The War In Afghanistan:
47 Questions and Answers
By Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom
Continued...

26. But aren't civilian casualties being avoided in Afghanistan?

If the question is, could the U.S. bomb in a fashion to induce greater civilian casualties, of course the answer is yes, so that in that sense it is avoiding many possible casualties. And if the question is, is it good that the U.S. isn't causing more deaths by our actions, again the answer is yes. But the question arises, why cause as many as we are? Why aggravate the desperate food situation to the point of possible calamity? Why attack in a manner that disrupts all social life and, inevitably, hits many civilians with bomb impact? This is not going to diminish hatred of the U.S. nor the violence in the region, but increase both. There is no justification for all this other than the desires to propel a state of war as a policy that benefits U.S. elites. If the food disaster materializes at the levels feared by aid and UN agencies, the catastrophe will be without historical parallel for such a short engagement

See also: Chien: Civilian Toll (http://www.zmag.org/civiliantoll.htm)

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The first week's airdrops, we're told, averaged about 37,500 rations per day. One ration is 3 meals, or one person?day of food. There are between 3?7 million people at risk of starvation. Thus, in order to alleviate the danger, the rate of airdrops has to increase over the largest drops so far by a factor of between one and two hundred.

Bush pledged $324 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Each ration costs $4.25. Let us assume that there are only 3 million at risk of starvation, that every ration will reach one of those people, and that every dollar of that $324 million is going to rations (and not to the planes, fuel, staff, medicine, or any other item associated with delivery). Under these fantastically generous assumptions, there will be enough food to feed these people for 25 days. The reality is much worse: millions are now fleeing the bombing, and will not sow their crops of winter wheat. Much of the dropped food will land in minefields and remote areas. Most of Bush's money will not be spent on food. And there are probably 7.5 million in danger of starving, not 3 million. But even in this scenario the money is insufficient to last for the winter. Also for comparison, $40 billion was appropriated for the war effort, and a single B-2 bomber costs $2.1 billion.

To first aggravate the starvation danger faced by roughly 7 million at risk people by creating internal bedlam and cutting off food transport and aid through closing borders and bombing, and to then drop food for about one out of every hundred of the at-risk people, assuming all these meals were even accessible as compared to being scattered across terrain littered with military mines, is not a serious approach to saving lives. Rather, as the U.S. policymakers and commentators have repeated ad nauseam, it is a public relations effort aimed to reduce opposition, and nothing more.

As Doctors Without Borders, one of the agencies that had been working in Afghanistan, put it, "What is needed is large scale convoys of basic foodstuffs.... Until yesterday the UN and aid agencies such as ourselves were still able to get some food convoys into Afghanistan. Due to the air strikes the UN have stopped all convoys, and we will find delivering aid also much more difficult." As for the U.S. airdrops, "Such action does not answer the needs of the Afghan people and is likely to undermine attempts to deliver substantial aid to the most vulnerable."

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We need to distinguish between privileges and basic rights. Being able to get to an airport just 25 minutes before your flight is a privilege, not a basic right. We should be more than willing to give up this privilege if it is necessary for security. But we should insist on an extremely high burden of proof before we're willing to scuttle fundamental rights. There are good reasons to think that the provisions of the anti-terrorism bill go far beyond what is necessary for security. For example, the definition of terrorism in the bill would cover domestic political organizations engaging in civil disobedience.

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Terrorist organizations have been able to finance their operations by laundering their money through banks. But cracking down on money laundering requires challenging the power of the banking industry and of the wealthy who use off shore banks to hide their assets something the politicians in thrall to the rich have been loathe to do. So U.S. officials have failed to use the legal tools they had to investigate terrorism's financial trail and have failed to request the new tools they needed. In May 2001, the U.S. blocked an effort by the OECD (the main industrial nations) to crack down on bank secrecy. (See Lucy Komisar, "U.S. Bank Laws Fund Terrorists," [AlterNet], 21 Sept. 2001, http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11556; Tim Weiner and David Cay Johnston, "Roadblocks Cited in Efforts to Trace bin Laden Money," NYT, 20 Sept. 2001.) U.S. officials consider Saudi officials especially uncooperative in freezing bin Laden's assets (NYT, 10 Oct. 2001). Ultimatums anyone?

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The Northern Alliance have in the past demonstrated a facility for barbarism only minimally less horrible than that of the Taliban. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who have been struggling for years for democracy and against fundamentalism, have warned against allowing the Northern Alliance to come to power.

This strategy of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" has been used before with disastrous results. This was the logic that led to U.S. and Western support for the Mujahideen, leading to the Taliban, and aid and support for Saddam Hussein, and so on. It is not hard to predict that support for the Northern Alliance will, in years ahead, lead to still more travail and horror for Afghanistan, for the region, and perhaps for the world beyond.

