"We've shot an amazing
number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has ever proven
to be a real threat to our force”.
General Stanley McChrystal,
former U.S.-NATO commander in Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led war on Afghanistan is
like the U.S.-led war on Iraq - to destroy the country and to indiscriminately
kill large numbers of Afghan civilians. The aim is to terrorise the civilian
population into submission using the so-called “War on Terrorism” as a cover-up
for a U.S.-led war of terror.
According to
media reports, the number of Afghan civilians killed by U.S.-NATO troops has
more than doubled this year. U.S.-NATO forces killed seventy-two civilians in
the first three months of 2010, compared to twenty-nine during the same period
in 2009. At least 6000 civilians were killed in 2009. While Western media often
blame the “Taliban”, Afghan media sources and few Western media outlets
continue to report crimes committed by U.S.-led NATO forces. The following are
selected cases as part of an ongoing bloodbath in Afghanistan.
On 27 December
2009, “American Special
Forces” with helicopters landed at Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the
eastern Province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of whom
were school students in grades six, nine, and ten, and one of whom was a guest.
They handcuffed them before murdering them in cold blood, according to a
statement on U.S.-installed “President” Hamed Karzai’s website. According to
Jerome Starkey of The Times (31
December 2009): “At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with
helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village. [...] The
troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my
investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room,
and opened fire.” (See also, Nieman Watchdog).
As always,
U.S.-NATO officials have denied civilians were killed; but Afghan investigators
said nearly all those killed were school-age boys. A statement released by
Hamid Karzai’s office said that a unit of U.S.-NATO forces descended from a
plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village and took ten people from three homes
and shot them dead.
On 12 February
2010, in a pre-dawn attack, U.S.-NATO forces killed two pregnant women, a
teenage girl, and two local officials in Khataba, just outside Gardez. Two
children who survived the initial attack slowly bled to death, denied medical
care. The invading forces then tried to cover-up the murder by claiming that
the pregnant women had been discovered bound and gagged, murdered execution
style. According to The Times (05
April 2010), U.S.-NATO forces have “admitted responsibility for all the deaths
for the first time last night”.
On 08 May 2010, The New York Times, which often downplays U.S.
war crimes, including the atrocity in Afghanistan, revealed that: “Shootings of Afghan civilians by
American and NATO convoys at military checkpoints have spiked sharply this
year, becoming the leading cause of combined civilian deaths and injuries at
the hands of Western forces”. At least twenty-eight Afghan civilians have been
killed and forty-three wounded at checkpoints this year. Afghan civilian
casualties jumped by 33 percent in a recent month-long period. There were 173
civilian deaths reported from March 21 to April 21 this year.
On 19 June 2010, TheNew
York Times reported that: “Ten civilians, including at least five women and
children, were killed in U.S.-NATO airstrikes in Khost Province, the provincial
police chief said Saturday. Five other civilians were killed, as were two
Afghan National Army soldiers and two police officials, in other violence
around the country on Saturday”.
The Associated Press reported on 09 July
2010, U.S.-NATO forces killed six Afghan civilians and wounded several others
in Jani Khel district of Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan in what it described
as artillery shells that “went astray”. The attack was “just one day after six
Afghan soldiers died in a botched NATO airstrike”. Initially, the U.S.
government and the media tried to bury the story and U.S. leaders denied that
civilians were killed. It has become nearly impossible to conceal
Western-perpetuated war crimes against defenceless population.
On 24 July 2010,
according to the Afghan National Directorate for Security, as many as 52 innocent Afghan civilians were killed and many more seriously injured in a
U.S.-NATO a missile strike in Rigi
village in Sangin district of southern Helmand Province. According to a
local press release, “Based on reports by the National Directorate of Security,
a house in Rigi village in Sangin district of southern province of Helmand was
hit with a rocket launched by NATO/ISAF troops leaving 52 civilians dead
including women and children”. Men, women, and children were massacred as they
took cover, according to the press release.
