"Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians"
..."Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out into civilian casualties in
Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on
corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies
around the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and
December 10."
..."But what is impressive about his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative
assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The figure does not include those who died later of bomb
injuries; nor those killed in the past 10 days; nor those who have died from cold and hunger because of the
interruption of aid supplies or because
they were forced to become refugees by the bombardment. It does not include military deaths (estimated by
some analysts, partly on the basis of previous experience of the effects of carpet-bombing, to be upwards of
10,000), or those prisoners who were slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and
elsewhere."
..."the high Afghan civilian death rate flows directly from US (and British) tactics and targeting. The decision to
rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated
towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those
of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians."
..."Raids on targets such as the Kajakai dam power station, Kabul's telephone exchange, the al-Jazeera TV
station office, lorries and buses filled with refugees and civilian fuel trucks were not mistakes. Nor were the
deaths that they caused. The same goes for the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs in urban areas. But western
public opinion has become increasingly desensitised to what has been done in its name. After US AC-130
gunships strafed the farming village of Chowkar-Karez in October, killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon
official felt able to remark: "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead", while US defence
secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that particular
village."
guardian.co.uk
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