Two articles in the Guardian UK address the issue of civilians killed in Afghanistan, and the gate keepers of the final totals.


Bombing blunders and misleading information on the ground keep the civilian toll rising in Afghanistan. In the first of a three-part investigation Guardian writers ask: How many innocent people are dying?

Ian Traynor in Kabul
Tuesday February 12, 2002
The Guardian

Fardin's world caved in on a bright Sunday morning last October when an American bomb came through the roof of the room where he was sleeping. He was spared physically. But the six- ear-old has not uttered a word nor taken a step since.

At a quarter to eight on the morning of October 21, exactly two weeks after central command in Florida started bombing the Taliban into submission and al-Qaida into flight, an F-18 airplane circling overhead dropped its ordnance on the north Kabul hovel that Fardin's and three other families shared.

The little girl next door lost both her eyes. Sardar Muhammad, 22, leapt out of bed in his room at the bottom of the gar den and ran outside to watch the airshow. A piece of shrapnel in the head killed him instantly.

The neighbour, Muhammad Sarwar, 50, lost his wife Aziza and seven other family members. "Maybe he wasn't a very good pilot," he murmurs. "We like the Americans."

The bomb, in a poor and thickly populated district on the capital's northern fringe, turned the two affected houses into a miniature earthquake zone of rubble, craters, and scattered household junk - a shredded patchwork quilt here, bits of a red and black carpet there, piles of smashed crockery and old cooking pots. The precision of the strike left the little disaster zone enclosed behind the walls of the two houses.

The roof collapsed on the first floor where Fardin was asleep. He was left speechless by the trauma and so paralysed by fear that he has not walked since.

On the same autumn day that the Americans killed nine Afghan civilians here, nine children perished to the south when the tractor and trailer in which they were travelling was bombed in Uruzgan province. And to the west in Herat dozens of civilians died when a 1,000lb cluster pod spilt its 202 yellow pea bomblets across a mosque and hospital complex.

They were all innocent victims of Washington's war on terror, part of the steadily mounting toll of civilian casualties still being inflicted on Afghanistan despite the collapse of the Taliban and the dispersal of Osama bin Laden's Islamist international. They are what have become known as "collateral damage", like "ethnic cleansing" a chilling and cliched euphemism of the past 10 years. The Afghans are wearily familiar with death - 10 years of war against the Russians, civil war between the mojahedin in the early 1990s, the Taliban's bloody conquest and consolidation of power.

In a country where death is so ubiquitous, killing a habit, and war has been a constant for an entire generation, few are bothering to count the casualties mounting from more than four months of US action. For the Pentagon, the Afghan war has been a triumph, the perfection of hi-tech combat techniques practised 10 years ago in the Gulf war and honed in the Kosovo campaign of 1999. The rapid victory at a minimal cost to American lives has helped to lay the ghost of Vietnam.

But as the international focus shifts from war to a fragile peace and to the rebuilding of post-Taliban Afghanistan, the war still raises several unsettling questions about the price of the Pax Americana. The first and most obvious question in this unfinished war is how many civilians have died. There is no easy answer. Somehow in the middle of America's hi-tech, $1bn a month bombing blizzard, the simple matter of keeping a tally of civilian casualties has been overlooked.

'Please don't ask'

There are no official US figures, and nor have the dozens of non-governmental charities now operating in the country done any independent research. "Undoubtedly there have been civilian casualties," says a well-informed Afghan professional working for an NGO mainly funded by the US government.

"No one is doing a real assessment of that. It gets very political. Please don't ask me about that."

"There's collateral damage in every conflict, but I don't feel comfortable talking about it," echoed a UN official in Kabul.

Despite the manipulation of casualty figures for propaganda purposes by both pro-war apologists and anti-war activists, it is already clear that the number of civilian dead from the bombing vastly exceeds the estimated 500 killed by US air strikes during the 78-day Kosovo war, and may also be higher than the 3,200 Iraqi civilians believed killed during the Gulf war.

"A lot of civilians are clearly being killed or injured. It's definitely in the four figures," says a UN source.

The charity Mdecins Sans Frontires says: "MSF increasingly sees evidence of an unacceptably high number of Afghan civilian casualties from the military operations."

A senior MSF worker, who has been in Afghanistan for five years, estimates the number of civilian dead at between 2,000 and 3,000, based on reports from hospitals and field workers around the country.

Some analysts say more than 60 Afghan civilians are being killed daily on average since the bombing began on October 7. A European demining expert in Kabul who works closely with the Pentagon reckons that up to 8,000 civilians have been killed.

The September 11 toll in the US is now put at just under 3,000 dead. In a new study, Carl Conetta of the Commonwealth Institute estimates that up to 1,300 civilians have been killed by US bombs and at least 3,000 other Afghans are dead because the American campaign worsened the humanitarian emergency.

Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire puts the number of civilian casualties at at least 4,000. Prof Herold, a leftwing anti-war activist, is one of the few seeking to establish the death toll, tabulating it daily from media reports. In his words, he wants "to put the record straight" and claims his is a "comprehensive accounting" even though it is being conducted from a computer terminal in America, and not from first-hand reporting inside Afghanistan.

He calculates that 3,742 civilians had died by December 3. Scores more have died since. Sceptics argue that his figures are exaggerated. He insists they are conservative.

"It's a good first go," says Sam Zarifi of Human Rights Watch in New York, which had two researchers on the Pakistani-Afghan border for 11 weeks trying to get a picture of the toll. It has a data base of 300 strikes it wants to investigate for civilian casualties.

What is certain is that Prof Herold's work is incomplete. Some of the strikes he records duplicate one another, others are fictional. For example, he has up to 19 women dying in a Kabul maternity ward around October 8 when a bomb fell on or near the Wazir Akbar Khan hospital.

Isatullah, the head nurse at the hospital's emergency department, is one of the few people in Kabul keeping a list of the dead from the bombing. He produces six A4 pages listing the names of 115 male bomb victims. Forty of them died. There is another list of 37 women, 10 of whom died.

"The Taliban ordered me to make the list for propaganda against America. I had to make the list. They were the bosses," he explains. "But there was no force, and there were no lies on the list."

But no bomb hit the hospital, and there have been no maternity ward casualties. But if the American professor is recording non-existent casualties, the obverse also applies since so many deaths have not been reported in the international media on which his data depends.

"You can probably double Herold's figure because so much goes unreported here," the demining expert says. "Most Muslims are buried within six hours of death. There's no need to report births or deaths here and the hospitals do not have anything on the dead."

Not included in the professor's statistics, for example, because it has not been reported until now, is the attack on the village of Moshkhil in the south-eastern province of Paktika. Three air strikes within 12 hours on December 5 and 6 left 16 people dead. The villagers insist there were no Taliban in the vicinity and no military targets.

On the afternoon of December 5, recounts a man from the village who gives his name as Rashid, a US plane bombed two cars, killing two brothers and a sister. An hour later an armed stranger on a motorbike sped through Moshkhil asking the locals where "the guests" [meaning Taliban or al-Qaida] were staying. There were no guests, he was told. Within an hour another US plane bombed an empty car. Then at half past three the next morning the planes returned, bombing a mosque and destroying it as well as seven adjacent houses. Thirteen people died as they slept.

"Why did they bomb my village?" asks Rashid, who lost two relatives. "It could not have been stray bombs since they bombed three times. It must have been a blunder."

Blunders

There have inevitably been plenty of "blunders", from the striking of Red Cross warehouses to the killing of anti-Taliban fighters, caused by stray bombs, mistakes and bad or deliberately skewed intelligence. The Pentagon factors in a 10% failure rate for the 11,315 bombs it had dropped by December 5 and only a 6% failure rate for the controversial cluster bombs, although demining experts now dealing with the fallout put the cluster failure rate at up to 22%.

Most civilians have died where the fighting and the bombing have been the most intense - the November battle for the Taliban's last northern stronghold of Kunduz, the early December onslaught on the Tora Bora caves complex south of the eastern town of Jalalabad, the campaign to capture the cradle of the Taliban, Kandahar in the south.

There was barely a fight for Kabul. The Northern Alliance lost four men taking the capital. But the concentration of military targets in and around the city means that an estimated 100 civilians died in the bombing.

Most of those killed are as a result of "mistakes" during high-altitude bombing, the central feature of modern American war-making, which wreaks havoc on the ground but keeps US servicemen in a relatively risk-free environment in the skies.

But in the past few weeks, there has been increasing evidence of how the Americans are also being drawn in on the ground, committing errors after being lured into local feuds.

In recent days CIA agents have been visiting a southern village doling out millions of dollars in compensation to relatives of men killed by US special forces who stormed Uruzgan village, guns blazing, in the hours of darkness on January 24. The Americans got the wrong men.

The bodies of two men were found shot dead with their hands tied behind their backs with plastic tape, suggesting that they had been bound and then executed. Read Admiral John Stufflebeem of the US joint chiefs of staff told journalists in Washington that the two men could have been handcuffed by local Afghans.

"That explains what we're talking about in terms of those bound and found dead," he said.

But western officials in Kabul said that in a night raid on another southern village last month near the town of Gardez, US special forces used the tape to bind local women. In both cases, houses or buildings were torched. In both cases, locals and western sources insist, the increasingly desperate hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban remnants targeted anti-Taliban forces loyal to the interim government of Hamid Karzai.

In Uruzgan village, the charred corpses of a dozen men were found among at least 21 dead. In the village near Gardez, western sources say, the Americans tied up the women and then took hair samples, apparently for DNA analysis to ascertain whether they might have been part of Bin Laden's extended family.

"This sort of thing seems to be quite common now. There's so much resentment now in the south-east," a source says.

