US Special Forces covered up massacre of Afghans

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US Special Forces covered up massacre of Afghans
Preparations advance for assault on Kandahar
By Tom Eley
6 April 2010

A NATO military statement issued Sunday admitted that US Special
Forces commandos carried out the execution-style killings of three
women and two men in a February 12 night raid in southeastern
Afghanistan. Among the dead women were two pregnant mothers, with 16
children between them. The third was a teenage girl. For weeks the
US-led NATO officials had denied killing the women.

After the killings US Special Forces dug their bullets out of the dead
women’s bodies and treated the holes with alcohol to erase forensic
evidence, an Afghanistan government investigation has reportedly
determined. A United Nations official confirmed that the Afghan
investigation found evidence US soldiers had tampered with the crime
scene. These reports are substantiated by family members and local
authorities, who say US soldiers blocked access for seven hours to the
home in Gardez, the regional capital of eastern Paktia province, while
they attempted to cover up the crime.

The US-led coalition, while admitting for the first time that its
forces killed the women, now contends that it did not attempt a
cover-up. “All regrettable,” said Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the top
military spokesman in Kabul, of the deaths. “That said, there is
absolutely no evidence that the forces covered anything up.” This is a
bald lie. In fact, all the available evidence shows there was a
cover-up, and a crude one at that.

Soon after the raid, NATO acknowledged that US Special Forces had
gunned down two brothers, described as the local police chief and the
district prosecutor, in their home. NATO conceded the men were
civilians, but claimed, without providing evidence, that they were
carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

NATO however denied that US Special Forces had killed the three women,
claiming instead, fantastically, that they had been bound, gagged, and
stabbed to death more than half a day earlier. Yet only a few hours
before the killings the family had concluded a celebration for the
birth of a new child, with 25 guests and musicians present in the home.

“In what culture in the world do you invite … people for a party and
meanwhile kill three women?” a senior Afghan official asked the Times
of London. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they
were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were
dead for 14 hours.”

The NATO statement released Sunday abandoned this earlier statement,
concluding “that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the
joint force firing at the men.” It did not bother to explain why the
earlier false story had been planted and now retracted.

Separately, the German government of Angela Merkel apologized for the
killing of six Afghan policemen on April 2. The German military, which
operates in Afghanistan’s increasingly violent north, claims that the
car carrying the men was obliterated by a German tank after it failed
to stop on command. Three German soldiers had died earlier in the day
in a gunfight with insurgents.

The episodes reveal the real nature of the occupation of Afghanistan,
which has nothing to do with “defending” the local population or the
US people against the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Its purpose is to assert US
and NATO control over the strategically-crucial nation, the better to
pursue Washington’s interests throughout resource-rich Central Asia
and block rivals such as China and Russia. This imperialist agenda
inevitably requires the terrorization of the population.

The spate of civilian killings offers a glimpse of the bloody violence
President Barack Obama has unleashed on the suffering country through
his “surge.” This will only intensify as the US makes preparations for
a major military offensive against Afghanistan’s second most populous
city, Kandahar, which Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Mike Mullen, has called “the center of gravity” for
anti-insurgent operations. The attack is slated for June.

Kandahar’s local government is ostensibly loyal to the Kabul regime of
Hamid Karzai. The head of its council is Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali
Karzai, who reputedly profits from the region’s major industry, the
narcotics trade. But vast sections of the city and its suburbs are
under the de facto control of the Taliban.

Unlike the recent attack on the rural area of Marjah, operations in
Kandahar will take place in an urban area of some 2 million people.
The scale of the forthcoming violence is indicated by the recent
decisions by UN and relief organizations to abandon the city for the
safety of their personnel.

Prior to the full-scale military assault, efforts are being made to
cajole, threaten, and bribe the local elite. The US is ordering a
series of “shura” councils, at which elders from Kandahar’s various
districts and neighborhoods are being told that if they fail to eject
the Taliban, they will face the American military.

These efforts are following a similar pattern as the Bush
administration “surge” in Iraq. The alternative to cooperating with
the Americans is assassination. In preparation for the invasion, US
Special Forces have reportedly carried out extra-judicial killings of
close to 70 locals accused of links to the Taliban, and have arrested
a similar number.

