[Nettime-bold] Collateral Damage?

["Steve McAlexander" <mcalexander@veriomail.com>]

Title: Collateral Damage?

This is a personal testimony written by a U.S. citizen living in India.  It's long, and emotional but definately worth reading...

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Dear friends,

Everything I hear from "back home" suggests that visual images
of the pale corpses of seven (need I say civilian?) babies and children
killed two days ago by yet another US "smart bomb" explosion in residential
Kabul are not making it onto American television screens. Nor the visual
coverage of Jalalabad, Kabul and Kandahar hospitals presently flooded with
innocent Afghan civilians burned, maimed, disfigured and dying from direct
US bomb explosions on their homes. Nor the picture of an orphaned Afghan
baby whose face is half skin, half shrapnel from a US bomb, that greeted me
on the Telugu news station (not a CNN affiliate) when I woke up this
morning.

Everything I hear coming out of the US seems to support Harper's Magazine
publisher John Macarthur's recent comment that the current US aggression in
Afghanistan is "the most censored war." When I turn on CNN (we do have a
television in the flat where I live in Hyderabad, but the neighborhood
monkeys sometimes tear up the wires, so it doesn't always work), I see
affirmation of that which is rapidly making the US "free press" the shame of
the international media community. Parochialism of fantastic proportions, 10
second soundbytes at the expense of context and substance,
all-terror-all-the-time (as one friend of mine put it), and most insidious
in the current context, shameful dependence on and uncritical acceptance of
Pentagon handouts instead of substantial, critical coverage of the ground
situation in Afghanistan.

The US corporate media seems to be muting any talk of civilian casualties
first by framing any such news with "Taliban claims that" and then happily
putting the matter to rest with Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman's
conclusive remark, "I would put very low credibility in any Taliban report."
Thus the matter is safely disposed of and we can return to anthrax, fear,
and how we might be attacked next.

So let's humor Bryan Whitman for a minute. Setting aside all Taliban claims,
here are just a few of the reports from the ground in Afghanistan, from
non-Taliban survivors, eye-witnesses, independent journalists, UN officials
present on site, the Pentagon's own occasional admissions of guilt, and
residents of the affected areas. I can cite and forward to you every one of
my sources if you are interested.

Since October 7, the US has:

Killed four Afghan UN workers engaged in clearing the countryside of landmines, and destroyed the building of their NGO, Afghan Technical Consultants, in Kabul. Oct 8.

Bombed a civilian area near the Jalalabad airport, blowing the leg and fingers off of 16-year-old Afghan ice cream vendor Assadullah, wounding numerous others, and destroying homes. Oct 8.

Bombed a populated residential area in central Kabul near a joint military-civilian hospital, destroying homes and inflicting uncertain numbers of civilian casualties. Oct 8.     

Killed a 12 year old child and destroyed several homes in the village of Qala-e-Chaman near the Kabul airport. Oct 11.

Destroyed 60-70 homes in the village of Khrum, near Jalalabad, killing "definitely above 150" civilians, possibly many more, and wounding large numbers. Oct 10. A
journalist who visited the mass graves and destruction at Khrum recounted,
"I meet Rahmatullah, a callow 16-year old. There's only one survivor in his
family of six," a sister, who's hospitalized in Jalalabad. I talk to
Rahmatullah. It's pointless. Numbed with shock, he only shakes his head."
Later, in a hospital in Jalalabad where the survivors of Khrum are being
treated, "There's Gul Khan, a three-year-old child, with a head injury. His
younger sister is unconscious. Rahmat Bibi, three, is crying inconsolably,
writhing in pain, her legs smashed. She wants her mother. But her mother is
rotting under the rubble of Khrum. I meet Tooray, the only survivor in a
family of eight. "'What's there for me to live?' he moans."

Dropped a 2,000-pound bomb onto a residential complex in Kabul, killing unspecified
numbers of civilians. This one is a Pentagon admission. Oct 13.

Destroyed the international telephone exchange in Kabul, cutting off
civilians from contact with the outside world and helping restrict media
coverage. Oct 13.

