Innocent Deaths
from: Seumas Milne, Dawn/The
Guardian News Service
LONDON, Dec 20
The price in blood that has already been paid for
America's war against terror is only now starting to become clear. Not by
Britain or the US, nor even so far by the Al Qaida and Taliban leaders held
responsible for the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
It has instead been paid by ordinary Afghans, who had nothing whatever to do
with the atrocities, did not elect the Taliban theocrats who ruled over them and
had no say in the decision to give house room to Osama bin Laden and his
friends.
The Pentagon has been characteristically coy about how many people it believes
have died under the missiles it has showered on Afghanistan. Acutely sensitive
to the impact on international support for the war, spokespeople have usually
batted away reports of civilian casualties with a casual "these cannot be
independently confirmed", or sometimes simply denied the deaths occurred at
all. The US media have been particularly helpful. Seven weeks into the bombing
campaign, the Los Angeles Times only felt able to hazard the guess that "at
least dozens of civilians" had been killed.
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 Oct 7 and Dec 10. That is an average of 62 innocent deaths a day -
and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New
York and Washington on Sept 11.
Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. 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 ten 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.
Champions of the war insist that such casualties are an unfortunate, but
necessary, byproduct of a just campaign to root out global terror networks. They
are a world apart, they argue, from the civilian victims of the attacks on the
World Trade Center because, in the case of the Afghan civilians, the US did not
intend to kill them.
On Wednesday, Rumsfeld inadvertently conceded what little impact the Afghan
campaign (yet to achieve its primary aim of bringing Osama and the Al Qaida
leadership to justice) has had on the terrorist threat, by speculating about
ever more cataclysmic attacks, including on London.
There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper
obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were
for the victims of the twin towers. But what has been cruelly demonstrated is
that the US and its camp followers are prepared to sacrifice thousands of
innocents in a coward's war.
- Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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