We have many children who are injured… Their families are gone…
Everyone says their parents are dead.” — with these chilling words a Kandahar
hospital nurse described the horror of Washington's latest massacre of
Afghan civilians.

The severely wounded included six-year-old Palika, who arrived at the
Mir Wais Hospital in Kandahar still wearing her blood-drenched party dress.
She is now an orphan.

Had the indiscriminate and cold-blooded slaughter of up to 150 people
— who just minutes before had been enjoying themselves at a wedding reception
— occurred in a Western country, or had it been perpetrated by any other
government, the big business newspapers' banner headlines would have bellowed
“Terrorist outrage!” or “Wedding massacre!”.

Instead, editors soberly emphasised that the terrible carnage was the
result of an “error”, a “blunder”, an “intelligence failure” or — perhaps
the most grotesque of the terms used to lessen the scale of the crime —
a “friendly fire mishap”.

In the early hours of July 1, US warplanes — including a B-52 bomber
and at least one AC-130 gunship, an aircraft that literally bristles with
rapid-fire machine-guns and cannons — attacked at least four villages in
the south-western province of Oruzgan, 400 kilometres from Kabul.

The village of Kakarak (also spelled Kakrakai in some news reports)
bore the brunt of the surprise attack. For two hours, warplanes unleashed
what the July 2 Washington Post described as a “withering field
of fire”.

Afghan officials estimated the death toll at more than 40, with another
100 people wounded. However, survivors and district officials told the
BBC on July 1 that between 100 and 150 people were killed, and more than
200 wounded. Some of the wounded were taken on a rugged nine-hour road
trip to the nearest hospital in Kandahar.

Most of those killed — including 25 people from one family — were attending
a wedding celebration in Kakarak. As villager Abdul Saboor told the BBC:
“There are no Taliban or al Qaeda here. These people were all civilians,
women and children.”

US officials scrambled to deny responsibility for the atrocity, issuing

conflicting and contradictory accounts of what had taken place. The US
Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, suggested that an “errant”
2000-pound bomb dropped from a B-52 bomber may have missed “an identified
complex of caves”.

US Army Colonel Roger King at the Bagram air base near Kabul claimed
that US warplanes were fired upon by “anti-aircraft artillery” and “heavy-calibre
machine-guns” based in the four villages. This prompted US forces to retaliate
with “close air support”.

Excuses

A third explanation offered by the US military was that the “anti-aircraft
artillery” shells, supposedly fired at the warplanes, had fallen on the
villagers.

Most mainstream media have speculated that the US pilots may have “mistakenly”
interpreted the celebratory firing of guns into the air at the wedding
reception as being hostile.

US officials have doggedly refused to accept that a wedding party had
been attacked, despite confirmation by provincial and national Afghan officials.

In a particularly disgusting comment, a US officer told the July 2 Washington
Post that the last time a wedding was reported to have been hit by
US bombs, “even the 'bride' had a beard and an AK-47. This group is masterful
at disinformation.” (The officer was referring to a May 16 massacre of
tribespeople by US forces, the first reports of which wrongly stated that
a wedding had been attacked.)

However, US officials have admitted that no wreckage of “anti-aircraft
artillery” has been located.

Even the pro-US regime of Hamid Karzai felt compelled to issue what
the Associated Press on July 2 described as “an unprecedented statement”
on the US attack. It was “unprecedented” because Karzai has never before
made a peep that could be interpreted as criticism of Washington's conduct
of the war, even following previous assaults that have caused significant
civilian casualties.

The Afghan government announced on July 2 that Karzai had “called officials
and commanders of the United States forces to his office and strongly advised
them of the grave concern and sorrow” the attack had caused. Kabul said
that Karzai had asked the US and its allies to “take all necessary measures
to ensure that military activities to capture terrorist groups do not harm
innocent Afghan civilians”.

Karzai's statement reflects the growing uneasiness of an increasing
number of Afghans at the civilian death toll that continues to mount nine
months after the defeat of the Taliban — particularly among the Pashtun
people in the country's south and east who are bearing the brunt of US-inflicted
massacres.

“The enemies of peace and stability could utilise this situation”, Karzai's
foreign minister Abdullah warned the US. “Our people were victims of al
Qaeda and it is not fair that they should be the victims of the American
campaign. Civilians should not be killed.”

Mounting atrocities

The July 1 massacre was the latest in a long list of known US atrocities
against Afghan civilians. They include:

 

• 
  On October 11, the village of Khorum (also known as Karam), near the eastern
  city of Jalalabad, was destroyed by US warplanes. At least 100 people were
  killed. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed Washington had “certain
  knowledge” that there was a Taliban military installation in the village
  and that anybody killed there “probably” had something to do with it. Reporters
  found no evidence of a military base.

 

• 
  On December 6 and 7, US warplanes killed 16 people in Moshkhil village,
  in the south-eastern province of Paktia. There were three separate attacks
  in the space of 12 hours. A mosque and seven houses were destroyed.

