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.
So did the Nazi death-camp guards.
I'm sure the Muslim families you know are good to their kids and all that. My question is: how many were boiling mad at the people who took out the WTC on 9/11. More importantly, if they had good reason to believe that a fellow Muslim was planning a terrorist attack, would most of them call up the FBI to report him, or would they instead feel religiously bound to not give up a fellow Muslim to the "infidels".
Of course we don't. And I don't believe for one minute that those bombs were dropped deliberately.
What I am arguing against is all the people here who say it's okay if they were.
That's a good question. And the only answer can be, 'I don't know.' My guess is that most would, and that Al-Qaeda kept the operational planning just as much a secret to Muslims as they did for anyone else. From what I have seen, first-hand, most Muslims don't spend every waking moment thinking about how they're going to destroy the Great Satan. Is it an essential part of 'victory' to demonise everyone of that faith?
I've been reading a book on the Revolutionary War recently, Redcoats and Rebels. General Washington believed that if you didn't have right, and God, on your side, and conduct yourself according to a set of principles, there was no point in even taking up arms. I think that still holds.
OK, but another thing these dirt bags like to do, is put military targets inside, or next to schools, hospitals and things like that. They are sneaky too.
If those assumptions were wrong, I apologise to you.
Well the assumptions are wrong. I restate that I have never whined to anybody at Free Republic about what anybody else has posted in my entire time here. I've never even hit the Abuse button. If I have a problem with what somebody posts, I will address it publicly by responding to the individual on the relevant thread as I did in this case. No "pings" to Jim Robinson or to any sidebar monitors. Perhaps one of them saw my reply to you and used that as a basis to remove the images I took offense to, but that would have been their decision. I never asked anybody to remove them.
Anyway, apology accepted.
Thank you.
Have you ever taken up arms - and pursued an armed enemy - that wanted you dead?
I would be interested to learn what "set of principals" George Washington considered appropriate for his time and his war. They may or may not be applicable in whole in our time. I doubt if George ever contemplated the weapons, enemy mentality or war conducted against civilian population centers we face in today's world.
Generalizing about the virtues of "honorable" war making - is best left to the Priests and War Crimes Judges. There is nothing "honorable" about war. It demeans and destroys those involved. Only the FR keyboard "warriors" see romance, heroics and swashbuckling honor in war. The real world warrior had best concentrate on accomplishing his mission and staying alive at the same time. One mistake, one hesitation, one reckless act can get you killed in an instant - and you stay dead, forever. Tends to keep you focused and vicious.
We send clear eyed, fresh young men into situations - that change them into hardened and bitter warriors looking for revenge. They find their brothers butchered alive and left for them to find. They find entire villages brutalized by the enemy they have been following/chasing for weeks. Can you not imagine the acts of war that take place - once these two opposing forces finally can not escape one another and must each fight to kill one another?
Men at war become something else. Much can be found to criticize - but your voice on this matter would perhaps sound a little less offensive if you had been there and were not guilty.
Semper Fi
I never said your mother was a comfort woman for the Japanese Imperial Army, I am certain she is a fine woman.
My point was that without the USA saving Oz in WW2, Aussie lasses WOULD have been FORCED to become a comfort ladies of the victorious Japs. And the thanks we get is your sniveling. BTW, are you aware that in war, civilians get killed? For example, during the 3 month war called the Battle of Okinawa, more civilians died than at Hiroshima? They called it "the Steel Typhoon". Do we regret their deaths? Of course. Do we regret winning the war? Not one little bit. Ask 75 year old Aussie women if they would have enjoyed working in Japanese Army brothels instead.
And, since you raised the issue, we have an excellent relationship with the People's Republic of China. You're the guys they're challenging.
Yeah sure, keep telling yourself that.
Just remember, to the Chinese and Indonesians, Australia looks as empty and ready for colonizing and settling as America looked to the British French and Spanish in 1500.
Like I said, learn Chinese, and go for a front desk job dealing with PLA officers.
Could you not say exactly the same thing about "good Germans" in 1942 or "good Soviet Communist Party members" in 1950?
Does that excuse the evil of their fanatical jihad mentality, and the horror it is bringing from the Philippines to Indonesia to (insert the next ten nations here) to New York?
What I am arguing against is all the people here who say it's okay if they were.
Well that settles it! I think that our gang believes you are arguing against the war in general. I'm sure all of us agree that it definitely AIN'T ok to bomb innocents! ;) Now that that's out of the way, why don't we all settle in for a foot-stompin' game of fizbin!
Of course we don't. And I don't believe for one minute that those bombs were dropped deliberately.
What I am arguing against is all the people here who say it's okay if they were. (Byron the Aussie)
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In Afghanistan, the strategic targets we are after are not ball bearing factories, oil refineries, or railyards.
In Afghanistan, the target is the leadership of Al Qaida and the Taliban. They are the strategic target, the head of the snake which bit us on 9-11. We are out to kill as many of them as possible before the end of hostilities, to deter future 9-11s.
To that end, we will bomb any hotel (like the one where we killed OBL lieutenant M. Atef) or village where intell puts a significant part of them.
When we targeted the ball bearing plants in Germany, sometimes we hit the town of Schwieinfurt's civilians. That's war.
Today, if the Al Qaida and Taliban leadership wants to hide in a remote hotel, and we find it, we are going to blow it up, and I regret the loss of the civilians who lived there also. The same goes for the village in this story. I believe that the truth is that it was possibly targeted if we saw (via UAVs etc) a collection of enemy leaders there. (Meaning nice SUVs and pickups, or reports from spies). So we may have hit it, intentionally, going after the Al Qaida or Taliban leadership.
I am sorry, but they are the "ball bearing factories" of this war. If they want to spare civilian casualties, they need to stop hiding next to women and children. It's a war, and they will be targeted when we find them. If they choose to hide next to women and children, that's on them.
Remember what I said about Okinawa: more civilians died in the crossfire than died at Hiroshima. Do you wish that instead, we had allowed the Japs to win WW2?
Remember, in every nation where the Japanese Imperial Army marched in victorious, they kidnapped the young girls to be forced prostitutes for their brutal troops, servicing as many as 20 a day.
So when you spit on America because our bombs do not fall perfectly, keep in mind that it was even more imperfect bombs which kept your Aussie lasses from being forced to service a victorious Japanese Imperial Army.
Just keep that in mind when you compare the Americans to Nazis.
And next time, when you need to be saved again, forget it.
Just learn Chinese instead. No innocent lives will be lost fighting back against a Chinese invasion, you'll just surrrender, I have no doubt.
It'll be too bad for your young girls though.
Not relevant to the discussion here, but very poignant and moving nonetheless.
They don't have a 'fanatical jihad mentality', Trav. They're just kids. Good Cubs, too.
I think we all know who's showing the fanatical mentality on this thread, bud.
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