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18 February 2002
Afghan
Casualties
Excerpts from the Marc Herold Dossier
Professor Marc Herold
of the Whittemore School of Business & Economics at the University
of New Hampshire has compiled a careful dossier of reported casualties
inflicted by US military action during the war in Afghanistan.
This is a compressed version of the dossier. the complete
and fully referenced version is available on the Web.
What causes the documented
high level of civilian casualties - 3,742 civilian deaths in eight
and a half weeks - in the U.S air war upon Afghanistan? The explanation
is the apparent willingness of U.S military strategists to fire
missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of
Afghanistan.
A legacy of the ten years
of civil war during the 80s is that many military garrisons and
facilities are located in urban areas where the Soviet-backed
government had placed them since they could be better protected
there from attacks by the rural mujahideen. Successor Afghan governments
inherited these emplacements. To suggest that the Taliban used
‘human shields’ is more revealing of the historical amnesia and
racism of those making such claims, than of Taliban deeds. Anti-aircraft
emplacements will naturally be placed close by ministries, garrisons,
communications facilities, etc.
A heavy bombing onslaught
must necessarily result in substantial numbers of civilian casualties
simply by virtue of proximity to ‘military targets’, a reality
exacerbated by the admitted occasional poor targeting, human error,
equipment malfunction, and the irresponsible use of out-dated
Soviet maps.
But, the critical element
remains the very low value put upon Afghan civilian lives by U.S
military planners and the political elite, as clearly revealed
by U.S willingness to bomb heavily populated regions. Current
Afghan civilian lives must and will be sacrificed in order to
[possibly] protect future American lives. Actions speak, and words
can obscure: the hollowness of pious pronouncements by Rumsfeld,
Rice and the servile corporate media about the great care taken
to minimize collateral damage is clear for all to see.
Other U.S bombing targets hit are impossible to ‘explain’ in terms
other than the U.S seeking to inflict maximum pain upon Afghan
society and perceived ‘enemies’: the targeted bombing of the Kajakai
dam power station, the Kabul telephone exchange, the Al Jazeera
Kabul office, trucks and buses filled with fleeing refugees, and
the numerous attacks upon civilian trucks carrying fuel oil. Indeed,
the bombing of Afghan civilian infrastructure parallels that of
the Afghan civilian.
Opening Shots
The air attack on Kabul,
Afghanistan began at 8:57 p.m. local time Oct. 7th. The following
day, Reuters carried an interview with a 16-year-old ice-cream
vendor from Jalalabad who said he had lost his leg and two fingers
in a Cruise missile strike on an airfield near his home: "There
was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was
in a hospital," said the boy, called Assadullah, speaking
in Peshawar after being taken across the border for medical help.
"I lost my leg and two fingers. There were other people hurt.
People were running all over the place". Mohammed Raza, an
odd-job man, was not so lucky. At 8 p.m. as he was walking back
home, near to the Jalalabad airport. A cruise missile targeted
at a Taliban facility "a few hundred yards away", strayed
and landed next to him. Shrapnel pierced his neck, grazing his
spine, paralyzing him.
Three days later,
a researcher at the Institute for Health & Social Justice,
Partners in Health of Harvard University, H.J. Chien, confirmed
that civilians had been killed in Jalalabad and elsewhere. On
Oct. 9, the Pakistan Observer [Islamabad] daily newspaper
reported on the first night, "37 Killed, 81 Injured in Sunday’s
Strikes." The casualties spanned four provinces : Kabul [20],
Herat [9], Kandahar [4] and Jalalabad [4]. By Oct. 10, The
Guardian reported 76 dead civilians. And by Oct. 15, the leading
Indian daily, The Times of India was mentioning over 300
civilian casualties and that the US-UK bombing action was in violation
of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter allowing the use of
force in self-defense. On the following day [Oct. 16], the alternative
U.S media noted that during the first week of bombing, 400 Afghan
civilians had been slaughtered.
