by Prof. Ira Chernus
Global Research, September 23, 2007
NATO bombs killed at least 45 civilians in Afghanistan the other day. If you get your news from the front pages of the U.S. mainstream media, you wouldn't know it. The New York Times did run news from Afghanistan on its front page the next day — a rather ghoulish piece about Muslims refusing to give Taliban suicide bombers a religious burial, because suicide bombing is morally reprehensible. And so it is.
But what about pushing a button in an airplane to drop bombs that fall on people's homes? Not so reprehensible, apparently. The Times buried its report on the slaughter in Helmand province back on an inside page, as did the Washington Post. The LA Times relegated to a "World in Brief" notice.
If you take the time to read those back-page articles, they all tell you that NATO faces a dilemma: not a moral dilemma — when Westerners kill Afghans, the moral issue does not seem to arise — but a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, "our boys" have to kill Taliban. That's a given. On the other hand, if we kill too many civilians in the process, we'll alienate the locals and send them over to the Taliban side. All the mainstream reports agree that the string of recent bombings, killing sizeable numbers of civilians, is already creating a growing problem for NATO's effort to win hearts and minds.
So what's a poor NATO commander to do? American General Dan McNeill, who took control of all NATO forces in Afghanistan this spring, seems to have an answer: Bombs away, and let hearts and minds fall where they may. The spike in civilian deaths from NATO bombs is no coincidence. It reflects a major change in strategy, which has gone totally unreported in the American media.
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punditman says: Question: Your country (ie: Canada, US, Britain), is engaged in a major counter-insurgency war in one of the poorest countries on earth. Civilians are dying regularly as a result of the stepped-up air war. As a citizen, do you think that your mainstream media outlets should put this on the front pages and lead items on broadcasts? If they did (rather than bury these reports or ignore them altogether), what do you think the public response to the 'noble' mission would be?
