Terror bombing of Afghanistan
Pentagon targets villages, food depots, UN & Red Cross
centers, creating 1.5 million refugee
By Fred Goldstein
As the debate goes on within the inner circles in Washington
over whether to widen the war, the U.S. government is showing
why it is regarded as the primary terrorist power in the world
with its relentless bombing of one of the poorest, most
defenseless countries in the world.
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Pentagon has sent
over 2,000 bombs and missiles raining down upon Afghanistan,
killing civilians, destroying the infrastructure of the cities
so as to make them unlivable, and creating a million and a half
refugees who have been forced to move away from shelter, the
food supply and medical care. And it is planning to increase
its attacks.
The casualties--innocent civilians who will die, become
malnourished or ill, lose all means of livelihood, and whose
lives will be traumatized and dislocated--will far exceed the
casualties of the horrendous Sept. 11 attacks in the United
States that destroyed thousands of innocent people.
The village of Karam, an hour from the Pakistan border in
eastern Afghanistan, was destroyed by bombs on Oct. 12. There
were reports of 200 people killed.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said such claims were
lies. But CNN camera crews toured the area two days later and
showed the rubble, the bodies, the bomb craters and an
unexploded U.S. bomb in the midst of what remained of the
village.
An Associated Press report carried in the New York Times of
Oct. 14 described the destruction in Karam and the horribly
wounded victims, including many children, who had been taken to
a hospital in Jalalabad. "One villager, Toray," wrote the
Times, "stood by the ruins of his former home, its roof gone,
and clutched a scrap of metal bearing the word 'fin guided
missile' in English."
The day before, the Navy dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a
residential neighborhood in Kabul, killing four people and
wounding eight. The bomb came from a Navy FA-18 in the Arabian
Sea. Earlier in the week a cruise missile killed four civilian
workers at a United Nations office.
Jets destroy Red Cross food depot
On Oct. 16 Navy F-18 jets dropped 1,000-pound bombs on a Red
Cross storage complex in Kabul full of food and shelter
materials. "The Red Cross," wrote the Times of Oct. 17, "said
each of the five warehouses in its compound was marked on the
roof with a large red cross. The raids occurred about 1 p.m. in
daylight, the agency said." The bombing destroyed about a third
of the food supply.
The bombing of the food supply only aggravated the war
crisis in Kabul. A New York Times article on Oct. 16 quoted
Shirjan, an unemployed former government worker: "Most of the
people who live in Kabul now are selling their belongings to
get food. There are no jobs for the people."
This is a brazen repeat of the tactics used against Iraq and
Yugoslavia of terrorizing the civilian population. The strikes
are designed to force capitulation when the air war against
military targets drags on, as it is doing in Afghan istan.
And, just as in the Gulf War, the Pentagon has established
"kill boxes" or areas on the outskirts of Kabul and Kandahar
where U.S. pilots and gunners are authorized to fire on
anything that moves that they think is a military target. This
is how many civilians, including an entire caravan of refugee
farmers, were killed by U.S. pilots during the Yugoslav
war.
The escalation of U.S. military terror is proceeding
rapidly. Washington had earlier said that the bombing would end
after a few days. Instead, it has continued for 12 days, as of
this writing. On the 12th day, 100 fighters and bombers flew
missions attacking 12 areas of the country, the most intense
bombing of any day so far.
In addition, the Pentagon has brought in the AC-130
turboprop slow-flying gunship, which can fire over 2,000 rounds
per minute of high-caliber shells and stay on target with
computer-controlled aiming devices. This terror device can
destroy buildings. It was used in Vietnam in a less developed
form.
Washington wants to destroy state
This escalating campaign of massive destruction cannot be
explained simply by a drive to get Osama bin Laden. The fact
that the Taliban have offered to negotiate several times but
have been flatly turned down by the Bush administration
demonstrates that Washington's goals go far beyond that limited
objective.
Whatever else, the Pentagon wants to demonstrate its ability
to destroy a state by military force. It wants to field test
its new generations of destructive firepower on a living people
and put on display for all the oppressed peoples and
governments of the world its terror machine. It is an act of
warning, an act of intimidation, and possibly a prelude to an
expanded war.
To be sure, the Taliban is one of the most reactionary
political regimes in the world. Its brutal oppression of women
is absolute. But the destruction of the Taliban by the Pentagon
is the worst possible outcome of the present situation. Victory
for the U.S. government, a government that only serves the rich
multinational corporations and protects exploitation, will only
strengthen imperialist domination of the region, to the vast
detriment of all the peoples of Central Asia and the Middle
East.
Everything must be done to resist the Pentagon onslaught in
Afghanistan.
Washington has so far been unable to achieve victory and is
running into significant political complications. It is unable
to cobble together a viable coalition of cutthroats to be
installed by Washington should the Taliban collapse.
It has also come up against the India-Pakistan conflict
because of the abrupt change in diplomacy necessitated by Sept.
11. Prior to Sept. 11, U.S. diplomacy towards India was to warm
relations in pursuit of economic penetration. Even more
important was the pursuit of India to bring it into an
anti-China political and military bloc. To this end, sanctions
were set aside which had been imposed after India's nuclear
tests and friendly diplomacy had begun to blossom.
After Sept. 11, Pakistan was suddenly the key to the war
effort in Central Asia. India was suddenly left out in the
cold. And Secretary of State Colin Powell is trying to keep the
situation from escalating out of control.
