The Massacre of Musa Qala

The Massacre of Musa Qala

1. British 'success' under siege in Afghanistan

2. Reports document deepening social catastrophe in Afghanistan
3. Afghanistan: Aid being distributed to displaced families in
Musa Qala
4. Dec. 14 airpower summary air strike chart 2004-2007

"So amidst the din of warfare coverage,

the silences and omissions for
me are always the most significant,
the most troubling."

first photos: a small boy injured by
US/NATO bombs
Take a look at Nick Cornish’s series of photographs in The Times Online of some of the 6,000 UK/American/Afghan forces engaged in the recent assault on the town of Musa Qala, in Helmand province. They show their massive firepower: lines of armoured vehicles; men in full military gear dragging away bare-footed Taliban captives in ragged civilian clothes. An unnamed Taliban is lying sprawled out dead in a field.

Photographs in the press before the attacks on the “strategically significant town” showed rag-tag Taliban forces crammed in battered old trucks desperately clutching their small firearms. Against them, poised to attack, stood the full might of the most powerful nation on the globe: armoured vehicles, infantry, artillery and logistics backed up by “dozens of attack helicopters and ground attack aircraft”, as the Daily Telegraph reported.

How many Taliban “forces” were there defending the town? We will never know. According to the British military spokesman, Lt Col. Richard Eaton, just 200. other reports suggested 2,000. Whatever the figure, this was no “battle”. According to the headline in the Observer of 9 December 2007, “Fierce battles rages for Taliban stronghold”. Yet when the firepower of one side so overwhelms that of the other (missing the crucial cover from the air bombardment) is this not better described as a massacre, a form of hi-tech barbarism?

How many casualties did the Taliban suffer? Again, we will never know. Significantly Nick Meo reported in The Times of 11 December, after the Taliban had allegedly fled the town on motorcycles: “Fears were growing that there had been heavy civilian casualties.” Certainly, buried in all the reports was the news that 2007 had proved “the deadliest” in Afghanistan since the US invasion in 2001 with more than 6,200 people estimated to have been killed. All we know, then, is that the many many dead Afghans will remain uncounted, unnamed.

So amidst the din of warfare coverage, the silences and omissions for me are always the most significant, the most troubling.

Horror is mentioned in the coverage but the focus is on the Taliban. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, alleged that an unnamed 15-year-old boy had been burned to death on a stove and the town had to be seized from the Taliban to halt such atrocities. “Taliban horror had to end” is the headline in the Mirror of 11 December 2007. There is no such outrage over “our” atrocities.

In contrast to the silence surrounding the dead Afghans, British casualties are named and celebrated. Sergeant Lee Johnson, of the 2nd Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, died on 7 December. His commanding officer describes him as “a huge personality and supreme soldier”.

And in the face of the unspeakable horrors, the military mumble the absurdities of massacrespeak. According to Lt Col Eaton, quoted in the Guardian of 10 December 2007: “It is like a game of chess and we are moving the right pieces into the right places so they are where we want them to be when we need them.”

In this way the hi-tech barbarism of the assault on Musa Qala is domesticated and trivialised, reduced to the level of a game of chess in a strange jangle of words.

* * *
Nearly 120 years ago this month, his ancestors fought the 7th Cavalry
at the infamous battle of Wounded Knee
May the eagle take you on your journey
Corporal Tanner J. O’Leary

* * *
U.S. troops recuperating from battle for Musa Qala

UK officer calls for US special forces to quit Afghan hotspot

August 12, 2007

"Sir,
Recently I read an article(Im having difficulty finding it again to post) about a change in mindset in US Special Forces while Rumsfeld was the boss. The gist of the article was that during Rumsfeld's tenure as Sec Def Special Forces started to place emphasis on the direct action role to the detriment of their other traditional roles. Could this be a result of that change? The comment made by one British Officer that, "sensitivity is not their strong suit" is especially disturbing. As Special Forces sensitivity should be exactly their strong suit." HKDan

UK officer calls for US special forces to quit Afghan hotspot
High civilian toll as teams rely on air strikes to provide cover
Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday August 10, 2007

Twelve-man teams of US special forces had been criticised for relying on air strikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters and their supporters.

British officers say US special forces are cavalier in their approach
to the civilian population. The tensions were illustrated by an
incident the Guardian witnessed in Sangin earlier this summer.

A British patrol was abandoned by its American special forces escort
in the town for several hours. Stranded in central Sangin, British
officers tried to establish radio contact with the Americans, who had
disappeared without warning, and swore impatiently when they could
not.

The British criticisms intensified after the Americans led them to
their proposed site for a new Afghan patrol base in the town - beside
a graveyard and a religious shrine. "Sensitivity is not their strong
suit," said one British officer.

Most British soldiers work well with regular American troops and some
speak admiringly of them. But US special forces units are a different
matter.

They operate under a different chain of command, with their own rules
on everything from dress code to the use of weapons. Whereas the
British troops operate under Nato command, the American special forces
are commanded from the US-led coalition in Bagram airbase outside
Kabul. That means the Americans can call on a wider range of
airstrikes, and also that British officers have little control over
which munitions are dropped in populated areas. .

EXCERPTS:
"The American troops’ training, in contrast, seemed ad hoc, usually carried out by each unit on its own, rather than by a dedicated training staff. And it involved very few civilians, despite the crucial humanitarian and political aspects of the mission here." SARAH CHAYES

"I was trained and trained well to sacrifice myself to war and I was also training others to make the same sacrifice. But what is it all for? Money for the power elite? A chance to prove my manhood? No, in the end all you get if you kill someone is a dead human being, or you are dead. That is all there is. There is no glory. There is no honor." Sgt. Kevin Benderman

Sniper

My Space: *"Yes . . . F---ING Yes!!!" said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. "I LOVE MY JOB, it takes
everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad
about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around
this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . .
and some that don't."* KingOf*Hearts. Deryk Schlessinger is the son of Laura Schlessinger who writes a bi-weekly column for the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Movie: KingOf*Hearts

AfghanAlbum

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EXTREME EXHAUSTION

Afghanistan....they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety

How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad

By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: August 12, 2007

Two years after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph — a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

Losing the Advantage
Misjudgments in Iraq’s Shadow
Reach of War

Terrorism on the Rise

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”

“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.”



But that skepticism had never taken hold in Washington. Since the 2001 war, American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports.

The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”