For my initial post on the subject of politically expedient NGOs and the WikiLeaks release, go here. A lingering issue has been the extent to which WikiLeaks endangered people in Afghanistan by releasing the records without checking with the Pentagon. This was a central assumption of six NGOs, Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the Kabul office of the International Crisis Group, and Reporters Without Borders, who criticized wikileaks for the release.

Turns out that WikiLeaks did offer to allow the Pentagon to identify the names of individuals who might have been at risk if their names were not edited out of the documents it subsequently released, as it is doing again now. Why is the Pentagon being so obstinate, when it has embraced previous requests by the mainstream media? Could it possibly be because the Pentagon wants to prosecute WikiLeaks for encouraging the theft of classified government documents, and any such prosecution would be impaired, perhaps, fatally so, by treating WikiLeaks the same as media organizations who have a constitutional right to release such records? In light of this, is there any chance that the six NGOs who sided with the Pentagon will now publicly repudiate their action? Didn't think so.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, Death Squads, NGOs, US Military

UPDATE: Want a good, shorthand way to determine if an NGO is collaborating with the occupation in Afghanistan? Look and see if they are scrambling to climb aboard the US public relations campaign against WikiLeaks. So far, we have Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, and, now, Reporters Without Borders:

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed incredible irresponsibility when posting the documents online.

The presence of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George Soros, is an interesting one. Perhaps, it is to be expected that an NGO funded by a currency speculator is, at the end of the day, supportive of the violent modernization project underway in Afghanistan. Indeed, don't all of these organizations rely upon such an endeavor for their very existence? Of course, the notion that the Pentagon cares about civilian deaths in Afghanistan remains risible, no matter how often CIVIC tries to persuade us to the contrary.

INITIAL POST: In April 2005, Marla Ruzicka, a US humanitarian worker who documented civilian casualties in Iraq, was killed. In one of my first posts here, I expressed sadness about her death, while describing her political approach to the war in Iraq as fundamentally misguided:

One need only visit the website of the organization that Ruzicka created, CIVIC Worldwide, to recognize the problem. CIVIC, you see, stands for The Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict. Accordingly, it promotes the pernicious distinction between innocent Iraqis, Iraqis who decline to violently resist the occupation, and other, guilty Iraqis who do not. Such a perspective, coming from an American organization, is morally myopic, if not morally offensive, given that it condemns Iraqis for violently resisting their own personal and economic victimization by the Occupation Authority. It is indistinguishable from the one continually advanced by the US military.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising as it is the inevitable consequence of Ruzicka's decision, after the start of the war, to sever her association with Global Exchange, a non-profit that organized against the war and now condemns the occupation, because she believed that she could subsequently accomplish more by working with the US rather than against it. It is tempting to dismiss the significance of her politics as the result of her political naivete. After all, according to Corn, she reportedly told a friend, My long-term goal is to get a desk at the State Department that looks at civilian casualties.

Not surprisingly, we now discover that CIVIC is providing NGO cover for the US government's public relations assault upon WikiLeaks:

A group of human-rights organizations is pressing WikiLeaks to do a better job of redacting names from thousands of war documents it is publishing, joining the list of critics that claim the Web site's actions could jeopardize the safety of Afghans who aided the U.S. military.

The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.

The human-rights groups involved are Amnesty International; Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC; Open Society Institute, or OSI, the charitable organization funded by George Soros; Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; and the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, or ICG.

Furthermore, in a statement posted on its website, CIVIC rationalizes the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan:

There are tragic stories of civilian loss in these 70,000 database entries, some that likely could have been avoided and some that seem like honest, horrible mistakes. Either way, they've got to be analyzed so lessons can be drawn. Certainly every incident of civilian harm deserves a full investigation.

To really understand a war and its implications, the human cost should be weighed against strategic considerations. The two go hand-in-hand. That's particularly true in Afghanistan, where commanders now realize the people are the main strategic consideration.

CIVIC has analyzed over 2,000 of entries thus far. We are looking specifically for information about civilian casualties caused by escalation of force incidents, with the goal of better understanding the impact of changes to the rules of engagement and tactical directives during the years these reports cover. To really understand what these documents mean both individually and collectively, we need to be aware of what they are and what they are not. They are, for the most part, spot reports -- one person's documentation of an incident transmitted through various means and held in a database. They do not, however, include much context, for example in-depth reports or investigations. The conclusions we can draw may therefore be limited.

Am I the only person who read this statement, and thought that CIVIC is playing both sides, trying to exploit the release to carve out a private contractor niche for itself as a Pentagon friendly outside investigator of civilian casualties even as it participates in the US campaign against WikiLeaks? In any event, the deferential tone of the statement is predictable, because if you read the list of 2009 accomplishments provided by CIVIC, one can only draw the conclusion that its existence is dependent upon policies of war without end pursued by the US:

•Advocating and helping design a new US program for Pakistani war victims, for which Congress appropriated $10 million


•Training US officers and enlisted forces, and contributing to new Army policies on civilian harm;


•Authoring the only civilian-authored article in the Escalation of Force handbook now being issued to deployed troops;


•Conferring by invitation with top military officers, government officials and policymakers on how to improve help for civilians harmed in conflict;


•Pressing international forces in Afghanistan for a new compensation policy for civilian casualties, a recommendation supported by Gen. Stanley McChrystal;


•Helping tell the story of Iraqi war victims through a critically acclaimed off-Broadway drama;


•Creating a global movement, the Making Amends Campaign, to change the outcome of war for civilians;


•Building the Making Amends Campaign coalition with a steering committee comprised of Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Handicap International USA;


•Convincing Security Council delegations that ‘making amends’ was an important new issue under protection of civilians for the international community

A closer examination of the list shows that CIVIC is apparently very good at seizing upon opportunities created by the Obama administration. With Obama expanding the purported war on terror into Pakistan, we discover that CIVIC is helping design a new US program for Pakistani war victims, for which Congress appropriated $10 million. Regrettably, CIVIC is a NGO dedicated to the practice of the political expediency that so characterized Ruzicka's time in Iraq. It may also be something of a bellwether. After all, if we see items on their website related to Iran or South America, we have cause to be concerned.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, Death Squads, NGOs, US Military

As reported in the Guardian:

Survivors of an alleged Nato rocket attack on a small town in Helmand, which the Afghan government says killed 52 civilians, spoke today of their anger at what they claim was a deliberate air strike, despite coalition denials.

