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2008-08-27 17:56:59 UTC
Bush Is Pouring Gas on Afghanistan's Bonfire
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted August 27, 2008.
Mounting NATO bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly
turning the country into the mirror image of Iraq.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible human
toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown off the
island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an airstrike that
killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, 50 of
them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the mounting bombing raids
and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into
the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have
devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely
ignored by us. We prefer to waste our time on the trivia and gossip that
swallow up air time and do nothing to advance our understanding of either
the campaign or the wars fought in our name.
As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the indiscriminate
use of airstrikes, including Friday's, which took place in the Azizabad area
of Shindand district in Herat province. The airstrike was carried out after
Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol
targeting a known Taliban commander in Herat, the U.S. military said.
Hundreds of Afghans, shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street
protests on Saturday in Azizabad to protest the killings, and Karzai
condemned the airstrike.
The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian deaths in
fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan and
international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting between
insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by two-thirds in
the first half of this year.
Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he
collected 60 bodies after the bombing.
"We put the bodies in the main mosque,'' he told the Associated Press by
phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. "Most of these dead
bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them."
Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who arrived
and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers fired into the
crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.
"The people were very angry," he said. "They told the soldiers, 'We don't
need your food, we don't need your clothes. We want our children. We want
our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You cannot, so go away.' "
We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to fight
the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban assaults,
funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly sophisticated
and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a rising toll on coalition
troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at a faster rate in Afghanistan
than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30 miles from the capital, Kabul, the
French army lost 10 and had 21 wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants,
aided by six suicide bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the
country. A week before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and
their Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about
withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited access.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, speaks about Afghanistan in words that look
as if they were penned by the Bush White House. Obama may call for
withdrawing some U.S. troops from Iraq, but he does not want to send them
all home. He wants to send them to Afghanistan, or to what he obliquely
terms "the right battlefield." Obama said he would deploy an additional
10,000 troops to Afghanistan once he took office.
The seven-year war in Afghanistan has not gone well. An additional 3,200
Marines were deployed there in January. Karzai's puppet government in Kabul
controls little territory outside the capital. And our attempt to buy off
tribes with money and even weapons has collapsed, with most tribal groups
slipping back into the arms of the Taliban insurgents.
Do the cheerleaders for an expanded war in Afghanistan know any history?
Have they studied what happened to the Soviets, who lost 15,000 Red Army
soldiers between 1979 and 1988, or even the British in the 19th century? Do
they remember why we went into Afghanistan? It was, we were told, to hunt
down Osama bin Laden, who is now apparently in Pakistan. Has anyone asked
what our end goal is in Afghanistan? Is it nation-building? Or is this
simply the forever war on terror?
Al-Qaida, which we have also inadvertently resurrected, is alive and well.
It still finds plenty of recruits. It still runs training facilities. It
still caries out attacks in London, Madrid, Iraq and now Afghanistan, which
did not experience suicide bombings until December 2005. Al-Qaida has moved
on. But we remain stuck, confused and lashing about wildly like a wounded
and lumbering beast.
We do not have the power or the knowledge, nor do we have the right under
international law, to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. We are vainly trying to
transplant to these countries a modern system of politics invented in
Europe. This system is characterized by, among other things, the division of
the Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship. The
belief in a secular civil government is to most Afghans and Iraqis an alien
creed. It will never work.
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between
bitter rivalries among competing ethnic and religious groups. We have
embarked on an occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan that is as damaging to our
souls as it is to our prestige and power and security. And we believe,
falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to
wage war.
We divert ourselves in our dotage and decline with images and slogans that
perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability, our own might, our own
goodness. We are preoccupied by national trivia games that pass for news,
even as the wolf pants at our door. These illusions blind us. We cannot see
ourselves as others see us. We do not know who we are.
"We had fed the heart on fantasies," William Butler Yeats wrote, "the
heart's grown brutal from the fare."
We are propelled forward not by logic or compassion or understanding but by
fear. We have created and live in a world where violence is the primary form
of communication. We have become the company we keep. Much of the
world--certainly the Muslim world, one-fifth of the world's population, most
of whom are not Arab--sees us through the prism of Iraq, Afghanistan and
Palestine. We are igniting the dispossessed, the majority of humanity who
live on less than two dollars a day. And whoever takes the White House next
January seems hellbent on fueling our self-immolation.
Chris Hedges' column, now weekly, appears Mondays on Truthdig.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the
Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War
Against Iraqi Civilians.
