U.S.-led forces confirm killing Afghan civilians

[cal04]

Source: Reuters

U.S.-led coalition troops killed eight Afghan civilians in an air strike in the western province of Farah during a Tuesday raid against suspected militants, the U.S. military said.

The acknowledgement came as reports of more civilian deaths caused by a fresh air raid by foreign forces emerged on Thursday from the neighbouring province of Herat.

Tuesday's air strike was summoned after a coalition convoy came under sustained attack from machine gun and indirect fire from a number of houses adjacent to a road in the Bakwa district of Farah, the U.S. military said.

"The coalition convoy returned fire and called for close air support on the enemy positions. A house was hit; eight civilians were killed, two others injured," it said in a statement late on Wednesday.



Read more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP312814.htm

---

US Afghan bombing 'kills dozens'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7510941.stm

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Déjà vu.

Acclaimed as the first “victory” in the “war on terror”, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra, his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. “Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are innocents,” Gulam Rasul told me. “Was the killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt.”

There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as “Taliban”; or, if they are children, they are said to be “partly to blame for being at a site used by militants” – according to the BBC, speaking to a US military spokesman.

The British military have played an important part in this violence, having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they took over command of Nato forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a contrived news event was the “fall” of a “Taliban stronghold”, Musa Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to “liberate” rubble left by American B-52s.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=470

[LynnTheDem]

2. The bUsh regime; good at killing innocent men, women & children.

Your "legacy", george.

[elocs]

3. My 19 year old godson arrived in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan yesterday.

This is a great 6 page article from Vanity Fair about the Koregal Valley and below are some excerpts concerning civilian deaths. It is clear that the U.S. wants to avoid killing civilians for very good reasons and that the Taliban has no trouble in seeing civilians killed if the U.S. gets the blame.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/01/afghanistan200801?currentPage=4

The American rules of engagement generally forbid soldiers to target a house unless someone is shooting from it, and discourage them from targeting anything if civilians are nearby. They can shoot people who are shooting at them and they can shoot people who are carrying a weapon or a handheld radio. The Taliban know this and leave weapons hidden in the hills. When they want to launch an attack they just walk out to their firing positions and pick up their weapons. Following a late-afternoon firefight, they can easily be home for dinner.

The reason for all this caution—other than the obvious moral issues—is that killing civilians simply makes the war harder. With their superior weapons, the U.S. military can kill insurgents all day long, but the only possibility of a long-term victory lies in the civilian population’s denying aid and refuge to the insurgents. The Russian military, which invaded this country in 1979, most emphatically did not understand this. They came in with a massive, heavily armored force, moved about in huge convoys, and bombed everything that moved. It was a textbook demonstration of exactly how not to fight an insurgency. More than one million people died—7 percent of the pre-war civilian population—and a truly popular uprising eventually drove the Russians out.

American forces are far more sensitive to humanitarian concerns than the Russians were—and far more welcomed—but they still make awful mistakes. In June, jumpy American soldiers in Korengal shot into a truck full of young men who had refused to stop at a local checkpoint, killing several. The soldiers said they thought they were about to be attacked; the survivors said they had been confused about what to do. Both sides were probably telling the truth.

Faced with the prospect of losing the tenuous support that American forces had earned in the northern half of the valley, the battalion commander arranged to address community leaders in person after the accident. Standing in the shade of some trees by the banks of the Pech River last June, Colonel William Ostlund explained that the deaths were the result of a tragic mistake and that he would do everything in his power to make it right. That included financial compensation for the grieving families. After several indignant speeches by various elders, one very old man stood up and spoke to the villagers around him.

“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”

About the Taliban using civilian deaths to further their goals:

It was probably no coincidence that the site chosen for this meeting was the foot of a steel bridge that the Americans had just built over the fast, violent Pech. According to Colonel Ostlund, there was a possibility that the Taliban had paid the driver of the truck to not stop at the checkpoint when ordered to. By the colonel’s reasoning, the Taliban would win a strategic victory no matter what: either they would find out how close they could get a truck bomb to an American checkpoint, or there would be civilian casualties that they could exploit.

Whatever the truth of that particular incident, the Taliban have certainly learned the value of American mistakes. Around the same time as the checkpoint shooting, coalition air strikes killed seven Afghan children at a mosque compound in the southeastern part of the country. Reaction was predictably outraged, but almost lost in the outcry was the testimony of survivors. They allegedly told coalition forces that before the air strike al-Qaeda fighters in the area—who undoubtedly knew they were going to be bombed—had beaten the children to prevent them from leaving.