In many instances, U.S bombs fall on spots without any military significance. On October 25th, a U.S bomb hit a fully loaded city bus at Kabul Gate, in Kandahar, incinerating 10-20 passengers. Another typical example was provided when U.S planes bombed the mountain village of Gluco, located on the Khyber Pass, on Sunday and Monday [November 18-19th], killing seven villagers. The village was far away from any military facilities. A reporter for The Telegraph visited Gluco, noting:
"their wooden homes looked like piles of charred matchsticks. Injured mules lay braying in the road along the mountain pass that stank of sulfur and dead animals…."
The wheat trader, Noor Mohamed, recounted the effects of U.S bombing on the highways of Afghanistan. Noor travels the Chaman to Ghazni road for his wheat business. During the week of November 29th, he saw the burnt-out, twisted, still smoking mess just north of Kandahar of a 15 lorry fuel convoy. The charred remains of the drivers and all the dozens of unfortunate souls who had bargained for a ride to Chaman, sickened Noor.
A refugee, Abdul Nabi, told the A.F.P. on October 24th, upon arriving in a refugee camp on the Pakistan border, how he had seen two groups of bodies---13 and 15 corpses---remainders of civilians near bombed out trucks on the road between Herat and Kandahar. Our data reveals that this U.S attack was carried out on October 22nd, against four trucks carrying fuel oil.
Fleeing refugees have become the Pentagon's "new targets of opportunity." During the couple weeks since November 25th , numerous first-hand reports tell how hovering U.S aircraft seeking out "targets of opportunity" in the Kandahar region, have fired missiles and dropped bombs upon fleeing taxis, trucks, and buses. A 39 year old, Afghan refugee in a Quetta hospital, Rukia, who lost her family of five children on December 3rd when a U.S bomb was dropped upon her neighborhood in Kandahar, tells a typical story. She fled Kandahar before she could bury her children, as she was wounded in her stomach and had her left arm shattered in the bomb blast. She was nearly bombed again on the Kandahar to Spin Boldak highway, as a relative was driving her to a hospital in Quetta. Rukia said,
"They're bombing anything that moves. It's not true that they bomb civilians by accident. They're targeting the innocent people instead of Osama bin Laden." [emphasis added b M.H., ibid].
On December 4th, an ambulance in Kandahar was struck killing four. On December 2nd, a jeep carrying civilians was hit near Spin Boldak killing 15. On December 1st, Reuters [12/1/01] reported a U.S attack on four trucks and 5 buses on the highway to Spin Boldak, killing 30. Dawn [12/2/01] cited the incineration by air of three refugee vehicles in front of the Maji Hotel in Arghisan on December 1st. On November 30th, U.S planes bombed two trucks on the highway from Herat, killing at least four. On November 27th, attracted by the lights of a vehicle, U.S bombers hit a hamlet of five houses between Kandahar airport and the city, killing Mohammed Khan's entire family of 5 and 10 others. Mohammed Khan also fled to Chaman for hospital treatment for his arms and legs. On December 6th, a Pakistani truck carrying fresh fruits was attacked by U.S planes on the highway between Spin Boldak and Kandahar.
Afghan civilians in proximity to alleged military installations will die, and must die, as 'collateral damage' of U.S air attacks aiming to destroy these installations in order to make future military operations in the sky or on the ground less likely to result in U.S military casualties. The military facilities of the Taliban were mostly inherited from the Soviet-supported government of the 1980s which had concentrated its military infrastructure in cities, which could be better defended against the rural insurgency of the mujahadeen. This reality is compounded insofar as the Taliban maintained dispersed facilities: smaller units spread out. U.S military strategists and their bombers, thus, engaged in a very widespread high intensity of bombing. Such intense urban bombing causes high levels of civilian casualties. From the point of view of U.S policy makers and their mainstream media boosters, the 'cost' of a dead Afghan civilian is zero as long as these civilian deaths can be hidden from the general U.S public' view. The 'benefits' of saving future lives of U.S military personnel are enormous, given the U.S public's post-Vietnam aversion to returning body bags.