The man the Americans were looking for was a member of the local anti-Taliban council and had been cooperating with the new government in Kabul. "But he was quarrelling with someone who has the ear of the Americans," the source says.

The raids suggest that the special forces shoot first and ask questions later. In both villages there were no US deaths although one American sustained a foot injury.

The botched operations may be explained by poor US intelligence. They must also partly be caused by the "bodybag syndrome" - the fear of US casualties which is forcing American forces into dependence on unsavoury characters on the ground who are tricking them into fighting their feuds for them.

The ground "errors" were preceded by several other strikes in which Afghan warlords coaxed the Americans into bombing their rivals, claiming that the targets were hostile forces. The International Committee of the Red Cross is investigating the deaths of at least 52 civilians on December 29 at Qalaye Niazi, south-east of Kabul, when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers struck after a regional warlord told the Americans it was a Taliban stronghold. It was not. At least 25 children were killed, according to the UN.

There have been several such attacks in the same region. The Moshkhil villagers think that the "blunder" that left 16 dead there followed a malicious tip-off from a former anti-Taliban village chief who wants his old job back.

Standing amid the rubble of the former frontline hill village of Isterghich, north of Kabul, Zakriyah, 38, brags about ordering the US strike on his native village that left four women dead. It was a Taliban-held village. Zakriyah was away on the other side of the lines. "I passed on all the information. The Americans bombed. They missed the Taliban and hit next door."

The Taliban are gone. Zakriyah is now back as the village chief, the four women sacrificed on the altar of his ambition.

A similar trend appears to be occurring at the broader political level, with the Northern Alliance officials running Kabul and dominating the interim government taking advantage of the current atmosphere to get the Americans to wipe out their perceived foes in the south.

In the post-Taliban phase of the war, the bombing has been concentrated for the past month on the south and south-eastern areas by the Pakistani border where support for the Taliban was strong. General Basir Salangi, a former Northern Alliance commander who is now Kabul's security chief, says the Americans should carry on bombing the Pashtun south: "If they're not al-Qaida, they're the people who supported al-Qaida. They should be bombed just to frighten them."

There is little doubt the war in Afghanistan has been a triumph of American might. But out of sight and out of mind, day after day, in dribs and drabs, a lot of ordinary people are dying in a war that sees the most advanced fighting machine ever assembled doing its killing in one of the most backward societies on earth.

The results: just two Americans killed by hostile fire to set against thousands of dead Afghan non-combatants. Is this civilian death toll warranted?

The Pentagon responds with age-old axioms about the inevitable and unfortunate collateral of war. "This has been the most accurate war ever fought in this nation's history," the campaign commander, General Tommy Franks, insisted in Washington last week.

That conclusion is contested by Carl Conetta of the Commonwealth Institute, who calculates that the so-called smartbombs and high-precision strikes have been a lot less accurate in Afghanistan than they were two years ago in Yugoslavia.

"Despite the adulation of Operation Enduring Freedom as a 'finely tuned' or 'bulls-eye' war, the campaign failed to set a new standard for precision in one important respect: the rate of civilians killed per bomb dropped," he says.

"In fact, this rate was far higher in the Afghanistan conflict - perhaps four times higher - than in the 1999 Balkans war."

----------

Guardian reveals botched raids on anti-Taliban forces

Ian Traynor in Kabul and Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday February 12, 2002
The Guardian

The Pentagon yesterday came under the most intense questioning over civilian casualties since the start of the Afghan war, after allegations that US special forces executed and beat men wrongly suspected of being Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, and tied up their women relatives.

On at least two occasions in the past month, the Guardian has also established, the US raids were botched and anti-Taliban forces were targeted as a result of bungled intelligence. According to western officials in Kabul, village women were tied up by the Americans and hair samples taken for DNA analysis to try to establish links with Osama bin Laden. In village raids last month south of Kabul, the homes of mistaken Taliban suspects were torched, the officials said.

The revelations add to the pressure on the Pentagon resulting from the mounting toll of civilian or innocent dead in Afghanistan from the US campaign in the air and on the ground. A Guardian investigation into the level of civilian casualties has found that thousands of civilians have died since the US launched its bombardment on October 7.

While the precise figure remains unclear, experts and informed sources put the total deaths of innocents at between 2,000 and 8,000. "It is definitely in the four figures," said a UN source in Kabul.

Recent blunders include:

A night raid by US special forces in early January on a village outside Gardez, south-east of Kabul. The Americans were searching for a local leader thought to be a prominent Taliban. Western sources say he was an anti-Taliban supporter of the interim government in Kabul. His wife and other women were bound with plastic handcuffs and hair samples were taken from them for DNA analysis, the sources say.

A US bombing raid on the village of Qalaye Niazi, also outside Gardez, on December 29, killed at least 52 civilians, including 25 children, according to the UN. The International Committee for the Red Cross has instituted an investigation, the only inquiry it has ordered during the war.

