DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The value of American - and Afghan
- lives By Tom Engelhardt
Do you do this in the United States?
There is police action every day in the United
States ... They don't call in airplanes to bomb
the place. Afghan President Hamid Karzai
denouncing US air strikes on homes in his country,
June 12, 2012
It was almost closing time
when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank
branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a
nightmare. The three gunmen entered with the
intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers
and bank employees toward a back room, they were
spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly
called emergency services. Within minutes, police
cars were pulling up, the bank was surrounded, and
backup was being called in from neighboring
communities. The gunmen promptly barricaded
themselves inside with their hostages, including
women and small
children, and refused to let anyone leave.
The police called on the gunmen to
surrender, but before negotiations could even
begin, shots were fired from within the bank,
wounding a police officer. The events that
followed - now known to everyone, thanks to 24/7
news coverage - shocked the nation. Declaring the
bank robbers "terrorist suspects", the police
requested air support from the Pentagon and, soon
after, an F-15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base
dropped two GBU-38 bombs on the bank, leaving the
building a pile of rubble.
All three
gunmen died. Initially, a Pentagon spokesman, who
took over messaging from the local police,
insisted that "the incident" had ended
"successfully" and that all the dead were
"suspected terrorists". The Pentagon press office
issued a statement on other casualties, noting
only that "while conducting a follow-on
assessment, the security force discovered two
women who had sustained non-life-threatening
injuries. The security force provided medical
assistance and transported both women to a local
medical facility for treatment". It added that it
was sending an "assessment team" to the site to
investigate reports that others had died as well.
Of course, as Americans quickly learned,
the dead actually included five women, seven
children, and a visiting lawyer from Los Angeles.
The aftermath was covered in staggering detail.
Relatives of the dead besieged city hall, bitterly
complaining about the attack and the deaths of
their loved ones. At a news conference the next
morning, while scenes of rescuers digging in the
rubble were still being flashed across the
country, President Barack Obama said: "Such acts
are simply unacceptable. They cannot be
tolerated." In response to a question, he added:
"Nothing can justify any air strike which causes
harm to the lives and property of civilians."
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Martin Dempsey, immediately flew to San
Diego to meet with family members of the dead and
offer apologies. Heads rolled in the local police
department and in the Pentagon. Congress called
for hearings as well as a Justice Department
investigation of possible criminality, and quickly
passed a bill offering millions of dollars to the
grieving relatives as "solace". San Diego began
raising money for a memorial to the group already
dubbed the Wells Fargo 18.
One week later,
at the exact moment of the bombing, church bells
rang throughout the San Diego area and Congress
observed a minute of silence in honor of the dead.
The meaning of 'precision' It
couldn't have been more dramatic and, as you know
perfectly well, it couldn't have happened - not in
the US, anyway. But just over a week ago, an
analogous "incident" did happen in Afghanistan and
it passed largely unnoticed in the United States.
A group of Taliban insurgents reportedly entered a
house in a village in Logar province, south of
Kabul, where a wedding ceremony either was or
would be in progress. US and Afghan forces
surrounded the house, where 18 members of a single
extended family had gathered for the celebration.
When firing broke out (or a grenade was thrown)
and both US and Afghan troops were reportedly
wounded, they did indeed call in a jet, which
dropped a 500-pound (225-kilogram) bomb,
obliterating the residence and everyone inside,
including up to nine children.
This was
neither an unheard-of mistake nor an aberration in
America's Afghan war. In late December 2001,
according to reports, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers,
using precision-guided weapons, wiped out 110 of
112 wedding revelers in a small Afghan village.
Over the decade-plus that followed, US air power,
piloted and drone, has been wiping out Afghans (as
well as Pakistanis and, until relatively recently,
Iraqis) in a similar fashion - usually in or near
their homes, sometimes in striking numbers, always
on the assumption that there are bad guys among
them.
For more than a decade, incident
after incident, any one of which, in the US, would
have shaken Americans to their core, led to
"investigations" that went nowhere, punishments to
no one, rare apologies, and on occasion, the
offering of modest "solatium" payments to grieving
survivors and relatives. For such events, of
course, 24/7 coverage, like future memorials, was
out of the question.
Cumulatively, they
indicate one thing: that, for Americans, the value
of an Afghan life (or more often Afghan lives)
obliterated in the backlands of the planet,
thousands of kilometers from home, is next to nil
and of no meaning whatsoever. Such deaths are just
so much unavoidable "collateral damage" from the
American way of war - from the post-September 2001
approach we have agreed is crucial to make
ourselves "safe" from terrorists.
By now,
Afghans (and Pakistanis in tribal areas across the
border) surely know the rules of the road of the
American war: there is no sanctity in public or
private rites. While funerals have been hit
repeatedly and at least one baby-naming ceremony
was taken out as well, weddings have been the
rites of choice for obliteration for reasons the
US Air Force has, as far as we know, never taken a
moment to consider, no less explain. Tomdispatch
counted five weddings blown away (one in Iraq and
four in Afghanistan) by mid-2008, and another from
that year not reported until 2009. The latest
incident is at least the seventh that has managed,
however modestly, to make the news in the US, but
there is no way of knowing what other damage to
wedding parties in rural Afghanistan has gone
uncounted.
Imagine the uproar in the
United States if a jet took out a wedding party.
Just consider the attention given every time some
mad gunman shoots up a post office, a college
campus, or simply an off-campus party, if you want
to get an idea. You might think then that, given
the US record of wedding carnage in Afghanistan,
which undoubtedly represents some kind of modern
wedding-crasher record, there might have been a
front-page story, or simply a story, somewhere,
anywhere, indicating the repetitive nature of such
events.