The absolute need to avoid U.S military casualties means fling high up in the sky, increasing the probability of killing civilians:
"……..better stand clear and fire away. Given this implicit decision, the slaughter of innocent people, as a statistical eventuality is not an accident but a priority----in which Afghan civilian casualties are substituted for American military casualties."
But, I believe the argument goes deeper and that race enters the calculation. The sacrificed Afghan civilians are not 'white' whereas the overwhelming number of U.S pilots and elite ground troups are white. This 'reality' serves to amplify the positive benefit-cost ratio of certainly sacrificing darker Afghans today [and Indochinese, Iraqis yesterday] for the benefit of probably saving American soldier-citizens tomorrow. What I am saying is that when the "other" is non-white, the scale of violence used by the U.S government to achieve its state objectives at minimum cost knows no limits. A contrary case might be raised with Serbia which was also recently subjected to mass bombing. But, the Serbs were in the view of U.S policymakers and the corporate media tainted ['darkened'] by their prior 'Communist' experience. No instance exists [except during World War II] where a foreign Caucasian state became the war target of the U.S government. The closest example might be that of the war waged by Britain upon Northern Ireland and, there, the British troops applied focused violence upon its Caucasian 'enemy.' When the "other" is a non-white foreigner , the state violence employed becomes amplified.
The use by the U.S Air Force of weapons of enormous destructive capability---including fuel air bombs, B-52 carpet bombing, BLU-82s, and CBU-87 cluster bombs [shown to be so effective at killing and maiming civilians who happen to come upon the unexploded 'bomblets']---reveals the emptiness in the claim that the U.S has been trying to avoid Afghan civilian casualties.
"Even though civilian deaths have not been the deliberate goal of the current bombing----as they were for the attackers of 9/11---the end result has been a distinction without a difference. Dead is dead, and when one's actions have entirely foreseeable consequences, it is little more than a precious and empty platitude to argue that those consequences were merely accidental."
The 1000 and 2000 JDAM-type bombs which hit the Red Cross warehouse in Kabul and the village of Kama Ado, are designed to "inflict maximum damage over the widest battlefield area."
In so many words, intent matters little but race matters much.
The U.S bombing campaign has also directly targeted certain civilian facilities deemed hostile to its war success. On October 15th, U.S bombs destroyed Kabul's main telephone exchange, killing 12. In late October, U.S warplanes bombed the electrical grid in Kandahar knocking out all power, but the Talian were able to divert some electricity to the city from a generating plant in another province, Helmand, but that generation plant [at Kajakai dam] was then bombed knocking out all power supplies to Kandahar and Lashkargah. On October 31st, it launched seven air strikes against Afghanistan's largest hydro-electric power station adjacent to the huge Kajakai dam, 90 kilometers northwest of Kandahar, raising fears about the dam breaking. On November 12th, a guided bomb scored a direct hit on the Kabul office of the Al Jazeera news agency, which had been reporting from Afghanistan in a manner deemed hostile by Washington. On November 18th, U.S warplanes bombed religious schools [Madrasas] in the Khost and Shamshad areas. U.S bombers have singled out trucks carrying fuel oil into Afghanistan from Iran, through Herat onto Kandahar and up to Kabul. Before the U.S bombing campaign started about 30 fuel trucks a day arrived in Kabul. But since a tanker convoy was struck on the road between Herat and Kandahar on October 22nd [my data], only five tankers at most arrived in Kabul. Private businessmen almoststopped bringing fuel picked up at the Iranian border town of Islam Qila, 30 miles west of Herat. Fuel convoys and fuel depots became favored targets for U.S jets. An eyewitness reports that a truck carrying cooking oil to towns north west of Kandahar had broken down on October 16th, and its three drivers slept in the truck. At 4 a.m. on October 17th , the truck was hit by a cruise missile. The three bodies were brought to the Kandahar hospital.
Electricity, telephones, news, fuel supplies, cooking oil, and spirituality are 'fair' targets.
