topic by
real watcher
7/6/2002 (10:57) |
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This probably portends many many more dead US soldiers in the months ahead. BTW I wonder how many of these US soldiers carrying out the wishes of international Zionism -- are jewish. Probably much less than the 2% of the US population that is of the hebraic faith.
Anti-US protest in Kabul: a sign of wider anger in
Afghanistan
By Peter Symonds
6 July 2002
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The slaughter of at least 45 civilians by US warplanes in a raid in central Uruzgan province
on Monday has prompted the first anti-US demonstration in Kabul. Around 200 Afghans,
many of them women clad in traditional burqas, marched through the street bringing
mid-morning traffic to a halt on Wednesday, to protest against the rising toll of civilian
casualties. Most of the dead and injured in the latest incident were women and young children
who were guests at a wedding celebration in the small village of Kakarak.
The protest is just the tip of the iceberg. Ongoing US bombing and search-and-destroy
operations in rural towns and villages along with a contemptuous indifference to the rising toll
of civilian casualties has generated widespread hostility, anger and opposition to the American
presence. Just nine months after the Bush administration launched its military intervention,
any pretence that the US is waging a war of liberation for the benefit of the Afghan people is
rapidly being stripped away. What is being revealed is that Washington is conducting a brutal
neo-colonial occupation to further its own strategic and economic interests in the region.
The protest in Kabul made a very cautious appeal. Outside the UN compound, one of the
organisers read from a prepared statement that declared: “We condemn terrorism. We are not
against the Americans, but it doesn’t mean they should drop bombs on residents, happy
ceremonies and sanctuaries instead of military targets. The US should get through to its
officers that this kind of incident could destroy relations and the trust between the two
nations.”
But the demonstration is symptomatic of far deeper resentment and hostility. Uruzgan
provincial governor Jan Mohammed Khan, who was himself appointed by the US-backed
regime in Kabul, demanded that the US military hand over the “spies” who had provided the
information that led to the air attack on Kakarak. “If Americans don’t stop killing civilians,
there will be a holy war against them in my province... This has to stop, or people will fight
Americans just like they did Russians [in the 1980s].
Uruzgan, along with other largely Pashtun provinces in the south and east of the country, have
borne the full brunt of US attacks. No official tally has been made of the number of civilians
killed by US bombing raids and ground operations. But conservative unofficial estimates
place the figure in the thousands and do not include those that have subsequently died from
their injuries.
Anger is clearly mounting throughout Afghanistan. Reacting to news of Monday’s attack,
Jabbar, a grocer, in Kabul told Associated Press: “We consider the Americans our liberators,
but after this, they may soon become occupiers. They should be here for peace, not death.” A
customer in Jabbar’s store, Raz Mohammed, commented: “Americans made so many
mistakes here, and we cannot accept that hitting a wedding party was just another one. They
should set their aiming devices right, or just pack up and go. We fought the Russians in the
1980s, we’ll fight the Americans if need be.”
Another Kabul resident, Sahibad, who lost two of his own children during a US bombing raid
in October told a reporter for the EurasiaNet website: “When I heard about the bombing in
Uruzgan, I thought the day I lost my kids had returned. My heart bleeds for the families who
now have to dig through the rubble for their loved ones, like I did. The people that are
supposed to be helping us are hurting us. We don’t want to start hating Americans, but if
they keep making mistakes like this, we have no choice... Why do they use bombs, it is such
an inaccurate way of getting the enemy. One slip of the hand and you could kill hundreds or
thousands of people.”
Such is the hostility that Afghanistan’s transitional president Hamid Karzai felt compelled for
the first time to make a muted criticism of US actions. He summoned Lieutenant General Dan
McNeill, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, and other US officials to his office on
Tuesday. According to an official statement, Karzai “strongly advised them of the grave
concern and sorrow” over the incident and called on the US military to “take all necessary
measures to ensure that military activities to capture terrorist groups do not harm innocent
Afghan civilians.”
Karzai’s actions will, however, do nothing to restrain US military which acts as an occupying
force, carrying out its operations without even token reference to the pro-US regime in Kabul.
Among ordinary Afghans, Karzai’s timid protest has been met with contempt. As Safiqulluh,
a merchant in Kabul, angrily told the press: “What is this ‘all necessary measures’? He
should’ve told the Americans: ‘If this happens again, out of our country.’ The Americans
didn’t even say ‘We are sorry’ for what happened. Probably they’ll soon say it was Afghans
who killed women and children at that wedding party.”
Some of those injured in Monday’s attack were brought to the southern city of Kandahar,
some 160km to the southwest of Kakarak. The criticism was just as vehement there. Ahmed
Jawad, a doctor at Mirwais Hospital, told the International Herald Tribune: “We heard that
this is a computerised war, and we have seen on television that the American warplanes can
pick out objects as close as four millimetres from the ground. How can they mistake a
wedding party for an attack?”
Another doctor noted that many rural Pashtuns carry automatic weapons and wear large black
turbans and robes similar to those of the Taliban fighters. “But that does not mean they are
Taliban,” he said. “If the Americans suspect there are real Taliban somewhere, they should
inspect the area first and control it. Even if someone does not shoot at them, it is not fair to
bomb villages where there are so many people.”
