The link to the Guardian article does not work in my post, although the link on Memeorandum worked, and I double-checked that I had pasted it in right. I guess you’ll have to take my word that the article exists — or you can click on the link from Memeorandum.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about the NATO-U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan that was ordered on the basis of one informant. At that time, at least one reader wondered what Afghan civilians were doing at the site of a fuel tanker, anyway, and concluded that they had no business being there. I confess that I didn’t know what they were doing there, either — I just didn’t jump to the conclusion that there was no good reason. Well, today, an article published in The (UK) Guardian puts this mystery to rest (emphasis mine):
At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.
What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.
“We didn’t recognise any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.
“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”
I already knew that Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries. I also knew that winters in Afghanistan are brutally cold. I just didn’t make the mental connection from those realities to the presence of Afghan civilians around a fuel tanker. It didn’t occur to me why they might have been there. That is, in part, because, as an American I have the luxury of not knowing and not being able to imagine what it’s like to have no fuel or not enough fuel when it’s cold — very cold — outside.
It strikes me as ironic, to say the least, that it’s so easy for us to say that Afghan civilians should not have been standing underneath a U.S. fighter pilot when he wanted to drop a bomb, when one of the reasons advanced for why we are in Afghanistan, and why we must stay there for now, is that we “liberated” this long-suffering people and still need to protect them from the evils of the resurging Taliban.
If the United States actually, really does care so deeply for the well-being of the Afghan people, then shouldn’t it be incumbent upon Americans to make at least a good faith effort to understand the conditions of daily life in Afghanistan?
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