The widespread, un-focused bombing and missile attacks by the United States, besides killing close to 4'000 Afghan civilians since October 7th, has contributed to wholesale panic amongst residents of villages and cities, leading to floods of refugees seeking to escape. Both Kabul and Kandahar were reported as having only 20% of their populations remaining, comprising primarily those too poor to flee. Interviews with the refugees point out that they blame the U.S for their current misery. This mass exodus from the cities of Afghanistan is further testimony to the terror effects of the intense U.S bombing of urban areas, not in the sense of carpet-bombing [like Tokyo or Dresden] but rather in the large number of dispersed targets struck.
The strategic U.S. bombing of Afghanistan has been guided by two concerns: (1). The U.S does not want to loose any combat troops; and (2) it does not want to loose expensive and technologically sophisticated aircraft. Hence, the hi-tech bombing carried on from above 30'000 feet where anti-aircraft guns and Stinger missiles cannot reach. In other words, unwilling to risk "our" pilots and planes, U.S war strategists cannot help but hit "their" mud homes, apartment complexes, bus stations, oil tanker trucks, buses and tractors, Red Crescent clinics, hospitals, mosques, schools, religious institutions [madaris and madrassas], Red Cross warehouses, etc..
On November 11th, U.S planes bombed a bus carrying fleeing refugees on
the north road out of Kabul, carrying fleeing refugees: 35 died INCLUDEPICTURE \d \z "file://C:\\My Documents\\bombedbus.jpg"
The war on civilians is not news in America. The reason has been amply displayed: the public must neither hear nor see images of the carnage on the ground, else their 'resolve' for the U.S war be shaken. The video precision techno-war must run uncontested. As a reporter wrote, "No one reports from Kabul, and that suits generals fine."
During the first three weeks [October 7-30th], U.S bombing focused upon the cities and Taliban infrastructure, inflicting heavy civilian casualties, as a means of splitting the Taliban leadership. When this failed and a growing anti-war movement began gathering worldwide, the United States resorted to its tried old carpet-bombing of troops and countryside with its blunderbusses of the skies, the B-52 bomber. This was also necessary as the ground forces of the so-called Northern Alliance showed themselves unwilling to engage the Taliban on the ground. It had the fortunate political side-effect of putting civilian casualties further away from the public gaze, compared to the previous bombing of "military targets" in urban areas. On October 31st, B-52's began with the carpet-bombing of Bagram and Mazar-i-Sharif front-line areas---"a B-52 bomber made its debut in the war, sending up a wall of orange flame and clouds of dust along Taliban positions overlooking opposition-held Bagram airbase north of Kabul." The front-line, however, weaves its way through the typical Afghan mud hut villages where civilians continued living. On November 4th, the U.S upped the ante and dropped two BLU-82 sub-atomic bombs [equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon] on Taliban positions in northern Afghanistan. The bombs destroy everything in a 600 yard radius, giving off a mushroom-like cloud, and has an-nerving effect upon the targeted troops. On November 23rd---a week into Ramadan---a third BLU-82 was dropped just south of Kandahar.
A nightmarish progression has quietly taken place:
"It's nightmarish to see that the U.S is slowly desensitizing the public to the level of
destruction taking place in Afghanistan. They have progressed from medium-sized
missiles to Tomahawk and cruise missiles, to bunker-busting 2'000 lb bombs, then
to [B-52] carpet-bombing using cluster bombs, and now the devastating daisy cutter
bombs that annihilate everything in a 600-meter radius."
A Washington-based military analyst and frequent radio commentator has sought to minimize the importance of and public discomfort felt about, civilian casualties from the U.S air war. William M. Arkin makes three points: [1] civilian deaths are to be expected given that the air campaign will last more than a few weeks because the Pentagon wants to destroy everything the Taliban may use [e.g., barracks, etc.]; [2] the public and even military and government officials overstate civilian deaths especially after a war; and [3] there is a popular myth that a ground war both guarantees military success and is less dangerous to non-combatants. With regards to the second point, Arkin cites 3'200 civilian deaths in the Persian Gulf War's 43 days, and 500 civilian deaths in Yugoslavia in 78 days of NATO bombing. In the Gulf War, 9% of the firepower used were 'smart weapons', compared to 35% in Yugoslavia. Arkin then turns to Afghanistan , arguing that targets are in its less populated areas and the percentage of smart weapons will be much higher. Hence, we need not be overly concerned about civilian 'collateral damage.'
