US airstrike kills Afghan civilians

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US airstrike kills Afghan civilians
By Bill Van Auken
23 February 2010

A US air strike killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan’s central
Uruzgan Province Sunday, while to the south a US ground offensive in
the Helmand Province town of Marjah ground through its second week,
producing growing casualties and the threat of a humanitarian disaster.

The massacre took place near the border between Uruzgan and Daykundi
provinces. According to the Wall Street Journal, special operations
troops called in an air strike on three minibuses, which they
reportedly believed were carrying armed insurgents.

Initial reports cited 33 people dead and at least 12 others wounded.
Later, Afghan officials revised the death toll to 27. Among the dead
were four women and a child. It appears to be the worst attack on
Afghanistan’s civilian population since September 4, when a German
commander ordered an airstrike on a fuel tanker truck surrounded by
local people, killing 142 of them.

The Afghanistan council of ministers criticized the air strike: “The
repeated killings of civilians by NATO forces is unjustifiable,” the
council said in a muted statement.

Those whose family members were slaughtered in the attack had a
different reaction. They demanded that the foreign troops get out of
their country. “They came here to bring security but they kill our
children, they kill our brothers and they kill our people,” said Haji
Ghullam Rasoul, whose cousins died in the attack. “We’ve had enough.”

The US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has
stressed that civilian casualties undermine American efforts to pacify
the country by inflaming popular opposition. He reportedly has changed
the rules of engagement in Afghanistan to reduce such casualties, yet
they continue.

A large share of these killings is the work of the Special Operation
Forces, which McChrystal formerly commanded. These units are being
used in an ongoing assassination program aimed at wiping out leading
elements of the Taliban and other forces resisting the occupation.
Last December, they were blamed for the execution-style killing of
eight students, some as young as 11, in Kunar province.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a tacit defense of
Sunday’s mass killing, stressing that such atrocities had to be
accepted as part of war.

“The thing to remember is that we’re at war,” Gates said at a Pentagon
press conference. “General McChrystal is doing everything humanly
possible to avoid civilian casualties.”

He continued, “I’m not defending it at all. I’m just saying that these
kinds of things, in many respects, are inherent in a war. It’s what
makes war so ugly.”

Appearing with Gates, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Mike Mullen, sounded the same note. “War is bloody and
uneven,” Mullen said “It’s messy and ugly and incredibly wasteful, but
that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the cost.”

Gates also fell back on the increasingly widespread justification that
those resisting the US-led occupation were using “civilians for
cover.” Such claims have been employed in every colonial-style war—in
which foreign troops fight against members of an indigenous
population—to justify the killing of unarmed men, women and children.

Significantly, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
published articles Monday on the same basic theme, with the Times
headline referring to “Afghans in the Crossfire” and the Journal to
“Civilians in the Crosshairs.”

The deadly air strike in Uruzgan largely overshadowed the Pentagon’s
continuous claims of progress and success in “Operation Moshtarak,”
the largest offensive launched by US-led occupation troops since the
country was invaded more than eight years ago.

Afghan officials have reported 19 civilians killed in the operation,
12 of them slain in a rocket attack on a home that wiped out all of
its occupants except one eight-year-old girl. Residents, however, have
put the death toll significantly higher.

Aziz Ahmad Tassal and Mohammad Elyas Dayee, writing for International
War and Peace Reporting, interviewed relatives of some of those killed
in the wake of the rocket attack earlier this month.

One of them, Harun, was at a hospital in the provincial capital, where
he had brought his two wounded brothers. One brother’s wife had been
killed by fire from a tank.

“My wounded brother Fazel Omar got married six months ago. When he was
wounded, his wife came out of the house and ran towards her husband,
but [they] shot at her from their tank and [killed] her,” he said.

He continued, “That moment was very difficult for me because I could
not go out of the house. I could not take my wounded brothers to the
hospital and could not bring my dead sister-in-law’s body home.”

