WHAT KIND OF A WAR IS THIS? A MURDER OF INNOCENTS AND PLUNDER OF RESOURCES
By Heather Cottin
November 8, 2003--The war in Afghanistan is creating "the most serious, complex emergency in the world ever," according to United Nations official Stephanie Bunker.
Considering the many horrible tragedies that the world has seen in recent years, this is a calamitous warning.
"As many as 100,000 more children will die in Afghanistan this winter unless food reaches them in sufficient quantities in the next six weeks," Eric Laroche, UNICEF spokesperson, said in an interview with the Times of India on Oct. 29.
But the heavy U.S. bombing of Afghan cities and supply routes, as well as the deliberate targeting of food supplies like the Red Cross warehouse in Kabul, has choked off relief efforts.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. The infant mortality rate is 165 per 1,000 births. Life expectancy is 46. UNICEF statistics show the problem of stunting affects over 50 percent of all children.
"If you are a child born in Afghanistan today, you are 25 times more likely to die before the age of five than an American or a French or a Saudi Arabian child," Laroche said. More than half the children in Afghanistan were already malnourished and 300,000 children died each year from preventable causes inside the country.
PILOTS RUN OUT OF 'MILITARY' TARGETS
The British tabloid The Mirror is usually supportive of British and U.S. policy. But on Oct. 29 former Mirror editor John Pilger wrote a scathing critique of the war. "One of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorized by the most powerful--to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious 'military' targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees," Pilger wrote.
While the U.S. media remain largely silent, readers in other countries can get some of the details of these deliberate war crimes.
The London Observer on Oct. 28 reported that U.S. warplanes hit a residential area in the Afghan capital of Kabul, killing at least 13 civilians and virtually wiping out one family.
Stephanie Bunker in Islamabad confirmed on Oct. 29 that a hospital had been hit in the Afghan city of Herat in an air raid carried out by U.S. military aircraft. Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Sallam Zaeef stated there had been around 100 victims--doctors, nurses, and patients--when the hospital received a direct hit.
Every time the Afghanis claim there are civilian casualties, the U.S. government rejects the reports. Yet, according to UN officials, up to 70 percent of the populations of the towns of Herat and Kandahar have now fled from bombing raids.
According to Yusuf Hassan, speaking for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of refugees will climb to 300,000 within weeks, and may reach 1.5 million in the longer term.
When the snows begin and temperatures plummet to below zero, the situation for those who remain in their homes, as well as the refugees now starving and homeless, will be horrific.
Already, conditions in the villages, where poor peasants and workers live far from Taliban positions, have become nightmarish.
SMALL VILLAGES BEING BOMBED
"Not long after 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 21, the bombs began to fall over the outskirts of Torai village. Mauroof saw a massive fireball rising from the ground," wrote the Times of London on Oct. 25 about one man who lost many family members. "Bombs had fallen over the little cluster of houses a mile away where his sister and his other relatives were living.
"The roll call of the dead read like an invitation list to a family wedding: his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, three brothers-in-law, and four of his sister's five young children, two girls and two boys, all under the age of eight."
The agony of Afghanistan is intensified by the use of weapons known as cluster bombs. The Times of London writes that Prime Minister Tony Blair "constantly parades his humanitarianism." This must extend to the choice of bombs. Of choice in the U.S./British bombing raids "is a CBU-87/B, containing bright yellow submunitions for attacking soft target areas (including human beings) with detonating bomblets."
Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They kill people without destroying property. They also serve as land mines and detonate later, even years later, when they are unearthed.
The Times noted that the U.S. lobbied at a landmine conference some years ago against classifying cluster bombs as landmines. But they serve this secondary and murderous purpose: "35,000 unexploded bomblets in Kosovo still kill one person a week," the paper noted. They are still killing people in Laos, 30 years after the war there ended.
The Times added, "Unexploded cluster bombs are a horror, [since] the bright yellow coloring of the canisters makes them horribly appealing to children." As reported in The Times, these weapons are "a killing field in a canister, designed to massacre anything within 100 feet."
Such a massacre took place in the village of Shakar Qala. The UN confirmed that eight people had been killed immediately when the village was attacked. A ninth person died after picking up the parachutes attached to the cluster bombs.
"He went to look at the object, touched it and it blew up," Stephanie Bunker said. Fourteen others were injured and 20 of the village's 45 houses were destroyed or badly damaged.
