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Human Charcoal in Afghanistan
From the Guardian...
At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike."We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "They were like burned tree logs, like charcoal."
"The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone."
"I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son."
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But I'm feeling all the changey changiness that I can believe in, right?
September 12, 2009 1:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son."
I'm staggered by this stunning account. That is one of the saddest things I've ever heard. Multiply it by thousands killed as collateral damage and thousands more to come. Yet we remain to help the Afghan people.
Why do some feel we are more justified in the deaths of innocent people there than we were in Iraq? One might call it more of a preventive war at this point than Iraq's preemptive war because we went in with some justification to begin with. But those reasons have long passed. Are the Taliban a threat to Americans at home? Will they get us here if we don't get them there? If the answer to that question is no, and I believe most recognize that it is, what right do we have to occupy that country and aerially bomb villages of women, children, old men?
September 12, 2009 8:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for posting this, Rootie. It's a story that just never quits:
The Taliban steal two NATO fuel tankers and proceed to drive them straight into the mud. They call the villagers to help tow them out with tractors, but (not surprisingly) it doesn't work. Then they say, "Hey, Happy Ramadan! Free fuel for everybody!" so the villagers line up with their fuel cans, knowing it's going to be a long winter but not knowing that a German NATO commander has unfortunately ordered an air strike on the tankers. Just when a decent-sized crowd of civilians has schlepped out to the muddy riverbank, a U.S. fighter jet drops two 500-lb. bombs on them, incinerating anywhere from 50 to 130 people, depending on whether your source is Western or Afghan.
At first, Germany lies and says only "Islamist insurgents" died in the strike, but word gets out that, um, quite a few civilians had died as well. On Wednesday a German newspaper reported that the German colonel had "overstepped his command in ordering the strike." France and Afghanistan are quick to criticize Germany, so on Friday, German ambassadors ask EU and NATO states to STFU until a NATO investigation is completed. Merkel is freaking out: Elections are later this month and she's been telling the voters that Germany's involvement is strictly humanitarian, so imagine the German people's surprise when their top commander has killed the most people since WWII. The German press is calling for withdrawl....
September 12, 2009 8:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Meanwhile, a NYTimes reporter, Stephen Farrell, rushes to the charred scene at Kunduz the gets himself kidnapped by the Taliban, along with an Afghan reporter, Sultan Munadi. Of course we in the U.S. didn't hear about this because the New York Times suppressed the story.
British special forces rescued Farrell, but Munadi gets shot to death, while a Brit and two more Afghan civilians—a woman and child—all die in the raid. They leave Munadi's body behind as they fly off into the sunset, angering Munadi's family and Afghan journalists.
Bill Keller freaks out that people have a problem with his suppression of yet another news story, and that his reporter is being blamed for recklessness (this is the second time Farrell has been kidnapped; the first time was in Iraq). Negotiations for the hostages were underway, apparently, and there's a lingering question about whether the rescue mission was premature and overdone.
September 12, 2009 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's more about Farrell (whose nickname is Robohack) and Munadi's final terrifying moments and that whole fucked-up scene while the Afghans collected the remains of their loved ones at Kunduz so they could bury them properly.
September 12, 2009 9:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
General Stanley A. McChrystal made an unprecedented appearance at the site of the controversial airstrike. Don't forget that our new policy in Afghanistan is to limit airstrikes so as to avoid civilian casualties.
September 12, 2009 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Eight years after 9/11, Taliban roils 80 percent of Afghanistan.
Heckuva job, USA! You're doing a heck of a job.
September 12, 2009 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just finished the Kite Runner, and my heart aches for the Afghans.
They live in hell, and we're not helping. The Taliban is disgusting, however. Somehow, something needs to be done.
September 12, 2009 10:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gasket...
The description of going after Farrell in your link from the Times Online doesn't look so much like a rescue mission to me as something more like...
"Make this thing go away no matter who gets killed."
If you're really trying to bring back hostages alive, you don't fly a helicopter right to the kidnappers' door and alert everybody in the neighborhood that the cavalry is coming.
They might just as well have blown a fucking bugle.
The story also leaves a lot of doubt about who shot the translator. The Taliban had already passed up an opportunity to shoot him when they heard the stupid helicopters.
This could just as easily be yet another death by "friendly fire" as a second-thought Taliban execution, but I doubt that we ever see reliable forensics about it.
September 12, 2009 10:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had the exact same conclusions, RR. That's why I juxtaposed these stories with yours: to show the West's spectacular incompetence (despite having superior hardware) and utter lack of empathy for the Afghan people.
That's how all the stories I linked to struck me after reading yours, anyway.
I had to severely edit myself about the Farrell story because my reaction to it was instantly negative. It sounds so much like extreme-sports adventure porn that it makes me livid. So I deleted all the adjectives and epithets I used to describe him before I posted. I wanted people to know about the story but not lead them too much. If anyone was interested in it, I wanted the process of discovery to evolve like it did with me: like a ton of bricks toppling onto my head in slow motion.
September 12, 2009 11:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gasket, IMHO your comments typically add more value to diaries than any other commenter on the internet. It's lucky for all of us that you apply your outstanding intelligence to making so many diaries on TPMCafe deeper and more perspicuous than the OP's could manage for themselves.
Thanks again for yet another series of exceptionally subtle and deeply informed comments.
September 12, 2009 11:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the overly generous compliment as well as for inspiring my comments in the first place, Rootie. I knew nothing about this event before I read your post. As usual, it prompted me to do further reading.
I always appreciate that you bring certain issues to this forum so that I can learn what I need to know. Therefore, in an effort to express my appreciation, I try to add something to extend the information or the experience, because I realize others may not have (or take) the time to do so.
This particular article left me speechless for some time. I began to wonder what the New York Times had had to say about it. When I started exploring that angle, my discoveries gave me my voice back.
September 13, 2009 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Taliban threaten Pakistan as well as secular Afghans. But the problem, for me, is the (understandable) reluctance to unnecessarily risk NATO soldiers. The only way to even try to distinguish civilians is to be among them. Standoff attacks will always kill innocents. But what commander can keep his job by ordering soldiers into certain attack? The ancient Greeks would execute commanders that exposed soldiers to unneeded risk.
We do have to give up the hope of criminal justice; I'm trying to accept it. Our initial on-the-cheap attacks pretty much guaranteed the bad guys would get away.
Walking away now is pretty hard politically. I'd like to hear suggestions on who could pull it off. Maybe McCain could have, but the world would likely pay the price somewhere else as he felt right-wing pressure to bully another country.
September 13, 2009 5:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nixon eventually walked us away from Vietnam, Eisenhower very quickly walked us away from a war with China which right-wing generals like McArthur and many right-wing politicians including Eisenhower's Vice-President Nixon were eager to enlarge, George H.W. Bush declined to pursue Saddam into Iraq after we chased him out of Kuwait and walked our soldiers home after a very short engagement.
Likewise Obama could probably walk us out of Afghanistan and Iraq without committing political suicide, but he doesn't have the balls to find out.
September 13, 2009 6:26 AM | Reply | Permalink