No End to the Savagery in Afghanistan

[babylonsister]

No End to the Savagery in Afghanistan
Posted on Nov 15, 2008
Afghan boy and soldiers

AP photo / Rafiq Maqbool

An Afghan boy watches as a U.S. Marine patrol passes by in the town of Garmser in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

By Robert Fisk

Editor’s note: This article was originally printed in The Independent.


Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war, but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave. The torture and killing of prisoners in this pitiful place—the American variety in Bagram and the Taliban variety in Helmand—is a kind of routine of history. Even execution has to be made more painful. A knife is more terrible than a bullet. The cult of the suicide bomber in the Middle East began its life in Lebanon, moved to “Palestine”, arrived in Iraq, leached over the border here to Afghanistan and passed effortlessly through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. And New York. And Washington. And London ...

Are human beings at war—any kind of war—by definition bound to commit atrocities? The International Committee of the Red Cross tried to answer this question in a report four years ago. Were combatants unaware of international humanitarian law? Unlikely, I would think. They just don’t care. The Red Cross enquiry interviewed hundreds of fighters in Colombia, Bosnia, Georgia—a bit of real prescience, there, on the part of the ICRC—and the Congo, and suggested that those who commit reprehensible acts see themselves as victims, that this then gives them the right to act savagely against their opponents. Certainly, this might apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, very definitely to the Serbs of Bosnia—I’m not so sure about Georgia—and quite definitely to the Taliban (not least when we’ve been bombing more wedding parties).

Such cruelty is abetted with a bodyguard of clichés—“police operations”, “clean up”, “mop up”, “surgical strikes”—where you can kill by remote control, “especially when the media are not present to show the realities of a conflict”. This is most certainly the case today, for what journalist will now dare to wander the village streets of Helmand or the city of Baquba in Iraq or, for that matter, the border towns of Pakistan? War has never, it seems, been so underreported. And both the good guys and the bad guys like it that way; they prefer to indulge in savagery unseen.

more...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081115_no_end_to_the_savagery_in_afghanistan/

[aquart]

1. Is some idiot blaming Afghan savagery on US??????

Is there a fool who believes we have anything to teach anyone in the Stans about savagery? They have had THOUSANDS of years of slaughtering each other in which to perfect their skills.

Which is why the Russians were idiots to invade. And how stupid do we have to be not to learn from what happened to them?

What is the first rule: DO NOT FIGHT A LAND WAR IN ASIA.

Get out now. Will they kill each other? YES. But it's their land, their fight, their choice. NOT OURS.

Meantime, a friend of mine is planning to visit an Afghan market to buy flour and milk powder. Milk powder sold in open barrels imported from WHERE? Anyone think there's an FDA in Afghanistan? I mentioned this to her and she laughed because there's no anything there: no dentists, no doctors, no medicine, no clean water, and no one can afford the luxury of buying milk for their children, which is why she visits the market and gives it as gifts when she's there.

[babylonsister]

2. Who's the idiot? Because surely you are so much more knowledgable

than this man...

Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. A journalist with decades of experience in foreign reporting, Fisk has interviewed Osama bin Laden multiple times and has been repeatedly recognized and awarded for his work.