"No Mercy": Annals of the Afghan Liberation

[Briar]

"No Mercy": Annals of the Afghan Liberation

by Chris Floyd

Britain's arch-conservative Sunday Telegraph continues to be a source of some of the most revealing reports about George W. Bush's "War on Terror." In its unquenchably pro-war pages, where the news section is just as skewed as the reliably rabid editorials, the ST regularly -- albeit inadvertently -- gives us a glimpse of the true face of the Terror War behind the painted masks of piety worn in Washington and London. We highlighted an example of this a few months ago, when the paper ran what was meant to be a panting, gushing paean to a super-duper Anglo-American unit in Iraq -- and unwittingly revealed the criminal heart of a very dirty "dirty war" being run by the Bush-Blair coalition in the conquered land. (See Ulster on the Euphrates.)

Now the ST has struck again, with another rah-rah piece that peels back some of the drapery obscuring the grisly realities of the "good war" in Afghanistan: US Aircrews Show Taliban No Mercy. The Tory story's political intent is two-fold: to portray the Blair government as a bunch of wussies in its prosecution of the Afghan war, and to exalt the Bush way of dealing with the dusky races, so redolent of the much-lamented Empire in its prime.

But the piece goes beyond the interesting interplay of politics and journalism to a much darker, deeper truth: the degradation of the human spirit in war. This is true in every conflict, of course, even the most limited and justified; but in unending campaigns of conquest and domination like the Terror War, whose ultimate aim is nothing more than the aggrandizement of a predatory elite, the brutalization and coarsening of the forces involved is all the greater. And we can see that in this Telegraph story, which is meant to show American soldiers at their strutting, manly best, but is instead a sad indictment of the Bush Imperium's all-pervading moral rot.

The burden of the piece is this: British forces in the hotly disputed Helmand province were not "ruthless enough in finishing off their targets" when going after the Taliban. They too often refrained from instant, massive retaliation in fear of killing civilians. But now the Americans have come down to show them how it's done, with the "uncompromising use of air power" and orders to "show no mercy" against suspected Taliban fighters. The centerpiece of the story is an attack by Apache helicopter gunships on a boatload of men crossing a Helmand river. Even though the copter crew "didn't have hostile intent or a positive ID from the ground commander," Special Ops told them "that although they could not themselves see the men on the boat, they must be the Taliban who had attacked them." And so the Apaches swung in low and opened up with 30mm cannons on the Afghans, who had by this time scrambled to shore.

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www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1471/81/