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Team America Kills Five Kids in Marja
"Civilian casualties are inevitable," said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, a U.S. rocket strike "hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians... killing at least 10 people, including 5 children."
What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?
It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that's absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja's civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate.
Recall the U.S. government's instructions to Marja's residents before the assault:
Afghan villagers should stay inside and "keep their heads down" when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO's civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.[...]
NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.
These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn't save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren't keeping their heads down.
Having advised civilians to stay - helping ensure the area remained heavily populated during the offensive - U.S. forces bore an extra responsibility to control their fire and avoid tactics that endanger civilians, Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch told Reuters:
"I suspect that they believe they have the ability to generally distinguish between combatants and civilians. I would call that into question, given their long history of mistakes, particularly when using air power," Adams said.
"Whatever they do, they have an obligation to protect civilians and make adequate provision to alleviate any crisis that arises," he said. "It is very much their responsibility.... They are going to be carrying the can if this goes badly."
"Avoiding such civilian deaths...has been a cornerstone of the war strategy" by General McChrystal, the Times informs us. If that's literally true, then McChrystal's strategy has failed spectacularly. But perhaps we're not meant to understand this statement literally. Perhaps what this statement means is that McChystal's strategy is to undertake the same military actions as before, and even to escalate them, but to change the rhetoric about them, in an effort to tamp down the outrage that might result from U.S. actions.
It's not too late for the United States to change course. These five children are gone forever, but other children in Marja can still be spared. Tell President Obama and Congress to protect civilians in Marja, as the United States is required to do by the laws of war.
If the United States cannot protect civilians from its military operations - as it is apparently either unable or unwilling to do - then the war should end. According to the repeated statements of senior U.S. officials, the way that the war is going to end is through negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, so those negotiations should commence immediately.
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34 Comments so far
Show AllChildren living in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have no more value to the Obama Administation than it did to the Bush Administration. The blood of innocents is taken in by antispetic vocabulary bites at the daily security briefs given in the Oval Office and carries no significant angst for the chief war propogator; rest assured, however, that if terrorists hit the White House lawn killing Obama's little darlings, one could expect the full weight and nuclear might of the US in retaliation. Of course, peasants living in Afghanistan are just numbers in a brief for the pond scum serving in the White House.
Well that's an unforntunate bit of unintended collateral damage, however it is for their own good in the end.
We have to teach those poor savages the superior ways of our glorious Western Civilisation. If we have to kill some of them to achieve our goals, so be it. We are doing a great service and we also must bear a great burden and financial cost to bring civilisation to these backward peoples. They will thank us for it one day.
Lord Thomas George Baring
Socialist: I really hope your quote is right, that "[t]hey will thank us for it one day". Hope the thanking happens before the blowback gets too strong. Pity they'll have to reincarnate first. But they're kids, so they'll be back up to same age in no time. - Fine piece of logic, that thanking thing...
My quote was sarcstic and fictitious, yet based on real written accounts from British imperial administrators during the last attempt by an English-speaking empire to control the region. Edward Said's classic "Orientalism" is a good source for these.
Got that. Continued in the same vein. Edward Said was great, as many have... ah... said. - Pretty mind-blowing summed-up "quote" there, not quite Politically Correct these days.
Exactly - not PC in today's rhetoric - yet in a more subtle and sophisticated way, the same underlying message seems to be part of the justification for US/NATO occupation today. A bit of historical irony I guess.
The continuing "Chronicles of death foretold"...
They didn't mention in the article above that the rocket that was fired was 600 METERS OFF COURSE!!!!
How in God's name, and I'm wondering where he is in all this mess, does the military of the government who spends more than all the other world together on defense, can screw up so badly? Jimmy Breslin wrote a book in the 70's about a "Gang that couldn't shoot straight". I know where they went - into the US military.
Obama said he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan, so whoever voted for him has to take partial blame for this tragedy. But, with the fact that Karzai, on January 26, 2010, said he was going to open talks with the Taliban for peace and extraction of al Qaeda, why are we even fighting at all?
We all know that the only link between the Taliban and the real enemy al Qaeda is that the Taliban needed money after the US abandoned them and the other warlords in Afghanistan after they fought the US-Soviet proxy war for us. Al Qaeda needed a place to go, the Taliban needed money and the two met. We also know that the Taliban was willing to give up al Qaeda three times prior to the October 7, 2001 invasion, but Bush said no - he wasn't going to negotiate.
