Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA An anatomy of collateral damage
By Tom Engelhardt
In a little noted passage in her bestselling book, The Dark Side, Jane
Mayer offers us a vision, just post-September 11, 2001, of the value of one. In
October 2001, shaken by a nerve-gas false alarm at the White House, Vice
President Dick Cheney, reports Mayer, went underground. He literally embunkered
himself in "a secure, undisclosed location," which she describes as "one of
several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the nearest of which were located
hundreds of feet below bedrock ... ".
That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, "the commander in
chief's suite".
Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, "he was
chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible
attackers". In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a
duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit". And lest
danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow".
When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn't exactly a profile in
courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but
whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of
self-worth. Has any wartime president - forget the vice president - including
Abraham Lincoln when southern armies might have marched on Washington, or
Franklin D Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely
overprotected in the nation's capital? Has any administration ever placed such
value on the preservation of the life of a single official?
On the other hand, the well-armored vice president and his aide David Addington
played a leading role, as Mayer documents in grim detail, in loosing a "global
war on terror" on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war, "the
gloves came off", and "the shackles were removed", images much loved within the
administration and, in the case of those "shackles", particularly by George
Tenet's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the process, no price in human
abasement or human life proved too high to pay - as long as it was paid by
someone else.
Recently, it was paid by up to 60 Afghan children.
The value of none
If no level of protection was too much for the White House, then no protection
was what it offered civilians who happened to be living in the ever expanding
"war zones" of the planet. In the Middle East, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
the war to be fought - in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless unmanned
aerial vehicles or drones - would, in crucial ways, be aimed at civilians -
though this could never be admitted. "Collateral damage", the sterile,
self-exculpating phrase the Pentagon chose to use for the
anything-but-secondary death and destruction visited on civilians, would be the
name of the game in the president's chosen war, almost from the moment the vice
president disappeared into his bunker.
In a world where death came suddenly into that vast swath of the planet the
neo-conservatives once called "the arc of instability" (before they made it
one), civilians had few doctors on hand, no full chemical body suits or gas
masks, when disaster struck. Often they were asleep, or going about their daily
business, when death made an unannounced appearance. Throughout these years,
the stories of these deaths, when they appeared at all, were normally to be
found on the inside pages of our newspapers in summary war reports, which
regularly had "women and children" buried in them somewhere.
We have no idea just how many civilians have been blown away by the US military
(and its allies) in these years, only that the "collateral damage" has been
widespread and far more central to the president's war on terror than anyone
here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral damage has come in myriad ways
- from artillery fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated shootings
of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints, and from troops (or even private
mercenaries) blasting away from convoys; during raids on private homes; in
village operations; and, significantly, from the air.
In Afghanistan, in particular, as the Taliban insurgency grew more quickly than
US and NATO troop strength, so did the use of air power. From 2004 to 2007, air
strikes increased tenfold. Over the past year, civilian deaths from those air
strikes have nearly tripled. According to Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon
official and military analyst at Human Rights Watch, 317,000 pounds of bombs
were dropped this June and 270,000 this July, equaling "the total tonnage
dropped in 2006".
As with all figures relating to casualties, the actual counts you get on Afghan
civilian dead are approximations and probably undercounts, especially since the
war against the Taliban has been taking place largely in the backlands of one
(or, if you count Pakistan, two) of the poorest, most remote regions on the
planet. And yet we do know something. For instance, although the media have
seldom attended to the subject, we know that one subset of innocent civilians
has been slaughtered repeatedly. While, for instance, Americans spent days in
October 2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of five Amish girls by
a madman in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and weeks following the
mass slaughter of 32 college students by a mad boy at Virginia Tech in April
2007, between 2001 and this year, one Iraqi and three Afghan wedding parties
were largely wiped out from the air by American planes, the latest only months
ago, to hardly any news coverage at all.
The message of these slaughters - an estimated 47 people, mostly from "the
bride's party", including the bride herself, died in the latest such "incident"
- is that if you live in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now much of
the country, you'd better not gather.
Each of these events was marked by something else - the uniformity of the US
response: initial claims that US forces had been fired on first and that those
killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the slaughters as the unavoidable
"collateral damage" of wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to genuinely
apologize for, or take real responsibility for, having wiped out groups of
celebrating locals.
And keep in mind that such disasters are just subsets of a far larger, barely
covered story. In July alone, for example, the US military and NATO officials
launched investigations into three air strikes in Afghanistan in which 78
Afghan civilians (including that wedding party) were killed.
Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such "incidents" have occurred again and
again. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration, in collaboration with the
Pentagon, has devised a method for dealing with such happenings. After all, the
war on terror is premised on an unspoken belief that the lives of others -
civilians going about their business in distant lands - are essentially of no
importance when placed against American needs and desires. That, you might say,
is the value of none.