The incident is alleged to have taken place last Friday in Regey, in the volatile Sangin district of Helmand. News of it came as a deluge of leaked US army documents about previously unreported civilian killings threatens to ruin Nato's attempts to persuade Afghans that it takes innocent deaths seriously.

Many residents of the town say they believe the strike, which they say was a missile attack on a mud house where people were hiding from nearby fighting, was deliberate. The foreign forces could see us, said Haji Abdul Ghafar, a 38-year-old farmer who had fled to Regey from a nearby village. We were not in any hideouts. The Americans can see tiny things on the ground, but they could not see us. I think they bombed us on purpose.

Ghafar said at first he had not known whether shooting was coming from tanks or from aircraft. But people a bit far from us said that the foreign troops' tank fired a cruise missile. It hit the house and destroyed the front of the house and the left wall.

He was speaking to the Guardian at the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city, where he went with his son, Agha Shereen, who suffered a broken leg and nose, and a seven-year-old nephew, Abdul Jabar.

Abdul was still suffering from severe shock, appearing to believe he was still at home and looking for his sandals to go out and play with other children. In total, Ghafar said, 17 members of his extended family were killed, including three sisters, three daughters and one son.

Hopefully, someone will leak the logs about this incident in the next year or so.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire

UPDATE: Sergeant Keith is going to miss his six month old son while killing people in Afghanistan. The propaganda effort in support of this conflict must be going poorly if the Pentagon has to resort to using infants to generate sympathy for the combatants. Apparently, Sergeant Keith wasn't fortunate enough to land an assignment directing drone attacks, which would have enabled him to remain in the US.

INITIAL POST: Next time someone says that you should support the troops, remember this:

Crouched in a field of opium poppies, a young Marine lieutenant pleaded over the radio for an airstrike on a compound where he believed a sniper was firing at his troops. Request denied. Civilians might be inside and the Marines couldn't see a muzzle flash to be absolutely sure the gunman was there.

The lieutenant's frustration, witnessed by an Associated Press journalist in February in Marjah in southern Afghanistan, points to a Catch-22 dilemma facing the NATO force: how to protect troops against an enemy that lives — and fights — among the population without killing civilians and turning the people against the U.S.-led mission.

Those complaints from the ranks are among the issues facing Gen. David Petraeus — along with relations with a weak Afghan government and jittery allies; slow and uncertain progress on the battlefield; and frayed ties to the civilian side of the mission.

But among the most sensitive and important to the troops he commands and to supporters of the military at home will be whether to continue the rules laid down by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that stress saving civilian lives but sometimes leave U.S. forces at greater risk.

Those rules, issued a year ago, helped make McChrystal a hero among many Afghans because they brought down the number of civilian casualties blamed on the NATO-led force. The rules were issued at a time of a rising tide of public anger over Afghan civilians killed by mistake in airstrikes and by heavy weapons such as cannons and mortars.

Down in the ranks, however, the rules are widely perceived as too restrictive, playing into the hands of the Taliban who appear keenly aware of the regulations. Some troops believe the rules cost American lives and force them to give up the advantage of overwhelming firepower to a foe who shoots and melts back into the civilian population.

Of course, despite rank and file troop anger, the rules had limited utility in reducing casualties among the Afghan populace. Drone strikes and night raids continue to kill large number of non-combatants. But the groundswell for liberalizing rules of engagement even further in the wake of McChrystal's departure give us an insight into the blood lust that defines the US mission in Afghanistan. Consistent with historic US practice, US troops have no problem indiscriminately killing the civilian populace in order to attain their objective.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Sadomasochism

The war on terror expands to Yemen, with predictable results:

A US cruise missile carrying cluster bombs was used in an attack in Yemen that killed 55 people, most of them civilians, Amnesty International has said.

The London-based rights group released photographs yesterday that it said showed the remains of a US-made Tomahawk missile and unexploded cluster bombs that were apparently used in the attack on December 17 on the rural community of Al-Maajala in Yemen's southern Abyan province.

Amnesty International is gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear to have been used in Yemen, said Mike Lewis, the group's arms control researcher. Cluster munitions have indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten lives and livelihoods for years afterwards.

And, you wonder why the US has no problem with the attack on the Gaza flotilla?

Labels: "War on Terror", Air War, American Empire, Yemen

UPDATE: From lenin at Lenin's Tomb:

And here's the punchline. The blockade has left most Gazans wholly or partially dependent on food aid. However, the blockade has also placed a stranglehold on the amount of aid actually getting to Gaza. The amount entering Gaza in mid-2009 was 25% of that entering in 2007. This has resulted in nine out of ten residents living below the poverty line of a dollar a day. Even such aid as is devoted to Gaza can't be spent because of the blockade, according to Amnesty and the ICRC. Israel has consistently blocked food shipments, only allowing them through when it became an embarrassing political incident. It has held up medicines until they have expired. 80% of all imports to Gaza come through the tunnels. Israel has deliberately turned Gaza into a ghettoised economy, dependent on smuggling from outside fences, walls, and boundaries enforced by military violence. The tunnels, of course, are routinely attacked by aerial bombardment, on the pretext that they are being used to smuggle weapons - because Gaza, this tiny land mass with no navy or standing army, might get a few guns to defend itself the next time Israel decides to invade.