All these complications notwithstanding, the overriding
preoccupation in high government circles in Washington is which
way to take the war, and when.
Struggle over next phase of war
The New York Times of Oct. 12 gave a slight glimpse into the
debate. "A tight-knit group of Pentagon officials and defense
experts outside government is working to mobilize support for a
military operation to oust President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as
the next phase of the war."
"The group," continued the Times, "which some in the State
Department and on Capitol Hill refer to as the 'Wolfowitz
cabal,' after Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, is
laying the groundwork for a strategy that envisions the use of
ground troops to install an Iraqi opposition group based in
London at the helm of a new government, the officials and
experts said."
The Times continues: "The group has largely excluded the
State Department. On Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board,
a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts
that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the
ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the
group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial
phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. Bin Laden is
over."
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Wolfowitz took
part in the meetings.
The 18-member board includes former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger; R. James Woolsey, director of the CIA under
President Clinton; former vice president Dan Quayle; James
Schlesinger, former defense secretary; Harold Brown, President
Jimmy Carter's defense secretary; David Jeremiah, former deputy
chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Richard Perle, former
Reagan administration security adviser; and Newt Gingrich.
"The State Department, including officials who work on Iraq
policy, was not briefed on the two-day meeting," according to
the Times.
To show the extent of the struggle, the Times said that "the
Knight Ridder newspaper group reported today that senior
Pentagon officials authorized Mr. Woolsey to fly to London last
month on a government plane, accompanied by Justice and Defense
Department officials, on a mission to gather evidence linking
Mr. Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks." The State Department was
unaware of the trip.
This current inside Washington, which is not limited to the
Pentagon, is causing consternation in sections of the ruling
class at home and in the imperialist capitals of Europe.
The Oct. 16 Washington Post carried an article entitled
"Allies Are Cautious on the 'Bush Doctrine.'"
The "Bush Doctrine," as defined by President Bush, consists
of "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists,"
according to the Post. But a corollary to the "doctrine" is
that "the United States will be the unilateral judge of whether
a country is supporting terrorism and will determine the
appropriate methods, including the use of military force," to
impose its will.
'Coalition building' vs.
'unilateralism'
The current that promotes this so-called "doctrine" is the
current that wants to widen the war. On the other hand, the
current that is more fearful of becoming isolated in an
adventure and being overcome by a mass uprising is promoting
"coalition building"as a form of restraint upon the
adventurers.
Thus the struggle over the course of the war is taking the
form of coalition versus unilateralism. Since the European
imperialists are weak compared to the U.S., and the reactionary
client regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan and so on
are even weaker, the fearful wing is sure that any coalition
will act as a restraint upon the more aggressive factions.
Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Advisory Board,
expresses the views of those who want to rapidly and
drastically widen the war. "Perle has advocated using military
force against one or two other countries," reports the Post,
"including Iraq, to make a point beyond Afghanistan. 'Whether
it is Saddam Hussein or Assad or the Lebanese or the Sudanese
... the regimes involved have to be persuaded that we will use
whatever tool is necessary and that they are truly in
jeopardy,' he said. 'The best way to give that the necessary
reality is to do it in a couple of places.'"
At the end of the day, concluded Perle, "no American
president can concede that responsibility [to attack] to a
coalition or anybody else."
As against this right-wing view, 28 former U.S. ambassadors
and envoys to the Middle East and South Asia sent a letter to
Bush advocating working with the regimes in the region in a
coalition.
The coalition argument was summed up by Brent Scowcroft,
former Bush national security adviser and one of the architects
of the Gulf War. He wrote in a piece in the Washington Post of
Oct. 16: "We already hear voices declaring that the United
States is too focused on a multilateral approach. The United
States knows what needs to be done, these voices say, and we
should just go ahead and do it. Coalition partners just tie our
hands, and they will exact a price for their support."
After enumerating all the difficulties of the war now
underway, Scowcroft declares that "success means a coalition, a
broad coalition, a willing and enthusiastic coalition. That
will take unbelievable effort and entails endless frustrations.
But we did it in 1990 and we can do it again. ... It can help
erase the reputation the United States has been developing of
being unilateral and indifferent, if not arrogant, to
others."
In other words, this former general is fearful of the
anti-imperialist explosion that could take place if Washington
is not careful to shore up its support among its imperialist
allies and clients in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Where the Bush administration will come down in this
struggle is an open question. What is important for the
workers, the oppressed, and all the revolutionary and
progressive forces at home and abroad who are fighting against
the war is to escalate their efforts in the struggle.
U.S. imperialism is an aggressive military power that had to
exercise restraint during the entire period of the Cold War
because of the existence of the Soviet Union. There are
elements in the ruling class who still feel anger that the U.S.
did not use more massive military force to try to vanquish the
Vietnamese.
There are other elements that are still frustrated that the
U.S. military did not try to occupy Baghdad in 1991. Others are
frustrated that they had to limit their war in Yugoslavia
because of the necessity to come to agreement with the European
imperialists on targeting and other military matters. Those
tendencies and others have all surfaced since Sept. 11, and are
promoting their agendas within the summits of the
government.
The anti-war movement, the workers and the oppressed, all
progressives and revolutionaries must be keenly attuned to the
inherent dangers of a wider war as they open up the struggle to
stop the war in Afghanistan. The movement should try with all
its might to make the most massive possible showing of anti-war
opposition. This is the surest way it can make a contribution
to forestalling a wider war.
Reprinted from the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page