Only an army of occupation would be willing to sacrifice a multitude of Afghan civilians in killing a single combatant, writes James Petras* The recent rash of civilian killings by NATO forces in occupied Afghanistan raises several basic questions. Why have US-NATO air and ground forces killed so many civilians, so persistently, over such long stretches of time, in regions throughout the country? Why has the number of civilians killed increased over the course of the conflict? Why do NATO-US airplanes continue to bomb civilian housing and village gatherings and ground troops and indiscriminately assault homes and workshops? Why do the pleas of NATO collaborator Afghan President Hamid Karzai to desist in home bombings go unheeded? Finally, knowing that the killing of civilians, often of entire families including children, mothers and the elderly, alienates the local population and breeds widespread and profound hostility, why does the NATO-US military refuse to alter its tactics and strategy? Apologists for the NATO killings of civilians are as abundant as their explanations are lacking in substance. US Pentagon spokesmen have spoken of "accidents", "errors of war" and "collateral damage". Media pundits have blamed guerrilla fighters for engaging in warfare in areas populated by civilians. Neoconservative academics and their "think tank" colleagues have blamed Islamic fundamentalism for converting villagers to their cause and "forcing" NATO to kill civilians in order to create martyrs and use their deaths as a recruiting device. These patently superficial explanations raise more questions than answers, or in some cases inadvertently refute the justification for the entire war. The "error of war" argument begs a more basic question: what kind of war is NATO and the US engaged in that constantly finds the guerrillas "melting" into the population, while the occupation breaks down doors and perceives each and every household as a possible sanctuary, or outpost, of the resistance? What kind of military relies on high-altitude fighter planes and pilotless planes directed from distant command posts to attack population centres and in which commerce, farming and household economies engage the population? Clearly, only an army of occupation, an imperial army, is willing to sacrifice a multitude of civilians to kill a single or a few suspected combatants. Only a military operating in a hostile civilian environment is going to assume that lodged behind every door of every home there is an "enemy;" that every family is sheltering a combatant; that it is better to "go in shooting" than to risk a bullet in the gut. "Accidents of war" do not just happen for an entire decade, covering an entire country. The killing of civilians is a result of a war of imperial conquest against an entire people who have resisted the occupation in whatever form is appropriate to their circumstances. The pilots and ground troops recognise that they are a hostile alien force, whose presence is commanded from above by generals and politicians dealing with abstract schemes of "terrorists-linked to Al-Qaeda" that have no relation to the dense web of personal bonds of solidarity between resistance fighters and civilians on the ground in Afghanistan. Working from these abstract categories, the strategists label extended family compounds as "hideouts," family gatherings as "terrorist meetings" and trade caravans as "guerrilla smugglers." The conflicting interests of the imperial politicians, generals, strategists and military officers on the one hand and the civilian population and resistance on the other are separated by an immense gap. The greater the number of civilians/ combatants killed, the faster the career advances for imperial officers eager for promotions and prized pensions. "Success," according to the imperial world view, is measured internationally by the number of client rulers; nationally by the number of flags pinned to war maps denoting "secure cities"; and locally by the body counts of massacred families. On the ground, among the millions belonging to intimate family and clan circles, where sorrow and anger co-exist, resistance in all of its manifold forms unfolds: sacred vows and profane pledges to "fight on" grow out of the millions of daily humiliations affecting young and old and wives and husbands alike in homes, markets, roads and by-ways. The hostile stare of a mother sheltering an infant from soldiers breaking into a bedroom is as telling as the crackle of gunfire from a sniper hidden in a mountain crevice. The killing of civilians is not "accidental". The fundamental reason that so many civilians have been killed every day in every region of Afghanistan for over a decade is because the civilians and the combatants are indistinguishable. The image of the Afghan combatant as some kind of footloose professional bomb-throwing terrorist is completely off the mark. Most Afghan fighters have families, cultivate farmland and tend herds; they raise families and attend mosques; they are "part-time civilians" and part-time fighters. Only in the schematic minds of the "great strategists of war" in the Pentagon and NATO headquarters do such distinctions exist. Their deadly military mission to "save the people from terrorist fundamentalists," a self-serving self-deception, is, in fact, a ladder up the military-political hierarchy. Each step up depends on waging a "just war" to a successful conclusion. The civilian-combatants are a mass popular phenomenon. How else can we explain their capacity to sustain armed resistance for over a decade -- indeed advancing with the passing of time? How can we explain their military success against armed forces and advisers from 40 countries, including the US, Europe and a clutch of Afro-Asian-Latin American mercenaries? How can we explain the growing resistance, despite their suffering from military occupation backed by the most advanced technological instruments of war? How can we explain the ebb of popular support for the war in the conquerors' countries and the growing number of recruits for the resistance? The combatants have the loyalty of the Afghan people; they do not have to spend billions to buy the spurious loyalties of mercenaries who can and have at any moment turned their guns the other way. Weddings are bombed because combatants attend weddings, along with hundreds of relatives and friends. Villages are bombed because peasants cultivate crops that contribute to the resistance. Civilian shelters become military sanctuaries. Afghanistan is polarised: the US military versus a people in arms. Faced with this reality, the real policy of NATO and the Pentagon is to rule and/or ruin. Each bomb killing dozens of civilians in search of one sharpshooter deepens the isolation and discredit of the puppet ruler. Karzai has seen his mission of building a "civilian base" to reconstruct the country utterly discredited. His impotent complaints to NATO to cease bombing civilian targets fall on deaf ears because NATO command knows very well that civilians constitute the "deep resistance." They are the vast reserve of support for the combatants, their eyes and ears far excelling all the electronic intelligence devices of the occupier. Just as Karzai cannot convince Afghan civilians to turn against the combatants, so he cannot convince the imperial armies to stop bombing civilian homes and gatherings. Washington knows that with each withdrawal or retreat, the terrain, the towns and villages, are occupied by resistance fighters who emerge from everywhere. The best that the US-NATO politicians can negotiate is an orderly departure. The best that they can hope is that their local collaborators do not defect or flee abroad prematurely, turning over billions of dollars in military ordinance to the resistance. The best the collaborators can hope is that they will secure an exit route, a visa, an overseas account and a comfortable second home abroad. What is absolutely clear is that the US, NATO and its collaborators will have no role to play in an independent Afghanistan. * The writer is a former professor of sociology at Binghamton University, New York, and an adviser to landless and jobless people in Brazil and Argentina.
