U.S.-led NATO forces bomb and kill Afghani civilians

Afghanis carry body of civilian killed in U.S. attack

Thousands of residents in the province of Herat in Afghanistan’s Shindand District gathered this past week to denounce two U.S.-led NATO bombing raids that killed at least 50 civilians.

NATO commander Dan McNeill claimed that “only firing insurgents were targeted.” U.S. military officials refused to acknowledge any civilian deaths, instead only reporting the killing of 136 “Taliban fighters.”

Protesters insisted that all of the victims were civilians. “We took the wounded kids to the foreign forces base to show them who they have bombed,” a local villager told AFP.

The protest condemned both the imperialist occupation, and the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai. In response, Afghan police fired on the gathering, wounding at least 20 demonstrators.

The bombing raids have become more frequent following reports of the Taliban’s increased presence in Afghanistan. The devastation of villages all over western and southern Afghanistan is part of the British and U.S.-led NATO “spring offensive,” which has meant nothing other than increased bloodshed in the region. The frequent raids have left 1,600 people homeless. Afghans remain among the largest refugee groups in the world with over 3.5 million residing in Pakistan and Iran.

An Associated Press news poll estimated a total of 151 civilian deaths in the past five months, not including the unaccounted for and wounded. These estimates, however, come from the U.S.-led NATO forces and the puppet government in Afghanistan. In Iraq, numerous independent studies have suggested that the United States systematically undercounts and omits the actual number of Iraqi deaths—a fact that sheds enormous doubt on the accuracy of U.S. figures in Afghanistan.

Afghanis protest U.S. attacks on civlians

Still, even by U.S. numbers, 151 civilian deaths since January equates to about one Virginia Tech massacre per month. The people of the Helmand province in Afghanistan were surely overcome with the same sense of misery and anger that the students of Virginia Tech experienced. But their story, in contrast, was buried in the back pages of U.S. newspapers, if it was covered at all.

Just last month, a one-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl, and three women were part of 47 civilians killed or wounded by a shooting rampage on the part of U.S. soldiers. These murders are serious crimes against humanity, but are far from isolated incidents.

Civilian casualties and the devastation of whole villages are not products of the misguided actions of individual soldiers. These crimes are part of every unwanted foreign occupation, in which the occupiers pursue a deliberate policy of brutality in order to subjugate and silence the occupied.

The U.S. war on Afghanistan, waged under the auspices of fighting the Taliban and avenging the Sept. 11 attacks, is an attempt to control this strategically placed Central Asian country through which some of the world’s biggest oil pipelines go.

For five years, Afghanis have had to endure the bitter presence of over 50,000 foreign troops conducting checkpoint searches, bursting into their homes, harassing young men and women, shooting in civilian areas, and bombing their villages. They have a right to determine their own government and their own future, free of U.S. occupation and foreign control.