BOMBLETS LOOK LIKE FOOD PACKETS
There is an even more insidious side to cluster bombs.
As hunger grows in Afghanistan, the U.S. has dropped approximately 1 million packages of food as a "humanitarian gesture." But these food packets are also wrapped in yellow packaging. Unsuspecting, starving refugees have grabbed yellow cluster bombs, thinking they were food. The result has been death and dismemberment.
Now the Pentagon tells us it is dropping pamphlets explaining the difference between the bomb canisters and the food packets. But most Afghanis are illiterate. Do the bombers really expect them to understand the written instructions, which begin, "Attention, noble Afghan people," and conclude with the statement, "Do not confuse the cylinder-shaped bomb with the rectangular food bag"?
To make the situation more ghastly, U.S planes are dropping the food packets into the largest minefield in the world, a leftover from the mining done during the 10 years of war the U.S. funded against the Marxist government of Afghanistan.
REFUGEES, OLD FOLKS' HOME ARE ATTACKED
The Russian newspaper Pravda, which generally supports the war, reported that "refugees arriving in the Pakistani city of Qetta yesterday claimed that a column of refugees trying to escape the bombing after their houses had been destroyed was strafed, also by American aircraft, and that 20 members of the column, including nine children, had been killed. The incident took place at Tarine Khot, near Kandahar. One refugee who witnessed the event stated that there were no Taliban bases within a radius of three kilometers from where the homes were destroyed."
Eyewitnesses stated that a 1,000-pound bomb had been dropped on Oct. 23 in a field near an old people's home near Kandahar. The British Ministry of Defense admitted there had been military activity against Taliban camps in the area on that day. The Pentagon has admitted bombing an old people's home in Herat, but claimed a "targeting error."
Although Pravda calls reports by the Taliban suspect, labeling the Taliban "pathological and compulsive liars," the paper admitted, "reports of collateral damage are true."
The weapons the U.S. is using in Afghanistan are already causing injuries consistent with those caused by depleted uranium and other weapons used in Iraq and Yugoslavia. Pravda noted, "Deputy public health minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, said the government did not have testing facilities," and urged outside observers to view the injuries from the bombing attacks.
Steven Gutkin, Associated Press writer, reported Thursday, Oct. 25 from Korak Dana, Afghanistan of a U.S. attack on Kandahar which hit a bus at the city gates Thursday, killing at least 10 civilians in a fiery explosion.
There have been repeated attacks on a food warehouse run by the Red Cross. The Associated Press reported on Oct. 26, "In separate raids late Thursday and early Friday, F/A-18 jets dropped two one-ton bombs on the Red Cross warehouse complex." The Defense Department, which admitted the bombing, claimed it was an error, but it took place in broad daylight and a Red Cross was clearly painted on the roof of this building.
THE 'GREAT GAME'
The genocidal bombing and heartless devastation of the Afghani people is part of the "Great Game" of the imperialist powers and has nothing to do with "fighting terrorism." As Pilger points out, "The 'war on terrorism' is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power."
In his book "The Grand Chessboard," Zbigniew Brzezinski urged a major role for the U.S. in Central Asia and the Middle East. Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor and instigated the CIA's arming and training of the Mujahadeen in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was his policy that helped to create a fundamentalist guerrilla army, including the Taliban, that was organized to overthrow Afghanistan's Marxist government and draw the USSR into a terrible quagmire. This policy played a part in fomenting the destruction of socialism in the USSR.
After the Cold War, Brzezinski wrote, "for America, the chief prize is Eurasia." Why? Because it contains the "Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin, known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea."
Brzezinski warned against "a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran" as "the most dangerous scenario." What country stands in the middle of those three nations? Afghanistan.
Brzezinski was a leading architect for the expansion of NATO. He wrote, "A comprehensive U.S. policy for Eurasia as a whole will not be possible if the effort to widen NATO, having been launched by the United States, stalls."
The war in Afghanistan is a continuation of the wars on Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO eastward. Brzezinski even called Central Asia the "Eurasian Balkans," and noted that they are "infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold."
John Pilger in the Mirror wrote, "The overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been victims of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries."
The war is one month old and a peace movement is burgeoning in over 20 countries. There is a growing anti-imperialist understanding that this war is about the profits of U.S. and British oil companies.
It is clear to all who look: the Great Game is based on murder of innocents and plunder of resources.
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