Reduced to rubble the historic, Mughal period Balahisar Fort, one of Kabul's celebrated heritage sites. Oct 14.      

Dropped a "smart bomb" onto another residential area in Kabul, killing
unspecified numbers of civilians. Oct 14.

Bombed a hospital in Kandahar, killing five civilians. Oct 15.     

Bombed with a "direct hit" a boy's school in Kabul. Oct 17.

Bombed and destroyed civilian homes and a bus in Kandahar, killing unspecified numbers of civilians. Oct 19. A journalist in Kandahar reporting on the destruction wrought by the favorite toy of every adolescent video-game addict boy, "the US military's AC-130 'Spectre' wrote, "the devastation was enormous. When I visited a house nearby, I saw the horribly mutilated remains of at least one woman. "Later,
we visited the still-smoking remains of a bus. The Taliban claimed 18
civilians had been on board. The bodies had long since been removed. The
effect of these devastating attacks on the morale of the inhabitants of
Kandahar was shattering." People had been leaving for more than a week,
driven out not just by fear of bombs but by a shortage of water "caused by a
direct American hit last weekend that took out the water pumping system. Any
hope it could be repaired was dashed four days ago, when the main power
station was destroyed, leaving people to queue with buckets for hours at
wells."    

Killed eight members of a single family all at once, along with other unspecified numbers of civilian casualties, by bombing their homes in Kabul. Two of the children might have been saved, reported their surviving uncle, were it not that Kabul's crowded hospitals now have a blood shortage. Oct 21.    

Dropped a "smart bomb" on Herat's second largest hospital, killing at least 70 patients and around 100 people altogether. Oct 22.      

Bombed and killed unspecified numbers of civilians in a mosque and a clinic in Paktia. Oct 22.      

Dropped "cluster bombs" on Herat, trapping and killing at least nine civilians. Oct 22.      

Admitted (the Pentagon) "US warplanes mistakenly dropped a 1,000 pound bomb near a home for the elderly in Afghanistan and two 500 pound bombs in a residential area outside the capital Kabul," causing unspecified numbers of civilian casualties. Oct
24.     

Killed at least 20 civilians, including nine children, as they
tried to flee Tarin Kot, a town under attack by US warplanes. Oct 25.     

Killed large numbers of civilians and destroyed their homes in Tarin Kot.
Oct 25. One journalist wrote of an Afghan man named Ullah who lost all of
his immediate family in the US bombing. "ŠIn the 11 hours between the
explosion and the moment when he finally regained consciousness, the bodies
of Ullah's wife, his four children, his parents, and five of his brothers
and sisters had been lifted from the rubble and buried. What do you say to a
stranger who tells you he has just lost every member of his immediate
family? All you can decently do is ask questions. When did it happen? On
Friday night or early Saturday morning. Where? In a suburb of Tarin Kot,
capital of the Afghan province of Oruzgan. And why? But Ullah, who is not
familiar with the phrase 'collateral damage' or 'just war' does not have an
answer." The journalist goes on to describe a woman in the hospital burned,
maimed and blinded by the explosion of a US bomb in her home.

Killed at least 15 civilians, mostly children, several babies, and destroyed homes
in Qali Hotair, a residential area of northeast Kabul. Oct 28. One surviving
woman sobbed, "They killed all of my children and husband. What shall I do
now? Look at their savageness."     

And in a spectacular display of America's profound humanitarian concern for the plight of starving and soon to be freezing Afghans, US jets bombed two warehouses of the International Committee of the Red Cross, destroying large quantities of wheat, blankets and other supplies on Oct 16. Ten days later, on Oct 26 US jets again "accidentally" bombed the Red Cross, this time striking six warehouses,
including the two from before, and again destroying humanitarian supplies.
Recall that all of the above, and this is by no means an exhaustive list,
just a sampling of what's been available from the free press on this side of
the world ?are confirmed by eye-witnesses, survivors, families of the
victims, journalists, residents, UN activists present, and the humble
Pentagon itself. In fact, though Rumsfeld might not care to hear it (and
certainly would rather not the American public hear it), what the
journalists are finding and what the eye-witness survivors of the bombing
are reporting confirms that the Taliban claims are? pretty accurate. Around
200 civilians killed in Khrum? Well, yes. Likewise the carnage in Herat. In
Kabul. In Kandahar. Slowly but surely, the reports of fleeing survivors and
international journalists are confirming the Taliban claims. Definitely
hundreds, and probably more than a thousand innocent Afghan people have been
killed directly by US bombs in the last 23 days.