INITIAL POST: From the Guardian:

Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.

Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.

The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.

Sound familiar? Well, sort of. But it turns out that US Special Forces do this sort of thing more cleanly and efficiently:

The two helicopters swooped low over a cluster of mud homes, whirling in the cold night sky before landing in a wheat field on the edge of the small Afghan village.

From his home nearby, 23-year-old Najibullah Omar strained his eyes in the darkness as he made out the faint shapes of armed men pouring from the helicopters’ bellies.

A third helicopter circled menacingly in the moonless sky above the village of Karakhil in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.

Then a loud explosion shook the ground and a plume of smoke rose from his cousin Hamidullah’s house 20 yards away. Its guest room caught fire. Omar heard a burst of gunfire before all went quiet.

His worst fears were confirmed the moment he walked through the compound gate at first light.

The body of his cousin, a 32-year-old construction engineer who had taken a break from his job in a far-off province to visit his family, lay sprawled next to those of his wife and their seven-year-old son. Blood ran in dark pools on the mud floor of the terrace outside their door.

The wife and son had been shot in the head, each with a single bullet. The engineer had died from a shot to the chest. The precision of the killings, coupled with his failure to find any bullet casings after the raid, led Omar to believe that his cousin was murdered either by US special forces or by an intelligence agency.

No wonder that Vice President Biden was mystified over the furor that has erupted as a result of the Israeli assault, exclaiming: So what's the big deal here?

Labels: Air War, American Empire, Death Squads, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

Yet another deadly air strike in Afghanistan:

U.S. Special Operations Forces ordered an airstrike that killed at least 27 civilians in southern Afghanistan and the soldiers may not have satisfied rules of engagement designed to avoid the killing of innocents, Afghan and coalition officials said Monday.

The airstrike Sunday hit a group of minibuses in a remote part of the south near the border between Uruzgan and Daykundi provinces. The area is hundreds of miles from Marjah, where the largest allied offensive since 2001 is now in its second week. But the airstrike nonetheless illustrated one of the major problems for coalition forces as they try to win over civilians in Marjah and across Afghanistan: figuring out who is a civilian and who is an insurgent—and not killing the civilians.

It also underscored the risks of the expanding use of Special Operations Forces, whose primary mission is hunting down Taliban, as the leading edge of the fight against the insurgents. Many Special Operations missions by their very nature emphasize the use of violent force, and coalition officials say they have led to a string of recent successes against valuable targets.

Apparently, General McCrystal is having some difficulty communicating the new policy about minimizing civilian casualties in the field. Or, could it possibly be that the purported new policy has only been announced for public relations purposes in the US?

On the ground in Afghanistan, it seems that the war is being fought as it has always been fought, by attempting to instill fear in the civilian populace through the application of indiscriminate violence. In this instance, the intention is pretty clear. Special Forces fired upon any transport on the highway to send a strong message that it was a free fire zone and that anyone who traveled along it did so at the risk of their lives. They weren't overly concerned whether non-combatants were in the minibuses or not, as long as the Taliban got the message.

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, NATO

According to The Peninsula in Qatar:

Of the 44 Predator strikes carried out by the American drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 12 months of 2009, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of around 700 innocent civilian lives.

According to the figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the Pakistani tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by the American drones, 140 civilian Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 percent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were innocent civilians.

Perhaps, the reality of the wars in Afganistan and Pakistan are a little different than reported in this country, and should induce more disquiet than that expressed by Gaius the other day. Beyond the indiscriminate killing of civilians associated with drone strikes, there is also the psychological distress experienced by the people who live in regions subjected to them.

Last summer, I interviewed someone from Voices for Creative Non-Violence who had traveled to Pakistan and spoke with people in the tribal areas. They told him that the drone strikes inflicted tremendous psychological distress upon the populace because the attacks could occur at any time. Hence, they must constantly be aware of whether drones have appeared in the sky, while ensuring that they can reach a place of relative safety. They must always be cognizant of their position in relation to their homes, their families, their fields and probable air strikes. Drones not only kill people, they eradicate any semblence of everyday life, disrupting its routines as well as opportunities for spontaneous play, surprise and affection. In effect, post-traumatic stress syndrome is interwoven into their lives, intensified with each passing day.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Pakistan

It happened so quickly that few people caught it. There was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pakistan, exposing the hypocrisy of Eurocentric feminism when a group of Pakistani women tried to impose the same standards on the US that the US imposes upon others:

During an interview broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to “executions without trial” for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

“Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

“No, I do not,” Clinton replied.

Clinton no doubt scheduled this particular appearance in furtherance of her long standing efforts to elevate the concerns of women around the world, as she has done on many other occasions, but one wonders why she bothers at all.

After all, it is evident that Clinton has no interest in what they have to say if it deviates from her belief that the objectives of feminism and US imperialism harmoniously reinforce one another. I have to concede that she deserves praise for scheduling the event, because she has control over her schedule, and she was undoubtedly well aware of what the Pakistani women was likely to say. We were treated to a rare episode wherein a white woman in a position of political power in the US provided a forum for women of color in a country subject to US military violence. She eschewed the public relations of photo opportunity.

