Casualties of U.S. Bombing

On July 1, an American AC-130 bomber attacked Kakarak, and other villages, in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan, killing some 40 members of a wedding party. U.S. military officials found plenty of excuses for the mistake. The crew allege that they had been fired upon, and that anti-aircraft weapons were thought to be somewhere in the area. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/07/08/national1314EDT0561.DTL)

There have been other botched attacks on Afghan civilians, such as the attack by Special Forces on a school in Uruzgan province in January, in which 21 Afghan government troops were mistakenly killed.

Naturally, there were protests of sorts from Afghanistan. The governor of Uruzgan warned of anger directed at Americans, even jihad, if the Americans don’t stop killing civilians. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/07/06/MN243261.DTL)

The protests should be coming from the American public. America is still pounding remote villages in Afghanistan more than a half year after the bombing campaigns began. In this “war,” the American public is not allowed to see photos of the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan

No doubt, the bombers often do find their target. But the incident illustrates the recklessness of bombing campaigns.

When American military leaders talk of going to “war,” they often mean a strategy that includes aerial bombardment. Our military leaders seem to think that bombing is one tactic that America does well. Bombing is fairly simple as an attack strategy. It doesn’t take a lot of planning, however much they would like us to believe that they carefully select their targets. Most potential “enemies” can’t retaliate with aerial bombardment against the United States. Bombing is relatively low risk for America’s soldiers (certainly compared to a ground assault). Aerial attackers do not have to look the “enemy” in the face, and in fact they usually do not see the results of their work. .

The death of 40 civilians in Afghanistan should remind everyone that bombing is in fact an imperfect tactic. In any campaign, there will be “collateral damage,” which our leaders seem to accept as inevitable and, therefore, justifiable. Even though the victims of bombing attacks frequently have no connection with “enemy” forces; the strategy seems to accept the inevitability of their inability to pinpoint an enemy.

Most Americans do not seem to be wary of the horror which bombing attacks bring to other people. America may come to be known as a power which terrorizes the world with bombing campaigns, including frequent mistakes like the attack on Kakarak. Can we expect bombing errors to become routine, in each case brushed off by our high command as justifiable “collateral damage?”

Americans should be speaking up about the aimlessness of this “war.” There is no particular enemy; our national leaders have taken Congress’s declaration of “war against terrorism” as license to go after a vaguely defined assortment of supposed enemies. As far as we can see they have no particular strategy other than gradually expanding the zone of warfare to more nations. In each case, the first course of action will be, of course, aerial bombardment.