0n 04 August
2010, more than a dozen Afghan civilians were killed in a night-time raid by
U.S. troops in Sherzad district in the Nangahar Province in eastern
Afghanistan, as reported by the Los
Angeles Times on 06 August 2010. It is possible that the number of
civilians killed in the raid is much higher than originally reported.
These were not a
few isolated massacres of innocent civilians, but rather part of U.S. ongoing
terror against the people of Afghanistan. Evidence shows that the U.S. has
always deliberately and indiscriminately targeted the civilian population in
its wars against defenceless nations for political gains. The deliberate and
systematic destruction of Iraq, including the mass murder of millions of
innocent Iraqi civilians (the majority women and children) and the displacement
and disappearance of at least 5 million Iraqis as a result of a premeditated
war of aggression and thirteen years of U.S.-enforced genocidal sanctions (a
U.S.-enforced infanticide), followed by seven years of murderous Occupation, is
a case in point.
It is true that
U.S. crimes are often ignored or downplayed by Western media. However, most of
the information about U.S.-led NATO war crimes in Afghanistan, which the
organisation Wikileaks took credit for publishing, is available on the Internet
and in some of the print media. There are no new “revelations”. Wikileaks
provides confirmation of U.S.-led barbarism against defenceless civilian
population.
The Wikileaks’ Afghan War
Diary,
which details a large portion of U.S.-NATO war crimes in more than 91,000
reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010 is a slap in the face
of those, including “progressive” opportunists and colonial feminists, who
claim that the war on Afghanistan is for the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan
people and “democracy”. But, Westerners don’t really care about their
governments committing war crimes abroad, especially if the victims are women
and children with brown skin colour.
Today’s Western
citizens are carefully manipulated and are too ignorant to care about others.
As the philosopher, Bertrand Russell observed: “It is the nature of imperialism
that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know and care
about circumstances in the colonies”. People, particularly in the West, are
conditioned not to think and not to ask questions. They are fed a daily diet to
promote consumerism and militarism. It is a type of brainwashing that Adolf
Hitler and his henchmen would have been proud of. That is why war criminals
like George W. Bush, Tony Blair – who has become a multi-millionaire from the
proceeds of his crimes – and the Australian John Howard were re-elected to
power while their armies were involved in two bloodbaths against Muslims in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
A new
epidemiological study concerning the population of Iraq found that, as a result
of the use of weapons of mass destructions (WMD), such as “Depleted Uranium”
(DU) by U.S. forces on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah, the rates of infant
mortality, fetal deformities, and cancer (mainly Leukaemia) are much higher
than those reported by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. (Int. J.
Environ. Res. Public Health, 7,
2010, PDF). Like the criminal attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the attack on Fallujah is a criminal act of terrorism on an epic
scale.
While Wikileaks’
Afghan War Diary confirms the U.S. and its allies as bloodthirsty invaders by
providing a large and comprehensive summary of information of war crimes, there
is nothing new or “top secret” about U.S. militarised violence. The U.S. is the
most militarised and dangerous outlaw nation in the world today, second only to
the fascist regime in Israel. The U.S. spends more money on its offensive
military than all other countries in the world combined, while millions of
Americans live in extreme poverty. The stated aim is to project violence on a
global scale. U.S. leaders are addicted to violence and there are only a few
bloodthirsty fascists outside the U.S. military. “It is fun to shoot some people”, said General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command who has a
long and violent record of war crimes against defenceless civilians in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Just listen to testimonies by U.S. soldiers themselves to validate
their war crimes.
The enormity of
the war crimes in Afghanistan even forced the most violent people in the U.S.
military to tell the truth. Before his dismissal, former U.S.-NATO commander,
Stanley McChrystal, admitted that: “[I]n the nine-plus months I’ve been here
[in Afghanistan], not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of
force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a
suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it”. McChrystal
was not a saint; he was an assassin. He was replaced by a more violent
commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who promised to escalate the violence in order
to subdue the Afghan Resistance and force them to make a deal with Washington.