As it turns out, on the day Mr. Arkin wrote his piece, U.S bombs killed 160 civilians in four Afghan provinces. A F-18 dropped a 1'000 lb cluster bomb on a 200-bed military hospital in Herat, bombs killed 26 in two residential districts of Kabul and 11 in the city of Tarin Kot in the Uruzgan mountains, and 23 in the farming village of Thori located 6 hours away from Kandahar. On October 21st, the U.S also began bombing front-line positions around Bagram in the Shomali Valley north of Kabul, about which I have no civilian casualty data.
The following Table 1 presents a comparison of our casualties [red line] with that announced by the Taliban [blue line] at various times. Two things stand out: our figures are relatively close to each other and the Taliban figures are an underestimate. We find this result quite explicable insofar as the Taliban initially sought to present itself as more invincible than was warranted.
Our compilation indicates a relatively stable rate of civilian deaths [slope of red line], with a falling-off between October 28th and November 14th, precisely at the time when the U.S air war shifted towards heavy bombing of front lines north of Kabul in the Shomali plain and around Mazar-i-Sharif.
The second table, Table 2 below, presents a day-by-day tabulation of civilian deaths. An Appendix [available upon request from the author] will present details for each day: location of air attack, weaponry used, numbers killed and other commentary, and the sources we have relied upon.
The seven single bombing attacks---"seven days of ignominy"---causing the greatest civilian deaths occurred on October 11, 18, 21, 23 and November 10 and 18th and December 1st .The U.S strikes hit four small farming villages, a city, a hospital and a mosque, and the central marketplace in the Taliban stronghold, Kandahar.
Seven Days of Ignominy
October 11th - the farming village of 450 persons of Karam, west of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province is repeatedly bombed, 45 of the 60 mud houses destroyed, killing at least 160 civilians. Ms. Tur Bakai, who survived the attack, but all of whose children died in the attack, said, her voice barely audible, "I was asleep. I heard the prayers and suddenly it started. I didn't know what it was. I was so scared…" ;
October 18th - the central market place, Sarai Shamali in the Madad district of Kandahar is bombed, killing 47 civilians ;
October 21st - a cluster bomb falls on the military hospital and mosque in Herat, killing 100 ;
October 23rd - in the early a.m. hours, low-flying AC-130 gunships repeatedly strafe the farming villages of Bori Chokar and Chowkar-Karez [Chakoor Kariz], 25 miles north of Kandahar, killing 93 civilians ;
November 10th - the villages of Shah Aqa and a neighboring sidling, in the poppy-growing Khakrez district, 70 kilometers northwest of Kandahar are bombed, resulting in possibly over 300 civilian casualties [though I have only recorded 125] .
November 18th - carpet-bombing by B-52's of frontline village near Khanabad, province of Kunduz, kills at least 150 civilians.
December 1st - "It Just Did Not Happen"
Village elders of Kama Ado, fifty kilometers southwest of Jalalabad, had trekked down the mountains on Thursday, November 29th to meet the governor of Nangarhar in Jalalabad. They pleaded with him to stop the American night time attacks around their village which had killed their livestock and destroyed their water supply, but none had lost their lives.
At 3.a.m, Saturday morning, as part of the intense bombing campaign of Tora Bora, U.S B-52 bombers made four passes over Kama Ado, dropping twenty-five 1'000 lb. JDAM MK-83 bombs, each 10 feet long. Kama Ado is a ten hour hike away from Tora Bora. Khalil Rahman survived because he had gone outside to urinate when a bomb struck his home, killing his 12 relatives. Sprina, a 50 year old widow, wounded in the attack, lost 38 of her 40 relatives. Hassan and other villagers say that in the following day, the saw only 40 of the 250-300 residents of Kama Ado. Kamal Huddin said that 156 of the 300 residents of Kama Ado had perished.
A second nearby village Khan-e-Mairjuddin, was bombed a few hours earlier with a likely death toll of 100-200, with 50 confirmed deaths by Saturday morning. And a third village, Zaner Khel, also reported being hit with scores of civilian casualties, when U.S warplanes bombed the nearby house of a minor Taliban official.
