(Not) Counting Afghanistan's Dead

[ full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,648784,00.html ]

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-year-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....

[ full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,648784,00.html ]