Posted on 12/20/2001 9:11:09 AM PST by afuturegovernor
The innocent dead in a coward's war
Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians
Seumas Milne
Thursday December 20, 2001
The Guardian
The price in blood that has already been paid for America's war against terror is only now starting to become clear. Not by Britain or the US, nor even so far by the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders held responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It has instead been paid by ordinary Afghans, who had nothing whatever to do with the atrocities, didn't elect the Taliban theocrats who ruled over them and had no say in the decision to give house room to Bin Laden and his friends.
The Pentagon has been characteristically coy about how many people it believes have died under the missiles it has showered on Afghanistan. Acutely sensitive to the impact on international support for the war, spokespeople have usually batted away reports of civilian casualties with a casual "these cannot be independently confirmed", or sometimes simply denied the deaths occurred at all. The US media have been particularly helpful. Seven weeks into the bombing campaign, the Los Angeles Times only felt able to hazard the guess that "at least dozens of civilians" had been killed.
Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62 innocent deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New York and Washington on September 11.
Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But what is impressive about his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries; nor those killed in the past 10 days; nor those who have died from cold and hunger because of the interruption of aid supplies or because they were forced to become refugees by the bombardment. It does not include military deaths (estimated by some analysts, partly on the basis of previous experience of the effects of carpet-bombing, to be upwards of 10,000), or those prisoners who were slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and elsewhere.
Champions of the war insist that such casualties are an unfortunate, but necessary, byproduct of a just campaign to root out global terror networks. They are a world apart, they argue, from the civilian victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre because, in the case of the Afghan civilians, the US did not intend to kill them.
In fact, the moral distinction is far fuzzier, to put it at its most generous. As Herold argues, the high Afghan civilian death rate flows directly from US (and British) tactics and targeting. The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians.
Thousands of innocents have died over the past two months, not mainly as an accidental byproduct of the decision to overthrow the Taliban regime, but because of the low value put on Afghan civilian lives by US military planners.
Raids on targets such as the Kajakai dam power station, Kabul's telephone exchange, the al-Jazeera TV station office, lorries and buses filled with refugees and civilian fuel trucks were not mistakes. Nor were the deaths that they caused. The same goes for the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs in urban areas. But western public opinion has become increasingly desensitised to what has been done in its name. After US AC-130 gunships strafed the farming village of Chowkar-Karez in October, killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official felt able to remark: "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead", while US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that particular village."
Yesterday, Rumsfeld inadvertently conceded what little impact the Afghan campaign (yet to achieve its primary aim of bringing Bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership to justice) has had on the terrorist threat, by speculating about ever more cataclysmic attacks, including on London. There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers. But what has been cruelly demonstrated is that the US and its camp followers are prepared to sacrifice thousands of innocents in a coward's war.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
LOL!!! The more we wins, the bitterer they gets.
So an ECONOMICS PROFESSOR who is an EXPERT in ECONIOMICS collected UNSUBSTANUATED reports from HIGHLY UNRELIABLE SOURCES to come up with definative death count, that is still only an ESTIMATE! Wonder if this goober was also used by the Democraps to calculate the number of black disenfranchised Florida voters! Call Jeff Cohn from F.A.I.R. This is the kind of crap he uses to back up acurate reporting by liberals!
Why do I think this number was arrived at via: “Hmmm… let’s see. ABC says 2 were killed, CBS has it at 3, NBC has 2, CNN 4, the Taliban claims 28. 2+3+2+4+28 is 39! 39 innocent civilians were killed yesterday.”
He uses newspapers as his sources for his estimates, but the reality is that just about all the estimates were either directly from Taliban sources or hearsay from relief people who talked to Taliban sources.
So, basically, it's Taliban garbage in and Taliban garbage out. And 62 civilian deaths per day actually would represent a mellowing of the Taliban regime.
Stay Safe and have a great Christmas
Sounds like a really credible authority for civilian casualties in the US bombing campaign, eh?
It is hard to imagine being so divorced from reality as this Seumas Milne fellow and the Guardian.
Milne seems to to be totally unaware that culturally and morally, the Afghans are as different from westerners as martians.
Their culture and their morality where it comes to the value of human life makes it absurd to talk about them as if they were the neighbors down the block.
They are brutal on the family level and it escalates from there.
They "feared" (and respected) the Taliban more that they feared us.
And they paid they price; They actually judged us as erroneously as Milne judges them. And saw the result of our anger as ordinary as another primitive tribe's.
Big mistake. And lesson not yet learned. They are actually negotiating away the leaders of the Al Qaeda for money!
Innocent? I don't think so.
Debt paid? Not even close...
Gee, the colonists didn't elect the British Empire and took care of business themselves in 1776.
Seems most of the posters here are merely disappointed that more were not killed or maimed. If God is 'on the side of' bloodthirsty barbarians who revel in, or attempt to disparage ANY spilling of innocent blood, I want no part of this 'god' they worship.
Meanwhile, as grief walks the frozen hills of Afghanistan, OBL or whomever was responsible for 9/11 walks free.
They can't see why they are hated
I can smell Milne from across the ocean, and it's not pleasant.
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