Also interviewed was Gula Jan, who had brought the bodies of his two
young sisters to the Bost Hospital in Lashkar Gah. Their house had
also been fired upon by the US-led forces. “My two little sisters were
martyred by the foreigners’ rocket,” he said, “and I will not
reconcile with the infidels until I can avenge my sisters.”

Ahmad’s father was shot dead by occupation troops when he left his
home to get food. “The body of my father was left inside our home for
two days because the foreigners did not let us out to bury the body in
the cemetery,” he said. “We were scared of being killed. They are
cruel and the infidels have no sympathy for us.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported growing anger among the
population of Marjah over troops kicking in the doors of their homes,
damaging the local market and killing their livestock.

There are growing concerns of a humanitarian disaster resulting from
the operation, which US commanders say could continue for a month.
Many residents who stayed behind have become imprisoned in their own
homes by the fighting, running out of food and water and unable to
seek medical care.

Many thousands more who fled are now homeless, with little assistance
from either the occupation forces or the government of Hamid Karzai.

Reports from Marjah describe a hellish environment of constant
firefights as the US and other foreign forces continue to meet
resistance. Overhead, helicopter gunships, pilotless drones and
fighter planes continuously circle the area, waiting for orders to attack.

At least 13 US and other foreign troops have been killed. Military
officials claim that 120 “insurgents” have died in the fighting, but
the count appears to be only an estimate and may well include civilians.

While the US military and the media have touted the operation—the
first offensive since the “surge” ordered by President Barack Obama—as
some kind of a turning point in the long war, it is increasingly
obvious that it is nothing of the kind.

Some 11,000 troops backed by airpower have been poured into Marjah, a
remote and largely rural district with barely 75,000 people. While the
ability of the US-led forces to prevail over a few hundred Taliban
fighters was largely taken for granted, their control over the area is
far from secure as they continue to face frequent attacks.

The offensive was largely a demonstration of US power, with little
strategic significance. But the strengths that it was supposed to
showcase have proven illusory at best.

The claim that US forces will be able to be drawn down as the Afghan
National Army takes over the fighting has been refuted by the conduct
of the Afghan troops, only one of whom has been reported killed. US
Marines have been compelled to take the lead in every operation, with
the Afghan forces showing little or no ability to act on their own.

Moreover, most of these troops are Tajiks, an ethnic group that formed
the base of the Northern Alliance, with which the Taliban, with its
base among the local Pashtuns, fought a protracted civil war. They are
widely seen, like the American troops, as a hostile occupying force.

The US-led operation is also supposed to install a new district regime
loyal to the US puppet government of Karzai and subservient to the
foreign occupation. Chosen to carry out this job is one Haji Zahir, an
Afghan émigré who returned to the country only recently after 15 years
in Germany. He reportedly has few ties to the area.

Zahir was flown into Marjah for the first time Monday “aboard a Marine
MV-22B Osprey helicopter with a contingent of Marine officers,” the
Washington Post reported, adding, “He was on the ground for about two
hours, not venturing more than 100 yards from where his aircraft landed.”

Also vying for leadership is the district’s former police chief, Abdul
Rahman Jan. According to the Post, the police he led “were so corrupt
and ruthless—their trademark was summary executions—that many
residents welcomed the Taliban as a more humane alternative.”

The Post reported that Jan—who was sacked in 2005 at the demand of
British officials—enjoys the backing of Karzai despite, or perhaps
because of, his close ties to narcotics traffickers.

McChrystal said that the operation in Marjah was a “model for the
future.” He suggested that the more important target would be
Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, with a population of
nearly one million. Fighting for control there will prove far more
costly in terms of casualties, both among civilians and US troops.

In an interview Sunday on the television news program “Meet the
Press,” Gen. David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, warned
that casualties in coming months would be heavy and prove “tough” to bear.

Petraeus stressed that the offensive in Marjah was just “the initial
operation of what will be a 12 to 18-month campaign.”

The general’s comment gives the lie to Obama’s claim that his
escalation, with the deployment of 30,000 more US troops, would be
reversed by July 2011, with the drawdown of US forces. His
administration is waging a protracted, expanding and bloody war, with
no end in sight.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/afgh-f23.shtml

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