US military officials, who had routinely rejected earlier accounts of civilian casualties as enemy propaganda, were forced back on the defensive at a Pentagon press conference yesterday at which every question focused on targeting errors and the treatment of captives. The press grilling came on a day of potentially embarrassing revelations that cast doubt on the accuracy of intelligence used to trigger US attacks and the reliability of the Pentagon press machine.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ordered an inquiry into a special forces raid on Uruzgan, central Afghanistan, on January 24, in which 21 local men were killed and 27 taken prisoner. Two of the victims were found shot dead with their hands bound behind their backs, fuelling suspicion that they were handcuffed and then executed.

The Pentagon first described it as a successful strike on an al-Qaida compound, then suggested the targets were Taliban fighters before being forced to release them last week when it emerged they were locals who had fought alongside US forces against the Taliban.

An alleged al-Qaida weapons cache supposedly uncovered in the raid turned out to be a pile of weapons confiscated weeks earlier from Taliban fighters and locked up. The Pentagon's embarrassment deepened further yesterday when the newly released captives told US newspapers they had been badly beaten while in detention.

A Pentagon spokesman last week claimed the two victims found with their hands bound behind their backs might have been tied up by Afghan forces operating alongside US soldiers. But a survivor of the raid told the Los Angeles Times that he had seen his cousin lying face down in the dirt being handcuffed by American soldiers. He later found his corpse with gunshots in the neck, chest, and stomach.

In the face of a barrage of questions yesterday, the Pentagon press team, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem and Victoria Clarke, refused to acknowledge the US military had made a mistake, saying the investigation was still under way. But the CIA is reported to have begun distributing compensation of about $1,000 (700) to the bereaved relatives, in what appeared to be the clearest admission so far that something had gone badly wrong.

I trust your aim here is NOT to replicate an online newspaper :confused:


Lats...

Would have been nicer if you had included links rather than posting all of that. =)

Just a thought for next time.

Interesting article. However, in war, civilian deaths is a fact of life. I know that might seem cold, but it's the truth. It's unfortunate, but that's war.

what im about to say is prolly gonna get me flamed, but im just being honest ok.
i know i should care about this, but im only human and to be honest my feeling is a strong case of tell it too the hand.
as a nation they harboured people who think its all good n proper to fly commercial passenger jets into croweded office buildings in the middle of densely populated metropolitan areas.
they didnt remove the people in power who let this happen. they havent turned him in.
now i dont agree with innocent people dieing. i know its wrong. but i cant help not feeling sorry inthis case. i know people may find this odd if not offensive and conflicted. just how i feel. this may change in time, and im most likely blaming the wrong people. but you gotta allow for people to be miffed in situations like this.

Originally posted by richy
what im about to say is prolly gonna get me flamed, but im just being honest ok.
i know i should care about this, but im only human and to be honest my feeling is a strong case of tell it too the hand.
as a nation they harboured people who think its all good n proper to fly commercial passenger jets into croweded office buildings in the middle of densely populated metropolitan areas.
they didnt remove the people in power who let this happen. they havent turned him in.
now i dont agree with innocent people dieing. i know its wrong. but i cant help not feeling sorry inthis case. i know people may find this odd if not offensive and conflicted. just how i feel. this may change in time, and im most likely blaming the wrong people. but you gotta allow for people to be miffed in situations like this.
Oh-Well :rolleyes:

my thoughts are still with the vicitims of sept 11th. if the country had handed over those responsible when presented with the facts then they wouldnt be in this situation.
war is war im afraid, people die, sometimes the wrong people. this doesnt make it right but you cant expect sympathy from people whose allegances lie elsewhere.

I really didn't want to respond to this thread due to it's nature, but I cannot help but vent my feelings when I hear something like this...

Sorry no sympathy from me, unlike terrorists, our intention is not to kill innocent civilians, our intention is to rid the world of those who seek harm upon our innocent civilians. Our military does not intend for our bombs and missles to land on innocents, like Bush said, "i'm not gonna use a $10 million bomb on a $10 dollar tent". War is war, is it right, no and yes there are casulties of innocents, but if you wanna harbour COWARDS like those who choice to attack us, then so be it, but just know that we are coming after you. If you wanna complain about it, try complaining to the thousands of wives, mothers, husbands, children and friends of those who were lost in Sept. 11th, see how much sympathy you get from them...

richy, USA supported and funded and allowed bin-laden as a terrorist to reach this position. does this mean thousands of american citizens need to die now because of this, or does it make it okay?