Consistently, in response to the almost daily reports of civilian deaths,
Don Rumsfeld has been repeating "we don't target civilians." Rear Admiral
John Stufflebeem recently elaborated that "what hits that may have occurred
in residential areas are rare mistakes, or rare errors is probably more
appropriate." First of all, I would think language like Stufflebeem's "hits
that may have occurred" immediately following his public admission that such
hits are confirmed realities, would insult the intelligence of the thinking
American public. Then there is the matter of these events being "rare," when
in fact incidents of the US bombing residential areas average more than one
a day, if one doesn't count any of the Taliban claims. More at the heart of
the matter, though, is the basic thrust of Rumsfeld's and Stufflebeem's
assertions, that civilian deaths are not intentional, they are mistakes or
errors, regrettable, but inevitable in the pursuit of our "just cause."

To those whose family members have been mangled and buried under rubble, it
doesn't matter whether the perpetrators intended to commit the murder or
not. From the words of civilian Afghan survivors of the US bombing, it seems
that Afghans are no more comforted by Rumsfeld's assurances that the US
'smart bombs? raining on residential homes are all accidents than survivors
of WTC would have been if the hijackers had left a note saying "sorry about
the civilian casualties, but you must understand that our primary goal was
simply to bring the buildings down." Before we accept justification for the
murder of innocent people "it's regrettable, say Rumsfeld and Bush, but hard
to avoid in the pursuit of our just cause" before we accept this dangerous
line of reasoning, recall that the hijackers, too, evidently felt that
theirs was a just cause, one worth dying for, as Bush would like our
soldiers to be. No matter how righteous the hijackers' anger toward American
imperialism might have been, nothing can justify the atrocities they
committed. But we cannot have it both ways: if the killing of innocent
civilians is condemnable and wrong, then the killing of innocent civilians
is condemnable and wrong. Slaughter is slaughter. Terror is terror. It was
an unspeakable crime against humanity in New York on September 11, and it is
an unspeakable crime against humanity in Afghanistan today.

Two enormous differences: one, the perpetrators of September 11 did not
claim democratic representation of an entire country. The US government,
however, does claim to represent you and me as it decimates and terrorizes
the Afghan civilian population (while failing to make any significant
headway in finding bin Laden or hurting the Taliban). Two, the perpetrators
of September 11 did not have the resources of the most extensive,
comprehensive, colossal propaganda machine in the world in their hands. The
perpetrators of the current atrocities in Afghanistan do, as was made
embarrassingly evident when all five major US television news networks
grovellingly obliged Condoleeza Rice's "request" to censor bin Laden and
al-Jazeera, when major newspapers began censoring comics critical of George
Bush, when Barnes and Noble began canceling readings of books critical of
George Bush, when a cable show cancelled Carol Wells' appearance because her
anti-war posters were not approved, when anti-war activists found words
stuffed in their mouths by the New York Times in its remarkably titled
article "Protestors in Washington urge Peace with Terrorists," etc.

Many of you have written to me about the sorry state of affairs when pillars
of the American "free press" publicly state, with a straight face, that it
is their "patriotic duty" to exercise censorship. But I've also been hearing
from several of you who are solidly in agreement with the general consensus
now enjoyed by the mainstream media, the current administration, and a
majority of the US population. I briefly wanted to address a couple of
concerns you have conveyed to me.      