Journalists who visited Kama Ado on Saturday reported huge bomb craters, debris of houses spread over two hillsides with children's shoes, dead cows and sheep, and the tail fin of a U.S MK-83 bomb. Locals said scores of people had been killed in three bombed villages.
The response of the Pentagon and Command Central on Saturday evening?
"It just did not happen."
Note: the impact of these days upon the cumulative total in Table 2 is very visible.
Conclusion: This dossier has presented detailed and reliable information about the large number of civilians killed in U.S bombing and missile attacks on Afghanistan since October 7th. Naturally, some might seek to dismiss parts or all of the report by attacking the sources employed. But, to do so would mean having to accuse news agencies from many countries, reporters from many countries, and newspapers from many countries of lying. We have sought to cite whenever possible multiple sources. The specific, detailed stories provided by victims, on-lookers, and refugees lend credibility.
Natasha Walter has eloquently stated our responsibility:
"They are far away from us, it's true, but their grief still rises from television screens and news reports. And this time around, we are implicated. These people are suffering from terror visited on them from the West. Yes, I know they have also suffered over the years from the evils of their fundamentalist rulers but we now share the blame for their plight. If it were not for the missiles the West has sent into Kandahar and Kunduz, these children whose faces we now see in our newspapers would not have had to take to the roads, desperately trudging the hills and deserts and sitting in tents on a bare plain.
And don't think that just because they have suffered so much during the last generation that their grief is any the less now. Or because they don't get obituaries in The New York Times that each of the civilian lives lost in Afghanistan isn't as precious to their loved ones as the people who died in the Twin Towers."
Table 1. Cumulative Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan
[red line: our data is red line, and blue line is Taliban reporting]
Note: On October 12th, the Bahrein Tribune reported a Taliban figure of 220. On Sunday, October 21st, the Taliban reported that over 1'000 civilians had been killed [Pakistan News Service, October 22, 2001]. On November 12th, the Taliban reported that over 2'000 Afghan civilians had been killed since the start of the U.S bombings [see "Taliban Says Bombing Has Killed 2'000," Pakistan News Service-PNS [November 12, 2001]].
Table 2. 'The Slope of Infamy': Cumulative Civilian Deaths Caused
by U.S Aerial Bombing Since October 7, 2001 [-December 6th ]
[horizontal axis represents days starting with October 7th]
Table 3. Daily Civilian Casualty Count
[October 7 - December 6]
Appendix 1. The U.S bombing through the words of Afghan refugees:
"Voices from Afghanistan"
Source: BBC News Online, Thursday, 25 October, 2001.
The bombardment of Afghanistan has caused untold numbers of people to flee their homes - as much as 70% of the population of three major Afghan cities is on the move, the United Nations has said.
While the Pentagon admits only that a few bombs have gone astray, refugees and internally displaced persons who spoke to the BBC say that innocent people have borne the brunt of the attacks.
Mohammed Gul, who worked at Kandahar military hospital, spoke to the BBC in the Pakistani border city of Quetta:
"Since the American bombing started a lot of people died. Bombs were hitting people's houses. They damaged lots of houses and they injured and killed lots of innocent people. We were there and I saw about 50 people who died and some became injured.
"There are no health facilities and medicine. The Taleban do not have the power to stop American bombing, because the planes are very high and the anti-aircraft [guns] can't reach them. When the bombing stops, people came out of their houses and continue their life under the pressure of war.
"Because of the bombing no one can sleep. Women and children can not eat or drink anything. Everyone is looking to the sky and waiting and thinking when will the American aircraft come and start killing them."
Man from Helmand, in southern Afghanistan, speaking on arrival in Quetta:
"The situation is somehow all right, but the bombs are going on the wrong places. They don't damage any military headquarters but they are killing innocent people.
"The places where Taleban were before are not there anymore. They moved out and went to mountains and other places where they can hide."
People arriving in Quetta from Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan:
"The situation was very bad in Kandahar. Americans were bombing day and night.
"The Taleban and Osama [Bin Laden] didn't face any damage, but innocent people were injured and killed. Homes were destroyed.
"All people are leaving and coming here. Children are dying. America was bombing innocent people's houses not military headquarters.