 

• 
  On December 21, as many as 65 people were killed when US warplanes attacked
  a convoy as it travelled between Khost and Gardez, the capital of Paktia
  province. US warplanes also attacked 10 houses and a mosque in the village
  of Asmani Kilai, from where the vehicles had departed, in a seven-hour
  bombardment. The Pentagon claimed that it was attacking Taliban or al Qaeda
  “leadership”, but the victims turned out to be members of the Paktia provincial
  council and other guests on their way to Kabul to attend the swearing in
  ceremony for the new government the next day.

 

• 
  In the early hours of December 30, US warplanes slammed bombs into Qalaye
  Niaze village, Paktia province. Washington again claimed that Taliban and
  al Qaeda leaders were present and that the village was the site of an underground
  arms storage bunker. Rather than “terrorists”, Qalaye Niaze was filled
  with people who had gathered for a wedding. According to doctors at the
  nearest hospital, 107 people were slaughtered. The UN put the death toll
  at 52, including 25 children.

 

• 
  On May 10, the London Times revealed that an April announcement
  by US and Australian military spokespeople that four “al Qaeda terrorists”
  had been killed was a lie. “A special forces source involved in the shooting
  described a small number of armed men, probably Afghans, stumbling across
  a six-man team of Australian SAS. Surprised, the men raised their weapons
  and were shot in the chest by the SAS”, Times journalist Anthony
  Loyd reported. He concluded: “If you carry a weapon in the wrong part of
  Afghanistan … you will inevitably die quickly.”

 

• 
  On May 12, US special forces killed five people and captured 32 others
  in a four-hour night raid on a village 100km north of Kandahar. Washington
  announced that the victims — including a 13-year-old gunned down as he
  was hiding in a wheat field and a 15-year-old killed as he slept — were
  “suspected” of being al Qaeda or Taliban.

 

• 
  On May 16, at least 10 tribesmen were killed as they exchanged shots with
  rival villagers squabbling over timber on a hill. Australian SAS troops,
  who had been observing the villagers' squabble for several days, claimed
  they had been shot at and requested an attack by US warplanes, which obliterated
  the tribesmen.

 

• 
  On May 24, US-led forces raided a “suspected Taliban leadership compound”
  in Bandi Temur near Kandahar. Two people were killed and 59 people were
  abducted and taken away in helicopters. Hajji Berget, the 100-year-old
  village chief, died in custody from a blow to the head with a rifle butt,
  while a three-year-old girl who ran in terror during the attack fell down
  a well and drowned.

These dramatic incidents only account for a small number of the Afghan
civilians that have died. Figures compiled by University of New Hampshire
professor Marc Herold found that between October 7 and May 14 alone, 3780
civilians were directly killed by US forces. A detailed study of “indirect”
civilian deaths — from starvation and illness — published in the May 20
British Guardian also found that “as many as 20,000 Afghans may
have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of US intervention”.

Are these atrocities — concentrated in Afghanistan's south and east
— simply a string of “errors”, “intelligence failures” or “friendly fire
mishaps” as the US military, the Western press and Washington's puppet
Kabul regime would have us believe?

An answer to this question was provided by an interview with a recently
returned US soldier published in the May 25 Ithaca Journal. Private
Matt Guckheimer, who served in eastern Afghanistan, told the newspaper:
“We were told there were no friendly forces. If there was anybody there,
they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women
and children to kill them.”

The Taliban drew much of its support from the people of the Pashtun
tribal regions of Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan. When Washington
launched its war to overthrow the Taliban following the September 11 terror
attacks in the US, US officials at first believed that the Taliban would
split and its top leadership around Mullah Mohammed Omar would be dumped.

However, as the war progressed, this split did not eventuate. Without
a credible or trustworthy political or military force within the Pashtun
population, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, Washington opted to form
a political and military alliance with the Northern Alliance. The NA is
led by warlords who claim to represent the smaller ethnic and religious
minorities that predominate in the centre, north and west of Afghanistan.

Part and parcel of this shift by Washington was to accept and facilitate
the political marginalisation of the southern and eastern tribal Pashtuns
from the post-Taliban political set up, which was formalised at the June
10-19 loya jirga.

The continuing US and allied military operations in the south and east
— including by Australian special forces — are no longer primarily aimed
at defeating Taliban and al Qaeda “remnants”, but at terrorising the disaffected
and disenfranchised southern Pashtun population and discouraging the formation
of a viable political and/or military force opposed to the US-installed
Karzai regime.

On July 2, Amnesty International issued a statement related to the July
1 wedding massacre. It noted that “the rules of international humanitarian
law require those who plan or decide upon an attack to do everything feasible
to verify that the objectives targeted are not civilian. When it is unclear
whether a target is used for military purposes, it shall be presumed to
be a civilian object.”

Is it any wonder then that Washington is attempting so strenuously to
have its armed forces exempted from the jurisdiction of the newly created
International Criminal Court?

The ICC is charged with bringing to justice perpetrators of war crimes
and human rights abuse in cases where national governments refuse to do
so. No disciplinary action is known to have been taken against any pilots
or commanders involved in the slaughter of Afghan civilians.

The July 1 massacre was just the latest in a long list of war crimes
Washington has already committed in Afghanistan. Sadly, it will not be
the last.

From Green Left Weekly, July 10, 2002.

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