Until, in December 2005, Seymour Hersh wrote a piece from Washington for the
New Yorker
, entitled “Up in the Air,” our reporters had, with rare exceptions, simply refused to look up. Yet here is an air force summary of just a single, nondescript day of operations in Iraq in July 2006, one of hundreds and hundreds of such days, some far more intense, since we invaded that country: “In total, coalition aircraft flew 46 close-air support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities.”
And here’s the summary of the same day in Afghanistan: “In total, coalition aircraft flew 32 close-air support missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. These missions included support to coalition and Afghan troops, reconstruction activities and route patrols.” Note that, in Afghanistan, as the situation began to worsen militarily and politically, the old Vietnam-era B-52s, the carpet-bombers of that war, were called back into action, again without significant attention here.
In summer 2006, using the highest-tech American precision-guided and bunker-busting bombs, Israel launched air strike after strike, thousands of them into Lebanon. They hit an international airport, the nation’s largest milk factories, a major food factory, aid convoys, Red Cross ambulances, a UN observer post, a power plant, apartment complexes, villages (claiming that they housed or supported the enemy), branches of banks (because they might facilitate Hezbollah finances), the telecommunications system (because of the messages that might pass along it), highways (because they might transport weapons to the enemy), bridges (because they might be crossed by those transporting weapons), a light-house in Beirut harbor (for reasons unknown), trucks (because they might be transporting those weapons, though they might also be transporting
vegetables), families who just happen to be jammed into cars or minivans fleeing at the urging of the attackers, who turned at least 20 percent of all Lebanese into refugees while creating a “landscape of death” (in the phrase of the superb reporter Anthony Shadid) in the southern part of that country. In this process, civilian casualties were widespread.
As the Israelis rediscovered—though, by now, you’d think that military planners with half a brain wouldn’t have to destroy a country to do so—it is impossible to “surgically” separate a movement and its supporters from the air. When you try, you invariably do the opposite, fusing them ever more closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in any case, never literal geography, never simply a set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken and destroyed.
As air wars go, the one in Lebanon in 2006 was strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it was historically anything but unique. It might even be said that war from the air, since first launched in Europe’s colonies early in the last century, has always been essentially directed against civilians. Air power—no matter its stated targets—almost invariably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its damage is anything but “collateral,” never truly “surgical,” and never in its overall effect “precise.” Even when it doesn’t start that way, the frustration of not working as planned, of not breaking the “will,” tends to lead, as with the Israelis in 2006, to ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which, if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will bring down not society’s will, but society itself.
Lebanon’s prime minister may have described Israel’s actions as “barbaric destruction,” but, in our world, airpower has long been robbed of its barbarism. For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but somehow is not barbaric. For that, you need to personally cut off a head.
An Anatomy of Collateral Damage
In a little noted passage in her book
The Dark Side
, Jane Mayer offered us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001,
shaken by a nerve gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reported Mayer, went underground. He literally bunkered himself in “a secure, undisclosed location,” which she described as “one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock.” That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, “The Commander in Chief’s Suite.”
Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, “he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers.” In the backseat of his car (just in case), added Mayer, “rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit.” And lest danger rear its head, “Rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow.”
When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime
president
—forget the vice president—including Abraham Lincoln when Southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation’s capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?
On the other hand, the well-armored vice president and his aide David Addington played a leading role, as Mayer documented in grim detail, in loosing a Global War on Terror that was also a global war
of
terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war, “the gloves came off,” “the shackles were removed”—images much beloved within the administration and, in the case of those “shackles,” by George Tenet’s CIA. In the process, no price in human abasement or human life proved too high to pay—as long as it was paid by someone else.
The Value of None
If no level of protection was too much for Dick Cheney, then no protection at all is what Washington offers civilians who happen to live in the ever expanding “war zones” of the planet. In the Middle East, in Somalia,
in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, the war—in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles or drones—is, in crucial ways, aimed at civilians (though this could never be admitted).
Civilians have few doctors on hand, much less full chemical body suits or gas masks, when disaster strikes. Often they are asleep, or going about their daily business, when death makes its appearance unannounced.
We have no idea just how many civilians have been blown away by the U.S. military (and allies) in recent years, only that the “collateral damage” has been widespread and far more central than anyone here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral damage has come in myriad ways—from artillery fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated shootings of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints; from troops (or even private mercenaries) blasting away from convoys; during raids on private homes; in village operations; and, significantly, from the air.
In Afghanistan, air strikes increased tenfold from 2004 to 2007 alone. From 2006 to 2007, civilian deaths from those air strikes nearly tripled. According to Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and military analyst at Human Rights Watch, 317,000 pounds of bombs were dropped in June and 270,000 in July 2008, equaling “the total tonnage dropped in 2006.”