Even so, Clinton's unwillingness to engage the sincere, legitimate concerns of her female Pakistani audience demonstrated the farcical nature of the enterprise. She just could not acknowledge that the deaths of Pakaitanis inflicted by US military operations, many of them women and children, were the equal of those killed by al-Qaeda or the Taliban, without demonstrating the impossibility of integrating the universalist principles of feminism with the pragmatic, often militaristic requirements of empire. Indeed, she could not even acknowledge what everyone knows, that these attacks do, in fact, kill many Pakistani women and children in addition to the men, who are, it seems, considered probable militant Islamic fundamentalists, anway. Nor could she open a dialogue with her inquisitors about whether the US strategy in Pakistan is intensifying the violence, as many Pakistanis believe, instead of quelling it.

Of course, the New York Times attempted to come to Clinton's rescue, but only made things worse by suggesting that the women who participated in the interview had been induced to question Clinton in a harsh, inhospitable manner because they had first seen Pakistani journalists do it:

Mrs. Clinton sat down first with the TV journalists because they set the agenda. So great is their influence that the questions posed to Mrs. Clinton by young people the next day sounded like those the broadcasters had asked — blunt and combative, though just short of rude.

An example came Friday at an interview for the program “Our Voice” when a young woman asked Mrs. Clinton whether she viewed the Predator drone attacks used by the United States in Pakistan’s frontier areas as terrorism.

Oh, that silly woman! We all know how inadequate the Pakistani educational system is. If she hadn't seen Hillary questioned in such a blunt, straight forward manner (undoubtedly much more directly than anyone in the US ever does), she would have continued to wonder about whether she should purchase a new kind of eyeliner. Again, the notion that Pakistani women have the own independent agency, an ability to relate to the world around them, separate from what they are told, either by Hillary or the Pakistani media, apparently never occurred to Marc Landler, the reporter who wrote the story. In fact, it goes beyond feminism into the realm of racism, as Landler suggests that the young people of Pakistan are so stupified that they cannot relate to anything other than what is fed to them by the media.

So, Hillary was left to lecturing the people of Pakistan about their inadequacies, which, at the end of the day, boiled down to a refusal to uncritically celebrate that Pakistan is a vassal of the US. We are therefore induced to conclude that her willingness to be critically questioned by Pakistani women served as a fig leaf, however inadequate, to distract attention from what were just more directives from the Raj. A larger question remains, though. Does the 21st Century Raj, the US, tired of Pakistan, intend to shatter it so that it can reconstructed in a more agreeable form? And, is the US attempting to facilitate such an outcome by intensifying the violence that makes the country even less and less governable? It is impossible to ignore these questions, because, if Hillary travelled to Pakistan to push the country towards fragmentation, she would have conducted herself precisely as she did.

Labels: "War on Terror", Air War, American Empire, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism, Pakistan

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Barack Obama

From today's New York Times:

Dozens of Afghan civilians were killed in American air raids in western Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday. But Afghan officials gave far higher death tolls, ranging from 100 to 130 or more.

The reports offered a grim backdrop to talks coming Wednesday afternoon in Washington between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose office called the civilian deaths “unjustifiable and unacceptable” and said a government team had been sent to investigate. If the deaths are confirmed to have been from American bombing raid, this would be the largest case of civilian death in Afghanistan since Mr. Obama took office.

The continuing toll in civilian casualties has been a principal factor in turning many Afghans against the war to defeat the Taliban.

The governor of Farah Province, where the strikes occurred overnight Monday, told the national Parliament in a phone call played on a loudspeaker that about 100 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi.

Mr. Farahi said that there might be even more deaths. He said he gathered accounts from villagers, tribal elders and officials and calculated that 130 people, including many women and children, had been killed.

On Tuesday, enraged villagers took between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show them to officials. Villagers’ accounts then put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said.

For some reason, Stalin and the White Sea Canal came to mind when I read this article. OK, OK, that's a little out there, but, just as Stalin worked thousands to death in his effort to construct socialism in one country, Obama appears equally willing to kill Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis in order to construct a new progressive order in America.

Oops! I forgot about the bailout. I'm getting older, you know, and sometimes I space out on these things, and accidentally incorporate the liberal orthodoxy into my analysis. It would be more accurate to say that Obama is, if anything, intensifying his effort to achieve his maximalist objectives of exploiting the recession to reconfigure the global economy even more to the advantage of finance capital, while extending the US military to the limit in order to establish hegemony over Central Asia. These are the defining characteristics of the Obama presidency, and, to quote Tariq Ali, it can only end badly.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama

A glimmer of real hope, as opposed to the illusory kind discussed here last Friday in relation to the killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Late this afternoon, fourteen peace activists were arrested at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. The arrests occurred during a ten-day vigil whose goal is to raise public awareness of the increasing use of unmanned drones in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Air Force personnel based at Creech AFB pilot the Predator and Reaper drones being used in Central Asia.

The 14 people walked through the open main gate shortly after 3:00 p.m. Air Force security rsonnel stopped them after they walked into the base. They were seeking to engage in ialogue with the Air Force service members controlling the Predators and Reapers used in Central Asia. In a gesture of good will, they offered to break bread and share Passover pizza with Air Force personnel.

The Nevada State Highway Patrol esponded, as did the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Police officers and Air Force security rejected the dinner offered by the 14 activists.

Meanwhile, 20 other activists continued the vigil. The 14 were arrested on the charge of trespass and transported to the Clark County Detention Facility, from where 13 were booked and released
by 7:30 the following morning.

One priest refused to sign his paperwork, and expects to be arraigned before April 15th.

This Jesuit (named Steve Kelly), says he’s disappointed he’ll miss today’s prayer-action of the Stations of the Cross at Creech AFB, “It’s inconvenient for all of us, we’re disturbing the war and I’ll be pleading ‘not guilty’.” The other 13 will be arraigned on June 9th 2009.

