Article on Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is there any thought that the US might compensate families of innocent
victims for their losses? It seems that Afghan allies lives are not equal to
those of US marines. Searching Tora Bora caves is apparently too dangerous
for US marines and is to be contracted out to locals for pay. They had
better hope the US does not experiment with their new bomb  that sucks air
out of the caves at the same time as the locals are searching in them.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

The innocent dead in a coward's war

Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians

Seumas Milne
Thursday December 20, 2001
The Guardian

The price in blood that has already been paid for America's war against
terror is only now starting to become clear. Not by Britain or the US, nor
even so far by the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders held responsible for the
September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It has instead been paid by
ordinary Afghans, who had nothing whatever to do with the atrocities, didn't
elect the Taliban theocrats who ruled over them and had no say in the
decision to give house room to Bin Laden and his friends.
The Pentagon has been characteristically coy about how many people it
believes have died under the missiles it has showered on Afghanistan.
Acutely sensitive to the impact on international support for the war,
spokespeople have usually batted away reports of civilian casualties with a
casual "these cannot be independently confirmed", or sometimes simply denied
the deaths occurred at all. The US media have been particularly helpful.
Seven weeks into the bombing campaign, the Los Angeles Times only felt able
to hazard the guess that "at least dozens of civilians" had been killed.

Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out
into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics
professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated reports
from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news
agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians
were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10. That is an
average of 62 innocent deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the
3,234 now thought to have been killed in New York and Washington on
September 11.

Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But what is impressive about
his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative
assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The figure does not
include those who died later of bomb injuries; nor those killed in the past
10 days; nor those who have died from cold and hunger because of the
interruption of aid supplies or because they were forced to become refugees
by the bombardment. It does not include military deaths (estimated by some
analysts, partly on the basis of previous experience of the effects of
carpet-bombing, to be upwards of 10,000), or those prisoners who were
slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and
elsewhere.

Champions of the war insist that such casualties are an unfortunate, but
necessary, byproduct of a just campaign to root out global terror networks.
They are a world apart, they argue, from the civilian victims of the attacks
on the World Trade Centre because, in the case of the Afghan civilians, the
US did not intend to kill them.

In fact, the moral distinction is far fuzzier, to put it at its most
generous. As Herold argues, the high Afghan civilian death rate flows
directly from US (and British) tactics and targeting. The decision to rely
heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and
repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a
deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with
those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians.
Thousands of innocents have died over the past two months, not mainly as an
accidental byproduct of the decision to overthrow the Taliban regime, but
because of the low value put on Afghan civilian lives by US military
planners.

Raids on targets such as the Kajakai dam power station, Kabul's telephone
exchange, the al-Jazeera TV station office, lorries and buses filled with
refugees and civilian fuel trucks were not mistakes. Nor were the deaths
that they caused. The same goes for the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs
in urban areas. But western public opinion has become increasingly
desensitised to what has been done in its name. After US AC-130 gunships
strafed the farming village of Chowkar-Karez in October, killing at least 93
civilians, a Pentagon official felt able to remark: "the people there are
dead because we wanted them dead", while US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that particular village."

Yesterday, Rumsfeld inadvertently conceded what little impact the Afghan
campaign (yet to achieve its primary aim of bringing Bin Laden and the
al-Qaida leadership to justice) has had on the terrorist threat, by
speculating about ever more cataclysmic attacks, including on London. There
will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper
obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there
were for the victims of the twin towers. But what has been cruelly
demonstrated is that the US and its camp followers are prepared to sacrifice
thousands of innocents in a coward's war.
The innocent dead in a coward's war

s.milne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx