Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA An anatomy of collateral damage
By Tom Engelhardt
the Shindand district of Herat Province, Friday, may have resulted in civilian
casualties apart from those already reported."
On August 28, the US military "investigation" released its results, confirming
that only 30 Afghans had died.
The next day, however, General David D McKiernan, American commander of NATO
forces, raised the number, suggesting that "up to 40" Afghans might have died,
though still insisting that only five of them had been civilians, the rest
being "men of military age."
These revised numbers were still being touted on September 2
when, according to the Washington Post, "US military officials flatly rejected"
the Afghan and UN figures.
On September 4, the Los Angeles Times reported that the US military was now
"acknowledging" 35 militants and seven civilians - 42 Afghans - had died in the
attack.
This is where the American numbers remain today. Think of all this as a strange
(and callous) kind of informal negotiation process under pressure. Over a span
of two weeks, the Americans slowly gave way on those previously definitive
figures, moving modestly closer to the ones offered by the Karzai and UN teams,
without ever giving way on their version of what had happened.
The investigations
The first investigation, according to US military spokespeople, occurred the
morning after the attack when investigators from the attacking force supposedly
went house to house "assessing damage and casualties" and "taking photos".
Combat photographers were said to have "documented the scene". According to New
York Times reporter Gall, the US military claimed its forces had made a
"thorough sweep of this small western hamlet, a building-by-building search a
few hours after the air strikes, and a return visit on August 26, which
villagers insist never occurred".
As claims of civilian deaths mounted and Karzai denounced the attacks, Major
General Jeffrey J Schloesser, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan,
ordered an "investigation" into the episode. ("All allegations of civilian
casualties are taken very seriously. Coalition forces make every effort to
prevent the injury or loss of innocent lives. An investigation has been
directed.")
On August 29, the conclusions of the investigation, completed in near record
time, were released. The casualty count - only 30 Afghans, 25 of them Taliban
militants - had been definitively confirmed. A future "joint investigation"
with the Afghan government was, however, proposed. On the same day General
McKiernan suggested that the UN, too, should be part of the joint
investigation.
On September 3, the Afghans accepted the US proposal for what was now a
"tripartite investigation".
On September 7, "emerging evidence" - a grainy video taken on a cell phone by a
doctor in Azizabad, "showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those of
numerous children, prepared for burial" - led General McKiernan to ask that the
US investigation be reopened. The US Central Command now prepared to "send a
senior team, headed by a general and including a legal affairs officer, to
reinvestigate".
Normally, such investigations, whose results usually remain classified, are no
more than sops, meant to quiet matters until attention dies away. In this case,
the minimalist military investigation, which merely backed up the initial
cover-up about the assault on Azizabad, was forced into the open and, as
protest in Aghanistan widened, has now essentially been consigned to the trash
heap of history.
The words
Initially, according to the Washington Post, "a US military spokeswoman
dismissed as 'outrageous' the Afghan government's assertions that scores of
civilians had been killed in the attack ... A US official in Washington,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has become adept at
spreading false intelligence to draw US strikes on civilians". In
not-for-attribution comments, US military officials would later suggest "that
the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites".
Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the US military,
insisted, "We're confident that we struck the right compound."
On August 24, as protests over the deaths at Azizabad mounted in Afghanistan,
White House Spokesman Tony Fratto said at a press gaggle, "We regret the loss
of life among the innocent Afghanis who we are committed to protect ...
Coalition forces take precautions to prevent the loss of civilians, unlike the
Taliban and militants who target civilians and place civilians in harm's way."
On August 25, Fratto added, "We believe from what we've heard from officials at
the Department of Defense that they believe it was a good strike ... I should
tell you, though, first of all, we obviously mourn the loss of any innocent
civilians that may lose their lives in these attacks in - whether they're in
Afghanistan or in Iraq, in any of these conflict areas."
On that same day, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "We continue at this
point to believe that this was a legitimate strike against the Taliban.
Unfortunately there were some civilian casualties, although that figure is in
dispute, I would say. But this is why it is being investigated."
On August 27, at a Pentagon press conference, Commandant of the Marine Corps
General James Conway said: "If the reports of the Afghan civilian casualties
are accurate - and sometimes that is a big 'if' because I think we all
understand the Taliban capabilities with regard to information operations - but
if that proves out, that will be truly an unfortunate incident. And we need to
avoid that, certainly, at every cost ...
"You know, air power is the premiere asymmetric advantage that we hold over
both the Taliban and, for that matter, the al-Qaeda in Iraq ... And when we
find that you're up against hardened people in a hardened type of compound,
before we throw our Marines or soldiers against that, we're going to take
advantage of our asymmetric advantage … You don't always know what's in that
compound, unfortunately. And sometimes we think there's been overt efforts on
the part of the Taliban, in particular, to surround themselves with civilians
so as to, at a minimum, reap an IO [information operations] advantage if
civilians are killed."