If you are saying in war like in war, it goes both ways. For the extreme muslims the americans violate much more values than the americans see the terrorists as violating.
Just food for thought.

and no, I dont support terrorism and I'm in a much worse position here than any of you (I'm from Israel)

the only point i was making was that a lot of people dont feel for them because of the situation. im not condoning either the us reaction or the terrorists, or the cowards that let them in power and sheltered the terrorists. i was merely explaining that whilst alot of people deep down may know that its wrong, they simply dont feel it because they are too taken by grief and empathy for the thousands that died and the hundreds of thousands that were directly affected. how many children didnt have their mother or father come home to them.how many wifes and husbands now have to live without the love of their life. on a more superficial level how many jobs were lost. the economic damage alone was beyond counting. im fairly certain that any casualties caused by stray bombs were just that, accidents. and accidents unfortunately happen, they shouldnt, and they are caused through laze or ignorance by morons. and yes it truly is a shame that innocents should loose their lives.
but just dont expect much sympathy in the near future. questions will be asked and people will be brought to account.

richy, USA supported and funded and allowed bin-laden as a terrorist to reach this position. does this mean thousands of american citizens need to die now because of this, or does it make it okay?

That was nearly 15 years ago when the soviet union was attempting to invade many middle eastern countries. If it wasn't for the United States and Britain funding, training and supplying them, then the middle east would most likely be in extreme poverty seeing as the Soviet Union used Communism and as we can see from Cuba, and when the Soviet Union was around, it does not work. And it is not like 9/11 was the only attack Bin Ladan is responisble for; Remember the embassy bombing back in '98, or the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, or even the first time he tried to bomb the World Trade Centers back in 1992. So, yes it is sad that many afgan civilians are being killed, but this guy needs to be taken out, and soon. If not, who knows what he could do next.

Originally posted by inogenius


That was nearly 15 years ago when the soviet union was attempting to invade many middle eastern countries. If it wasn't for the United States and Britain funding, training and supplying them, then the middle east would most likely be in extreme poverty seeing as the Soviet Union used Communism and as we can see from Cuba, and when the Soviet Union was around, it does not work. And it is not like 9/11 was the only attack Bin Ladan is responisble for; Remember the embassy bombing back in '98, or the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, or even the first time he tried to bomb the World Trade Centers back in 1992. So, yes it is sad that many afgan civilians are being killed, but this guy needs to be taken out, and soon. If not, who knows what he could do next.

BS!!!!
That happend also in the Balcan war, Bin-Laden was financed by USA to fight with the Albanese against Yugoslavs.
Do not offend, but do not repeat everything that you hear.
Try to read more and get your own posture.

BTW, do you remeber when USA bombed Lebanon? 18.000 civilians died in 1 day, Ohh, don't you remember? probably you didn't saw it in CNN. I wonder why :rolleyes:

So to take down one terrorist it is okay to kill thousands of innocent civilians?
If bin laden was in france hiding somewhere would you bomb all of france?

Jedito, could you provide me with a link to more information on the Lebanon bombing?

IceBlaze, I was not saying it was okay for anyone to kill thousands of innocent civilians. However I feel that we cannot let Bin Laden get away with this. If we do, who knows what he could do next. Say for example if he got a hold of mass destruction who knows what he could do with them. I'd imagine the US would be a prime target, but I'm sure he'd also go after Australia, Canada, the UK, France, and the one other country (I want to say Belgium, but I know that is not it) seeing as they all have had troops over there helping out with war on terrorism. As I said before, it's sad to see innocent civilians die, but unfortunately it is part of war.

That was in 1983, but I'll try to found some information anyway.
As I said, you didn't saw it in CNN, probably it will be hard to find.

BTW, I live in Argentina, and 30.000 civilians died here due a dictatorship imposed by USA.

This is something that I wrote awhile ago.
All this are facts, you can search it or belieave that are lie, that is your problem.


Any act of terrorism is deplorable, without concerning its magnitude and the amount of victims who have perished or suffered in them.
But lamentably, some people think that to put under the slavery groups or ethnoses it is the solution, to impose puppet governments in countries with the purpose of delaying the " advance of opposite ideologies to their economic interests " in their hemisphere or in another one he is so " terrorist " as the one of yesterday.
The attack to the WTC of NY is completely inadmissible and I believe that that nobody can feel proud or with joy by similar massacre, but now the North Americans, in their own territory, have suffered what they goverment caused in diverse countries: in Iran Shah de Persia put under during decades his town with the aid of the USA; Saddam Hussein " was invented " to stop the Islamic revolution in Iran; talibanes was armed by the USA to expel to the URSS of Afghanistan; Fidel Castro went an answer to the dictatorship of Batiste, maintained by the USA, that he had sunk in the misery to the Cuban town whereas the Mafia and the High Society of the USA enjoyed the goodness of the island; military governments in Central America and South America during the decade of ' 70 and ' 80 were fomented, helped and " armed " by the USA, only remember to Somoza in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, Pinochet in Chile, Videla and the military juntas in Argentina, Stroessner in Paraguay, Noriega in Panama. How many Latin American died in conflicts created by the company and the government of the USA with the purpose of imposing their economic interests and selling arms to fight with our neighboring countries? Hundreds of thousands. How many people died and die by the blockade to Iraq? Thousands. How much people died in Dominican Republic in the ' 65 when she was invaded by the USA? How much people died in Panama? Obvious, all these conflicts and/or governments count on the complicity of " favored " groups within the country. This can be naif but if much of the money that uses to design and to develop arms were used in improving the quality of life in many of the regions in where there is conflicts, diseases and hunger; if that money were used to establish a dialogue and real approach, the history of Latin America and the Middle East would be different. The one of is yesterday a demonstration that the company, like the pathetic Latin American agencies of intelligence, only serve to create conflicts instead of preventing them.