Yet, the mainstream
western press only took note of civilian casualties on Oct. 9
when a cruise missile destroyed the building of the United Nations
land mine removing contracting firm, the Afghan Technical Center,
in the upper class Macroyan residential district of eastern Kabul,
killing four night watchmen. Tellingly, the day before, Oct. 8,
twenty other Afghans living near the Kabul airport [in the Qasabah
Khana neighborhood] and near the Kabul radio station were also
killed. On Oct. 10, the Sultanpur Mosque in Jalalabad was hit
by a bomb during prayers, killing 17 people. As neighbors rushed
into the rubble to pull out one injured, a second bomb was dropped
reportedly killing at least another 120 people [this figure is
not included in my tally].
Fleeing the intense bombing
in Kandahar, Mehmood, a Kandahar merchant, brought his family
to his ancestral village of Chowkar-Karez, a village 25 miles
north of Kandahar. His extended family, crowded into six cars,
arrived at a village just about when it was attacked by U.S warplanes
in the night of Oct. 22/23. Ironically, the cars arriving in the
night may have prompted the raid - as the Pentagon labels "a
target of opportunity." Said Mehmood, "I brought my
family here for safety, and now there are 19 dead, including my
wife, my brother, sister, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, my uncle.
What am I supposed to do now?"
At 4:30 p.m. on Saturday,
Oct. 27, a U.S bomb and missile fired from a F-18 hit the village
of Khan Agaha at the entrance of the Kapisa Valley, some 80 kms
northeast of Kabul. The U.S planes dropped 35 bombs in the area.
Ten civilians were reportedly instantly killed said an ambulance
driver who had gone to the village. A nearby hospital to which
victims were rushed, run by the Italian relief agency, Emergency,
said up to 16 people had been killed in Saturday’s attack on Khan
Agaha. Television photos taken by Britain’s Sky News showed footage
of the F-18 dropping bombs, hitting a mud and timber family home.
The TV report said ten members of a family were missing under
the rubble and another twenty were injured. A five year-old girl
lay in a wheelbarrow with a bloodied face.
Compiling The Dossier
This report sets the record
straight: we shall document how Afghanistan has been subjected
to a barbarous air bombardment which has killed an average of
65 civilians per day since that fateful evening of Sunday, Oct.
7. When the sun set on December 3, at least 3,742 Afghan civilians
had died in U.S bombing attacks [roughly equivalent to about 37’000
U.S civilian or the equivalent of ten World Trade Center attacks].
I have relied upon official news agencies, major newspapers, reported
first-hand accounts. Whenever possible, I have sought cross-corroboration
[the idea being that if a couple of major news agencies report
the event, then it is more likely accurate]. I have avoided granting
greater reliability to U.S or British sources---the ethnocentric
bias. When greater detail was given about the specifics of a bombing
attack, I lent it greater credibility.
Military Targets?
When faced with the indisputable
‘fact’ of having hit a civilian area, the Bush-Blair team responds
that a military facility close-by was the target. In every case
we can document, this turns out to be a long abandoned military
facility. For example, in the incident where four night watchmen
died when the offices of a United Nations de-mining agency in
Kabul was bombed, the Pentagon said it was near a military radio
tower. U.N. officials said the tower was a defunct, abandoned
medium and short wave radio station that hadn’t been in operation
for over a decade and was situated 900 feet away from the bombed
U.N. building.
On Oct. 19, U.S planes
had circled over Tarin Kot in Uruzgan early in the evening, then
returned after everyone went to bed and dropped their bombs on
the residential area , instead of on the Taliban base two miles
away. Mud houses were flattened and families destroyed. An initial
bombing killed twenty and as some of the villagers were pulling
their neighbors out of the rubble, more bombs fell and ten more
people died. A villager involved explained: "We pulled the
baby out, the others were buried in the rubble. Children were
decapitated. There were bodies with no legs. We could do nothing.
