U.S.-NATO warplanes raze Afghan village

The Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr is supposed to be a joyous event, marking the end of the month-long fasting of Ramadan. Literally the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” it is a time where people dress in their finest clothes, adorn their homes with lights and decorations, give treats to children, and enjoy visits with family and friends.

But for the people of the Panjwayi district in southern Afghanistan, the celebrations turned into a nightmare last week as U.S.-NATO warplanes bombed their village, leaving as many as 85 civilians dead.

Witnesses told reporters that 25 homes were razed in four to five hours of bombing. Abdul Aye, a villager, said 22 members of his extended family were killed.

The civilian death toll, even by conservative estimates, is the largest in Afghanistan since July 2002 when U.S. planes attacked a wedding party, killing 46 and wounding 117.

Five years ago on the day of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, President George W. Bush, in his radio address to the nation, said: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we’ll also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.”

There were no reports amidst the bombed out wreckage of Panjwayi of any food, medicine or supplies having been dropped.

The day after the attack, the occupation forces issued their pro forma “apologies.” NATO Commander Gen. David Richards offered, “In the night, in the fog of war, mistakes were made.”

But to underscore the real message, NATO representative Mark Laity later said: “We have demonstrated that we are strong enough on the combat side to be the winners. After 30 years of fighting, people in the south are nervous of being on the wrong side.”  (Our emphasis)

In the past weeks groups like the New York-based Human Rights Watch, International Red Cross, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and the U.K.-based Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict have condemned U.S.-NATO violence, which is increasingly targeting civilians.

Two days before the Panjwayi attack, more than 30 civilians were killed in a NATO bombing of the village of Zangi Abad. In the first weeks of October, at least 20 civilians were killed in Kandahar and Helmand Province. And on Oct. 23, a young Afghan girl was killed and two children injured when a NATO mortar test fell short of its target, hitting a residential home in the eastern province of Kunar. U.S.-NATO forces routinely test mortars in areas close to civilian populations.

This month marks five years of the Pentagon’s “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan. For media which love to mark anniversaries, this fifth anniversary was notably absent from the U.S. press.

In Canada and much of Europe, however, where there is more opposition to the war, media attention has focused on a new report by the Senlis Council, a prominent British-based think tank, on the U.S.-NATO occupation.

“Afghanistan’s people are starving to death,” the report states. “Afghanistan continues to rank at the bottom of most poverty indicators and the situation of women and children is particularly grave. One in four children born in Afghanistan cannot expect to live beyond the age of five, and certain provinces of the country lay claim to the worst maternal mortality rates ever recorded in the world.”

More than 70 percent of the population is malnourished, according to the Senlis Council. Less than a quarter of the people have access to safe drinking water.

Under the guise of fighting the Taliban and bringing democracy and freedom to the people, the U.S. has installed into power a corrupt group of warlords, drug smugglers and gangsters. Human Rights Watch estimates that 60 percent of Afghani legislators have links to warlords. The country has reemerged as the world’s leading source for opium and heroin. “The government has become so full of drug smugglers,” said Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan’s minister of tribal and frontier affairs, “the cabinet meetings have become a farce.” (Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2005). Violence against women and girls is pervasive, and is worse than conditions under the old Taliban regime.

Like Iraq, the Afghan intervention was based on a lie. It had nothing to do with democracy and freedom and everything to do with economics—that is, neocolonial, imperialist economics. Afghanistan sits in the center of Central Asia, a region rich with vast gas and oil reserves. Even more importantly for the U.S., it is strategically poised between Russia, China and the Middle East.

At the beginning of the last century, the “Great Game” was the name given to the struggle between British imperialism and tsarist Russia for domination of Afghanistan and Central Asia.

But the “Great Game” ended in 1917 when the Russian Revolution threw out the tsar and put the workers and peasants in power. The Bolsheviks published and nullified the secret imperialist treaties and practiced self-determination for the republics of Central Asia.

Today, 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. military bases dot the region—in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and throughout Afghanistan. Many of these countries are now neocolonies, their natural resources at the mercy of U.S. energy monopolies, their governments some of the worst human rights abusers in the world.

This invasion of Central Asia has been in the works for years. The 9/11 attack gave Washington an easy justification for sending in its troops.

Today the world is witnessing the spectacle of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet trying to occupy and subdue the poorest and weakest. What is remarkable, and should give hope to people everywhere, is that they are failing miserably.