And yet if US carnage in that
country gets attention at all, it's usually only
to point out, in self-congratulatory fashion, that
the Taliban - with their indiscriminate roadside
bombs and their generally undiscriminating suicide
bombers - are far worse. If a US campus is shot
up, what are the odds that the 2007 massacre at
Virginia Tech won't be mentioned? And yet not a
single report on the recent deaths in Logar
province has even noted that this is not the first
time part of an Afghan wedding party has been
taken out by the US Air Force.
Over the
years, such incidents, when they rose individually
to the level of news, almost invariably followed
the same pattern: initial denials by US military
or North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesmen
that any civilian casualties had occurred and
then, if outrage in Afghanistan ratcheted up or
the news reports on the incident didn't die down,
a slow back-pedaling under pressure, and the
launching of an "investigation" or, as in the case
of the Logar bombing, a "joint investigation" with
Afghan authorities, that seldom led anywhere and
often was never heard from or about again. In the
end, in some circumstances, apologies were offered
and modest "solatium" payments made to the
survivors.
And yet, over the years, amid
all the praise for the "precision" of America's
air power, for the ability of its air force to
bring a bomb or a missile to its target in a
fashion that we like to call "surgical", it is no
small thing - explain it as you will - to wipe out
parts or all of seven weddings. You might almost
think that America's wars on the Eurasian
continent had been launched as an assault on
"family values". At the very least, the Afghan war
has given a different meaning to the ceremonial
phrase "till death do us part".
The
country crasher For years, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai has bitterly complained about similar
air strikes that kill and wound civilians in or
near their homes and repeatedly demanded that they
be stopped. In this particular case, he cut short
a trip to China and returned to Afghanistan to
denounce the attack as "unacceptable". Ordinarily,
this has meant remarkably little.
In this
case, however, the Afghan president, who lacks
much real power (hence his old nickname, "the
mayor of Kabul"), seems to have the wind at his
back. Perhaps because the Obama administration is
on edge about its disintegrating relations with
Pakistan (thanks, in part, to its unwillingness to
offer an apology for cross-border US air strikes
that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November);
perhaps because the list of recent US blunders and
disasters in Afghanistan has grown long and
painful - the urinating on bodies of dead enemies,
the killing of civilians "for sport", the burning
of Korans, the slaughter of 16 innocent villagers
by one American soldier, the rise of green-on-blue
violence (that is, Afghan army and police attacks
on their American allies); perhaps because of its
need to maintain a facade of if not success, then
at least non-failure in Afghanistan as drawdowns
begin there in an election year at home; or
perhaps thanks to a combination of all of the
above, Karzai's angry initial response to the
Logar wedding killings did not go unnoticed in
Washington.
In fact, the initial denials
that any civilian deaths had occurred were quickly
dropped, the head of US forces in Afghanistan,
General John Allen, promptly apologized to the
president, and then, in what might have been a
unique act in the Afghan war record, went to Logar
province to meet with the provincial governor and
apologize directly to grieving relatives. ("The
faces of the people were very sad," said Mohammad
Akbar Stanekzai, a parliamentarian member of a
delegation Karzai appointed to investigate the
incident. "They told [General Allen], 'These
incidents don't just happen once, but two, three,
four times and they keep happening.'")
At
the same time, it was announced that there would
be a change in the US policy of calling in air
strikes on homes and villages in support of US
operations. The Afghans promptly claimed that the
Americans had agreed to stop calling in air power
at all in their country. The Americans offered a
far vaguer version of the policy change. Anonymous
US military officials in Kabul quickly suggested
that it represented only "a subtle shift in the
ground realities of the war against the Taliban".
In fact, it did contain loopholes big enough to
slip a B-52 through. As General Allen put it,
"What we have agreed is that we would not use
aviation ordnance on civilian dwellings. Now that
doesn't obviate our inherent right to
self-defense. We will always ... do whatever we
have to do to protect the force."
It's
easy enough, however, to sense an urge in
Washington to calm the waters, not to have one
more thing go truly wrong anywhere. At this very
moment, the president and his top officials are
undoubtedly praying that the euro zone doesn't
collapse and that the Af-Pak theater of operations
doesn't disintegrate into chaos or burst into
flames in the early months of a planned drawdown
of US troops; that, in fact, nothing truly
terrible happens - until at least November 7,
2012.
Karzai has clearly grasped the Obama
administration's present feeling of vulnerability
and frustration in the region and, gambler that he
is, he promptly upped the ante. While the
Americans were speaking of those "subtle" changes,
he branded US air strikes in Afghanistan an
"illegitimate use of force" and demanded that,
when it came to air attacks on Afghan homes, the
planes simply be grounded, whatever the dangers to
US or Afghan troops.
Back in 2009, war
commander General Stanley McChrystal ordered a
somewhat similar reining in of US air strikes, a
position countermanded by the next commander,
General David Petraeus, who called the planes back
in force. Now, those air strikes will, to one
degree or another, once again be a limited option.
But realistically, air power remains essential to
the American way of war, whatever Karzai may
demand. So count on one thing: Before this is all
over, it will be called in again - and in
Afghanistan, weddings will still be celebrated.
In the meantime, after more than a decade
of our most recent Afghan war, the Obama
administration and the US military are clearly
willing to hang out a temporary sign saying:
"Washington at work. Afghans, thank you for your
patience ..." Just across the border in Pakistan,
however, "kill lists" are in effect and the air
campaign there is being ratcheted up.
In
the process, one thing can be said about US
firepower: It has been remarkably precise in the
way it has destabilized the region. In December
2001, we Americans first took on the role of
wedding crashers. More than 10 years later, it
couldn't be clearer that we've been country
crashers, too.
Tom Engelhardt,
co-founder of the American Empire Project and
author of The United States of Fear as well
as The End of Victory Culture, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest
book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001-2050.
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