What kind of war is this?
A murder of innocents and plunder of resources
By Heather Cottin
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.
Reprinted from the Nov. 8, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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