Incident in Azizabad
Another gathering of Afghans recently ended with the slaughter of civilians on
a startling scale. For once, it's gotten far more than minimal coverage and
hasn't (yet) gone away. Remaining in the news, it has also opened a window into
just how the US military and the Bush administration have dealt with most
incidents of "collateral damage" that made it into the news over these last
years.
Here are the basic facts as best we know them. On the night of August 21, a
memorial service was held in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand District of
Afghanistan's Herat Province, for a tribal leader killed the previous year, who
had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban. Hundreds had attended, including
"extended families from two tribes".
That night, a combined party of US Special Forces and Afghan army troops
attacked the village. They claimed they were "ambushed" and came under "intense
fire". What we know is that they called in repeated air strikes. According to
several investigations and the on-the-spot reporting of New York Times
journalist Carlotta Gall, at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and
up to 60 children, died that night. As many as 76 members of a single extended
family were killed, along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound seems to have
been specially targeted.
Khan, it turns out, was no Taliban "militant," but a "wealthy businessman with
construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand
Airport". He reportedly owned a private security company which worked for the
US military at the airport and also a cell phone business in the town of Herat.
He had a card "issued by an American Special Forces [USSF] officer that
designated [him] as a 'coordinator for the USSF'". Eight of the other men
killed that night, according to Gall, worked as guards for a private American
security firm. At least two dead men had served in the Afghan police and fought
against the Taliban.
The incident in Azizabad may represent the single deadliest media-verified
attack on civilians by US forces since the invasion of 2001. Numerous buildings
were damaged. Many bodies, including those of children, had to be dug out of
the rubble. There may have been as many as 60 children among the dead. The US
military evidently attacked after being given false information by another
tribal leader/businessman in the area with a grudge against Khan and his
brother. As one tribal elder who helped bury the dead put it, "It is quite
obvious, the Americans bombed the area due to wrong information. I am 100%
confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute. The
Americans are foreigners and they do not understand. These people they killed
were enemies of the Taliban."
Repeated US air attacks resulting in civilian deaths have proven a disaster for
Afghan President Hamid Karzai. He promptly denounced the strikes against
Azizabad, fired two Afghan commanders, including the top ranking officer in
western Afghanistan, for "negligence and concealing facts", and ordered his own
investigation of the incident. His team of investigators concluded that more
than 90 Afghan civilians had indeed died. Karzai and the Afghan Council of
Ministers, demanded a "review" of "the presence of international forces and
agreements with foreign allies, including NATO and the United States".
Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights
Commission, similarly reported that one of the group's researchers found, "that
88 people had been killed, including 20 women". The UN mission in Afghanistan
then dispatched its own investigative team from Herat to interview survivors.
Its investigation "found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of
eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60
children, 15 women and 15 men". (The 60 children were reportedly "3 months old
to 16 years old, all killed as they slept".)
The American response
Given the weight of evidence at Azizabad, the on-site investigations, the many
graves, the destroyed houses, the specificity of survivor accounts, and so on,
this might have seemed like a cut-and-dried case of mistaken intelligence
followed by an errant assault with disastrous consequences. But accepting such
a conclusion simply isn't in the playbook of the US military or the Bush
administration.
Instead, in such cases what you regularly get is a predictable US narrative
about what happened made up of outlandish claims (or simply bald-faced lies),
followed by a strategy of stonewalling, including a blame-the-victims approach
in which civilian deaths are regularly dismissed as enemy-inspired
"propaganda," followed - if the pressure doesn't ease up - by the announcement
of an "investigation" (whose results will rarely be released), followed by an
expression of "regrets" or "sorrow" for the loss of life - both weasel words
that can be uttered without taking actual responsibility for what happened -
never to be followed by a genuine apology.
Now, let's consider the American response to Azizabad.
The numbers
Initially, the US military flatly denied that any civilians had been killed in
the village. In the operation, they claimed, exactly 30 Taliban "militants" had
died. ("Insurgents engaged the soldiers from multiple points within the
compound using small-arms and RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fire. The joint
forces responded with small-arms fire and an air strike killing 30 militants.")
Targeted, they said, had been a single compound holding a local Taliban
commander, later identified as Mullah Sadiq, who was killed. (Sadiq would
subsequently call Radio Liberty to indicate that he was still very much alive
and deny that he had been in the village that night.) Quickly enough, however,
military spokespeople began backing off. Brigadier General Richard Blanchette,
a NATO spokesman, said that "investigators sent to the site immediately after
the bombing" had, in fact, verified the deaths of three women and two children
who were suspected of being relatives of the dead Taliban commander.
After Karzai's angry denunciation, and the results of his team's investigation
was released, the US military altered its account slightly, admitting that only
25 Taliban fighters had actually died as well as five Afghans identified as
"noncombatants", including a woman and two children. The US command, however,
remained "very confident" that only 30 Afghans had been killed.
Later, after a military investigation had been launched, the US command in
Afghanistan issued a vague statement indicating that "[c]oalition forces are
aware of allegations that the engagement in
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