The recently revealed video of American marines urinating on dead Afghans identified as Taliban fighters has sparked much debate, but unfortunately little of it has any value. The usual suspects make the expected comments. Liberals wring their hands and declare that they are shocked, shocked to see such terrible behavior committed by their troops. The right wing shrug their shoulders and either dismiss the behavior’s importance altogether or express outright support.
The Obama administration tries to have it both ways by simultaneously expressing outrage and promising punishment of the offenders but also declaring that the continued occupation of Afghanistan is a necessity. It is meaningless for the secretaries of State and Defense to express outrage and promise to punish the offenders when they are in charge of the inherently murderous occupation.
NATO/G8 meetings are scheduled to take place from May 19-21 next year in Chicago. Plans are ramping up everywhere. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen exulted over bringing NATO and the G8 to Chicago, and Clinton promised to call Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and convey Rasmussen’s glowing opinion that Chicago, built upon diversity and determination, shares values that underpin NATO.
Activists on the ground, envisioning a different kind of Chicago, and bracing themselves for the crushing, militarized police response that in recent years has consistently met protesters at these events, can only hope that this is not the case.
A correspondent wrote me yesterday, "what [is]our government and military doing attacking a Pakistani military base? Pakistan is supposed to be our ally in this ten years old crazy war in Afghanistan." NATO Airstrike Kills 24 Pakistani Soldiers.
Pakistan had a military government over decades, supported by every US administration. There's a large base in Pakistan for Islamic fundamentalism, which has deeply penetrated the Pakistani military, which is itself an utterly corrupt institution deeply involved in owning land and business (like Egypt's US-funded military is).
This article is excerpted from the original on BBC News
Pakistan has buried 24 of its troops who were killed in a Nato airstrike at a checkpoint on the Afghan border. The incident on Saturday has heightened already tense relations between Pakistan and the US and Nato.
Nato has apologised, calling it a "tragic unintended incident", and is investigating what happened.
Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he had written to Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to "make it clear that the deaths of Pakistani personnel are as unacceptable and deplorable as the deaths of Afghan and international personnel".
U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) killed well over 1,500 civilians in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011, analysis of official statistics on the raids released by the U.S.-NATO command reveals.
That number would make U.S. night raids by far the largest cause of civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan. The report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on civilian casualties in 2010 had said the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) by insurgents was the leading cause of civilian deaths, with 904.
Afghanistan has been engaged with more than 30 years of war with thousands of civilians killed or injured since 2001.
It is under these conditions that children are at extreme risk of violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect.
The children of Afghanistan are growing up in one of the least developed countries in the world. Six percent of babies die at birth and 25 percent before their 5th birthday. Conflict and political violence force millions of children and their families to flee their homes and as a result displaced families spend years in situations of uncertainty and insecurity.
Girls face multiple gender discrimination from the earliest stages of their life and throughout childhood. 70 percent of school-age girls do not attend school. Ninety-four percent of births are not registered.
Simon Jenkins fires a powerful salvo of scorn and spleen to mark the 10th anniversary of the imperial quagmire in Afghanistan. Among the glories and triumphs of this magnificent adventure, Jenkins notes the fact that international agencies are now calling for emergency aid to combat the imminent threat of mass starvation in the liberated land. This is what 10 years, thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of "nation-building" have produced: a broken, brutalized, bankrupt society on the verge of murderous famine.
The whole piece is well worth reading, but here are some highlights:
Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai. ...
They disappeared
caskets of dead
soldiers coming home;
cameras out of view.
We knew.
They did not count
all they killed;
the killed do not count
at all.
We knew.
They said the
mission was accomplished.
Standing at #OccupyWallStreet this week, we got a chance to talk with occupiers, supporters, and tourists about the upcoming 10th anniversary of the U.S. bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, and plans to protest it next week, particularly starting Thursday, October 6 at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.
The great majority warmly embraced us, some literally, helping to write "Stop the War" in Arabic, Spanish, and French for our signs, or dropping donations in our bucket. People stared a long time at a photo of Afghan civilians wounded by a U.S. bomb, and asked, "Is that war still going on?" "Why hasn't it been stopped, because we're all against it?" "I think the people there must hate us."
U.S. Special Operations Forces have been increasingly aiming their night-time raids, which have been the primary cause of Afghan anger at the U.S. military presence, at civilian non- combatants in order to exploit their possible intelligence value, according to a new study published by the Open Society Foundation and The Liaison Office.
The study provides new evidence of the degree to which the criteria used for targeting of individuals in night raids and for seizing them during raids have been loosened to include people who have not been identified as insurgents.
It’s difficult to pick out the most disturbing feature of the Obama administration’s expanding use of unmanned drones in its continuing war on “terror” in at least 5 countries. Would it be that the pilots, sitting in Texas or Nebraska, “watch” targets across the world for hours or days, and then go home for dinner with the kids? That their slang term for human beings they’ve hit is “squirter?” That the C.I.A. minders of one of the U.S. drone programs claim “no” civilians are killed? Or that there’s no oversight, no budget limit, no one in the upper levels of government who is even disturbed by this inhumanity?
I’d go for all of the above, and together, they are only one reason I’m calling you to protest on October 6, and in the days after, at the outrage of 10 years of aggressive war and occupation of Afghanistan by the United States. See World Can’t Wait protest plans and 10 Years and Counting.
On Saturday August 6, 2011, a U.S. military Chinook transport helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing 30 American soldiers, including 17 elite Navy SEALs, and eight Afghans. The mainstreamnewsmedia was awash with somber reports about this being the "deadliest day" for U.S. forces in the ten years since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan began.