The US has to quit killing civilians at all costs.
Nothing new here. As a British veteran of World War 2 wrote in a letter to the Guardian some years ago: "When we fired, the Germans ducked; when the Germans fired, we ducked; when the Americans fired, everybody ducked."
Mookie: Well, you've doubled this "error" that I've seen in other reports: which is 300 meters (or yards). But does it really matter in terms of the acceptability of using artillery fire in an area that is known to contain large numbers of civilians?
That cannon ball could have hit the very epicenter of its target and still have taken out a countless number of civilians in the kind of guerilla combat operations in which fighters mingle with non-fighters. Granted this is not quite as indiscriminant as carpet bombing, but it still represents the product of our well-programmed reptilian brains that allow us to launch weapons of any level of mass destruction which are inevitably going to have "collateral" human damage: not to mention the intentional damage of killing the enemy's soldiers.
We are never going to "humanize" war; we simply have to put a stop to it.
Oh, I dunno. That looks like a potential "military age male" on the slab. It's not "cost-effective" to wait until they hide in caves and thus become much harder and more expensive to kill.
Winning hearts and minds ain't easy, but we're working on it.
The petition promoted by Naiman and Just Foreign Policy is NOT the demand that America and the world should be making on U.S. foreign policy: as the organization's name implies, it should be a demand for a JUST foreign policy. This would not be a policy in which the U.S. and its allies carry out acts of injustice in pursuit of military operations of doubtful morality or chance of success. Imploring the U.S. to protect civilians while carrying out a one-sided assault on an essentially defenseless area gives subtle legitimation to that illegitimate operation...as long as it "protects civilians": as NATO chiefs always say they "do their best" to do. Hamid Karazi made more sense when he told Al Jazeera a couple of days ago that NATO should refrain from any assaults on Afghan villages and towns. Now he is quoted as simply demanding that civilians be protected during these raids whose legitimacy he is not questioning.
There is only one "just" policy of the U.S. and its "coalition of the bribed" with reference to Afghanistan: get the hell out of there and remove the single largest provocation of the violence that its operation is supposed to be controlling.
Civilians killed by Americans abroad receive an apology but American civilians killed by the economic collapse (fathers killing their families, suicide, death by cop etc.) don't even get that. Maybe they get an unmarked grave provided by the town.
As for the Democrats, they can't create any jobs, they can't reform the health system, and they can't grow the economy except for the rich getting richer, but by God they can kill civilians abroad and they can promote killings, suicides, and crime in general at home as well as the Republicans can.
We are the biggest terrorists on the planet. The US military has murdered some five million people in the third world in the last one hundred and twelve years. Al-Kida has killed about five thousand people in the last twenty years. So we have killed one thousand times as many people as Al-Kida... Heck of a job, corporate imperial America...
And the rockets' red glare, Marjah Afghans bursting in air, gave proof thru' the night, that the US imperialists were still there...
True, but "Al-Kida has killed about five thousand people in the last twenty years" ? Who is Al Quaeda anyway? Where is the hard evidence that "they" killed five thousand people?
At least bin Laden claims responsibility for 9-11, USS Cole and a few other attacks. Not much more proof's been presented. Yet some people obviously did help practically with the attacks on WTC twice, USS Cole, US embassy bombings in Africa etc. (though 5,000 dead is a bit high - more like 3,500 total; they're not very good compared to NATO).
A problem with suicide attacks is that "the guilty ones" mostly die in the attack. That's kind of central to such attacks. Hard to punish them for it. It's a current philosophical problem to the US army in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, that people can't be killed twice. Dead people are notoriously difficult to punish. All the more reason to be angry at them, and try to kill them for being dead. That's why whole countries are made to stand in for them.
But yeah, al-Quaeda ("the database" - originally of hot-headed muslims fighting USSR in Afghanistan useful to the cia, who named them thus) are probably a rag-tag band of at most a few hundred ("less than a hundred" according to Pentagon last fall) wild-eyed, over the top, fanatical criminals being exploited to the hilt for domestic repressive purposes by the US-led west - a group of countries sometimes known as "The international community". Citing "The international community" is most often like a group of three when a strong one says to a weaker one "We're all against you" and the third one stays out of it. It's a trick US-NATO uses all the time.