Furthermore,in an Op-Ed for The New York Times (05 August 2009), former army officers
and supporters of U.S.-led war on defenceless nations, David Kilcullen and
Andrew Exum have called for a halt on civilian killing. Quoting Pakistani
sources, they write that, U.S. unmanned drones had “killed some 700 civilians.
This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent –
hardly ‘precision’”. They believe too much violence is exposing the true goal
of U.S. imperialist ideology which is to control Afghanistan’s geostrategic
position in Central Asia.
The principle of U.S.
Christian-fascist ideology has always been to intervene in other nations’
affairs, using military threat, terrorism and overwhelming violence against the
civilian population. U.S. politicians and U.S. apologists justify this “policy
of barbarism” as U.S. “exceptionalism” or a U.S. “right”, which is based on the
false assumption that the U.S. and its allies can dominate and change societies
through violence and suffering. For example, despite overwhelming evidence of needless bloodbath in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the U.S. government and U.S. vassals continue to insist that their wars
on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are “morally and politically justifiable”
wars, using the manipulative rhetoric of “democracy” and “human rights” as a
cover.
What the Afghan
War Diary does, is support the C.I.A. propaganda and provide U.S. Zionist
leaders with ammunition to attack Pakistan and Iran. It is possible that the
C.I.A. and the Pentagon use Wikileaks to spread anti-Pakistan and anti-Iran
propaganda. In fact, the C.I.A. has a history of leaking false information to
manipulate public opinion and cover-up U.S. war crimes. According to Wikileaks
co-founder, Julian Assange: “We contacted the White House as a group before we
released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to
make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept
that request”. So, where is the “top secret” or “classified” information?
In reality, the
U.S. and British governments expressed no serious interest in the Afghan War
Diary and have criticised Pakistan’s alleged support for the “Taliban”.
However, Western politicians and Western media use the Afghan War Diary to threaten
and warn ordinary people who oppose the war. Wikileaks is being accused of “moral
culpability” as if Western leaders who were responsible for the premeditated
mass murder of millions of Afghan and Iraqi civilians are Christian saints.
George Bush, Tony Blair, and their accomplices should be arrested and tried for
war crimes.
U.S. President
Barack Obama used Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary to announce a “change in
strategy”. The President pleaded for the U.S. House of Representatives to pass
legislation to fund the war on Afghanistan for another year. Thirty-six hours
after Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, the U.S. House of
Representatives voted to pass a bill that funds the bloodbath in
Afghanistan with an extra $33 billion and 30,000 more troops.
The British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, has accused Pakistan of “exporting” of terrorism,
forgetting his own country’s complicity in terrorism and the mass slaughters of
innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Credible media sources revealed that the
U.S. and Britain are secretly financing and arming different groups through the
increase in the cultivation and trafficking of narcotic drugs. (See: Peter Dale Scott, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 5,
2010). According to Russian and Iranian media sources, the U.S. earns “about
$50 billion a year from trafficking in drugs often transported out of
Afghanistan in body bags on American planes”. The U.S.-NATO aim is to prolong the violence and justify
long-term occupation of the region (Daniella Peled, The Guardian, 25 May 2010) using the pretext of “terrorism” as a
cover.
The fact that the
West’s major pro-war newspapers, the British Guardian, the Zionist New
York Times, and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel have been contacted first to publish the so-called
“revelations” is suspicious. Indeed, the Guardian
and the New York Times have called
for escalation of the war. “It’s very strange that such a large cache of
information can be leaked to the [mainstream] media so conveniently. Is
something deliberate? What is its purpose? We’ll be looking into that”, a
Pakistani official familiar with the Wikileaks’ “revelations” told Declan Walsh of
the Guardian. The
information serves the U.S. purpose of targeting Pakistan and Iran, both
fingered by Wikileaks of supporting the “Taliban”. Of course, India and Israel
couldn’t be happier.
