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.
Yeah.
The 'lying Limey journalist', who works for a 'liberal dishrag', printed in 'the country that gave us Dresden.'
Who also just happened to observe the serial number of one of the Hellfire missiles that struck the village.
Travis.
They don't even know where Osama and Omar are hiding.
They're not even sure if they're in Afghanistan.
Can you somehow get these facts through your head?
Travis, I have not and never would 'spit on America.' Ask someone who knows around here (eg Chapita) about the number of times I've expressed the very deepest gratitude and debt towards America for her efforts in WWII.
And then get a grip on yourself. I haven't seen hysteria like this since my niece bought her first Britney CD. But she's fourteen years old.
What's your excuse?
One wouldn't expect that kind of thing to survive such heat intact.
The cost of a miss is too high (doggone daisy bombs cost $18 million a pop). I suppose you could say the cost of the bomb is more that what it's destroying on the ground.
Yup !! We (the public) never challenge peace loving liberals as to how they would proceed.
Probably get an answer like ..."Can't we all get along?"
My bet is that those three have just enough of the John Paul Vann/David Hackworth style of honesty in 'em that you might just get a surprise, Travis.
We? How about the NVA using civilian shields a$$ hole. Or Bin Laden using the Afghans as shields. Yeah, like America should bow to you and your terrorists, fraud. Because whether it is using airliners or demagoguery, subversion of the right of America to self defend is part of the total terror war, of which you just volunteered yourself.
Certainly the USA was not targeting its own troops and the Northern Alliance forces during the Mazar prison battle but we did bomb them and kill some of them. Consider the damage to civilians in this area fortunes of war.
I see you engage in cheap shots, when incapable of countering logic you resort to comparing your foe to Nazis. I find that rather insulting since my grandmother and two of my aunts spent time in German concentration camps.
However, you seem to be incapable of separating the necessities of war from your moral prejudices. How one treats POW's who are no longer combatants or a population in a zone under your jurisdiction after it has been liberated from enemy control is a totally separate issue. You seem to be confused and are unable to tell the difference.
I suppose the reason you did not reply to my post #133 is because you cannot refute the logic.
So please, let's now hear your utter condemnation of all the errant bombs and shells which killed so many Japanese civilians, not to mention the dead in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo.
That is if you want to be consistant.
Otherwise, you should shut your trap about our less than perfect bombing in Afghanistan, or just hang the selective morality tag of the hypocrite on your door. That is, you express gratitude for the USA saving you in WW2, imperfect bombs and all, but you condemn our far more accurate bombs in Afghanistan.
Our strategic target is the Al Qaida and Taliban leadership, and this is a war, not a negotiation. They started it on 9-11, and now we will finish it.
If they want to hide among civilians, that's on them.
Bemoaning it doesn't help reach the objective, so let's just move-on....FRegards
I guess my "shot" at that sanctimonious clown, pissed him off.
He didn't responded to me! He responded to everyone else - but not to me... I wonder if I had bad breath?
This forum is sure filled with "experts" that got all their information and experience from movies and books.
I have no idea of what must be done to square away some of these clowns with screwed up brain housing groups.
Thanks for your service, and welcome home brother.
Semper Fi
Have you ever heard again from our young Gulf War "stinger" lad? I forgot his user name. I exchanged several freep mails with him - and in private conversation he comes across as VERY different from his posting persona.
Semper Fi
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