This self-styled “political” campaign faces several glaring
contradictions, most notably the fact that the local Pashtun political
elite are closely tied to both Karzais. Like Ahmed Karzai, their
wealth and influence rests largely on the narcotics trade. Moreover,
both Hamid and Ahmed Karzai owe their positions to the US invasion and
the phony democracy established in its wake. It is this final
contradiction that Washington finds most galling.

In a demonstration of their contempt for their own charade of
democracy in Afghanistan, US officials are openly contemplating the
assassination of Ahmed Karzai, who was elected to his position in a US
gun-barrel vote, as a recent Washington Post news article reports.
Hamid Karzai reportedly defied an ultimatum from Obama to sideline his
brother by providing him with an international post.

A senior US military official told the Post of a recent conversation
with Ahmed Karzai in Kandahar. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching
every step you take,’” the official said. “If I catch you meeting an
insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL. That means that I can
capture or kill you.” JPEL stands for Joint Prioritized Engagement
List. Those whose names appear on it have been slated for execution by
the US.

The Post article expressed frustration, however, that such a fate
appears unlikely for Ahmed Karzai, at least in the short term. “As an
elected official, Karzai cannot simply be removed from office,” the
Post concluded.

The physical removal of Hamid Karzai, whose pro forma denunciations of
US military violence have aggravated the Obama administration, is also
under consideration.

Over the past two days, Karzai has once again become the target of a
full-scale US media campaign. In the wake of the killings in Gardez,
Karzai has reported to have asked US and coalition forces to cease
house searches and said that he would consider joining the Taliban if
western heavy-handedness continued. All of the major US newspapers
quickly responded with articles Monday focusing on growing
“frustration” in the Obama administration with Karzai.

This is the second media campaign against Karzai in half a year. In
the recent disputed and fraud-ridden elections of last year, it was
frequently hinted that Karzai might have to be eliminated. This
possibility is now being openly articulated, Karzai’s main offense
this time his hollow criticism of US brutality.

“To some it may seem as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish,” a
Monday comment in Time magazine notes. “The Afghan leader has lately
begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies—the only force
protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last
foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996.”

Yet Karzai must also contend with the overwhelming hatred of the US
and NATO presence. “The wily President knows that the presence of
foreign forces in his country is deeply unpopular, particularly when
civilians are killed in the course of NATO military operations,”
according to Time. “Karzai, moreover, is humiliated and shown to be
powerless when his protestations over such operations are ignored by
his Western patrons.”

Time points out that Karzai’s career as president has depended on the
US and its calculations for the country. “It’s worth remembering that
Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of
the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government”
backed largely by warlords and “all manner of unsavory characters”
funded by the CIA, which transported “hundreds of millions of dollars
in suitcases” to Kabul.

The opposition to the US occupation is ultimately rooted in its
predatory character, which has done nothing to improve the living
conditions for masses of Afghan workers and peasants. This basic
reality was highlighted by last week’s UN release of startling new
data on social conditions in the country.

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR), fully 36 percent of Afghanistan’s population live in
“absolute poverty,” and another 37 percent live only slightly above
the official poverty threshold. Only a quarter of the population have
access to safe drinking water.

“Poverty is neither accidental, nor inevitable; it is both a cause and
a consequence of a massive human rights deficit,” OHCHR head Norah
Niland said in Kabul on March 31.

The devastating effects of Obama’s surge are also reflected in a sharp
increase in US and coalition casualties. At this time last year
approximately 45 U.S. soldiers and 35 other NATO troops had been
killed. So far in 2010, some 90 U.S. soldiers and 57 additional
coalition deaths have been reported, almost twice the rate for 2009,
the bloodiest year since the 2001 invasion.

The looming attack on Kandahar is being carried out in conjunction
with stepped up drone attacks on the border provinces of North and
South Waziristan in Pakistan. According to a report in the New York
Times, 90 people have been killed in the attacks since January 1. The
drones hover constantly overhead in the border regions and their CIA
operators have become far less concerned over killing civilians close
to alleged militants, striking fear into the entire civilian
population, the Times boasts. These attacks, and Washington’s free
admission that they kill civilians, constitute war crimes and are a
violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The drone attacks have only stirred bitter anger in the tribal regions
and beyond, increasingly destabilizing the Pakistani government which
consents to the killings. On Monday a series of apparently coordinated
attacks killed at least 30 people in Northwest Pakistan. The most
audacious was a sustained attack on the US consulate in Peshawar,
during which six people were killed.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/afgh-a06.shtml

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