BY NORM DIXON
US forces in Afghanistan continue to inflict deaths and injuries on civilians, long after US air power has driven the Taliban regime from power and scattered its al Qaeda allies to the four winds. The latest slaughter occurred on February 4 on a hillside near Khost.
The CIA operator of a remote-controlled drone aircraft observed a tall man with a beard, standing with others near a vehicle. The CIA controller believed that the men were "paying homage" to a tall man and concluded that he must be a Taliban or al Qaeda leader, or perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself. Their death warrants had been signed. The operator asked his superiors to approve a strike and then coolly fired a powerful anti-tank missile. They were blown to pieces.
In fact, the men on the hillside were peasants collecting scrap metal and other saleable debris from a bombed-out al Qaeda camp. "They were just poor people trying to feed their families", a villager told Doug Struck, the Washington Post reporter who revealed Washington's deadly action on February 11.
The murder of the foraging peasants came hard on the heels of revelations that US special forces massacred up to 21 innocent people on January 23 in the village of Hazar Qadam, Oruzgan province, 160 kilometres north of Kandahar. At least two appear to have been executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Most were members of a local disarmament committee and other government officials loyal to the pro-US government of Hamid Karzai.
Twenty-seven others were seized in the night raid on a school and government building. The captives were bound and beaten, and flown to Kandahar where they were tortured. For 13 days, the captives were imprisoned in wooden crates or shipping containers, some in solitary. They were not allowed to wash and were interrogated daily. The US finally released them after Karzai privately appealed for Washington to investigate the "mistake".
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US military spokespeople had immediately lauded the raids as a successful assault on two Taliban "leadership facilities" and that those killed and captured were Taliban fighters. Rumsfeld claimed the "enemy" had been guarding an "arms cache".
However, within days local villagers and the governors of Kandahar and Oruzgan provinces were protesting that those killed and kidnapped were government supporters. There was no "firefight", the people were killed as they slept or as they tried to escape. The "arms cache" were weapons that had been collected from the people of the area at the direction of the Kabul government.
The January 28 New York Times reported that the morning after the raid, a provincial official found that a sign had been placed on a vehicle destroyed in the raid. It said in large letters: "God Bless America. Have a nice day, from Damage Inc."
Incredibly, while the 27 captives were finally released on February 6 after it was determined that they were innocent of being Taliban or al Qaeda, the US continues to refuse to admit that the 21 people massacred were also innocents and that the detention of those kidnapped was unjustified. "I don't think it was with any sense on our part that we've done anything wrong", General Richard Myers, chairperson of the US Joint Chief of Staffs, told reporters.
However, CIA agents have distributed compensation payments to the families of the Afghans killed by US forces. The value of an Afghan life, according to the CIA: US$1000.
These were not the first massacres committed by US forces in Afghanistan. Known massacres include:
- On October 11, the village of Khorum (also known as Karam), 29 kilometres from the eastern city of Jalalabad, was destroyed by US warplanes. At least 100 people — perhaps as many as 200 — were killed as their mud huts were obliterated. Rumsfeld said he 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 who visited Khorum find no evidence of a military base.
- On December 21, as many as 65 people were killed when US warplanes attacked a vehicle convoy as it travelled between Khost and Gardez, the capital of Paktia province. Warplanes also bombed 10 houses and a mosque in the village of Asmani Kilai, from where the vehicles departed, in a seven-hour bombardment. The US claimed that those attacked were Taliban or al Qaeda "leadership". They 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 has put the death toll at 52, including 25 children.
- British Guardian reporter Ian Traynor revealed on February 12 that on December 6 and 7, US warplanes killed 16 people in Moshkhil village, in the south-eastern province of Paktika. There were three separate attacks in the space of 12 hours. A mosque and seven houses were destroyed. There were no Taliban in the area and there were no military targets.
According to the February 7 Washington Post, "no disciplinary action is known to have been taken against any pilots or commanders" involved in the slaughter of Afghan civilians. On February 7, as pressure mounted for the US to explain the numbers of innocents killed, General Tommy Franks, US commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, defended the US air war and described it as "the most accurate war ever fought" in US history.
Despite spending around US$30 million a day on its war on Afghanistan, the Pentagon has not seen fit to appoint anybody to keep track of the civilian death toll.
However, an independent study conducted by Marc Herold, professor of economics and international relation at the University of New Hampshire, found that between October and December at least 3767 civilians had been killed by US bombs. The most recent estimate of the number of people killed or missing in the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington is less than 2900.
A Medecin Sans Frontieres worker, whose comments were reported by the February 12 British Guardian, estimated the civilian death toll in Afghanistan at between 2000 and 3000, based on reports from hospitals and field workers around Afghanistan. Herold told the Guardian that civilian deaths were now at least 4000.
"You can probably double Herold's figure because so much goes unreported here", a de-mining expert told the Guardian.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 20, 2002.
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