As with all figures relating to casualties, the actual counts you get on Afghan civilian dead are approximations and probably undercounts, especially since the war against the Taliban has been taking place largely in the backlands of one (or, if you count Pakistan, two) of the poorest, most remote regions on the planet. And yet we do know something. For instance, although the media have seldom attended to the subject, we know that one subset of innocent civilians has been slaughtered repeatedly. While Americans spent days in October 2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of five Amish girls by a madman in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and weeks following the mass slaughter of thirty-two college students by a mad boy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, a number of Afghan wedding parties and at least one Iraqi wedding party were largely wiped out from the air by American planes to hardly any news coverage at all.
The message of these slaughters is that if you live in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now much of Afghanistan, you’d better not gather.
Each of these events was marked by something else—the uniformity of the U.S. response: initial claims that U.S. forces had been fired on first and that those killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the slaughters as the unavoidable “collateral damage” of wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to genuinely apologize for, or take real responsibility for, having wiped out groups of celebrating locals.
And keep in mind that such disasters are just subsets of a far larger, barely covered story. In July 2008 alone, for example, the U.S. military and NATO officials launched investigations into three air strikes in Afghanistan (including one on a wedding party) in which seventy-eight Afghan civilians were killed.
Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such “incidents” have occurred again and again. The Global War on Terror is premised on an unspoken belief that the lives of others—civilians going about their business in distant lands—are essentially of no importance when placed against American needs and desires. That, you might say, is the value of none.
Incident in Azizabad
To take one example: on the night of August 21, 2008, a memorial service was held in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand District of Afghanistan’s Herat Province, for a tribal leader killed the previous year, who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban. Hundreds had attended, including “extended families from two tribes.”
That night, a combined party of U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army troops attacked the village. They claimed they were “ambushed” and came under “intense fire.” What we know is that they called in repeated air strikes. According to several investigations and the on-the-spot reporting of
New York Times
journalist Carlotta Gall, at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children, died that night. As many as seventy-six members of a single extended family were killed, along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound seems to have been specially targeted.
Khan, it turns out, was no Taliban “militant,” but a “wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport.” He reportedly had a private security
company that worked for the U.S. military at the airport and also owned a cell phone business in the town of Herat. He had a card “issued by an American Special Forces officer that designated [him] as a ‘coordinator for the U.S.S.F.’” Eight of the other men killed that night, according to Gall, worked as guards for a private American security firm. At least two dead men had served in the Afghan police and fought against the Taliban.
The incident in Azizabad represents one of the deadliest media-verified attacks on civilians by U.S. forces since the invasion of 2001. Numerous buildings were damaged. Many bodies, including those of children, had to be dug out of the rubble. There may have been as many as sixty children among the dead. The U.S. military evidently launched its attack after being given false information by another person in the area with a grudge against Khan and his brother. As one tribal elder, who helped bury the dead, put it: “It is quite obvious, the Americans bombed the area due to wrong information. I am 100 percent confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute. The Americans are foreigners and they do not understand. These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban.”
Repeated U.S. air attacks resulting in civilian deaths have proven a disaster for Afghan president Hamid Karzai. He promptly denounced the strikes against Azizabad, fired two Afghan commanders, including the top-ranking officer in western Afghanistan, for “negligence and concealing facts,” and ordered his own investigation of the incident. His team of investigators concluded that more than ninety Afghan civilians had indeed died. Along with the Afghan Council of Ministers, Karzai also demanded a “review” of “the presence of international forces and agreements with foreign allies, including NATO and the United States.”
Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, similarly reported that one of the group’s researchers had “found that 88 people had been killed, including 20 women.” The UN mission in Afghanistan then dispatched its own investigative team from Herat to interview survivors. Its investigation “found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15
women and 15 men.” (The 60 children were reportedly “3 months old to 16 years old, all killed as they slept.”)
The American Response
Given the weight of evidence at Azizabad, the on-site investigations, the many graves, the destroyed houses, the specificity of survivor accounts, and so on, this might have seemed like a cut-and-dried case of mistaken intelligence followed by an errant assault with disastrous consequences. But accepting such a conclusion simply isn’t in the playbook of the U.S. military.
Instead, in such cases what you regularly get is a predictable U.S. narrative about what happened made up of outlandish claims (or simply lies), followed by a strategy of stonewalling, including a blame-the-victims approach in which civilian deaths are regularly dismissed as enemy-inspired “propaganda,” followed—if the pressure doesn’t ease up—by the announcement of an “investigation” (whose results will rarely be released), followed by an expression of “regrets” or “sorrow” for the loss of life—both weasel words that can be uttered without taking actual responsibility for what happened—never to be followed by a genuine apology.