THIS IS ANTI-TERRORISM? PENTAGON SLAUGHTERS 15 AFGHAN CHILDREN

By Heather Cottin

December 11, 2003--U.S. occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are creating a nightmare for the population there as they step up military repression in the face of growing resistance.

On Dec. 5, a Pentagon air and ground assault killed six children and two adults after a wall fell on them on a farm compound in eastern Paktia Province in Afghanistan. U.S. military officials admitted the deaths on Dec. 10.

Another nine children were playing quietly on Dec. 6 near a small house in Hutala, a tiny village in southern Afghanistan. Two girls were fetching water from a stream. The boys were playing marbles. The girls' uncle stood nearby. Suddenly the roar of a huge armored plane shattered the silence of the country morning.

The U.S. A-10 Warthog launched 30 to 40 rockets into the village, murdering nine children along with the man, who had raced toward the creek to protect his nieces.

The massacre followed "stringent rules of engagement," according to Maj. Christopher West, U.S. military spokesperson. West proudly claimed that the attack "was precisely targeted--it hit one house without damaging others in the area."

Villagers said the man the U.S. was hunting, Mullah Wazir, was not in the village. But a U.S. spokesperson claimed that Abdul Muhammed Wahid, who had been killed, was the man they sought. (BBC, Dec. 7)

Wahid had recently returned to Afghanistan from Iran to get married. His mother, who also lost two granddaughters, Bibi Toara and Bibi Tamama, in the raid, identified his body.

Two brothers who had lost three children stood near little embroidered hats and bloodied galoshes. One said: "Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?" (New York Times, Dec. 8)

Washington justified the attack because Wazir was allegedly involved in recent attacks on foreign workers constructing a "ring road." The "ring road" is a giant project that the United States, Saudi Arabia and Japan have undertaken to develop Afghanistan's infrastructure.

Since October 2002, the Louis Berger Group of East Orange, N.J., has been working on a $180-million enterprise reconstructing the critical road connecting Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. The U.S. Agency for International Development sees Afghanistan's location and the development of its land routes as central to its "special geo-strategic and economic importance," according to a State Department publication.

The U.S. concern with protecting infrastructure over human lives is in keeping with its military priorities in what is, according to UNICEF, the fourth-poorest nation in the world. One in every five children still dies of disease and/or malnutrition before the age of five.

Afghanistan's children are Washing ton's least concern. But killing children by hunger or rockets isn't helping the United States win Afghan hearts and minds.

LOSING HEARTS AND MINDSIN IRAQ, TOO

The British daily, the Guardian, reported Dec. 9 that U.S. intelligence and military officials had admitted that the Israeli army sent warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where U.S. special forces are based, to train them for operations in Iraq. The Guardian report said U.S. special forces units were also operating inside Syria.

"This is basically an assassination program. That is what is being conceptualized here. This is a hunter-killer team," a former senior U.S. intelligence official told the newspaper.

The U.S. occupation forces were carrying out raids throughout Iraq, including attacking union offices. According to a release from the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, the U.S. military, "using a force of about 10 armored cars and dozens of soldiers," attacked the temporary headquarters of IFTU at the offices of the Transport and Communications Union in Baghdad on Dec. 6 and arrested eight of its leaders. The troops then wrecked the offices, "without giving any reason or explanation."

The U.S. had made appeals for relief troops from NATO. But the Pentagon, in a directive from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has barred French, German and Russian companies from competing for $18.6 billion in contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq, saying the step "is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States."

Of course, the Pentagon is keeping the lion's share of the contracts for U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, which have contributed a long line of corporate officers to government posts in order to grease the wheels of military adventure and expansionism.

Paris, Berlin and Moscow, which opposed the U.S. moves toward war last year but were cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation, reacted angrily. The European Commission said it is investigating whether the move complies with global trade rules. Canada and China are also cut out of the contracts.

But the U.S. will dole out a few to those countries--like Britain--that sent soldiers to help the U.S. suppress the Iraqi people, and to Spain, Japan, Italy and Poland, which have troops in Iraq or are about to send them.

Meanwhile, a car bomb near Mosul in northern Iraq wounded 51 U.S. troops. The official number of U.S. troops killed in action since Bush's triumphant speech at the beginning of May reached 194 on Dec. 10. So far, the Pentagon hasn't been able to overcome the Iraqi people's resistance and "rebuild" much of anything. But that isn't stopping Washington from using potential construction contracts as both carrot and stick.

U.S. EMPIRE HAVING PROBLEMS

The U.S. military is having a hard time waging endless war. On Nov. 26, Washington announced a decision to close down 20 percent of its military installations in Europe and parts of Asia to move to "geographic areas where U.S. forces have increasingly found themselves ... particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia." (Boston Globe, Nov. 26)

Meanwhile, the Nov. 18 Stars and Stripes reported that to keep more troops in the military, the Army has imposed a "stop-loss/stop-movement order" on all active-duty units preparing to deploy into Iraq. This means the Army is preventing service members from retiring or leaving the service at their scheduled time; stop movements prevent permanent change-of-station moves.

Even this is not enough. The Pentagon's military might cannot control Afghanistan any more than it can defeat Iraq. Both occupations are brutal, killing thousands of civilians, including children, and turning the populations into resistance fighters.

With U.S. forces inadequate to the task, Washington is turning to NATO for help. On Dec. 2, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called for a shift of NATO forces into Afghanistan, saying, "NATO might take over military operations in Afghan istan some time in the future."

Eager to expand the NATO-led "peace-keeping" mission in Afghanistan beyond Kabul, the imperialist and comprador powers of NATO have committed themselves to "deliver ... real security from Kosovo to Kabul."

At a Dec. 3 meeting in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson proposed shifting NATO forces from Bosnia to Afghanistan. NATO began its expansion in the war on Bosnia in 1992, but its 17,500 troops in Kosovo are still necessary for that occupation.

On Dec. 6 Rumsfeld roared into Mazar-e-Sharif with a cavalcade of 35 vehicles to announce an escalation of the war on Afghanistan: Operation Avalanche, which began with the slaughter of the innocents in Hutala.

To the military occupiers, Afghanistan is still "the worst place in the world," according to U.S. Army Col. Rodney Davis. "This forgotten war is not about to end any day soon." (London Daily Telegraph, Nov. 30)

For the people of Afghanistan the recent U.S. offensive began with a war on their beloved children. As one Afghan man asked a reporter, "As a human, what would you think?" (New York Times, Dec. 8)