The Afghan War
Diary plays in the hands of the anti-Muslim warmongers. According to
The Guardian: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files
today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan,
revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported
incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring
Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency“. Where is the evidence? Can
anyone imagine the Guardian accusing
the U.S. of fuelling the Afghan Resistance (the so-called, “Mujahideen”)
against Soviet troops? The allegation that Pakistan’s intelligence agency is
arming and training the “Taliban” is a falsehood. Western media and politicians
have become addicted to attacking Pakistan and deliberately making false
accusations against Pakistan in order to deflect attention away from their own
crimes.
It is important to
remember that Pakistan (a Muslim nation) is forced (by the U.S.) to participate
in a U.S.-led war, not only against the people of Afghanistan but also against
its own people and Pakistan’s vital strategic interests. Since the U.S. illegal
invasion of Afghanistan, “Pakistan has lost more soldiers than the combined
losses suffered by foreign forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and five times more
civilians than those lost in the 9/11 strikes, which eminently reflect on
Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror”, writes Javed Hussain, a retired
officer in the Pakistan Army. For each targeted assassination by U.S. drones in
Pakistan, 140 innocent Pakistani civilians were also killed in a deliberate act
of terrorism. According to Pakistani media, attacks by U.S. drones killed 708
people in 44 attacks targeting the Pakistani tribal areas between January 1 and
December 31, 2009. “On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every
month, 12 persons every week, and almost two people every day”. (Dawn, 02 January 2010). Meanwhile, the
leader of the Pakistani corrupted elites (President Asif Ali Zardari) is
visiting European leaders – his nation’s enemies – at a time when the Pakistani
people are struggling to cope with the worst-ever floods in Pakistan’s history.
Taking advantage of a corrupt government in Pakistan, U.S. leaders have
extended their war into Pakistan, using the same pretext to cover-up the war on
Afghanistan with dire consequences for the people of the region.
Afghanistan was
not “a training camp for terrorists”, as is often accused by Western
politicians and Western media. The truth is, in 1979 the U.S. government of
president Jimmy Carter began a covert operation of training and arming warlords
and militias against the democratically-elected Afghan government months before
Soviet troops went into Afghanistan. In the early 1980s, the U.S. established a
training base (‘al-Qaeda’) in Afghanistan to sabotage and fight the Soviet
troops in the country, using militant fighters from around the world. They were
named by the C.I.A. the “Mujahideen” to associate them with Islam. After the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the “Mujahideen” took control of
the country and began bloody infighting. The “Taliban” – funded and armed by
the C.I.A. – defeated the “Mujahideen” in a criminal war that ravaged the
country. According to C.I.A. officials, there are no more than 100 ‘al-Qaeda’
fighters in Afghanistan today. (For an analysis, see: Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story). Linking Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks
on the U.S. is a flawed argument.
There is no
evidence to prove Afghanistan’s or any other Muslim nation involvement in the
9/11 attacks. All Muslim nations and organisations have unequivocally condemned
the attacks. In order to commit attacks like 9/11, one needs state-of-the-art
resources and well-connected contacts. The official story remains
unsubstantiated and unproven.
Overwhelming
evidence shows that the Israeli Mossad agents, the C.I.A., and influential U.S.
Zionists in the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
Early this year, Israeli Mossad agents were able to acquire and counterfeit
more than twenty foreign passports to murder a Palestinian politician Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh in Dubai, an act of terrorism that was condoned by several Western
nations.
The 9/11 attacks
were used as an “opportunity” not only to justify war against Muslim nations,
but also to instil fear and disseminate anti-Muslim propaganda. Many People,
including most Americans have been coerced and indoctrinated to believe that it
was morally justified to attack Afghanistan and Iraq as a response to the 9/11
attacks. The argument advanced by Western politicians and Western media that,
“We were attacked and we have to fight back” is preposterous.
According to
Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former
president of the National Lawyers Guild, the U.S. and its allies have no case
for self-defence, because: “The necessity for self-defence must be ‘instant,
overwhelming, leaving no choice for means, and no moment for deliberation’”. Like the war on Iraq, the war on Afghanistan
constitutes an act of illegal aggression in violation of the UN Charter and international law.
