Eight Years of Horror Perpetrated against the people of Afghanistan
By Marc W. Herold
October 18, 2009 "GlobalResearch" --- Lecture given on October 15, 2009 at a public forum with Zoya of RAWA, "Afghanistan: Resisting Occupation and Fundamentalism," organized by United for Justice with Peace and the Afghan Women's Mission, held at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts
The casing of a CBU-87 cluster bomb found in Tora Bora had a hand-stenciled note on it, "this is gonna shine like a diamond in a goat's ass - Gary."[1]
Air bombardment is the terrorism of the rich - C. Douglas Lummis[2]
Ten Main Points:
1. The execution of America's post-Korean wars in the Third World is all about the differential value of life put on those colored "Others," in other words, race/ethnicity matters. This can be seen in the language/framing of official discourse, in the language of soldiers, and in outcomes exposing the differential value of life practiced by Americans such as in compensation for wrongful death;
2. America's war in Afghanistan has been anything but a "precision" war executed with new, high-tech weapons. The fault lies less in the weapons themselves and more in how they have been used by American military personnel carrying out the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. The metric of civilians killed to occupation soldiers killed, measures the relative lethality of the American-led Afghan war. I demonstrated that Taliban suicide-bombers are more precise than U.S. high-tech aerial bombs;
3. The costs of this war for Afghanistan and the Afghan people are enormous and multi-dimensional;
4. The "new" war approach by General McChrystal which has substituted rising deaths of (mostly lower class rural) American soldiers for lesser Afghan civilian deaths (in order to maintain a NATO effort) confirms what I have long been arguing: U./S aerial strikes were a chosen way of minimizing U.S casualties at the expense of Afghan civilian deaths and injured;
5. Obama, the quintessential Mr. Image, has significantly escalated the U.S-led war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whereas the older NATO allies are increasingly reluctant to continue what augers to be a war without end. They are intelligently avoiding the sunk cost fallacy whereas Obama is embracing it. On the other hand, the U.S. cannot pursue this war on its own (along with some token , ill-trained Estonians, Mongolians, Colombians, or Macedonians);
6. The U.S mainstream media, especially television (e.g., CBS News' Lara Logan) and talk radio but also the Associated Press wire service, has played a major role in confusing the American general public about the reasons for and the execution of America's Afghan war. Where are all the photos of those obliterated and/or maimed by U.S troops?[3]
7. Other American commentators - the humanitarian interventionists on Afghanistan - including Human Rights Watch, National Public Radio, Sarah Chayes, Harvard's Carr Center, etc. - present a completely idyllic end-game where jolly Afghan farmers labor in cooperatives producing pomegranates or saffron for export and Afghan girls' schools dot the countryside. This has nothing to do with reality and all with marketing/selling the war to the American general public;
8. America's Afghan war is unwinnable militarily as well as in a hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency terms. Moreover, the American bombing and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan has strengthened, not weakened, Al Qaeda by promoting its decentralization across at least two continents (Asia and Africa). Thanks to America, Al Qaeda is now a global organization;
9. The only solution is for the U.S to withdraw as expeditiously as possible just as the Soviets did in 1989, letting Afghans work out a livable arrangement as the Vietnamese did in 1975. The Obama/McChrystal approach promises war without end and the Biden approach is an invitation for a second 9/11;
10. History tells us very clearly that the single most important factor which motivates a U.S withdrawal from a conflict soon is escalating U.S. military casualties. The lessons from Indochina (1965-75), the Lebanon bomb attack which killed 241 US troops (1983), Somalia's Blackhawks down (1993) are clear for all to see.
I wish to focus in my talk upon the execution of (not the rationales for) war and on the effects of this U.S-led war upon Afghanistan and its people. A fully referenced version of my talk is coming up on RAWA's web site as I speak.
Let me begin with a brief comment. As all marketing accepts, words matter and we thus need to struggle which meaning dominates. Let me give you two examples: the U.S/NATO presence in Afghanistan is not about peace-keeping but rather about a foreign occupation; and those fighting such occupation are neither terrorists nor insurgents but rather the resistance (though maybe not our preferred type of resistance). A strange thing happened during the last twenty years: any force opposing U.S. geo-political designs around the world is now labeled terrorist. As Mike Davis so tellingly pointed out, the car bomb or suicide-bomber is the air force of the poor.[4] The Axis armies of mid-twentieth century were never labeled terrorist. You see this war is as much about words, meanings, images and information as it is about IED's and GPS-guided bombs.
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