Mujtaba Ali Mujtaba Ali is a third-year
physiological science student. E-mail him at [email protected].
It was recently reported that at 2 a.m., Jan. 24, U.S. Special
Forces raided Sharzam High School in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan.
What ensued was the brutal massacre of 16 young Afghan men. The men
were sleeping when American troops began firing at them from close
range. The assault concluded when American warplanes obliterated
the compound. Two of the men were found with their hands bound,
apparently having been killed execution-style.
The victims of the Uruzgan attack were neither Taliban nor
al-Qaeda; they were men loyal to the U.S.-backed interim leader of
Afghanistan Hamid Karzai. In an interview with the Washington Post,
Karzai confirmed that ?a mistake? had been made by American troops
and that the U.S. had acknowledged to him that innocent Afghans
were killed. These images conflict with U.S. claims that civilian
casualties have been kept low in Afghanistan. They also coincide
with other brutal U.S. military action in the past, most notably
the Vietnam War.
The Uruzgan incident is one of several reported cases involving
civilian casualties in the U.S.-led ?war against terrorism.?
Thousands of innocent Afghan civilians have been killed by American
forces since the onset of the war.
The ease with which U.S. officials are able to dismiss the loss
of innocent lives as merely ?collateral damage? is by no means a
new phenomenon.?Reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan serve
as disturbing reminders of the cover-ups during Vietnam.
As it has done in the past, the U.S. military has succeeded in
effectively shrouding the killing of civilians in secrecy and
ensuring that mainstream American media reports of such losses are
kept to a minimum.
On Dec. 10, Professor Marc Herold of the University of New
Hampshire released an extensively detailed report on incidents
involving civilian casualties in Afghanistan. He reported, for
example, that on Oct. 11, U.S. planes bombed the small mud-house
mountain village of Karam during dinner and evening prayer time,
killing at least 100 innocent people.
Professor Herold summarized that, in the first nine weeks of the
war, no fewer than 3,767 Afghan civilians had been killed ? a
conservative figure that already exceeds the 2,800 that are
estimated to have died on Sept. 11.
Reports of civilian casualties were heavily downplayed during
the Vietnam War, just as they currently are in Afghanistan. On
March 16, 1968, a U.S. Army division invaded My Lai, a village in
South Vietnam, and slaughtered 347 unarmed civilians. The incident
was the subject of an immense military cover-up and was not
revealed to the American public until the fall of 1969.
By 1974, nearly one million innocent Vietnamese had been killed.
It is disturbing and depressing that in the 30 years following the
war, nothing has been learned from Vietnam, and that the same path
to genocide is being followed by the administration today in the
so-called ?war on terrorism.?
It is much easier kill someone once they have been dehumanized
and viewed as ?the other.??To most Americans in the early ?60s,
Vietnam was an unfamiliar land, half a world away. In the early
stages of the war, before reports of the atrocities reached the
public, the enemy was perceived as less than human.
The prevalence of the ?us/them? dichotomy during the Vietnam War
has been exemplified in how three decades after its end, Vietnam
War veteran Sen. John McCain told reporters, ?I hated the
(Vietnamese). I will hate them as long as I live.?
Similarly, the fact that Army Gen. Tommy Franks can dismiss the
previously mentioned Uruzgan high school incident as something
which he would ?not characterize as a failure of any type?
indicates his bigotry and disregard for Afghan civilians.
It is unacceptable that U.S. warplanes conducted a six-hour
bombing assault on a wedding party in the village of Qalaye Naizi
in Eastern Afghanistan, killed 106 attendants, and cleared
themselves of responsibility in the massacre simply by claiming
that the gathering of cars outside resembled a meeting of al-Qaeda
terrorists.
No formal apology has been given for any of the civilian deaths
in Afghanistan. In fact, only the Uruzgan incident generated the
slightest hope of an official investigation.
?A misinformed raid by U.S. troops on an Afghan village last
week resulted in collateral damage? is the mantra echoed by
mainstream media to dehumanize the losses of civilian life and
ensure that no sympathy is felt for the Afghan victims. These
victims simply had the misfortune of having the wrong skin color or
names too difficult to pronounce, and thus failed to prove to
America that they too are human beings.