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.
Exposing the Cancer Indu$try.
Please Click Here
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.
Life sucks when you grow up in a country where there isnt enough moral fortitude or competence in your nation's Men that they would stand up and liberate their own country from tyranny.
Women are just as capable of men of organizing and pulling the triger of a gun as men. They did so as partisans in WWII and as concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany and they fought as Vietcong in Vietnam etc.etc.. People are victims or followers because that is a conscious choice they make. "Women" in beligirent countries and societies bear the children of the enemy, replace him on teh factory floor producing ordinance and are an integral part of the logistics and support structure by which a nation is able to wage war. You are living in fantasyland if you believe otherwise.
Since it's apparent that the only responce you can make in any intelligent discussion is to bring into question your opponents intelligence. I suggest that you take a self critical look at your responces before you throw such epithets at others. When someone resorts to such a debating tactic most often found in schoolyards and practiced by infants who have not yet acquired any sense of maturity or adult mmentality. I find most often it is a waste of time to engage such persons as they generally prove to be either uneducated. or of such low level of intelligence and emotional bearing that any sense of logic and reason is generally lacking.
You are either lying or being disingenuous. Your very first reply was to #4 - Paradox who simply said "War is hell, and unfortunately, mistakes are sometimes made." That's ALL he said. And you responded with some nonsense about Hitler with a picture of the murderer of millions along with it. What's up with that? And why are you lying about it now?
Yeah? Well, I'll tell you something.
I have Muslim kids in my Cub Scout pack. And they are good kids and they come from good families. And their fathers get up in the morning, pull their pants on one leg at a time, and wonder what's for breakfast just like you and I do. Just like the other billion Muslims do. And watching some of you guys casting about for justification for your hate of these people is what's really 'loathsome.'
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/agm-114.htm Hellfire
B-52s don't do hellfires. Close in weapon, b-52 is longstick, ie standoff. They carry a belly full of either dumb bombs, or 2000# laser guided. Before they racked 'em up with standoff cruise missiles.
But I gotta admit they do make an impression, so once you see 'em you see 'em everywhere.
That's a quote from Schumer during the Waco hearings, right?
Because I thought it was obscenely trite and dismissive to respond to this tragedy with such a pathetic cliche.
Now; any chance of responding to the points I raised with you, or do they make you so uncomfortable you're just going to keep muddying the waters?
Hmmm. That's a toughie. Refuting an illogical position, by using logic.
Oh well, here goes nothing : give me just one example of where Afghani women have operated as 'partisans' in this conflict, Cacique. Cause, y'know : it's kind of hard to run around in the mountains with an AK when you're wearing a burqa.
What are you talking about?
In my four years on Free Republic, I have never hit the abuse button, I have never gone to a moderator to have a thread removed and I have never complained to anybody at Free Republic ever about another member or the content that was posted. I have always fought my own battles here. If I have a problem with what somebody posts, I deal with that person directly as I have done with you on this thread in a public manner.
Why do you so blatantly lie?
No, and no. Bye-bye.
Just for starters.
However, it is irrelevant. It is not an issue in my argument. I argued that the civilian sector (including women) of an enemy population provides logistical support to the combatants. That is an irrefutable fact, an army or any fighting force cannot exist in a vacuum, it requires a support structure.
The objective in any conflict is victory and the destruction of an adversary's capacity to wage war and oppose your forces. To that end modern warfare requires the destruction of the logistical base of an enemy. That invariably means disabling the civilian capacity to give that logistical support. That in turn requires the imposition of casualties and destruction of selective civilian targets that provide that support.
The only morality in war is to win. To maximize casualties on the enemy population and minimize casualties of your own. The only rule is victory by any means necessary. That is the logic of war.
You may wish to be emotional about this matter and bring out the Judeo Christian weakness of compassion for an adversary,that is your privilidge and prerogative. I have no such scruples being an atheist.
I do not base my position on emotion based positions but simply on the practical elements involved in a war.
It is you who are illogical since you base your arguments on emotion and compassion, something that has no place in war. Magnanimity may occur once an enemy is vanquished, defeated or destroyed but it has no place while a struggle is effect.
I'm talking about an assumed connection between your repeated complaints about the images I posted, and the overnight disappearance of same, plus warnings to me from the moderator.
If those assumptions were wrong, I apologise to you.
Is that the one of Malmedy fame?
Sounds too much like plain English to have been military markings. More like the index entry from "Janes".
But Dietrich is gazing approvingly from down in Hell on some Freepers today, Mark. Can't you see him using Cacique's words in an address to the Leibstandarte Division?
The only morality in war is to win. To maximize casualties on the enemy population and minimize casualties of your own. The only rule is victory by any means necessary. That is the logic of war.
Well, our side does not usually specifically target innocent civilians, their side does, always, like in New York, maybe our latest Pearl Harbor. My mom was 21 when Pearl harbor was attacked, and she tells me that she has never seen such anger in America, since Dec 7th, 1941.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.