Those arrested include:

Fr. John Dear, S.J. (New Mexico)
Dennis DuVall (Arizona)
Renee Espeland (Des Moines, Iowa
Catholic Worker Community)
Judy Homanich (Binghamton, New York)
Kathy Kelly (Chicago Illinois, she has been
nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize)
Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J. (California)
Mariah Klusmire (Trinity House Catholic
Worker, Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Brad Lyttle (Chicago, Illinois)
Elizabeth Pappalardo (Crystal Lake, Illinois)
Sister Megan Rice, SHCJ (Nevada Desert
Experience, Las Vegas, Nevada)
Brian Terrell (Strangers & Guests Catholic
Worker, Maloy, Iowa)
Eve Tetaz (Washington, D.C.)
Fr. Louis Vitale, O.F.M. (Oakland, California)
Jerry Zawada, O.F.M. (Tucson, Arizona)

Will we have to rely upon religious progressives, as opposed to secular ones, to press the struggle against US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan? It would appear so, at least for now.

Hat tip to Catherine for drawing my attention to it.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Pakistan, Religion, US Military

Updated accounts on the killings in Khost by US forces are even worse than initially reported:

An Afghan army colonel whose wife and children died in a US-led raid demanded action against the troops responsible Friday as President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings.

The operation in the eastern province of Khost around midnight Wednesday killed the wife of Afghan National Army artillery commander Awal Khan, two of his children and a brother.

The troops, who had been hunting a militant linked to radical Islamist groups, also shot a pregnant woman and killed her unborn baby, which had almost come to term, Khan and a provincial health official said. The woman survived the shooting.

Across the border in Pakistan, US drone attacks, along with Pakistani military operations, have created approximately 536,000 internally displaced people, commonly known as refugees, as reported last Sunday in the Times of London:

American drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army. In Bajaur agency entire villages have been flattened by Pakistani troops under growing American pressure to act against Al-Qaeda militants, who have made the area their base.

Kacha Garhi is one of 11 tented camps across Pakistan’s frontier province once used by Afghan refugees and now inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis made homeless in their own land.

Yet another human catastrophe in a region misfortunate enough to find itself at the center of American geopolitical designs:

Many have terrible stories. Baksha Zeb lost everything when his village, Anayat Kalay in Bajaur, was demolished by Pakistani forces. His eight-year-old son is a kidney patient needing dialysis and he has been left with no means to pay.

Our houses have been flattened, our cattle killed and our farms and crops destroyed, he complained. There is not a single structure in my village still standing. There is no way we can go back.

He sold his taxi to pay for food for his family and treatment for his son but the money has almost run out. God bestowed me with a son after 15 years of marriage, he said. Now I have no job and I don’t know how we will survive.

If Zeb is lucky, some NGO worker will contact the reporter who wrote this article, track the man down and get him connected with an American medical organization willing to have him and his son flown to the US so that his son can receive necessary medical treatment for his kidney condition. And then, of course, we will all be subjected to media accounts about the child's salvation, accounts that serve the purpose of humanizing our military invention, similar to previous accounts regarding the treatment of Iraqi burn victims, like this and this and this.

More likely, Zeb is going to experience the agonizingly painful death of his son because of his inability to pay for the dialysis treatment. It is the new American progressivism, a self-induced delusion paid in full with the deaths of Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans. Perhaps, it is time for the reissuance of the iconic HOPE poster, splattered with the symbolic blood of the victims of the shockingly cynical politics that it now ironically represents.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Barack Obama, Pakistan, Sadomasochism, US Military

From antiwar.com:

Afghan officials and local residents say that a US air strike struck an Afghan wedding party on Monday, killing at least 40 civilians and wounding 28 others (including the bride). The strike occurred in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar Province. Reporters on the scene say that villagers are still search the debris for survivors, and the toll is expected to rise even further.

Another report from the Globe and Mail states:

Survivors of the attacks, which occurred in the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kowt on Monday evening, said the majority of the dead and injured were women – the bombs struck while male and female wedding guests were segregated, as is customary in Kandahar province.

They said the bodies of at least 36 women have been identified, and hundreds more men and women have been injured. Local leaders have yet to establish a firm casualty count because many of the victims remain buried beneath rubble, said Abdul Hakim Khan, a tribal elder from the district.

Poor Afghans. Has no one told them that they are going to pay for the new dawn of progressivism in America? As for why this continues to happen, please consider my August 4, 2008 post entitled People in White. It provides a partial explanation as why the US military invariably directs its firepower against non-combatants.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Barack Obama

From TomDispatch:

The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Sen. Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Sen. John McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have now echoed this view, and so it has become, by consensus, official U.S. policy.

Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.

Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.

When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto.

Consistent with my post last week, I am fearful that Ali is wrong about this. While prominent political figures like Obama are befuddled, incapable of distinquishing between the Taliban, al-Qaeda and local tribal resistance, I am worried about the possibility that there is a neoconservative group that is well aware of the consequences of these measures, and actively encourages them in the hope of destroying the Pakistani state for the perceived geopolitical advantage of the US.

Iraq, Iran, Pakistan . . . all have been problematic from a US perspective because of their varying degrees of independence. Even a client state like Pakistan conducts its own foreign policy in Afghanistan and the Punjab. Have the neoconservatives concluded that a radical destruction of the existing political order is required to render the region complaisant? If so, who will stop them? As with the proposed attack upon Iran, the answer is probably the Pentagon.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Pakistan, Tariq Ali

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Pakistan

antiwar.com maintains that local media within Pakistan is reporting that Pakistani troops fired upon US helicopters engaged in an unauthorized incursion into South Waziristan. Who needs to elect Barack Obama president when the current administration is implementing his policy in the tribal regions of Pakistan?

