Nederland en Afghanistan 78

Iemand die al lang een serieuze studie van Afghanistan maakt is de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Marc W. Herold. Hij schrijft: '“Grab News Headlines, Isolate Bombed
Area and Stonewall: U.S. Military’s
Virtual Reality about Afghan Civilian
Casualties. A Case Study of the U.S.
Assault upon Hajiyan”
by
Marc W. Herold
Departments of Economics and Women’s Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire
Durham, N.H. 03824
U.S.A.
E-mail: mwherold@unh.edu
May 24, 2006

A growing disconnect exists between the daily reality of war experienced by the common
Afghan and how this war is represented to the American general public by the corporate
media, many non-governmental organizations favoring “humanitarian interventions”
around the globe (e.g., Human Rights Watch), and the U.S. military and its defense
minions. The war in Afghanistan – as most other wars beginning with Vietnam – is
waged both on the ground there and in the living rooms here. The recent midnight assault
2
upon the small village of Hajiyan (also called Alizi) along the Arghandab River in
Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province provides a case study to explore this disconnect.1
No doubt many similar cases exist, but the U.S. military strategy to contain and stonewall
succeeded there.
A very graphic way – a picture is worth a thousand words – is simply to contrast photos
of how the U.S. military is portrayed with Afghan children. The first photo depicts U.S.
Army Capt. John Pritchard of Combined Joint Task Force 16 giving a tee-shirt to a young
boy in Panjwayi (from http://www4.army.mil/cjtf76/picture.php?id=21 ). Another type of
interaction is shown in the second photo: the legacy of “precision fire” by A-10 Warthog
attack jets upon the village of Hajiyan in Panjwayi, revealed on the body of three year-old
Mohammad Imran (photo by Noor Khan, A.P.).
1 Four years ago, I wrote a similar article exploring the attack upon a wedding in Kakarak village, Uruzgan
Province. The article was widely reprinted and may be seen in India’s foremost weekly magazine,
Frontline, at: “The massacre at Kakarak. Of arrogance and Pentagon-speak, in the midst of chasing Mullah
Omar's shadows and keeping Hamid Karzai in power,” Frontline 19, 16 (August 16, 2002), at:
http://hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1916/19160660.htm
3
Both pictures are “true” and neither one alone represents reality. Both illustrate two
images of modern war: the war to win hearts and minds and the war to kill the enemy.
They are inseparable. But every effort will be made to keep images like that of Imran off
pages and screens of America because the wars the U.S. carries out are represented as
being the “good fights” where only the bad guys die in a hail of “precision” bombs and
rockets… “in the rockets red glare.”
On the other hand, the case of Imran was front-page news in the major national daily of
our neighbor to the north on May 23rd (an impossible event in the United States where
news about civilian casualties at best gets buried in pages twenty to thirty).' Zie: http://www.traprockpeace.org/marc_herold_hajiyan_24may06.pdf Zie ook Herold's website over Afghanistan: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/