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted August 27, 2008.
Mounting NATO bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly
turning the country into the mirror image of Iraq.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible human
toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown off the
island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an airstrike that
killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, 50 of
them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the mounting bombing raids
and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into
the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have
devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely
ignored by us. We prefer to waste our time on the trivia and gossip that
swallow up air time and do nothing to advance our understanding of either
the campaign or the wars fought in our name.
As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the indiscriminate
use of airstrikes, including Friday's, which took place in the Azizabad area
of Shindand district in Herat province. The airstrike was carried out after
Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol
targeting a known Taliban commander in Herat, the U.S. military said.
Hundreds of Afghans, shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street
protests on Saturday in Azizabad to protest the killings, and Karzai
condemned the airstrike.
The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian deaths in
fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan and
international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting between
insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by two-thirds in
the first half of this year.
Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he
collected 60 bodies after the bombing.
"We put the bodies in the main mosque,'' he told the Associated Press by
phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. "Most of these dead
bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them."
Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who arrived
and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers fired into the
crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.
"The people were very angry," he said. "They told the soldiers, 'We don't
need your food, we don't need your clothes. We want our children. We want
our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You cannot, so go away.' "
We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to fight
the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban assaults,
funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly sophisticated
and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a rising toll on coalition
troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at a faster rate in Afghanistan
than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30 miles from the capital, Kabul, the
French army lost 10 and had 21 wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants,
aided by six suicide bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the
country. A week before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and
their Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about
withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited access.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, speaks about Afghanistan in words that look
as if they were penned by the Bush White House. Obama may call for
withdrawing some U.S. troops from Iraq, but he does not want to send them
all home. He wants to send them to Afghanistan, or to what he obliquely
terms "the right battlefield." Obama said he would deploy an additional
10,000 troops to Afghanistan once he took office.
The seven-year war in Afghanistan has not gone well. An additional 3,200
Marines were deployed there in January. Karzai's puppet government in Kabul
controls little territory outside the capital. And our attempt to buy off
tribes with money and even weapons has collapsed, with most tribal groups
slipping back into the arms of the Taliban insurgents.
Do the cheerleaders for an expanded war in Afghanistan know any history?
Have they studied what happened to the Soviets, who lost 15,000 Red Army
soldiers between 1979 and 1988, or even the British in the 19th century? Do
they remember why we went into Afghanistan? It was, we were told, to hunt
down Osama bin Laden, who is now apparently in Pakistan. Has anyone asked
what our end goal is in Afghanistan? Is it nation-building? Or is this
simply the forever war on terror?
Al-Qaida, which we have also inadvertently resurrected, is alive and well.
It still finds plenty of recruits. It still runs training facilities. It
still caries out attacks in London, Madrid, Iraq and now Afghanistan, which
did not experience suicide bombings until December 2005. Al-Qaida has moved
on. But we remain stuck, confused and lashing about wildly like a wounded
and lumbering beast.
We do not have the power or the knowledge, nor do we have the right under
international law, to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. We are vainly trying to
transplant to these countries a modern system of politics invented in
Europe. This system is characterized by, among other things, the division of
the Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship. The
belief in a secular civil government is to most Afghans and Iraqis an alien
creed. It will never work.
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between
bitter rivalries among competing ethnic and religious groups. We have
embarked on an occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan that is as damaging to our
souls as it is to our prestige and power and security. And we believe,
falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to
wage war.
We divert ourselves in our dotage and decline with images and slogans that
perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability, our own might, our own
goodness. We are preoccupied by national trivia games that pass for news,
even as the wolf pants at our door. These illusions blind us. We cannot see
ourselves as others see us. We do not know who we are.
"We had fed the heart on fantasies," William Butler Yeats wrote, "the
heart's grown brutal from the fare."
We are propelled forward not by logic or compassion or understanding but by
fear. We have created and live in a world where violence is the primary form
of communication. We have become the company we keep. Much of the
world--certainly the Muslim world, one-fifth of the world's population, most
of whom are not Arab--sees us through the prism of Iraq, Afghanistan and
Palestine. We are igniting the dispossessed, the majority of humanity who
live on less than two dollars a day. And whoever takes the White House next
January seems hellbent on fueling our self-immolation.
Chris Hedges' column, now weekly, appears Mondays on Truthdig.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the
Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War
Against Iraqi Civilians.