With Obama having opened the door to unilateral US military action in Pakistan against al-Qaeda, the Bush administration is typically pressing the concept to maximum advantage, exploiting the confusion on the ground, the inability to distinguish between al-Qaeda, the Taliban and local tribal resistance to the US military presence in this region, as well as domestic confusion about the nature of the occupation of Afghanistan. Would Obama, if elected President, rescind Bush's recently reported executive order authorizing US Special Forces operations in Pakistan? It doesn't sound likely, does it? Perhaps, if I can find the time, I will e-mail the campaign and ask about it. Not surprisingly, NATO is declining to participate.

If you are old enough, you have the disquieting feeling that you've seen this movie, before, or, at least, something very much like it. In 1969 and 1970, during the Vietnam War, President Nixon authorized, first, the carpet bombing of eastern Cambodia in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese forces that used that sparsely populated area adjacent to South Vietnam as a sanctuary, and then, when that failed, ordered a full scale invasion. Of course, one cannot compare the relatively limited US military operations in Pakistan with an invasion of Cambodia that required thousands of American and South Vietnamese troops, but it is not commonly known that US intervention in Cambodia started with the types of military action that we now see in Pakistan.

For example, the carpet bombing of Cambodia and subsequent invasion was preceded by an extensive bombing campaign and special forces operations that commenced in 1965:

Thanks to the Air Force database, we now know that the U.S. bombardment started three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation into carpetbombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely designed to support the nearly 2,000 secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces during that period. B-52s -- long range bombers capable of carrying very heavy loads -- were not deployed, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives or the country's neutrality, or because carpet bombing was believed to be of limited strategic value.

The failure of the bombing campaign initiated by LBJ presented Nixon with a stark choice: accept the unfavorable contours of a negotiated settlement of the war, or escalate with the use of ground forces. As already mentioned, we know the decision that he made, and the people that were killed within Cambodia, and even within the US, at Kent State, because of it. Even the ideologically friendly wikipedia entry concludes with this evaluation of the consequences:

The Cambodian people, whose fate was the most dramatically effected by the results of the incursion, were basically ignored by all but a few historians listed below. The incursion, about which the Cambodian government was not even informed until it was under way, heated up what was basically a low-key civil war and irrevocably widened the boundaries of the conflict. The withdrawal of U.S. forces, after only a 30-day campaign "left a void so great that neither the Cambodian nor the South Vietnamese armies were able to fill it."

Lon Nol's forces would then have to contend with not only PAVN and the NLF, but with an ever-growing indigenous insurgency, which was now fully supported by Hanoi and its armed forces. The Nixon administration, callous of the weakness of the Cambodian regime and its military, pushed its new ally into a conflict that it had no possibility of winning. Cambodia (like neighboring Laos) would be sacrificed for the withdrawal of the Americans and the future existence of the Republic of Vietnam. Millions of Cambodians would pay the ultimate price as a result of those decisions.

Let's repeat that: Cambodia (like neighboring Laos) would be sacrificed for the withdrawal of the Americans and the future existence of the Republic of Vietnam. It is hard to read this sentence in the current context of Afghanistan and Pakistan without feeling a distinct chill. If the airstrikes and special forces raids fail, what will the next President do? Pull back? Or, like Nixon, escalate with more ground forces? Momentum would clearly be with the escalation option, given that no one has politically prepared the American public for a pragmatic reduction in the US presence in those countries.

In this instance, US leadership is much more ambitious, even if it is increasingly aware of the deterioration of conditions under the Afghan occupation. Unlike in Southeast Asia in the early 1970s, the US is not trying to find a way to put a positive face upon a major defeat, but, rather, still considers an unconditional victory essential. Pat Buchanan has properly observed that an incremental increase in the number of US forces in neighboring Afghanistan, as proposed by Obama, can only lead to an escalation imposed by adverse external events. Likewise, it is also hard to imagine any other outcome in neighboring Pakistan.

At this point, at such an early stage of intervention (but, is it really that early, how many raids and airstrikes have conducted in Pakistan since 2001?), there is only a succession of troubling questions. Is a bipartisan consensus being formed, based upon the grotesquely cynical belief that, through the expansion of the conflict, both Pakistan and Afghanistan can be refashioned in a way more favorable to US interests? With the liberals and conservatives, walking on two legs to form a coalition to ensure its implementation? Liberals would, of course, perform their usual role, promoting a more purportedly surgical intervention, a magical one, if you will, that will kill fewer people, while the conservatives, ever the realists, acknowledge the force required, evidencing a willingness to see it through to the end, no matter how bloody. If so, we need to remind the proponents that Pakistan, unlike Cambodia in the 1970s, has a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Barack Obama, NATO, Pakistan

The United Nations confirms that 90 people, including 60 children, were killed as a result of a US/NATO airstrike last Friday in Herat province. I guess that, in a perverse way, you could say that the US and NATO honored the service of those 10 French troops killed a few day earlier.

I have perused the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent, over the last several days, and encountered few articles about the incident beyond those generated by wire services. Interestingly, the Times took the most interest, although all emphasized the Afghan government response, a demand for a formal treaty authorizing the presence of NATO forces and the firing of two Afghan generals involved in the operation, than they did the incident itself.

Apparently, the media assumes that, for us, the lives of Afghans are relatively insignificant in comparison to larger geopolitical concerns, especially when it appears that one of our surrogates is trying to slip the leash. As I said in May 2007:

One wonders if NATO is subjecting the Afghans to the kinds of indiscriminate, violent brutalities that occupation forces have inflicted upon people so often in the past when it is no longer possible to evade recognition of defeat.

I don't think that we have to wonder about this anymore. As reported by lenin, the number of monthly airstrikes in Afghanistan has increased from about 500 a month last summer to over 2000 a month now. He also astutely observes that, if elected, Obama will receive favorable responses to requests for more troops from other countries. He additionally informs us that progressives, whatever that means, appear to be supportive of such a course.

