Afghanistan: War Crimes

Last Saturday, after a major attack by air and land launched by occupational forces against Marjah, a presumed Taliban target in southern Afghanistan, Western military commands were elated with the thought of having killed about 20 of the resistant combatants in the attack — in which an American and a Briton also lost their lives — and of having encountered minimal resistance. British General Gordon Messenger said that the Taliban appeared disoriented, unorganized and incapable of coming up with a coherent response. A day later, the occupying militants had to admit that 12 of the dead were civilians, murdered by two missiles that were “diverted” from their target and ended up hitting a house in the province of Helmand. Hours earlier, the U.N. had asked both sides to avoid civilian deaths.

The invading troops acted with support from the local officials sustained by Hamid Karzai’s puppet regime. A possible explanation for the confusion, weak resistance and the disorganized reaction could rest in the fact that the attack’s main objective was shaped around unarmed and defenseless non-combatants. While Karzai was worthlessly reiterating useless petitions to foreign troops not to kill civilians, Messenger apologized for what he called an unfortunate event and estimated that the Western offensive is in its easy phase; the difficult one will be calming public opinion.

The shamelessness and immorality of Washington’s adventure — accompanied by London and other minor allies — in a tormented Afghanistan remain in view: For the Western governments, massacring the local population is not just licit, but also easy. The consequences of such atrocities represent nothing more than an image problem.

Since the beginning of American aggression against the Central Asian nation at the end of 2001, with the pretext of avenging the 9/11 al-Qaida terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, one constant of this war — with the help of heavy artillery and air invasions — has been the massacre of innocent people. To Western societies, the foreign authorities are now portraying such facts as normal and inevitable incidents.

In this way, they are trying to inform the international public opinion of the moral degradation that the Afghan affair has provoked in the governments of countries that promote “civilization” and respect for human rights. The phenomenon is particularly exasperating considering the fact that the Obama administration’s actions in Afghanistan are not much different from those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, in Iraq. By transferring the superpower’s military priorities from the Arab country to Afghan territory, Obama has practically taken, intact, the predatory and genocidal model that the Texan had practiced on Iraqi soil. In doing so, Obama has failed the worldwide hope, generated by his inauguration as president, that the United States would stop behaving as an intrinsic, interfering country. Obama could have at least changed the methods of his imperial policies.

From whichever point of view one takes, the massacres of civilians in Afghanistan deserve the label of war crimes. If the crimes do not capture such a label in international tribunals, it can only be because the political and diplomatic power exerted by Washington and its European allies is capable of paralyzing and neutralizing the whole justice mechanism, resulting in beneficial outcomes for their cause. As a last resort, the only thing left is the pressure and mobilization of Western societies to prevent the occupying forces of Afghanistan from continuing to assassinate, en masse, innocent civilians in their names. All there is left to do is hope that these societies will begin to act. If they don’t, they will become accomplices to the atrocities perpetrated by their respective governments.