Notably, many news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and The Washington Post claimed the helicopter crash and its 30 American casualties marked the "deadliest day of the war", without adding the vital qualification, "for United States military personnel." Even the progressive website Truthout provided its daily email blast that day with the headline: "Deadliest Day in Decade-Long Afghanistan War: 31 Troops Killed in Shootdown."
One year ago, WikiLeaks released the Afghanistan war logs. Around seventy-six thousand previously classified military reports were released in collaboration with the New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. The contents of the documents revealed several dark realities of the war. And, the release drew condemnation from the Washington establishment that made certain the war logs had a minor impact.
The significance of the documents, according to WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, was that they covered the war from 2004-2009 and provided details on incidents with Task Force 373, a US-assassination squad known as “the Squad Hunters.” The war logs showed this squad, comprised of Navy Seals and members of the Delta Force, kept a “kill-and-capture list” of targets believed to be drug barons, bomb makers or members of al Qaeda or the Taliban. The assassination squad would “seize” targets on the list for “internment” but in many cases the targets were simply killed.
When I first saw the stories about the CIA’s super-cunning covert op – setting up a fake vaccination scheme to try to get DNA from Osama bin Laden's children in Abbottabad – I immediately thought: How many innocent people are going to die or suffer needlessly from this unconscionable tainting of medical programmes by Terror War subterfuge?
How many people will now turn away from ostensibly genuine humanitarian efforts, wary of being used by foreign spies infiltrating their country? How many more genuine medical relief and health care workers will now be targeted as agents of militarist agendas in troubled lands already rightly suspicious of the murderous spy games being played in their midst?
Now Médecins Sans Frontières has voiced the same concerns, in public blast on Thursday which called the CIA's toying with the lives and health of vulnerable children "grave manipulation of the medical act."
NATO admitted to the first strike, but termed the slain “associated family members” of the Taliban they were trying to kill, and insisted some Taliban were killed. They have yet to comment on the new strike, though they did say they were investigating a third incident of civilian killings.
I would like to see resolutions passed that say that we must end these wars because they are bankrupting us morally…that the cost of war is too high for our souls.
The Afghanistan War. War itself is inherently immoral, but especially so when the fight is not between two state-sponsored militaries, but rather between a military superpower and a third-world country with 70% of its populace living in rural areas without electricity or running water and whose citizens do not even know why they are being attacked. It has been illegal from the outset in that it was waged against a sovereign country which was no threat to us, ignoring international law, and without adequate Congressional approval. And by the DoD’s own admission, it has not been effective. In fact, many experts believe that it has been counterproductive; that by killing thousands of people and destroying property and infrastructure we are creating enemies. We are propping up a government which is as corrupt as a crime syndicate, and labeling anyone who opposes us an “insurgent,” and therefore justifying their deaths.
Ten years ago, when the Taliban had mostly wrested control of Afghanistan from former fundamentalist warlord allies of the United States, the U.S. government turned a cold and deaf ear to testimony about the suffering of Afghan women. Then, suddenly, after her husband announced a "war on terror" to last "generations," Laura Bush told us in November 2011 that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was "a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
U.S. activists for the global rights of women quickly differed over what has become the longest U.S. occupation. A number of us asked, where, ever, had U.S. bombs, contractors, armies and money brought liberation for women? A section of feminists, led by the Feminist Majority Foundation formed up in support of the Bush regime’s aim of removing the Taliban. While deploring violence, they lobbied for humanitarian aid programs to be part of the war, and for women to be included in the U.S. puppet government. Initially, some were, but the cynical inclusion of women in occupied governments has been meaningless, largely done to fool outsiders.
Drones, with their low cost and low risk, make targeted killing more convenient and more likely.
By Doug Noble
Ever since becoming involved with the protest activities at Hancock Field I have been trying to get some clarity about my objections to drones. A new children’s book on Predator Drones explains, “The US military is always looking for ways to reduce risks for soldiers and to keep pilots safe. This is why unmanned drones are important.” This seems right, but consider that, due to overwhelming US air power superiority, there hasn’t been a US Air Force plane lost in combat in nearly 40 years, and so there is negligible difference in risk between piloting a drone aircraft and flying a fighter jet. Add to this the fact that killer (Predator or Reaper) drones are used most frequently in sovereign nations – Pakistan, Yemen, Libya - with which the US is neither at war nor has any official boots on the ground. So there are no US soldiers to keep safe in these places. It seems that neither US pilots nor soldiers are made safer by most drone deployments. And still their use has skyrocketed.
Twelve-year-old Nelofar was shot dead early Thursday morning outside her family's home in Eastern Afghanistan because NATO troops mistakenly believed that her uncle was a Taliban leader. She was running, apparently in fear of the military troops that had just invaded her father's house in the middle of a sweltering summer night.
NATO quickly apologized for its mistake. But it's just one of many such errors by U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan that have led to the deaths of civilians. As documented in a report released earlier this week, similar mistakes are also leading to the imprisonment of many innocent Afghans.
On May 4, 2011, CNN World News asked whether killing Osama bin Laden was legal under international law. Other news commentary has questioned whether it would have been both possible and advantageous to bring Osama bin Laden to trial rather than kill him.
World attention has been focused, however briefly, on questions of legality regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden. But, with the increasing use of Predator drones to kill suspected "high value targets" in Pakistan and Afghanistan, extrajudicial killings by U.S. military forces have become the new norm.
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by Debra Sweet
By Debra Sweet
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