Bin-Laden COWARDLY attacked the United States, it's people, and it's way of life. As inogenius stated previously it's not the first time either.

We finally took a stand and decided that his time is up, time for him to be brought to justice, or even better be killed.

You ask if we would bomb France if Bin-Laden were hiding there, depends, we asked the Taliban to turn him over to us several times, we threatened with force and they still wouldn't budge. So we found no other to bring this man to justice but to go after him and those who were guarding him.

Like I stated earlier, we are not intending to kill thousands of Afgans, we are intending to route him and his associates out.

You wanna blame someone for the death of the Afgans?? Blame Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, blame them for being cowards and running and hiding.

Oh no, I wasn't trying to say that you are lying, I searched Yahoo, but I was unable to find anything on it. All I found was some information on a terrorist bombing of the marine barracks.

To be honest, I can't found it now.
Anyway that's not the only shameful attack to civilians, or do you forgot Vietnam? or the attack to bagdad?

The attacks on baghdad were out of protection of it's neighbors. If we're discussing when the US attacked in 1991, then it was because Iraq invaded Kuwait, unfortunately there were Civilian casualties. In 1998 when the US bombed Baghdad it was because Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons directors do their job, which was to check on Iraq's biological weapons. So the US bombed baghdad out of protection for it's for it's neighbors... I mean hey if someone is not letting do something, wouldn't you figure it was because they are hiding something? Unfortunately some missles went astray and civilians were killed. While I was touching up on my memory of the baghdad attacks, I found this interesting article too. It's about 4 months old, but I feel it is still a good read. http://216.26.163.62/2001/me_iraq_12_04.html
Here's another one that is a little newer... http://library.northernlight.com/FC20020303500000013.html

As for Vietnam are you talking about when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam in it's attempt to spread communism? If so you already saw my thoughts on communism. And yes, I do know about American Soldiers killed innocent civilians, however that was only due to the fact that North Vietnam had built (or dug) underground tunnels allowing for them to crawl from North Vietnam down to South Vietnam and then allowing them to hide in villages. When American soldiers would go through the towns, they would get shot up by what they thought were innocent civilians. And that is why many innocent civilians were killed, I don't agree with how some soldiers would line up the civilians and shoot them, I think that is just sick.

lol i see a forula here

Anything America does is justified, anything anyone else does is not.

Who cares, God knows whats in the Heart of All of Us, and God is the Most Just. :D

There is no Justice in our intlellect or our man made laws, only in the laws of god, will we find justice, prb not till we die either.

not everyone believes in god. and to be honest there isnt 100% conclusive proof either way. but thats a whole world of other arguments.and while people dont believe people wont be affected by that argument.
i dont agree that anything that american or anyone else for that matter is justified on the sole basis that they did it BUT there are generally sound justifications for actions.
by your argument shouldnt god also condem the afghanis for allowing the taliban to stay in power so long or for hiding bin lid for so long?

in the end , the only true proven judge is your self. if when you die you can look back at your life and say boy you done good, then thats what matters.

Originally posted by inogenius
The attacks on baghdad were out of protection of it's neighbors. If we're discussing when the US attacked in 1991, then it was because Iraq invaded Kuwait, unfortunately there were Civilian casualties. In 1998 when the US bombed Baghdad it was because Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons directors do their job, which was to check on Iraq's biological weapons. So the US bombed baghdad out of protection for it's for it's neighbors... I mean hey if someone is not letting do something, wouldn't you figure it was because they are hiding something? Unfortunately some missles went astray and civilians were killed. While I was touching up on my memory of the baghdad attacks, I found this interesting article too. It's about 4 months old, but I feel it is still a good read. http://216.26.163.62/2001/me_iraq_12_04.html
Here's another one that is a little newer... http://library.northernlight.com/FC20020303500000013.html

As for Vietnam are you talking about when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam in it's attempt to spread communism? If so you already saw my thoughts on communism. And yes, I do know about American Soldiers killed innocent civilians, however that was only due to the fact that North Vietnam had built (or dug) underground tunnels allowing for them to crawl from North Vietnam down to South Vietnam and then allowing them to hide in villages. When American soldiers would go through the towns, they would get shot up by what they thought were innocent civilians. And that is why many innocent civilians were killed, I don't agree with how some soldiers would line up the civilians and shoot them, I think that is just sick.

Ok, you said that the Bagdad bombing was an act of war, who told you that Talibans didn't declared the war agains USA along time ago?
Ahh. Diddums. I suppose I can't mention Korea, Somalia etc?
Do you guys ever apologise for anything?
Who call you to Vietnam? defending what? What changed the USA intervention in Vietnam?.
The Americans view of the world is not necessarily always as balanced as it might be!

