by Brendan O'Neill

Breaking reports claim that a US bombing raid has killed or injured ‘more than 120 people’ at a wedding party in southern Afghanistan. According to a BBC report, ‘A witness from a village in Uruzgan told the BBC there had been an overnight air raid on a wedding party which left scores of people - many of them women – dead’.

The US military admits that ‘it dropped bombs in southern Afghanistan after an aerial patrol came under attack from artillery fire’, but claims that ‘one of the bombs was “errant”’, accidentally hitting the wedding party. ‘There are no Taliban or al-Qaeda or Arabs here. These people were all civilians, women and children’, says one of the survivors, asking ‘so why did they bomb us?’.

In fact, despite America’s claims of an ‘errant’ bomb, this isn’t the first time allied forces in Afghanistan have attacked wedding parties. On 29 December 2001, a wedding in the Qalai Niazi village in eastern Afghanistan was bombed, killing dozens of civilians. The UK Guardian claimed that the wedding guests had been ‘vapourised’. The UN says that 62 civilians were killed in the December wedding bombing, while others put the figure as high as 107.

On 10 January 2002, the Washington Post told the story of this earlier wedding attack: ‘Burhan Jan's 15-year-old son, Inzar, married a local girl about his age, and people came to Qalai Niazi from miles around for the wedding. About 3:30 a.m., while the family and their guests slept in the largest house after an evening of celebration, the U.S. planes attacked. After an initial series of blasts in which men, women and children died, people fled in panic out of Qalai Niazi, which is located north of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia province. Then more bombs fell, killing a dozen other people as they moved across the barren landscape.’

Then in early May 2002, Britain’s Royal Marines launched Operation Condor after Australian troops had allegedly come under fire from al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, and called in American bombers to launch an attack. But according to an Afghan press agency based in Pakistan, the men ‘engaged’ by the Australian troops and later bombed by US forces in fact ‘belonged to a wedding party, whose traditional AK-47 firing celebrations had been mistaken for offensive fire’.

And now there is another wedding party bombing – and US forces expect us to believe that a bomb simply went astray. In fact, the American military’s penchant for bombing wedding parties seem to capture a couple of home truths about the war in Afghanistan.

First it illustrates the dearth of intelligence. After the December wedding bombing, US forces claimed they were acting on ‘reliable intelligence’ from Afghan sources which showed that al-Qaeda and Taliban forces were in the vicinity. ‘There were multiple intelligence sources that qualified that target’, said US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in January 2002, claiming that ‘the multiple secondary explosions’ that followed the bombing of the wedding party suggested that there were, indeed, arms dumps in the area.

But where did US forces get this ‘reliable intelligence’? From the same Afghan sources who have duped the US military into bombing their enemies by falsely labelling them al-Qaeda forces? From the same intelligence sources who openly admit that they have their own battles to fight, and that defeating al-Qaeda takes second place?

The wedding party attacks also capture the sense of fear and loathing with which America views Afghanistan as it flies overhead (America rarely engages the enemy on the ground for fear of sustaining casualties and getting bogged down – a fear which also explains its lack of intelligence).

For US forces that are fearful of getting too stuck into this dangerous, alien territory, any large gathering of people is immediately suspect – and any large gathering of people that fires AK-47s in celebration may as well have signed their own death warrants. US forces cannot tell one ‘towel-head’ from another, and sometimes just opts to blast them all.

All of this illustrates an important point: the fact that the Afghan war has little coherence or direction doesn’t make it any less bloody than traditional warfare. Indeed, as hundreds discovered today, a war without aim fought from on high is a dangerous and deadly affair.


Reproduced from:
http://www.boneill.blogspot.com/2002_07_01_
boneill_archive.html#78425581

Kerr, I believe you missed the writer's satirical comment on the wedding to show a much larger picture and although you are right about people who are engaging the conflict using their communities, you failed to see that many who engage conflicts actually live in the 'communities' and do not have standing armies or military bases.

It is also true to say that Israel uses communities as military outpost. What do you think they are doing when they extend settlements in the Palestinian regions? All of Israel is a military post.