Sadly, there are few who recognize that we can't get out of Iraq by trading off the lives of Afghans. Seamus Milne is one of them, as he recently confronted the pervasive myth that Afghanistan is the good war in contrast to the bad one in Iraq:

The original aims of the invasion, it will be recalled, were the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the destruction of al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the US and its friends brought back to power an alliance of brutal and corrupt warlords, gave them new identities as democrats with phoney elections, and drove the Taliban and al-Qaida leaderships over the border into Pakistan.

Far from reducing the threat of terrorism, this crucible of the war on terror has simply spread it around the region, bringing forth an increasingly potent campaign of resistance and giving a new lease of life to a revamped Taliban as a champion of Pashtun nationalism. And as mission creep has detached the Afghan war from its original declared target of al-Qaida - let alone the claims made about women's rights, which have been going into grim reverse again in much of the country under Nato tutelage - it has morphed into the kind of war of "civilisation" evoked by Sarkozy and Browne, a certain recipe for conflict without end. No wonder British politicians have talked about digging in for decades.

I concur with his pessimistic assessment of the future:

The only way to end the war is the withdrawal of foreign troops as part of a political settlement negotiated with all the significant players in the country, including the Taliban, and guaranteed by the regional powers and neighbouring states. A large majority of Afghans say they back negotiations with the Taliban, even in western-conducted opinion polls. The Taliban themselves insist they will only talk once foreign troops have withdrawn. If that were the only obstacle, it could surely be choreographed as a parallel process. But given the scale of commitments made by the US and Nato, the fire of the Afghan war seems bound to spread further.

Milne cannot, however, bring himself to say the unmentionable. US policies in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s exploded in Pennsylvania and New York City on 9/11. Is it possible that something similar will happen again? As long as Americans retain an alarming complacency about killing people in other countries, I would have to say that the answer to this question is yes.

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Mainstream Media, NATO

In October of 2001, I participated in a protest, along with about 30 other people, against the US invasion of Afghanistan. We marched along Russell Boulevard in Davis, California, passing by people entering the stadium to watch the UC Davis Aggies play football. They either ignored us or looked at us as if we were freaks.

At least, at that time, there was a plausible pretense that the war was about al-Qaeda and getting the people responsible for 9/11. No longer. On Monday, 10 French peacekeepers were killed in an insurgent attack of unknown origin, although there is a report that they were actually killed by NATO air support which NATO denies. Upon hearing of the French deaths, my immediate reaction was, oh, no, NATO and the US are going to launch some airstrikes to kill a bunch of people so as to look like they are doing something about it.

Which is, of course, exactly what happened:

A US-led operation in western Afghanistan has killed 76 civilians, including 50 children and 19 women, according to claims from the Afghan interior ministry.

But the death toll has been challenged by US forces, who said only 30 people, all of them Taliban fighters, lost their lives in today's air strikes.

Another Afghan government department, the defence ministry, said five civilians and 25 insurgents died in the operation in Shindand district in Herat province.

If the figure of 76 civilians is proved correct, it would be one of the largest civilian losses of life since the US-led operation against the Taliban began in 2001.

An Afghan interior ministry spokesman said that the civilians had been killed by "accident", but that it was sending investigators to find out how the tragedy occurred.

This incident follows immediately upon the heels of earlier reports that 20 out of 30 alleged Taliban insurgents killed by US airstrikes in the province of Laghman were actually civilians, again mostly women and children.

For more background on what is happening here, please consider reading my post of August 4th entitled People in White. Taking the indiscriminate killing of Korean peasants and refugees by the US during the Korean War as an example, it explores the question as to why the US has perpetually killed large numbers of civilians during its military interventions since World War II.

Domestically, the political alternatives are dim. Obama wants to take troops out of Iraq, so that he can put more troops in Afghanistan. That's the choice that we have in this election, a choice between a Republican candidate who wants to make killing Iraqis his priority, and a Democratic opponent who wants to emphasize killing Afghans. Will the US ever pull out of the killing fields of the Middle East and Central Asia during my lifetime? Only if forced to do so.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Barack Obama, NATO

A suppressed past of indiscriminate killings of South Korea civilians by US forces is now slowly being exposed:

South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War.

A half-century later, the Seoul government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens' petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.

Large numbers of people died during these attacks:

News reports at the time hinted at such killings after North Korea invaded the south in June 1950. But the extent wasn't known. Commission member Kim Dong-choon, in charge of investigating civilian mass killings, says there were large numbers of dead — between 50 and 400 — in many incidents.

As at No Gun Ri, some involved U.S. ground troops, such as the reported killing of 82 civilians huddled in a village shrine outside the southern city of Masan in August 1950. But most were air attacks.

In one of three initial findings, the commission held that a surprise U.S. air attack on east Wolmi island on Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the U.S. amphibious landing at nearby Incheon, was unjustified. Survivors estimate 100 or more South Korean civilians were killed.

In clear weather from low altitude, "U.S. forces napalmed numerous small buildings, (and) strafed children, women and old people in the open area," the commission said.

Investigator Kang Eun-ji said high priority is being given to reviewing attacks earlier in 1950 on refugees gathered in fields west of the Naktong River, in North Korean-occupied areas of the far south, while U.S. forces were dug in east of the river. One U.S. air attack on 2,000 refugees assembled Aug. 20, 1950, at Haman, near Masan, killed almost 200, survivors reported.

"There were many similar incidents — refugees gathered in certain places, and there were air strikes," she said.

The declassified record shows the Americans' fear that enemy troops were disguising themselves as civilians led to indiscriminate attacks on "people in white," the color worn by most Koreans, commission and AP research found.

