THESE KILLINGS WILL ONLY STRENGTHEN THE TALIBAN
by Patrick Cockburn

The Independent
May 16, 2009
UK

It is astonishing to discover that the same small American unit, the
US Marine Corps’ Special Operations or MarSOC, has been responsible for
all three of the worst incidents in Afghanistan in which civilians have
been killed. Its members refer to themselves as "Taskforce Violence"
and the Marines’ own newspaper scathingly refers to the unit as
"cowboys".

Related articles The US military commanders in Afghanistan must have
known about MarSOC’s reputation for disregarding the loss of life among
Afghan civilians, yet for 10 days, they have flatly denied claims by
villagers in the western Afghan province of Farah that more than 100
of their neighbours had been slaughtered by US air strikes.

Everything the US military has said about the air strikes on the three
villages in Bala Boluk district on the evening of 4 May should be
treated with suspicion – most probably hastily-concocted lies aimed
at providing a cover story to conceal what really happened. Official
mendacity of these proportions is comparable to anything that happened
in Vietnam.

The US military now seem to have dropped their previous suggestion
that Taliban gunmen had run through the village streets lobbing
grenades into houses because villagers had failed to give them a cut
of the profits from the opium crop. No evidence was produced for this
unlikely tale. Witnesses saw no signs of grenade blasts or machine
gun fire. A US official source in Washington eventually admitted that
the claim was "thinly sourced".

Survivors from Gerani, Gangabad and Khoujaha villages say that there
had been fighting nearby but the Taliban had long withdrawn when US
aircraft attacked. This was not a few errant sticks of bombs but a
prolonged bombardment. It had a devastating effect on the mud-brick
houses and photographs of the dead show that their bodies were quite
literally torn apart by the blasts. This makes it difficult to be
precise about the Afghan Rights Monitor, after extensive interviewing,
says that at least 117 civilians were killed, including 26 women and
61 children.

The US military has now fallen back on the tired old justification
that the enemy was using civilians as human shields. This certainly
is not satisfying infuriated Afghans from demonstrating students
at Kabul university all the way to President Hamid Karzai. Whatever
MarSOC troops thought they were doing in Bala Boluk, the killing of
so many civilians will do nothing but strengthen the Taliban.

2009 The Independent Middle East correspondent for the British
newspaper The Independent, Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha
Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on his years covering the
war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was
a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.