Smarter:
Yes, and even the report that bin Laden claims responsibility cannot be verified. We shall likely not know the truth for many many years. Until I see evidence of Al-Quaeda, I will continue to doubt its existence. So called terror groups have been around for centuries. Groups that have legitimate grievances that are regularly ignored tend to resort to violence. There are many such groups all over the world.
But the Al-Quaeda storyline and narrative is largely fictitious and even laughable, as far as I can see. There is no evidence that a world-wide network of Islamic "terrorists" extists. The Tom Englehardt article also makes some important points regarding these. If Adam Curtis is correct ("Power of Nightmares" BBC 2004) Al-Quaeda was fabricated and used to replace the Soviet Union as the wildly exaggerated threat to our "security".
Now of course, since the USA is the most hated nation on earth, there are folks out there who would like to attack us, however this is a self-fulfilling feedback, or blowback (Chalmers Johnson). If we did not go around bullying and murdering so many around the world, they would not have "terrorists" to scare the people with.
The threat of violence exists daily as well over 10 thousand Americans are murdered by fellow US citizens every year. The wildly exaggerated threat of a "terrorist attack" is statistically insignificant when compared to dying on the road, for example. Yet our govt. would like us all to be irrational and paranoid.
"Civilian casualties are inevitable," said U.S. officials
Im sure all terrorists agree with the previous statement.
So the us military has murdered some five million people? I think the actual number is much much higher, its also worth considering how many people have been murdered and empoverished by its economic policies, and how many more will suffer and die in the future.
"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children."
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. "
Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010
Yes I know, shame is an antiquated concept in our nation, as are guilt and moral responsibility. Our answer is always the schoolboy's -- "But I didn't mean to."
Yes, we did mean to kill the innocent. And we mean to keep on killing them. And no, not to save them. Because we can. Because they are in the way of history. Because we need to be "free" -- free of justice, free of empathy, free of our own humanity, free of anything and everything that gets between us and the world of mediated death-in-life that our glorious economic system daily drips into our veins.
Forget global warming, nuclear weapons -- it's already happened, and we don't even know it.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
petrkrop: your post blows away the rhetorical garbage behind or underneath which we try to clothe our acts of human indecency. My country tis of thee, sweet destroyer of worlds, to thee I sing. Thank you for this stunning moral clarity.
Maybe if a Little Big Horn like battle occurred, the Obomber administration might back off this stupid occupation. Upon further review, they would probably drop a nuclear weapon and blame in on Bin-laden.
As always, Murder Incorporated is on the move... they sure do love their toys in the sand.
Aren't certain of these soldiers being told that they are doing battle with Satan? Well, the intention to kill does kill.
We didn't "Kill" those children Bob, we murdered them. Murder in the 2nd degree, conspiracy to commit murder and depraved indifference.. There is a big difference.
The new protocol in the USA, is that if you murder someone, you can choose life imprisonment or apologise.
Hooray for our side!
ยท Yr Obd't Servant
More likely Xe-team activities: "Dubai's police chief said Monday an 11-member hit squad carrying European passports and disguised in wigs, fake beards and tennis clothes was behind the mysterious killing of a Hamas commander in his hotel room last month."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100215/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_dubai_hamas_slaying
We're number one! We're number one!
I am an American. I love war. War is what my country does. We are warmongers. War is great. War is awesome. War is profitable. They are only brown people. They are not white people. They do not count. They are targets. War, baby, war. Fuck the rest of the world. War is the way to go. Health care my ass. Debt my ass. Pain and suffering my ass. War. I am an American. I love war.
I love the headline : Team America!
Remember the song from the movie, Team America: World Police?
I do. "America, Fuck Yeah!"
South Park. Prophetic as usual.
"If the United States cannot protect civilians from its military operations - as it is apparently either unable or unwilling to do - then the war should end. "...if??? if we could war is o.x.???
Once again, I wake up in the morning and find more blood on my hands. As a child, I never dreamed that I would grow up and become a serial killer. Yet, that is what I have become. As a taxpaying citizen of this country and as a contributor to this murderous society, my guilt is beyond question. The cognitive dissonance is becoming too much to bear.
Every day I am more and more disgusted to live in this country.
"Although the worlds imperfections may call forth the acts of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child..."Robert F. Kennedy Congressional Record Nov. 28, 1967" To Seek a Newer and Better World for Our Children."
I do not know if Bobby would think that the world's imperfections can righteously call forth the acts of war, that obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child,if he were alive today.
"But it is also the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall from the improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend."
Sadly there is nothing new under the sun except newer and better ways to kill the children.