Some of the victims have described the carnage that took place at the wedding festivities when
US warplanes attacked the rural village around 2am. “Everyone was making so much noise
that we never heard the sound of the planes,” Shahbibi, 30, a seamstress, whose leg was
broken, explained. “Then the bombs came and we started running. There was so much dust
we couldn’t see.”
Her husband, Amillah, 35, added: “If there were Taliban or Arabs in the area, they would
never have let us make such a wedding party. They did not allow people to make music or
beat drums; they said it was not Islamic.” A farmer, Abdul Bari, 30, who was comforting his
heavily-bandaged, six-year-old nephew, Ghulam, said: “Fifteen people from my home are
dead. My wife, my brother, everyone is dead. We don’t know why the Americans hate us.”
Doctors at the Mirwais hospital explained that Ghulam, who lost both his parents in the raid,
almost died of his injuries as well.
Ma’amoor Abdul Qayyum, a retired local official, said he saw his 11-year-old son die in front
of him. “The Americans have destroyed us. We have neither seen Al Qaeda nor Taliban but
they bombed us. What did we do wrong?”
No answers from the Pentagon
The US military has so far refused to accept any responsibility for the tragedy in Kakarak or
provide any answers as to why the wedding celebration was bombed. A combined team of US
and Afghan officials has been dispatched to the area to investigate the deaths and is due to
return to Kabul today. According to Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, “We just don’t
have enough information to believe or disbelieve anything at this point.”
But the lack of information has not stopped Clarke and other US spokespersons from
spreading often contradictory stories, all of which serve a common purpose: to question or
belittle the massacre and to pin the blame on the victims themselves.
Clarke told the media that US investigators at the site “saw some evidence of damage, but
there was no determination of what caused the damage.” They found no bodies or graves, she
added, the obvious implication being that the events had simply been concocted. According to
Islamic tradition, however, the dead have to be buried quickly. Moreover, as a reporter for the
US military forces magazine Stars and Stripes noted, local villagers had offered to take the
team to the gravesites.
Central to the Pentagon’s justification for the attack is a claim that US aircraft had repeatedly
come under attack from anti-aircraft guns, one of which had been firing from the compound
where the wedding celebration was taking place. According to Major Gary Tallman,
spokesman for the investing team, hundreds of US and allied soldiers had been in the area for
weeks, had fought gun battles with “enemy forces” and identified six sites that had
anti-aircraft guns.
Tallman claimed that American forces had reliable information that senior Taliban leaders
were sheltering in the tiny village and that an anti-aircraft gun had fired on US warplanes.
Last Sunday night US troops were positioning to surround and search the village when they
saw more anti-aircraft fire and called for support from an AC-130 gunship which struck the
village and other sites in the area. The AC-130, which is designed to destroy tanks, is a
slow-flying, heavily armoured aircraft that is capable of laying down a withering fire from a
howitzer that shoots 105 mm shells and other large-calibre cannons.
After examining the site, however, Tallman was forced to concede that the team found no
wreckage of an anti-aircraft gun or any evidence that one had been fired from the compound.
At Bagram airbase, US military spokesman Colonel Roger King tried to fill in the gap left by
the missing gun, saying that the investigators had seen some guns mounted on cars. King
would not, however, provide any details as to where or the type and calibre of the weapons.
General Gregory Newbold, director of operations on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, added his
own angle, saying that an arms dump had been found—16km from the village. “It’s
symptomatic of the area and the capabilities that they have,” he said.
All of these accounts tacitly assume, of course, that the victims are lying. A number of
villagers have told the media that gunshots were fired during the wedding celebration—a
longstanding tradition in rural Afghanistan—but that there had been no shooting for several
hours prior to the attack. Residents now put the toll at 44 killed and at least 100 injured. They
have repeatedly insisted that there were no Taliban nor Al Qaeda leaders in the village.
Karzai’s chief of staff, Tayeb Jawed, explained that those at the wedding ceremony were
supporters of the present administration in Kabul. “The president knew personally some of
those who were killed,” he said.
Their statements have not stopped Pentagon spokespersons from reeling off their
stock-standard excuses. Victoria Clarke told the press that it was “unclear” whether the
Taliban had used “human shields” in this episode. “It is not unusual for the Al Qaeda or the
Taliban to place weapons and ammunition and fighters in areas where people, civilians, are
living, around schools, areas like that,” she said. Why, even assuming that the “missing
gun” suddenly appears, Karzai’s close supporters would allow their compound and a
wedding ceremony to be used as a “human shield,” Clarke did not explain.
General Newbold offered an even more sweeping rationalisation, declaring: “This is an area
of enormous sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.” Even if the statement were true, which
is highly unlikely, “sympathy” is no justification for the slaughter of civilians. Far more
probable is that the growing hostility to the US presence is simply interpreted by the US
military as “sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda”. Just as in Vietnam, where all
Vietnamese became “gooks,” Afghans, particularly those in former Taliban strongholds, are
increasingly treated as enemies, less than human and therefore expendable.
The outlook underlying all these excuses and lies is that of all invaders: that the US has the
right to send its forces throughout the length and breadth of the country, at any time of the
day and night, to attack any target considered “a threat” to American military occupation.
Any fire is deemed hostile and immediately brings down the full weight of US hi-tech
weaponry, regardless of the consequences. Civilian deaths, when grudgingly acknowledged at
a
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