Posted on 12/04/2001 9:53:48 AM PST by truth4all
Very good article below by a British journalist in Afghanistan doing his job and reporting events that we never hear about in "The New York Times", "Washington Post" or CNN etc. Civilian deaths are extremely high and mounting. High tech weapons make little difference if you bomb indiscriminately. In Vietnam we destroyed the village in order to save it, here we destroy the village in the hopes of killing a few terrorists and sacrifice dozens of innocents in the process. Please visit my nonprofit website.
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Thank you. Gavin.
A village is destroyed. And America
says nothing happened
War on terrorism
Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan
04 December 2001
The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.
Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.
A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.
In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning – when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children – nothing happened.
We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen."
So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday, as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the desert road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.
The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied and funded by the US government. The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out – mujahedin soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit the government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.
There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks – seven more bloody bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse in which they were sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday morning.
Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yesterday,'' was all he could say. "I sent them for security.''
But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished the previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It bore the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a serial number: 232687. It was half-buried in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had died: Fazil Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah. "They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the local elder who was accompanying us. "They were not terrorists – the terrorists are in the mountains, over there.''
So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself, are hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was happening over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the pathetic remains I found only one sinister object - an old leather gun holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable that a handful of al-Qa'ida members had been spending the night there, and that US targeters learnt of their presence.
But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains some military relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban fighters for a fortnight. Certainly there could not have been enough terrorists to fill the 40 fresh graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact people, but simply body parts.
We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry reception in the village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair and bafflement. I had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered away.
Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.
He would possibly think different if it were his flesh and blood that perished in the WTC.
...btw; change your screen name to, Truth4no1; fast.
What would be the object, or "plus side" if you will, of such actions?
People die in war. It's unavoidable. You have to admit that the USA goes out of their way, even to our detriment, to avoid collateral damage. Do you expect perfection? Do you think we (FReepers) should demand, or expect, perfection? What is your point?
But fantasizing and doing are two separate things. Yeah, maybe if I was president, I would have given the nuclear option more serious consideration than President Bush. But I'm not the president. We have elections here in America that tend to eliminate hotheads like me from contention. So you can rest safe knowing that I'll never be America's president. Then again, had I had the power and knowledge of the presidency, chances are, my emotions would have been held in check, knowing that I also had the military option that is now being employed. But that said, the United States does have nuclear weapons at its disposal and they WILL be used to defend this nation if there are no other alternatives.
So you can get off your high and mighty throne down there in sunny Australia and take your Nazi literature with you.
You consider Muslims to be of a separate race? Even though Palestinians and Israelis are geneticly almost indistinguishable, as are Pakistanis and Indians and Black Muslims v Black Christians? Besides, the "racist" card has been so over-used that it's getting tattered and moldy
I consider Islam (as currently believed and practiced in Islamic countries, not your theoretical construct), to be a loathsome belief system. The way I feel about someone who chooses to follow that belief system, is probably comparable to how you would feel about someone who chooses to belong to the Nazi Party or the KKK.
The contrails of the B-52's are very visible over the cool skies of Afghansistan. Perhaps they would not be quite so visible in a warmer climate. Also, they are dropping a lot of JDAMS, which may require a lower altitude. (Not sure)
...how much concern would be shown then ?? ??
Pilots wear night vision goggles (NVGs) to enhance their vision during night operations. Night vision goggles provide greater safety during night operations by increasing the pilot's ability to visually clear terrain, avoid enemy radar and see other aircraft in a covert/lights-out environment.
No runway in sight. Welcome to low-level penetration.
That, and I've seen them fly low-level missions while I was at Nellis.
How convenient for you.
So you think the women of Afghanistan 'maintain their leaders in power'?
Idiot.
...and you're either too gutless, or too stupid, to address the issue at hand. Probably a bit of both.
What who did, Skull? Because at this point, we don't even know if Bin Laden and his clique are still in Afghanistan. Sorry if the facts get in the way of your excitement at watching the latest DoD MPEG, but I'm a gunowner; and therefore not real big, on collective guilt.
I was driving with a woman from Seattle to Montana a few years ago and stopped at a Columbia River Gorge vista point to admire the view. There were around 10 other people there and we're all looking down in this picturesque canyon when we hear a rumble coming from up toward the north. Just as I look northward a B-52 comes flying around a bend in the canyon and passes us....not above...not eye-level but BELOW - so we're all looking at the top of this monster as it flies by.
"Whoa" was just about the only thing I could say about it.
The fact is, you don't know, and you don't want to know. You're sitting behind your computer, disputing an eyewitness account, that differs with your cosy worldview.
Of course not. But do you find it interesting, that so many on this thread are prepared to deny a village of innocents was bombed, and yet a month later another bomb kills US and Alliance soldiers?
What I am saying is this :
1. Let's not automatically pile on any report contrary to our prejudices because the 'reporter's English', or the paper's 'liberal' (which is a load of crap anyway, the Independent has done some excellent reporting), or the dead villagers 'deserved it.'
2. What has happened to the usual questioning of authority that takes place on FR? Considering the problems caused by the misapplication of firepower in, say, Somalia (a country with a similar clan/warlord system) is it now 'unpatriotic' not go into a goosestep on demand?
Hey, they were an appropriate response to your posts, Dr. Strangelove. But I see you've been burning up the Freepmail wires today, getting the moderators to delete them. Lucky for you the umpire's on your side.
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