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An influential group of Pentagon officials and national security elites have been urging that the United States use this opportunity to take military action to depose Saddam Hussein. Hussein is a monster and many Iraqis would be thrilled to see him go. But going to war against him without the most compelling evidence of his responsibility for the September 11 attacks would lead to massive instability in the Muslim world -- with horrific human consequences. A recent meeting of Islamic nations did not condemn the U.S. bombing Afghanistan (thanks to the efforts of U.S. allies), but all agreed that any further military action would be utterly unacceptable. Whatever benefit the Iraqi people might obtain from the deposing of Hussein would likely be outweighed by the horrors of a war in Iraq and of holy wars from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The simplest way to help the people of Iraq would be to lift the economic sanctions that have caused such devastating hardship.

Despite their eagerness to link Saddam Hussein to September 11, Israeli, Jordanian, and U.S. intelligence have found no connection (NYT, 11 Oct. 2001). Though both Al Qaeda and Hussein hate the United States, Hussein is not an Islamicist, and Al Qaeda considers him an infidel.

At the moment it seems as if the State Department, with its strategy of just going after Afghanistan, at least for now, will prevail over Defense Department officials who want to go after Iraq. But the United States delivered a note to the Security Council saying that its self-defense measures might require it to attack other countries. (Apparently this sentence was added by the White House to the U.S. note without informing Secretary of State Colin Powell [NYT, 12 Oct. 2001].) Thus, we must await the result of the bureaucratic struggle within the Bush administration to see whether we'll go to war against Iraq. Is this a decision that Congress should have declined to get involved in? More crucially, is this a decision that should be up to the United States government rather than the United Nations?

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Does it make sense for some effort to be made to develop means of better predicting and interdicting terrorist attacks? Yes. Can one make a cogent argument that a large country needs some military expenditure to be in position to repel attacks, and to even engage in war should that horrible eventuality come to pass? Yes, though many will reasonably disagree. But does the U.S. need to spend not only $343 billion as in the year 2000, which was 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined (with Russia spending less than one-sixth what the United States does, and Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spending in total $14.4 billion combined and Iran accounting for 52 percent of this total), but still more to accomplish such security? No, the rush to spend more on militarism has nothing whatever to do with security against terrorism and has everything to do with military profiteering.

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Such a system has nothing to do with protecting against terrorism. Such a system in fact destabilizes world prospects for peace by propelling a new arms race as well as a launch on warning mentality in other countries. The system is pursued by the U.S. government largely as a sop to high tech industry and profit making and should be opposed on those grounds, and due to the danger it places all humanity in.

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The U.S. government has been targeting foreign leaders for a long time, perhaps under an explicit waiver from the executive order, perhaps not. For example, the U.S. air force targeted not just Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1986 -- on the grounds that his barracks were command and control centers -- but (according to Seymour Hersh) even his family. Today, the U.S. is hitting the homes of Taliban leaders. So it is hard to imagine that Washington needs a freer hand. In situations short of war, a basic principle of our jurisprudence is that people should be brought to trial, not subjected to extra-judicial execution.

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We need to distinguish between two different kinds of situations. Consider first the sort of situation that even strong opponents of racial profiling agree would be appropriate police work: "Police receive a credible tip that a white man armed with a bomb is somewhere in an office building. They surround the building and then enter it. The police examine white men more closely than those who are non-white." (See Randall Kennedy, Race, Justice, and the Law, Vintage, 1997, pp. 141, 161.) In these kinds of emergency situations, it would be reasonable to scrutinize whites more closely (or blacks or Middle Easterners, depending on the situation). But this is very different from making the targeting of a particular ethnic group a routine part of police work. Doing so involves two real dangers: (1) It's not likely to be very effective. The suspected 20th hijacker, a native Moroccan, looks black, not Middle Eastern. And next time, Islamic terrorists might use an Asian-looking Indonesian or a white-looking Bosnian. Recall too the pregnant Irish woman in 1988 whose luggage contained a bomb, put there unbeknownst to her by her Palestinian boyfriend. (2) It's likely to undermine an important protection against terrorism, namely, the cooperation of the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. If these people are treated abusively, they are not likely to come forward with information needed by the police.

So what happens when a Middle Eastern man gets on a plane and the flight crew doesn't feel safe? In one notorious case, a Pakistani was removed from a Delta flight after the pilot said he wouldn't fly with the man on board. We can sympathize with the pilot's concern -- reporters have shown how easy it was even after September 11 to board a plane with knives and other weapons -- but his solution was totally unacceptable and discriminatory. The proper solution was for the pilot to say to Delta that security remains inadequate and demand that an armed air marshal be put on board. People's fears are real and legitimate. But we must try to address those fears in ways that do not scapegoat and abuse Arabs or Muslims or anybody else.
 

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