It’s No Accident that Oil Drives Afghan Slaughter

[titoman]

It’s No Accident that Oil Drives Afghan Slaughter


Lately the liberal media, led by the New York Times, has begun to analyze "possible" civilian casualties in the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They quote "humanitarian" organizations as saying there "might" be as many as 1,000 civilian deaths, but "it’s hard to prove" since they "lack independent evidence." Their latest editorial (Feb. 13) reduces even that figure: "No reliable overall casualty numbers exist, although some estimates say that hundreds of Afghan civilians have perished in misdirected strikes." It’s all an "accident" says this leading liberal mouthpiece. They give short shrift to the most detailed reports compiled by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, drawn and cross-checked from dozens of newspaper reporters from Britain, France, India, Canada, Pakistan, Australia and even the U.S. (although the latter are few and far between). Herold proved a minimum of 3,767 deaths just from Oct. 7 to Dec. 6, but this warranted merely a half sentence in the Times "analysis," the latter preferring to fall back on the "hard-to-prove" defense.

Herold declares that, "The absolute need to avoid U.S. military casualties means flying high up in the sky, increasing the probability of killing civilians…."

"….Better stand clear and fire away," reports the Toronto Globe & Mail (10/31/01) "Given this implicit decision, the slaughter of innocent people, as a statistical eventuality is not an accident but a priority — in which Afghan casualties are substituted for American military casualties."

Thus, in the U.S. imperialists’ war, where "The sacrificed Afghan civilians are not ‘white’ [and] the overwhelming number of U.S. pilots and elite ground troops are white….the scale of violence used by the U.S government…knows no limits." (Herold) For U.S. rulers, racism knows no bounds.

The bombing has "progressed from medium-sized missiles to Tomahawk and cruise missiles, to bunker-busting 2,000 lb. bombs to [B-52] carpet-bombing using cluster bombs and now the devastating daisy cutter bombs that annihilate everything in a 600-meter radius." ("The Evils of Bombing," London Guardian, 11/08/01)

"A U.S. officer aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson described the use of 2,000 lb. cluster bombs dropped by B-52 bombers: ‘A 2,000 lb. bomb, no matter where you drop it, is a significant emotional [!] event for anyone within a square mile.’" (London Guardian, 11/2/01)

The liberals go as far as justifying the bombing saying "in the long run" without the Taliban "more lives will be saved." They ignore the fact that the U.S. under the liberal Democrat Carter organized the fundamentalists’ attack on Afghanistan 23 years ago — before the Soviet invasion —which continued under Reagan/Bush, using $3 billion of CIA-directed funds. It was out of this terrorist movement that the Taliban was born.

But the thousands of deaths from carpet bombing are only a small part of the story. "In the long run," tens of thousands will die from the disease-creating depleted uranium (DU) used in all U.S. bombs which makes them more deadly; from the starvation caused by the destruction of Afghan society and the withdrawal of previous emergency aid missions fearing these bombings; from the unexploded bombs remaining throughout the country (virtual land mines); and the looting, banditry, warlord fighting and drug trafficking resurrected by his war.

Finally, since the 26 million population of Afghanistan is one-tenth that of the U.S., Herold says the proven minimum figure of 3,767 Afghan civilian deaths (up until Dec 6) would become "roughly equivalent to about 38,000 U.S. deaths or . . . eleven World Trade Center attacks." The current civilian death total is well over 5,000..

All this slaughter stems from the U.S. bosses’ drive to control the world’s oil supplies, shipping routes and pipelines. Afghanistan stands between the massive oil and gas reserves of Central Asia and the Arabian Sea, a gateway to the energy needs of India, China and Southeast Asia. It is only a small taste of what the mass murderers in Wall Street and the White House have planned for the world’s working class, with Iraq next on the war agenda. The absence of a world communist movement permits these butchers to run rampant in their pursuit of profit. It is our task to re-build such a movement and turn these imperialist wars into class war for communism. Building red May Day marches is a crucial step in this direction, part of the working class’s answer to the ravages of world capitalism.

"They bomb anything that moves…"

"When U.S. warplanes strafed [with AC-130 gunships] the farming village of Chowkar-Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar on Oct. 22-23, killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official said, ‘The people are dead because we wanted them dead’ The reason? They sympathized with the Taliban." (BBC, 11/1/01) "When asked about the Chowkar incident, [Secy. of War] Rumsfeld replied, ‘I cannot deal with that particular village.’" (Toronto Globe & Mail, 11/3/01)

On Oct. 10, 2001, the Sultanpur Mosque in Jalalabad was hit by a bomb during prayers, killing 17 people. As neighbors rushed into the rubble to pull out the injured, a second bomb was dropped reportedly killing another 120 people. (BBC News Online, 10/11/01)

In an article entitled, "Living With War: Dying a Way of Life for Civilians in Afghanistan," the Los Angeles Times reported (11/19/01) that bomb strikes on Nov. 17 killed two entire families — one of 16 members and the other of 14 — together in the same house. On the same day, massive carpet bombing of Khanabad near Kundez killed over 150 civilians. (the London Independent, 11/19/01) A refugee, Mohammed Rasul, recounts himself burying 11 people, pulled out of the ruins.

On Oct. 19, U.S. planes 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 20 and as some of the villagers were pulling their neighbors out of the rubble, more bombs fell and ten more people died. ("Families Blown Apart, Infants Dying. The Terrible Truth of this ‘Just’ War," the London Independent, 10/25/01)

A villager 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." (John Nicol in the London Guardian, "The Myth of Precision," 10/20/01)

"A US bomb flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul…blowing apart seven children as they ate breakfast with their father. The blast shattered a neighbor’s house, killing another two children." (Times of India, citing Reuters, 10/29/01)

Fleeing refugees have become the Pentagon’s "new targets of opportunity." U.S. aircraft have fired missiles and dropped bombs on fleeing taxis, trucks and buses. (Sydney Morning Herald, 12/8/01) A 39-year-old refugee, Rukia, who lost her five children on Dec. 3 when a U.S. bomb hit her neighborhood in Kandahar, fled before she could bury her children, her left arm shattered and wounded in the stomach, and just escaped another bombing while being driven to a Quetta hospital. She told the Herald: "They’re bombing anything that moves. It’s not true that they bomb civilians by accident. They’re targeting the innocent people instead of Osama bin Laden."