Silent Slaughters

Just a couple of days after “ Sergeant Massacre” left his base in southern Afghanistan and singlehandedly perpetrated the My Lai of the Afghan War, shooting and evidently in some cases stabbing to death 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, a district police chief in Kapisa Province reported that a NATO air strike had killed three civilians and injured two more. Mistaken for insurgents, two shopkeepers had, he claimed, died on the spot, as had an elderly man later. A NATO spokesman responded that the dead were, in fact, insurgents, though “additional information” on those deaths was being collected.

Since then, while the media has been filled with discussion of theuntil recently unidentified sergeant’s atrocity and what it means for America’s war in Afghanistan, those other dead Afghans have typically faded into obscurity. There have been no further reports on what happened to them, nor, as far as we know, has one of the scores of U.S. and NATO “investigations” so-thorough-they-never-manage-to-see-the-light-of-day been launched. But those three contested deaths, not the sergeant’s grim, up-close-and-personal slaughter, best catch the nature of America’s Afghan War, ever since in December 2001 a B-52 and two B-1B bombers took out110 of 112 Afghan villagers celebrating a wedding. Though the sergeant’s acts have been headlined, Afghans have been dying, largely unnoticed here, for a long while now. The truth is this: from the air and on the ground, Americans have been profligate with Afghan lives. More here