On August 29, General McKiernan reiterated the American position, while
expressing regrets for any loss of civilian life, "This was a legitimate
insurgent target. We regret the loss of civilian life, but the numbers that we
find on this target area are nowhere near the number reported in the media, and
that we believe there was a very deliberate information operation orchestrated
by the insurgency, by the Taliban." He also complained about the UN
investigation, saying: "I am very disappointed in the United Nations because
they have not talked to this headquarters before they made that release," and
suggesting Karzai had been the victim of bad information.
On September 3, with pressure growing, US ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad
put the disparities in numbers down to the "fog of war," while urging a new
joint investigation, "I believe that there is a bit of a fog of war involved in
some of these initial reports. Sometimes initial reports can be wrong. And the
best way to deal with it is to have the kind of investigation that we have
proposed, which is US, coalition, plus the Afghan government, plus the United
Nations."
On the same day, Karzai's office issued a statement indicating that President
Bush had phoned the Afghan president, "The president of America has expressed
his regret and sympathy for the occurrence of Shindand incident." They quoted
him as saying, "I am a partner in your loss and that of the Afghan people."
On September 3, General McKiernan said, "Every death of a civilian in wartime
is a terrible tragedy. Even one death is too many ... I wish to again express
my sincere condolences and apologies to the families whose loved ones were
inadvertently killed in the crossfire with the insurgents in Azizabad."
Although the Afghans seem to have largely died due to US air strikes, not in a
crossfire, this was as close to an apology as anyone related to the US
government or military has come.
On September 7, as he was reopening the military investigation, General
McKiernan said, "The people of Afghanistan have our commitment to get to the
truth."
Playing with fire
Let me mention a small irony of history. The US military claimed that its now
discredited findings at Azizabad "were corroborated by an independent
journalist embedded with the US force." That man turned out to be none other
than Oliver North, working for FOX News. North had not only gained notoriety as
an official of, a defender of, and a shredder of papers for the Reagan
administration in the Iran-Contra scandal, but had earlier fought in Vietnam.
He actually appeared as a witness for the defense in the case of one of the
Marines accused of carrying out a massacre of Vietnamese at Son Thang in
February 1970.
As now, so in Vietnam, were "hearts and minds" being hunted both from the air
and on the ground; so, too, civilians were repeatedly blown away there; and so,
too, as in the case of the infamous My Lai massacre, cover stories were
fabricated to explain how civilians - Vietnamese peasants - had died and those
stories were publicized by the US military, even though they bore little or no
relation to what had actually happened.
Today, "hearts and minds" are being similarly hunted across large stretches of
the planet, and people in surprising numbers continue to die while simply
trying to lead their lives. This summer was, in fact, dotted with "incidents"
that often barely reached the news, in which civilians died in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the tribal areas of Pakistan: At a checkpoint in Iraq's Diyala
Province, American soldiers killed Dr Abdul-Salam al-Shimari, the chief
internist at the Baaquba Public Hospital, while he was driving to work as other
American soldiers in a convoy had gunned down the manager and two female
employees of a bank branch at Baghdad International Airport on the Airport
road. (The unarmed, dead Iraqis would then be declared armed "criminals" before
protests forced the US military to withdraw the charge.) Similarly, an Afghan
woman and two children were killed recently at a German checkpoint in Kunduz
Province, as were two Afghan civilians by an errant NATO bomb.
In the tribal areas of Pakistan, a US assault by helicopter on a village killed
20 civilians, according to the outraged provincial governor; and Pakistanis,
mainly the relatives of a man identified as a Taliban commander, including one
of his several wives and, "his sister-in-law, a sister, two nieces, eight
grandchildren and a male relative," were killed by missiles from a US Predator
drone.
This sort of "collateral damage" is an ongoing modern nightmare, which, unlike
dead Amish girls or school shootings, does not fascinate either our media or,
evidently, Americans generally. It seems we largely don't want to know about
what happened, and generally speaking, that's lucky because the media isn't
particularly interested in telling us. This is one reason the often absurd
accounts sometimes offered by the US military go relatively unchallenged - as,
fortunately, they did not in the case of the incident at Azizabad. Nonetheless,
the Bush administration has been more than willing to accept "collateral
damage" as an everyday matter in pursuing its global war on terror.
Of course, it matters what you value and what you dismiss as valueless. When
you overvalue yourself and undervalue others, you naturally overestimate your
own power and are remarkably blind to the potential power of others - you
underestimate them, that is. This might be said to be a reasonable summary of
the short, bitter history of the Bush era.
In this way, not just Vice President Cheney but the president and his top
officials have remained self-protectively embunkered throughout their years in
office. The 60 or so children slaughtered in Azizabad, each of whom belonged to
some family, don't matter to them. But they do matter. And when you kill them,
and so many others like them, you surely play with fire.
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