In the first case the commission confirmed, last November, its investigators found that an airborne Air Force observer had noted in the "Enemy" box of an after-mission report, "Many people in white in area."

The area was the village of Sanseong-dong, in an upland valley 100 miles southeast of Seoul, attacked on Jan. 19, 1951, by three waves of Navy and Air Force planes. Declassified documents show the U.S. X Corps had issued an order to destroy South Korean villages within 5 miles of a mountain position held by North Korean troops.

"Everybody came out of their houses to see these low-flying planes, and everyone was hit," farmer Ahn Shik-mo, 77, told AP reporters visiting the apple-growing village. "It appeared they were aiming at people."

At least 51 were killed, the commission found, including Ahn's mother. Sixty-nine of 115 houses were destroyed in what the panel called "indiscriminate" bombing. "The U.S. Air Force regarded all people in white as possible enemy," it concluded.

"There never were any North Koreans in the village," said villager Ahn Hee-duk, a 12-year-old boy at the time.

One episode is especially disturbing:

The Gokgyegul attack occurred in January 1951, as retreating U.S. and South Korean forces struggled to stop the North Koreans, massively reinforced by Chinese troops, from penetrating deeper into South Korea.

Declassified U.S. military records show that the Americans, on guard against possible enemy disguised as refugees, were blocking South Korean civilians fleeing the fighting. Air Force pilots were told to view "people in white" — the color most civilians wore — as potential enemy.

Ordered to evacuate south by local officials, the villagers one early January day left this secluded hamlet, among snowy, humpbacked hills 120 miles southeast of Seoul, but were stopped just 3 miles away at Hyangsan by U.S. 7th Infantry Division troops.

"Across a stream there were U.S. soldiers with a tank. They blocked us," said Cho Tae-won, 85, another resident of this village, which is dominated by a Cho clan. A declassified U.S. regimental document confirms a roadblock was established there.

Cho and his younger brother, Cho Kook-won, were finally allowed to pass, after pleading that as government employees they would be targeted by the North Koreans. But the rest of his family and other refugees had to turn back.

"My feelings were indescribable because not all of us could go," said the white-haired, frail Cho Tae-won.

In the following days, fearing bombings, the Yeongchun villagers left their homes again and moved into the nearby 85-yard-long cave, named for the "crying" sound of its intermittent stream. Outside, they tethered cows and stacked household goods.

"People thought they'd be safe inside," said Cho Tae-won. But on Jan. 20, at 9:50 a.m., two or three Air Force F-51 Mustangs struck, the U.S. record shows.

"They dropped oil drums" — gasoline-gel napalm bombs — "and then the fire incinerated everything and spread into the cave," Cho Byung-woo, 66, told Associated Press reporters visiting the site, today a quiet place of chirping birds and fluttering Confucian prayer flags.

His father saved the 9-year-old boy, but from a ditch outside, young Cho witnessed more carnage as U.S. jets strafed fleeing villagers with .50-caliber machine guns. He saw a bullet slit open a young friend's belly.

"His bowels spilled out. His mother fell down and cried over his body in the shower of bullets."

The absent Cho brothers lost their father, a teenage sister and brother, and Cho Tae-won's 2-year-old son in the attack, they said. Survivors say there were no North Koreans near the cave and surveillance pilots who flew overhead for days should have known that. American pilots claimed in after-mission reports to have killed "troops" and "pack animals." But six days later a U.S. ground patrol reported finding 75 refugee bodies instead.

The truth commission concluded "well over 200" civilians were killed.

Gokgyegul remains a hallowed site. "For years, when it rained, water flooding out of the cave carried the bones away," said Cho Byung-woo.

If there is one consistent theme associated with US military involvement since World War II, it is the willingness of US forces to exploit the reasons for the intervention as a justification to kill large number of civilians, usually non-white ones. George Carlin addressed this subject with characteristic ruthlessness in a monologue about the First Persian Gulf War.

As the oft-paraphrased lyric of Moloko states, the faces change, but the game remains the same. And the game is tragically quite simple: substitute Rumsfeld for McNamara and McArthur, Iraqis and Afghans for Vietnamese and Koreans, Bush for Johnson and Truman, Fallujah for My Lai and Gokgyegul. Over 58 years have elapsed since the beginning of the Korean War, a war that, incidentally, that has never formally ended, and the US military continues to conduct operations that treat the lives of civilians as acceptable collateral damage.

What are the reasons for the persistence of it? Of course, there are no doubt many, but recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight an important one, and that is the unquestioning acceptance of perceived danger by US troops as a defense against the killings of civilians. A subjective sense of peril, no matter how implausible, irrational or excessive, is sufficient to relieve troops of any responsibility for their actions.

For example, as I recently observed in regard to Iraq, if a convoy erroneously travels down a civilian roadway near Baghdad airport, experiences a vehicle breakdown and encounters some Iraqi bank employees traveling to work as they had always done after passing through a high security checkpoint, then, they can kill them because they perceive themselves to be in danger, rendering it just an extremely unfortunate and tragic accident.

Consistent with a policy apparently similar to the one adopted in Korea in 1951, US forces are killling large numbers of civilians in Afghanistan through air strikes as well. One need only click upon the Afghanistan label at the bottom of this post to find several examples. The concept of people in white constituting an amorphous enemy that must be subjected to immediate attack appears to be a quite flexible and enduring one, capable of being adopted for use in subsequent conflicts with predictable results.

Will there be Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Iraq and Afghanistan some day? And, if so, how much more will we discover about the operations of US forces in these conflicts? Given what we already know, one shudders involuntarily. And, if Barack Obama becomes President, how many more horrors will be perpetuated in Afghanistan in a misguided, amoral effort to produce something that can marketed as a victory in the War on Terror?

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Korea, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism