Pacified

If the U.S. public looked long
and hard into a mirror reflecting the civilian atrocities that have
occurred in Afghanistan, over the past ten months, we would see
ourselves
as people who have collaborated with and paid for war crimes committed
against innocent civilians who meant us no harm.

Two reporters, Jerome Starkey
(the Times UK), and David Lindorff, (Common Dreams), have persistently
drawn attention to U.S. war crimes committed in Afghanistan. Makers
of the film "Rethinking Afghanistan" have steadily provided updates
about the suffering endured by Afghan civilians. Here is a short list
of atrocities that have occurred in the months since General McChrystal
assumed his post in Afghanistan.

December 26th, 2009:
US-led forces, (whether soldiers or "security contractors" (mercenaries)

is still uncertain), raided a home in Kunar Province and pulled eight
young men out of their beds, handcuffed them, and gunned them down
execution-style.
The Pentagon initially reported that the victims had been running a
bomb factory, although distraught villagers were willing to swear
that the victims, youngsters, aged 11 - 18, were just seven normal
schoolboys and one shepherd boy. Following courageous reporting
by Jerome Starkey, the U.S. military carried out its own investigation
and on February 24th, 2010, issued an apology, attesting the boys'
innocence.

February 12, 2010: U.S.
and Afghan forces raided a home during a party and killed five people,
including a local district attorney, a local police commander two
pregnant
mothers and a teenaged girl engaged to be married. Neither Commander
Dawood, shot in the doorway of his home while pleading for calm waving
his badge, nor the teenaged Gulalai, died immediately, but the gunmen
refused to allow relatives to take them to the hospital. Instead, they
forced them to wait for hours barefoot in the winter cold outside.

Despite crowds of witnesses
on the scene, the NATO report insisted that the two pregnant women at
the party had been found bound and gagged, murdered by the male victims
in an honor killing. A March 16, 2010 U.N. report, following on
further reporting by Starkey, exposed the deception, to meager American
press attention.

Two weeks later: February 21st,

2010: A three-car convoy of Afghans was traveling to the market in
Kandahar
with plans to proceed from there to a hospital in Kabul where some of
the party could be taken for much-needed medical treatment. U.S.
forces saw Afghans travelling together and launched an air-to-ground
attack on the first car. Women in the second car immediately jumped
out waving their scarves, trying desperately to communicate that they
were civilians. The U.S. helicopter gunships continued firing
on the now unshielded women. 21 people were killed and 13 were wounded.

There was press attention for
this atrocity, and U.S. General Stanley McChrystal would issue a
videotaped
apology for his soldiers' tragic mistake. Broad consensus among
the press accepted this as a gracious gesture, with no consequences
for the helicopter crew ever demanded or announced.

Whether having that gunship
in the country was a mistake - or a crime - was never raised as
a question.

And who would want it raised?
Set amidst the horrors of an ongoing eight-year war, how many Americans
think twice about these atrocities, hearing them on the news.

So I'm baffled to learn that
in Germany, a western, relatively comfortable country, citizens raised
a sustained protest when their leaders misled them regarding an atrocity

that cost many dozens of civilian lives in Afghanistan.

The air strike was conducted
by US planes but called in by German forces. On September
4, 2009, Taleban fighters in Kunduz province had hijacked two trucks
filled with petrol, but then gotten stuck in a quagmire where the trucks

had sank. Locals, realizing that the trucks carried valuable fuel,
had arrived in large numbers to siphon it off, but when a German officer

at the nearest NATO station learned that over 100 people had assembled
in an area under his supervision, he decided they must be insurgents
and a threat to Germans under his command. At his call, a U.S. fighter
jet bombed the tankers, incinerating 142 people, dozens of them
confirmable
as civilians.

On September 6, 2009, Germany's

Defense Minister at the time, Franz Josef Jung, held a press conference
in which he defended the attack, playing down the presence of
civilians.
He wasn't aware that video footage from a US F15 fighter jet showed
that most of the people present were unarmed civilians gathering to
fill containers with fuel.

On November 27, 2009, after
a steady outcry on the part of the German public, the Defense Minister
was withdrawn from his post, (he is now a Labor Minister), and two
German
military officials, one of them Germany's top military commander
Wolfgang
Schneiderhan, were forced to resign.

I felt uneasy and sad when
I realized that my first response to this story was a feeling of
curiosity
as to how the public of another country could manage to raise such a
furor over deaths of people in faraway Afghanistan. How odd to
have grown up wondering how anyone could ever have been an uninvolved
bystander allowing Nazi atrocities to develop and to find myself, four
decades later, puzzling over how German people or any country's
citizenship
could exercise so much control over their governance.

Today, in the US, attacks on
civilians are frequently discussed in terms of the "war for hearts
and minds.".

Close to ten months ago,
Defense
Secretary Robert Gates told reporters at a June 12, 2009 press
conference
in Brussels that General Stanley McChrystal "would work to minimize
Afghan civilian casualties, a source of growing public anger within
Afghanistan."

"Every civilian casualty
-- however caused -- is a defeat for us," Gates continued, "and
a setback for the Afghan government."

On March 23rd, 2010, McChrystal

was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph. "Your security comes
from the people," he said. "You don't need to be secured away
from the people. You need to be secured by the people. So as you win
their support, it's in their interests to secure you, .... This can
mean patrolling without armored vehicles or even flak jackets. It means
accepting greater short-term risk - and higher casualties - in the
hope of winning a "battle of perceptions and perspectives"
that will result in longer-term security."

And on March 2nd, 2010, he
told Gail McCabe "What we're trying to do now is to increase their
confidence in us and their confidence in their government. But
you can't do that through smoke and mirrors, you have to do that through

real things you do - because they've been through thirty-one years of
war now, they've seen so much, they're not going to be beguiled by a
message."

We're obliged as Americans
to ask ourselves whether we will be guided by a message such as
McChrystal's
or by evidence. Americans have not been through thirty-one years
of war, and we have managed to see very little of the consequences of
decades of warmaking in Afghanistan.

According to a March 3, 2010
Save the Children report, "The world is ignoring the daily deaths
of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhea
and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency rather than providing

humanitarian aid." The report notes that a quarter of all children
born in the country die before the age of five, while nearly 60 percent
of children are malnourished and suffer physical or mental problems.
The UN Human Development Index in 2009 says that Afghanistan is one
of the poorest countries in the world, second only to Niger in
sub-Saharan
Africa.

The proposed US defense budget
will cost the U.S. public two billion dollars per day. President
Obama's administration is seeking a 33 billion dollar supplemental
to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most U.S. people are aware
of Taleban atrocities, and many may believe the U.S. troops are in
Afghanistan
to protect Afghan villagers from Taleban human rights abuses.
At least the mainstream news media in Germany and the UK will air
stories
of atrocities. The U.S. people are disadvantaged inasmuch as the media
and the Pentagon attempt to pacify us, winning our hearts and minds
to bankroll ongoing warfare and troop escalation in Afghanistan.
Yet it isn't very difficult to pacify U.S. people. We're easily
distracted from the war, and when we do note that an atrocity has
happened,
we seem more likely to respond with a shrug of dismay than with a
sustained
protest.

At the Winter Soldier hearings,

future presidential hopeful John Kerry movingly asked Congress how it
could ask a soldier "To be the last man to die for a mistake," while
contemporary polls showed less prominent Americans far more willing
to call the Vietnam war an evil - a crime - a sin - than "a
mistake." The purpose of that war, as of Obama's favored war
in Afghanistan, was to pacify dangerous populations - to make them
peaceful, to win the battle of hearts and minds.

Afghan civilian deaths no
longer
occur at the rate seen in the war's first few months, in which the
civilian toll of our September 11 attacks, pretext for the war then
as it is now, was so rapidly exceeded.

But every week we hear -
if we are listening very carefully to the news, if we are still reading
that final paragraph on page A16 - or if we are following the work
of brave souls like Jerome Starkey - of tragic mistakes. We are
used to tragic mistakes. Attacking a country militarily means
planning for countless tragic mistakes.

Some of us still let ourselves
believe that the war can do some good in Afghanistan, that our
leaders' motives for escalating the war, however dominated by strategic
economic concerns and geopolitical rivalries, still in some small part
include the interests of the Afghan people.

There are others who know where

this war will lead and know that our leaders know, and have simply
become
too fatigued, too drained of frightened tears by this long decade of
nightmare, to hold those leaders accountable anymore for moral choices.

It's worthwhile to wonder,
how did we become this pacified?

But far more important is our
collective effort to approach the mirror, to stay in front of it,
unflinching,
and see the consequences of our mistaken acquiescence to the tragic
mistakes of war, and then work, work hard, to correct our mistakes and
nonviolently resist collaboration with war crimes.