We just fled."
Civilian Targets
The U.S bombing campaign
has also directly targeted certain civilian facilities deemed
hostile to its war success. On Oct. 15, U.S bombs destroyed Kabul’s
main telephone exchange, killing 12. In late Oct., U.S warplanes
bombed the electrical grid in Kandahar knocking out all power,
but the Talian were able to divert some electricity to the city
from a generating plant in another province, Helmand, but that
generation plant [at Kajakai dam] was then bombed. On Oct. 31,
it launched seven air strikes against Afghanistan’s largest hydro-electric
power station adjacent to the huge Kajakai dam, 90 kilometers
northwest of Kandahar, raising fears about the dam breaking. On
Nov. 12, a guided bomb scored a direct hit on the Kabul office
of the Al Jazeera news agency, which had been reporting from Afghanistan
in a manner deemed hostile by Washington. On Nov. 18, U.S warplanes
bombed religious schools [Madrasas] in the Khost and Shamshad
areas. Electricity, telephones, news, and spirituality are ‘fair’
targets.
12 Feb. 2002 Updated Estimates
No month available low
count 74 deaths high count 74 deaths
Oct. 2001 low count
1,181 deaths high count 1,398 deaths
Nov. 2001 low count
1,090 deaths high count 1,203 deaths
Dec. - 7 Feb. 2002 low
count 690 deaths high count 937 deaths
Total low
count 3,035 deaths high count 3,612 deaths
Conclusion
This dossier has presented
detailed and reliable information about the large number of civilians
killed in U.S bombing and missile attacks on Afghanistan since
Oct. 7th. Naturally, some might seek to dismiss parts or all of
the report by attacking the sources employed. But, to do so would
mean having to accuse news agencies from many countries, reporters
from many countries, and newspapers from many countries of lying.
We have sought to cite whenever possible multiple sources. The
specific, detailed stories provided by victims, on-lookers, and
refugees lend credibility.
Natasha Walter has
eloquently stated our responsibility: "They are far away
from us, it’s true, but their grief still rises from television
screens and news reports. And this time around, we are implicated.
These people are suffering from terror visited on them from the
West. Yes, I know they have also suffered over the years from
the evils of their fundamentalist rulers but we now share the
blame for their plight. If it were not for the missiles the West
has sent into Kandahar and Kunduz, these children whose faces
we now see in our newspapers would not have had to take to the
roads, desperately trudging the hills and deserts and sitting
in tents on a bare plain.
‘And don’t think that
just because they have suffered so much during the last generation
that their grief is any the less now. Or because they don’t get
obituaries in The New York Times that each of the civilian
lives lost in Afghanistan isn’t as precious to their loved ones
as the people who died in the Twin Towers."
Comment by Stephen Glover, The Spectator, 26 Jan. 2002,
p. 9
My pointing out that the official death
tool for the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September
now stands at fewer than 3,000, under half the highest estimate
used by many politicians. I also remarked that Professor Marc
Herold of the University of New Hampshire had worked up some figures
which suggest that as many as 4000 Afghan civilians may have been
killed by American bombs.
‘So far as I can see,
the only person in the world who has produced a comprehensive
toll of civilian dead is Marc Herold of the University of New
Hampshire... His report strikes me as being surprisingly lucid
for an American academic, and measured and balanced in its tone.
‘As I have pointed
out before, American and British politicians have consistently
suggested that more people died in the World Trade Centre than
they should have known was the case. Now, on the other side of
the gruesome equation, the American government and its more uncritical
supporters in the media are straining every muscle to minimise
the number of civilian casualties. There is a brutal calculus
here... if, in a month of two or three, neutral parties should
suggest that as many Afghan civilians have been killed by US bombs
(let alone those who died from mass starvation made worse by the
war) as Americans were murdered on 11 September, there will be
some explaining to do.’ARROW
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