Americans Must Take A Hard Look At The Mirror
By Kathy Kelly
30 March, 2010
Afterdowningstreet.org 
If the U.S. public looked long and
hard into a mirror reflecting the civilian atrocities that have occurred in
Afghanistan, over the past ten months, we would see ourselves as people who have
collaborated with and paid for war crimes committed against innocent civilians
who meant us no harm.
Two reporters, Jerome Starkey (the Times UK), and David
Lindorff, (Counterpunch), have persistently drawn attention to U.S. war crimes
committed in Afghanistan. Makers of the film “Rethinking Afghanistan” have
steadily provided updates about the suffering endured by Afghan civilians. Here
is a short list of atrocities that have occurred in the months since General
McChrystal assumed his post in Afghanistan.
December 26th, 2009: US-led forces, (whether soldiers or
“security contractors” (mercenaries) is still uncertain), raided a home in Kunar
Province and pulled eight young men out of their beds, handcuffed them, and
gunned them down execution-style. The Pentagon initially reported that the
victims had been running a bomb factory, although distraught villagers were
willing to swear that the victims, youngsters, aged 11 – 18, were just seven
normal schoolboys and one shepherd boy. Following courageous reporting by Jerome
Starkey, the U.S. military carried out its own investigation and on February
24th, 2010, issued an apology, attesting the boys’ innocence.
February 12, 2010: U.S. and Afghan forces raided a home during a
party and killed five people, including a local district attorney, a local
police commander two pregnant mothers and a teenaged girl engaged to be married.
Neither Commander Dawood, shot in the doorway of his home while pleading for
calm waving his badge, nor the teenaged Gulalai, died immediately, but the
gunmen refused to allow relatives to take them to the hospital. Instead, they
forced them to wait for hours barefoot in the winter cold outside.
Despite crowds of witnesses on the scene, the NATO report
insisted that the two pregnant women at the party had been found bound and
gagged, murdered by the male victims in an honor killing. A March 16, 2010 U.N.
report, following on further reporting by Starkey, exposed the deception, to
meager American press attention.
Two weeks later: February 21st, 2010: A three-car convoy of
Afghans was traveling to the market in Kandahar with plans to proceed from there
to a hospital in Kabul where some of the party could be taken for much-needed
medical treatment. U.S. forces saw Afghans travelling together and launched an
air-to-ground attack on the first car. Women in the second car immediately
jumped out waving their scarves, trying desperately to communicate that they
were civilians. The U.S. helicopter gunships continued firing on the now
unshielded women. 21 people were killed and 13 were wounded.
There was press attention for this atrocity, and U.S. General
Stanley McChrystal would issue a videotaped apology for his soldiers’ tragic
mistake. Broad consensus among the press accepted this as a gracious gesture,
with no consequences for the helicopter crew ever demanded or announced.
Whether having that gunship in the country was a mistake – or a
crime – was never raised as a question.
And who would want it raised? Set amidst the horrors of an
ongoing eight-year war, how many Americans think twice about these atrocities,
hearing them on the news.
So I’m baffled to learn that in Germany, a western, relatively
comfortable country, citizens raised a sustained protest when their leaders
misled them regarding an atrocity that cost many dozens of civilian lives in
Afghanistan.
The air strike was conducted by US planes but called in by
German forces. On September 4, 2009, Taleban fighters in Kunduz province had
hijacked two trucks filled with petrol, but then gotten stuck in a quagmire
where the trucks had sank. Locals, realizing that the trucks carried valuable
fuel, had arrived in large numbers to siphon it off, but when a German officer
at the nearest NATO station learned that over 100 people had assembled in an
area under his supervision, he decided they must be insurgents and a threat to
Germans under his command. At his call, a U.S. fighter jet bombed the tankers,
incinerating 142 people, dozens of them confirmable as civilians.
On September 6, 2009, Germany’s Defense Minister at the time,
Franz Josef Jung, held a press conference in which he defended the attack,
playing down the presence of civilians. He wasn’t aware that video footage from
a US F15 fighter jet showed that most of the people present were unarmed
civilians gathering to fill containers with fuel.
On November 27, 2009, after a steady outcry on the part of the
German public, the Defense Minister was withdrawn from his post, (he is now a
Labor Minister), and two German military officials, one of them Germany’s top
military commander Wolfgang Schneiderhan, were forced to resign.
I felt uneasy and sad when I realized that my first response to
this story was a feeling of curiosity as to how the public of another country
could manage to raise such a furor over deaths of people in faraway Afghanistan.