According to
credible media and NGO reports, the Afghan Resistance against the U.S.-NATO war
is a collection of native Afghani movements, legitimately fighting to liberate
their land from foreign invaders. There are no “terrorist bases” in Afghanistan
that threaten Western societies. The biggest terrorist bases in the world are
not in Muslim nations, they are in Washington and Tel Aviv. From there, nearly
all terror operations are organised and financed. The two countries are
war-hungry and rightly viewed by the majority of world’s people as the two
greatest threats to world’s peace and stability.
Meanwhile, a
report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights claims over two-thirds of
Afghans live in dire poverty. The report criticises the “international
community” for emphasizing security over development and also cites widespread
corruption within the U.S.-installed puppet government of warlords and criminals.
The ‘National Survey 2010’ by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) revealed that
under the Occupation corruption has worsened, particularly in the police,
justice, health, and education sectors where the Occupation authorities exert
most power. Corruption, of course, is one of imperialism’s most effective tools
to control the occupied population; violence is the other. There is no
occupation without a corrupted and criminal puppet government. It is not
coincidental that Afghanistan and Iraq are ranked very high among the most
corrupt countries in the world.
Finally, the
U.S.-NATO Occupation is responsible for the worst human rights abuses,
including torture, rape, and denial of personal freedom. Moreover, the Afghanistan Rights Monitor reported: “In terms of insecurity, 2010
has been the worst year since the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001”.
Security is the new pretext for the ongoing Occupation. Women’s rights have all
but disappeared even before the Occupation.
The situation for women (one of
the pretexts to invade Afghanistan is to “liberate” Afghan women) is far worse
than before the invasion. The
U.S.-backed “Mujahideen” and “Taliban” warlords have reversed all the gains that had been made in 1970s and the 1980s under the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) progressive government of Noor Mohammad Taraki. It is
shameful, that Western politicians, academics, and colonial feminists use women
rights to advocate for ongoing Occupation of Afghanistan.
If anything,
conditions have gotten worse for children in Afghanistan since the invasion.
According to a report by UNICEF, under U.S.-NATO Occupation, Afghanistan is the
worst place for children to be born. The report says: “Afghanistan has the
highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live
births, and 70 percent of Afghans have no access to clean water”. The country
“is especially dangerous for girls”, added the report. One-quarter of Afghan
children will not reach the age of five, and life expectancy for Afghans is
only 44 years. A new study says nearly two out of every three male
youths jailed in Afghanistan are physically abused. The children’s rights
organization Terre des Hommes says
its findings are based on interviews with 40 percent of all those jailed in
Afghan juvenile detention centres. One hundred-thirty out of 208 male youths
said they had been beaten since their arrest.
The vast majority of the people of Afghanistan (and
Pakistan) have rejected the Occupation and demand an end to the presence of
foreign troops in their countries. After nine years of murderous Occupation,
opposition to the U.S.-led terror in Afghanistan is also rising among the
populations of the countries involved in the Occupation. The latest Gallup
opinion poll shows support for the Obama Administration’s war policy has
declined from 48 per cent in February 2010 to 36 per cent. Moreover, 43 per
cent of Americans believe the war was illegal. In Britain, 72 per cent of the
public opposes Britain involvement in the Occupation and the ongoing terror in
Afghanistan.
The U.S. has inflicted great
suffering on the people of Afghanistan. It is time for U.S. leaders and U.S.
allies in the war on Afghanistan to renounce the use of violence and terrorism,
and withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. The U.S. should concentrate instead
on developing friendly and peaceful relations with all nations based on mutual
respect and broad common interests to safeguard world peace.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the
article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of
Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you!
If you appreciated this article, please consider making a donation to Axis of Logic.
We do not use commercial advertising or corporate funding. We depend solely upon you,
the reader, to continue providing quality news and opinion on world affairs.Donate here