"A lot of people died and many were injured. About 200 or 300 houses were damaged."
A resident of Kabul speaking of the destruction in the capital:
"The street next to my home was bombed, and 18 were killed and 23 injured. Everything was destroyed there.
"The doors and window glass of our homes were broken. I have a baby child, one and a half years old. Even she is afraid of the plane sounds and bombing, and she runs towards me and hugs me when the planes come over.
"I am surprised by those who claim to be defending human rights. Those who claim that the terror attacks were carried out by the followers of Osama and his group, may be wrong.
"But still if they are right, two buildings have been destroyed and some people have been killed.
"Anyway now it has been done, and we are also sorry for the victims of the attack. But now these American and British planes have added our nation's blood [to that of the dead in Washington and New York] and they have made all people frightened.
"No one can go to sleep for whole night up to the morning. Their planes come proudly at a low altitude and as a result the plastic in all our windows and doors - whose glass has already been broken - started shaking in this cold weather.
"In the Darulaman area they again carried out a heavy bombardment in which many houses were destroyed and many people have been washed in blood and made another disaster.
"At the moment when I am talking to you, the planes are going up and down and who knows what might be their goal and what disaster might happen again to the poor and innocent people."
Afghan children in Peshawar, Pakistan, worry about US-led bombing in their country.
Sultan Sarwar, a young boy:
"It has been three days since I arrived in Peshawar from Jalalabad. My uncles are still there. My school was closed because of the fighting and bombing there. My classmate Zubair is still there."
Hamid, a nine-year-old boy:
"As America started its bombing in Afghanistan, my parents sent me to Peshawar with the hope [that I would] not be killed there. Now I am living in my uncle's home. I miss my parents and other family members very much."
Feriba, a young girl:
INCLUDEPICTURE \d \z "file://C:\\My Documents\\Feriba in Quetta.jpg"
"I and all my classmates are very sad because of the situation in our homeland. When our teacher said in the class that many people have been killed in Afghanistan, I and my all classmates started weeping because everyone has relatives there. I expect America not to kill the poor Afghans. They are hungry and poor."
Despite US radio broadcasts in local languages, many Afghans have no clear idea of why they are under attack.
An ironmonger in the small town of Hojibahodin:
"Bin Laden killed many donkeys and many people and animals, and they killed (Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah) Masood. That's why they are attacking."
BBC News Online [October 12, 2001], reported on the U.S bombing of the Sultanpur mosque in Jalalabad, which killed 15 people. A Kabul man who had escaped to Peshawar, told a BBC reporter on October 12th that he had witnessed the destroyed mosque :
"I saw it with my own eyes. It had been hit at nine o'clock at night. And I saw for myself that
many people had been killed."
The Toronto Globe & Mail [November 24, 2001], described U.S bombers pummeling Taliban positions in the Khanabad-Kunduz area during the 21st - 23rd and talking with one of three burqa-clothed women who had walked six hours to flee the rain of bombs in Khanabad:
"A neighbor of ours has a14 year-old daughter who was killed by a bomb on Wednesday along
with her brother. Last week, there was a doctor who was killed with 12 members of his family."
Another woman in a burqa described how a village was struck by U.S bombs and rockets on Thursday [November 22nd]:
"Five houses were destroyed and all the people were killed."
Kate Holt of The Independent [November 25, 2001] reports on the effect of recent U.S bombing of the small market town of Nahrin in Baghlan province:
"The living are as much casualties as the dead. Bibi is one of the thousands of innocent people
who have been forced to flee their homes as the bombing of Taliban targets continues in the
"war against terrorism". Hers is a terrible tale.
"The bombs started falling from the sky," she recalls. "My husband ran outside to find our son
and then he screamed. I ran to the door. He and my son were lying dead. The rest of us left
when the fighting had stopped. We just wanted to get away from the bombs and the killing."
Severely traumatized by her experiences, Bibi left the remote Afghan village of Nahrin with
her five remaining children and traveled south. "I just wanted to reach the safety of a camp,
but now we are here there is nothing." Tears are streaming down her face."
Ridiculous? Propaganda? The claim could not be independently verified?
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