How odd to have grown up wondering how anyone could ever have been an uninvolved
bystander allowing Nazi atrocities to develop and to find myself, four decades
later, puzzling over how German people or any country’s citizenship could
exercise so much control over their governance.
Today, in the US, attacks on civilians are frequently discussed
in terms of the “war for hearts and minds.”.
Close to ten months ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told
reporters at a June 12, 2009 press conference in Brussels that General Stanley
McChrystal “would work to minimize Afghan civilian casualties, a source of
growing public anger within Afghanistan.”
"Every civilian casualty -- however caused -- is a defeat for
us,” Gates continued, “and a setback for the Afghan government."
On March 23rd, 2010, McChrystal was interviewed by the Daily
Telegraph. "Your security comes from the people," he said. "You don't need to be
secured away from the people. You need to be secured by the people. So as you
win their support, it's in their interests to secure you, …. This can mean
patrolling without armored vehicles or even flak jackets. It means accepting
greater short-term risk – and higher casualties – in the hope of winning a
"battle of perceptions and perspectives" that will result in longer-term
security."
And on March 2nd, 2010, he told Gail McCabe "What we're trying
to do now is to increase their confidence in us and their confidence in their
government. But you can't do that through smoke and mirrors, you have to do that
through real things you do - because they've been through thirty-one years of
war now, they've seen so much, they're not going to be beguiled by a
message.”
We’re obliged as Americans to ask ourselves whether we will be
guided by a message such as McChrystal's or by evidence. Americans have not been
through thirty-one years of war, and we have managed to see very little of the
consequences of decades of warmaking in Afghanistan.
According to a March 3, 2010 Save the Children report, “The
world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from
treatable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the
insurgency rather than providing humanitarian aid.” The report notes that a
quarter of all children born in the country die before the age of five, while
nearly 60 percent of children are malnourished and suffer physical or mental
problems. The UN Human Development Index in 2009 says that Afghanistan is one of
the poorest countries in the world, second only to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa.
The proposed US defense budget will cost the U.S. public two
billion dollars per day. President Obama’s administration is seeking a 33
billion dollar supplemental to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most U.S. people are aware of Taleban atrocities, and many may
believe the U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to protect Afghan villagers from
Taleban human rights abuses. At least the mainstream news media in Germany and
the UK will air stories of atrocities. The U.S. people are disadvantaged
inasmuch as the media and the Pentagon attempt to pacify us, winning our hearts
and minds to bankroll ongoing warfare and troop escalation in Afghanistan. Yet
it isn’t very difficult to pacify U.S. people. We’re easily distracted from the
war, and when we do note that an atrocity has happened, we seem more likely to
respond with a shrug of dismay than with a sustained protest.
At the Winter Soldier hearings, future presidential hopeful John
Kerry movingly asked Congress how it could ask a soldier “To be the last man to
die for a mistake,” while contemporary polls showed less prominent Americans far
more willing to call the Vietnam war an evil – a crime – a sin – than “a
mistake.” The purpose of that war, as of Obama’s favored war in Afghanistan, was
to pacify dangerous populations – to make them peaceful, to win the battle of
hearts and minds.
Afghan civilian deaths no longer occur at the rate seen in the
war’s first few months, in which the civilian toll of our September 11 attacks,
pretext for the war then as it is now, was so rapidly exceeded.
But every week we hear – if we are listening very carefully to
the news, if we are still reading that final paragraph on page A16 – or if we
are following the work of brave souls like Jerome Starkey - of tragic mistakes.
We are used to tragic mistakes. Attacking a country militarily means planning
for countless tragic mistakes.
Some of us still let ourselves believe that the war can do some
good in Afghanistan, that our leaders’ motives for escalating the war, however
dominated by strategic economic concerns and geopolitical rivalries, still in
some small part include the interests of the Afghan people.
There are others who know where this war will lead and know that
our leaders know, and have simply become too fatigued, too drained of frightened
tears by this long decade of nightmare, to hold those leaders accountable
anymore for moral choices.
It’s worthwhile to wonder, how did we become this pacified?
But far more important is our collective effort to approach the
mirror, to stay in front of it, unflinching, and see the consequences of our
mistaken acquiescence to the tragic mistakes of war, and then work, work hard,
to correct our mistakes and nonviolently resist collaboration with war crimes.
Kathy Kelly ([email protected]) co-coordinates
Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) and helps promote
the Peaceable Assembly Campaign, a Voices project to end U.S. funding for war
and occupation.