It may be hard for you guys to admit, but it is impossible to be always right

Hey, I don't agree with everything America has done. I don't think it was necessary that we dropped the nuclear bomb in Japan, I believe was too harsh. Or I don't think it was necessary to force a trade embargo on Cuba, seeing as how much it effects the citizens there. There are many things that I don't think were necessary for the USA to do, however there were also many things that I think we did that have effected the world for the better.

as a side note the justification for the bomb was as a shock tactict i.e. kill X million in one go (or in this case 2 goes) and shock the country into submission or have to kill 20X million in a slow and costly for both sides altercation.

but back to the subject. the us isnt always right. and it probably doesnt always have someone elses best interests at heart but most of the time it tends to. i support the initative to locate and eliminate the terrorists and the us could do well to look to the irish connection when its finished with bin lid inc. its about time these groups got taken down hard, and i dont see that the people that harbour them should be treated much different. thats a comment on the overall not specific case.

but i would find it very hard to condem the us for its reaction to such a cowardly and unjust attack on so many innocent people. it could be argued that the pentagon is a valid target but the towers were certainly not. were talking about one nutter (with hitleresk aspirations) with a whole lotta money and a real chip on his shoulder taking a noble religion and twisting it and hiding behind it. the us shouldnt have employed him in the past. if they want something doing they should send in the seals or whoever but this headcase needs taking down and if people stand in the way they should be taken out too. and in war innocents die, thats just a fact and theres nothing i can do or say to change that. im sure the pilots who missed the target will be dealt with and im sure they will remember. theres certainly a difference tho between a bomb astray and a plane flown into civilians.

I don't know if this "Children Overboard" incident has made headlines outside Australia, but if you want to know about misinformation to the public, particularly during an election campaign, have a read of that one. Whether the misinformation was given deliberately or not, it either shows deception or mistake, and certainly speaks greatly for questioning what you hear. What gets me is that where so many people have difficulty believing politicians during an election campaign, they take every word as fact when conflict comes around. More disturbing is that perhaps they have no choice but to do so.

I just want to see facts. By the time its gone from primary source up the ranks of government, released to the media and displayed on my TV screen, I just can't reach any conclusion about whether what I'm hearing it true or twisted. And when I can't do that, I can't qualify my own opinion.

I do wonder, however, whether boosting security and defence, putting money back into the economy and investing in long term diplomatic solutions would have been the better alternative, rather than continuing the cycle of violence. By attacking, there's now revenge to deal with, and legacies passed on to the next generation. If you can stop fuelling the fire, you can let it die out. I think the current course of action will only work if it can wipe out terrorism completely so that it can't re-grow, and I think that's impossible.

Originally posted by Jedito
To be honest, I can't found it now.I think you may be slightly mistaken, and so searching for the wrong thing. For there to have been 18,000 killed in one day in Lebanon would have been very remarkable, and heavily reported. Maybe what you're thinking of is Israel's bombing of West Beirut in 1982 in conjuction with "Operation Peace in Galilee" after their ground invasion of that city was held off by PLO troops. I've read reports placing the deaths from that bombing campaign at between 14,000 and 18,000 -- it's said to have been similar in intensity to the Luftwaffe's attack on Rotterdam or the US bombing of Hanoi -- but that's for the entire campaign, not just one day.

The US shelled -- not bombed, but I suppose if 2000-pound projectiles are falling and exploding around you it doesn't really matter if they came from a plane or from a ship -- Druse villages in Lebanon in 1983 and later attached Syrian anti-aircraft emplacements in Lebanon, but casualties from those actions weren't on that large a scale.

Hmmm.. I was sure about that, until read your post JayC, now you make me doubt :)
Anyway, my point its that US not always act as they want to other countries act.
The bombing to Bagdad was coward act as the WTC attack was.

Yep, bombing military targets suspected of warehousing the development of weapons that are intended to wipe out entire populations is just like targeting civilians innocently going about their daily routine, working for a living. :rolleyes:

<edit>keeping further opinions to myself.</edit>

Supected by WHO?
Do you know that it was calculated that 10.000 civilians will been killed before the bombing to Bagdad?
Pretty civilized huh?
Do you call Self-preservation to oppress less powerfull countries?
Sorry, but I don't

You compare it to people living their lives in giant buildings that likely have no desire to any harm done to anyone.

Self-preservation of our livelyhood has nothing to do with smaller less powerful countries, the US helps many many countries all the time. Man, if you think the US is oppressing every smaller country then yer living in the dark. As one example, up until just this week we've let struggling countries DUMP their steel on our markets driving our entire steel industry to near bankruptcy. Now we'll charge them the same tariffs they charge us, that isn't oppression.

If you threaten my existance then I will do whatever it takes to keep you from succeeding in your agenda. That isn't wrong, it's natural.

