Wholesale terrorism: a reprehensible cycle of sanctioned slaughter

That being the only way to describe the US/NATO regime’s self-styled “stabilising mission” in Afghanistan, which continues with the most unspeakable consequences.

The more keen-eyed reader will, perhaps, have glimpsed a version of the below at some point this month. Maybe.

US air strike wiped out Afghan wedding party, inquiry finds

A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.

Another nine people were wounded in Sunday's attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.

"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate.

"They were all civilians and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida." Around 10 people were missing and believed to be still under rubble, he said. The inquiry team were shown the bloodied clothes of women and children in a visit to the scene.

The Red Cross said 250 people had been killed or wounded in five days of military action and militant attacks in the past week.

Please – please – reflect on this for a moment.

Re-read it, and reflect.

And then consider that this incident caused barely a ripple in the apparently news-hungry pages of the UK’s mainstream press. Relegated deep into to mid-section obscurity by the ‘quality’ dailies – if covered at all – the deaths of 39 innocent women and children barely scratched the surface. The silence is mystifying.

The Times granted the massacre a total of 43 words – tacked onto the end of a piece, no less, which reported that nine British troops had been injured in a ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan. (For a full and frank discussion of this remarkable disparity, see the Media Lens report Some Matter More – when 47 lives are worth 43 words.)

And then, let us glance at the annals of six years ago:

No US apology over wedding bombing

US military officials in Afghanistan have refused to apologise following the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding party on Monday which killed at least 30 people, insisting that aircraft had come under sustained and hostile fire.

Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near Deh Rawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, had been firing into the air - a Pashtun wedding tradition - when American planes struck.

The Pentagon has admitted that one of its bombs was "errant" and missed the target, but has refused to confirm that a missile hit the wedding party.

US forces killed 15 people in the same province in January in a firefight which they later admitted was "ill-advised".

A question: what does the concept of one’s ‘wedding day’ signify in this society? What thoughts, allusions, excitements and considerations are evoked by the thought of this occasion?

In turn, then, can we even countenance the kind of reality experienced by the obliterated Afghan communities above?

Another question: how many victims died in the London bombings of 2005? The outpouring of grief for those 52 souls still reverberates today. And rightly so. But what world do we live in where a wedding party of 47 civilians can be bombed from the air (I am referring here to the massacre of a few Sundays ago in Kacu, rather than the identikit 2002 episode in Deh Rawud, lest there be any confusion) and the ‘event’ register little more than a flicker on our social and moral radars?

I use the example of the London bombings with deliberate precision. Because our presence in Afghanistan, like it is in Iraq, is wholesale terrorism of the most horrific nature, carried out specifically for Western interests at the cost of people who have been deemed officially disposable.

As Tariq Ali asserts: “To portray the invasion [of Afghanistan] as a ‘war of self-defence’ for Nato makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.”

Since 2001, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for reconstituting and extending the West’s power-political grip on the world order - at any cost. The agreement signed by the US with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan, potentially including nuclear missiles.

Our governments are liars and murderers, and our flagship media outlets complicit in the attendant slaughter. And the lives of Afghan children and women are, officially, superfluous.

Moral anaesthesia
Let us consider for a moment that at around the time of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, Franco’s employment of German planes for airstrikes caused widespread outrage, for the now-inconceivable reason that bombing from the air was then considered utterly inhumane – even in warfare.

Yet eighty years on, it is genuinely routine to read of the most shocking atrocities carried out in just such a manner – and in situations officially deemed to be “humanitarian security operations”, let alone those designated “war”.

Moreover, it is not simply the methods of mass, state-sanctioned violence that are today normalised as judicious and necessary by our mainstream media and its readers, but the inestimable human costs of such methods, too.

What is it that indurates us to such crimes when they happen to Afghans and Iraqis? Their regularity, perhaps? Their remoteness, certainly. But there must be more…

Let us try to imagine what the response would be if a wedding party was bombed to death, with hi-tech airborne weapons, in the UK. Is it even possible to square such inexpressible levels of violence with our own ‘civilised’ reality? On a summer’s day in Brighton, the lives of 47 innocents eviscerated in a thunderous clap of splintered concrete and screaming and blood?

And then imagine if exactly the same incident occurred again, six years later.

What could we expect to float across our screens and front pages? Confidently, we can speculate that the events would be described as the most acutely shocking human injustice in modern history, garlanded by an avalanche of column inches, television reports and Hollywood movies stretching across the next decade – amid the tears, hysteria and wrecked lives of course.

The overarching answer to many of the above questions lies, of course, in considering what the response of the average UK citizen would be if they were asked what US/UK/Canadian/NATO "coalition" forces were and are actually doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. What would they answer? What would you answer? Why?

The near-total corporate media smokescreen in regard to the unilateral and geopolitical reasons for the instances of “military action” in Afghanistan described at the top of this piece (as distinct, of course, from "militant attacks") goes a long way towards illuminating the extraordinary chasm which separates our tears for London 2005 and our ambivalence for Afghan brides and Iraqi children.

Contrary to the daily flood of establishment-exonerating propaganda which swills through our flagship media channels, we must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the appalling human cost being levied upon the world’s innocent citizens as a result of our governments’ actions.

Those being strategic, violent, immoral occupation of sovereign territories.

Countless thousands of Afghans have been killed in a “war” which has raged for seven years. Life expectancy stands at 44, and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world.

This is their reality.