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We Burn Corpses, Don't We?
War Crimes in Afghanistan
By Erid Ruder
10/26/05 "Counterpunch"
-- -- Shocking images from Afghanistan have
again exposed the racist barbarism of the U.S. "war on terror."
Last week, U.S. soldiers were caught on videotape burning the bodies
of two dead Taliban fighters--something forbidden under Islamic
law--in Gonbaz, a village in southern Afghanistan.
After the bodies had been defiled, U.S. psychological operations
specialists used loudspeakers to taunt local villagers, in an
attempt to draw out other Taliban supporters. "Attention, Taliban,
you are all cowardly dogs," blared the loudspeakers, after calling
out several religious leaders by name.
"You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned.
You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just
proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be...You
attack and run away like women. You call yourself Talibs, but you
are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your
family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you
are."
The taunts--according to Stephen Dupont, the Australian freelance
journalist embedded with the soldiers, who captured the incident on
video--were designed to infuriate. "They used that as psychological
warfare, I guess you'd call it," said Dupont of the October 1
incident. "They deliberately wanted to incite that much anger from
the Taliban so the Taliban could attack them...That's the only way
they can find them."
The images provoked outrage in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim
world. "The burning of these bodies is an offense to Muslims
everywhere," said cleric Said Mohammed Omar. "It makes no difference
that they were Taliban." Abdul Qayum, a senior cleric in Kandahar,
said, "During the past quarter-century of war, I have never heard of
anyone burning dead bodies. The Americans claim to be here to bring
peace, but what are we supposed to think about this?"
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai tried to help his Pentagon
puppet masters contain the damage by dismissing the incident, saying
that sometimes "soldiers make mistakes." But this latest revelation
shows that the atrocities committed by the U.S. military--from the
torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the murderous siege of the
Iraqi city of Falluja--aren't "mistakes." They're policy.
In the U.S., the media has generally connected the desecration of
the two bodies in Afghanistan with the defiling of the Koran by U.S.
interrogators earlier this year. But every report also said that
Newsweek retracted that story about the Koran--even though the
magazine's retraction was limited to admitting that a government
report didn't reveal the abuse, not that the incident never
occurred.
And the U.S. government has confirmed other atrocities committed in
Afghanistan--like the case of a 22-year-old taxi driver named
Dilawar who died with his wrists chained to the top of his cell at
Bagram Air Base after being tortured for nearly four days by U.S.
interrogators.
The videotape comes at a bad time for the Bush administration for
two reasons.
One, the administration is seeking to scuttle or at least blunt
legislation before Congress that would ban the use of torture by
U.S. troops--on the grounds that this would "tie the hands of
interrogators." Supporters of the legislation now have fresh
ammunition to make the case that guidelines are necessary, if for no
other reason than to give the impression that the U.S. cares about
human rights.
And two, the Bush administration is struggling to maintain its
assertion that the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are on
track.
Even before this video came to light, news from Afghanistan suggests
the opposite is true. During 2005, for example, 86 U.S. soldiers
were killed in Afghanistan--compared to 55 killed between the
beginning of the U.S. operation to oust the Taliban in October 2001
and the end of 2002.
The illicit drug trade--largely ended under the Taliban--has
flourished under the U.S. occupation, with opium production now
accounting for 60 percent of the economy, by one estimate.
The massive scale of the drug trade is both an embarrassment for the
administration, as well as a strategic dilemma. "You can't have a
nation-building policy on the one hand and a policy to kill off a
major sector of the economy on the other," said Afghanistan expert
Barnett Rubin. "There is no sign of a comprehensive development
strategy...to build an economy that is legal," Rubin added.
During the last four years, the U.S. has spent $5 billion--roughly
equal to Afghanistan's annual gross domestic product--to prop up the
Karzai government, but to little effect.
Karzai won re-election last October by appealing to voters' fears of
the warlords who now control huge swaths of the country, but after
he was back in office, he brought several of the most ruthless
warlords into his cabinet. Then, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan
Zalmay Khalilzad endorsed the decision, saying six months ago that
the "decision to give a role to...regional strongmen is a wise
policy."
For the people of Afghanistan, fed up with U.S. atrocities and
support for regional warlords, there's growing talk of ejecting U.S.
troops--just as the former USSR's military was kicked out in 1989
after a decade of occupation. "Their future will be like the
Russians," said Zahidullah, a resident of Kabul.
Eric Ruder writes for the
Socialist Worker.
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