"The US strikes in Afghanistan are defensive in nature." The policy idea is that the strikes are "defensive" in the sense that their express purpose is to destroy al-Qaeda, an aggressive terrorist outfit that attacks Americans. I agree that the policy idea sounds good and fits cleanly into the understanding of the war that Bush's speeches present to us nicely packaged every few days. The problem is that the
packaged understanding, however appealing, is terribly divorced from the
ground reality: al-Qaeda remains vigorously intact, the Taliban are dancing
and cheering to the sound of missiles, and bin Laden continues to elude.
Meanwhile what the policy makers call defensive strikes, and what the
American public understandably wants to think of as defensive strikes, are
inflicting the same kind of carnage, terror and suffering on innocent
Afghans that hijackers inflicted on innocent citizens of the US and many
other countries on September 11. If you'd like to assert that the US strikes
in Afghanistan are supposed to be defensive, well fine; but that's not going
to hold any water with the 16-year-old ice cream vendor whose leg was blown
off by a US missile on day one. Nor should it.

"Anti-war language like yours is just what the terrorists want from Americans now." This point and its obvious response have both been repeated ad nauseam in recent weeks so I won't dwell on it. Anyone can say anything is "just what the terrorists
want": the statement alone hardly constitutes an intellectually sustainable
criterion for discrediting an argument. And the obvious response is that
terrorism thrives on the escalation of violence. Every day that the US
continues to massacre innocent Muslims in Afghanistan, uncountable numbers
of young people will ideologically join ranks with Osama. Violent US
aggression gives legitimacy and moral standing to its opponents. State
terrorism breeds non-state terrorism.      

"What we do to the Afghans cannot be as bad as what the Taliban is doing." This one is invariably followed up with the equation with Hitler and Nazi Germany. That the Taliban are purveyors of massive violence and oppression is not in doubt. That being
buried under rubble, having one's children all killed, or having one's face
torn apart by shrapnel constitutes a better deal than living with the whips,
stonings, suppression and other horrors of the Taliban is an interesting
assertion that I propose we debate not amongst ourselves in standard
parochial American fashion, but rather take up with the people of
Afghanistan. We might do well to note that western journalists in
Afghanistan are encountering increasing hostility and resentment from Afghan
civilians devastated by the bombings ("First you bomb us, then you come to
take pictures!" said an angry old man in Khrum). Or that non-Taliban Afghan
women, so often invoked by Americans as reasons why we must destroy the
Taliban, are marching in huge numbers in the streets of Pakistan's cities
and refugee camps denouncing US aggression, carrying banners that read "Stop
the killing of innocent Afghan Muslims". If everything went according to the
rosy vision of Bush's speeches, the famous 'burqa-clad women" of Afghanistan
would be weeping with gratitude as every next Anglo-American commando
parachuted onto Afghanistan's dusty surface. But in fact that doesn't seem
to be the case; women and children ?as usual the worst hit in wartime ?are
increasingly raising their voices against the US bombing. They don't support
the Taliban, they don't support the US bombing. The idea that those are the
only two options is not only dimly conceived, but also insulting to the
dignity and intelligence of the Afghan people.     

Finally, one other concern I have with the "what we're doing cannot be as bad" thesis is that it represents a symptom of a larger illness, that is, the mainstream
American public's general disbelief that what "our" government (and our
businesses, our banks, our US-trained military allies, etc.) does in the
rest of the world can really be as bad as what voices from ravaged
"developing countries" say. This is a huge issue so I won't try to address
it here, except to say that even if the current state of the media and
public discourse in the US shows little promise of it, people in places like
South Asia are nonetheless still hoping that the sensitive, thinking
American public will respond to current world crises by rising out of its
somnolence (the corporate media is the opiate) and holding its government
accountable for its actions. As an American living abroad I would like to
see the US less hated. This cannot be accomplished by shouting, "We're good!
We're good! We're a peaceful nation! Why don't you poor countries
understand!" while killing and terrorizing and smashing the homes of
innocent people, who have absolutely nothing to do with either state
terrorism or non-state terrorism, in one of the poorest countries in the
world. This can be accomplished (along with the lessening of terror in the
world) by radically changing US foreign policy in ways that actualize,
rather than make a mockery of, our Constitution's ideals of freedom and
democracy. Though less spectacular and less profitable for Lockheed-Martin
et al, working with the people of Afghanistan and the United Nations to
responsibly negotiate a political solution to Afghanistan's current crisis,
using the instruments of international law to pursue justice in the context
of September 11, would be a good start.