Bah, I edited my previous message so I wouldn't get into it with anyone. I'll leave this as is and not continue down a path of simple back-and-forth bashing as it'll solve nothing. We just have to accept that we have our own beliefs and be happy with that.

Over and out.

Israel never killed 18,000 citizens in lebanon. Its completely false figures, and I have no idea where you got them from.

Originally posted by DizixCom
You compare it to people living their lives in giant buildings that likely have no desire to any harm done to anyone.

Self-preservation of our livelyhood has nothing to do with smaller less powerful countries, the US helps many many countries all the time. Man, if you think the US is oppressing every smaller country then yer living in the dark. As one example, up until just this week we've let struggling countries DUMP their steel on our markets driving our entire steel industry to near bankruptcy. Now we'll charge them the same tariffs they charge us, that isn't oppression.

If you threaten my existance then I will do whatever it takes to keep you from succeeding in your agenda. That isn't wrong, it's natural.

Bah, I edited my previous message so I wouldn't get into it with anyone. I'll leave this as is and not continue down a path of simple back-and-forth bashing as it'll solve nothing. We just have to accept that we have our own beliefs and be happy with that.

Over and out.
Who is talking about what you do in your country? What I'm concern its what you do to other countries in other territories.
Like kept Saddam Hussein in Irak to preserve the price of oil, leaving thousands of childrens die due the lack of medicine (block impossed by US).
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/chossudovsky/bombingbagdad.htm

I call oppress what US did in ALL south america in the 70's-80's.

I know that you're trying to defend your economy, but, come on? there is not limit to that? even if that mean kill thousand of people?
I'll out of this thread since now, I get really angry when I think about this, I have first hand experience with all this thing, I have relatives and friends dead due dictatorship impposed by US in Argentina to defend their economical interest.

I live in the USA, and I am proud of such a country, we have to remember how young this country is, and how well it has done for itself

but I have to agree with some people here, the US government and military are arrogant and keep sticking their noses where they don't' belong, this whole Bin Ladin **** happen because the US could not wait to interfere with the whole Iraq / Kuwait saga .. why ? .. because Kuwait had OIL .. if it was a poor country, they would not have looked twice ... let the UN deal with it.

The terribly demented Bin Laden (that as we all know got to where he is with US help), saw the deployment of US troops in his country as a sacrilege

anyway, we all know the rest .. my point is, sometimes you stick you nose too far out and it gets cut .. of course there is no justification for what happen in Sept 11, but sometimes I wish the US would spend more time dealing with issues in the US than trying to be a hero in another part of the world.

And don't anybody start with the whole Hitler crap, we (US) where the last ones to jump into that war.

Man, I cannot relate to what you must feel so it's hard to have a real objectional view on things. I wish things could be better everywhere, really I do.

Those steel tariffs haven't gone down too well in Australia, steel being a major export. People are even questioning why we send troops to help in US-led missions when this sort of thing happens in return.

I'm sure the vast majority of Australians don't share their views, but something worth mentioning nonetheless.

Originally posted by IceBlaZe
Israel never killed 18,000 citizens in lebanon. Its completely false figures, and I have no idea where you got them from. It's a commonly quoted figure for the number of deaths in Operation Peace in Galilee. I don't know whether it's accurate or not; I was only guessing that those reports may be what Jedito was referring to and misattributing.

A quick web search brings up some references:

From Amnesty International: http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/print/MDE150421996?OpenDocument

From the Parliamentary Human Rights Group (UK): http://www.webcom.com/hrin/parker/israel.html

From Z Magazine, an interview with Noam Chomsky: http://www.zmag.org/chomskygsf.htm

From RAND, a "think tank" based in the USA, in a report on the use of air power: http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1187/MR1187.chap2.pdf

The reference is on page 16 of the last report, a pdf file. Search for "18,000" in the other html pages.

Again, I don't know how many civilians were actually killed, but 18,000 is a number that has commonly been reported.

Regardless of the past you have to ask yourself one simple question: Was the action taken in the best interest of the people?

I think you'll find that all actions taken were taken only to better the world in general. If the USA didn't get involved with other peoples battles time to time I think most people would regret it deeply. This isn't to say the USA doesn't make mistakes because we no doubt do, however you aren't being truthful to yourselves if you don't think your country does as well.

On the specific discussion of civilian casualties it's unfortunate but you can't do much about it. A countless number of civilians from the USA would be willing to give their lives to rid the world of terrorists and I can only hope the Afghanistan civilians who were tragically killed see it the same way.

What do you want us to do? Protest against the war? I'm sorry but I think this is needed and if 50,000 innocent people have to die to save millions later I think we have to do it. Even if all 50,000 are USA citizens, I know myself and many others would give their lives for the better of future generations. If these terrorists even managed to obtain one nuclear bomb the civilian casualties don't seem quite so unreasonable. Horrible yes, but unfortunately it's the price paid for war.

No one likes to see innocent people die but if the USA and other countries can rid the world of terrorists now, the sacrifice of the few will greatly outweigh the sacrifice of the many later on.