Tom Engelhardt : ‘Accidents’ of War

American (and NATO) officials regularly make the point that the enemy’s barbarism – and from car-bombs to a 6-year-old boy sent to attack Afghan soldiers wearing a suicide vest, their acts have indeed been barbarous – is always intentional; the killing of noncombatants by American planes is always an “inadvertent” incident, an “accident,” and so, of course, the regrettable “collateral damage” of modern warfare.Recently, however, in Afghanistan, such isolated incidents from U.S. or NATO (often still U.S.) air attacks have been occurring in startling numbers. They have, in fact, become so commonplace that, in the news, they begin to blur into what looks, more and more, like a single, ongoing airborne slaughter of civilians. Protest over the killings of noncombatants from the air, itself a modest story, is on the rise. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, dubbed “the mayor of Kabul,” has bitterly and repeatedly complained about NATO and U.S. bombing policies. ACBAR, an umbrella organization for Afghan and international relief and human rights organizations, has received attention for claiming that marginally more civilians have died this year at the hands of the Western powers than the Taliban; and, most recently, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has made a “’strong’ appeal to military commanders in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties.”In all of this, the weakening of the American and NATO position in Afghanistan, and of the American one in Iraq, continue to play crucial roles – while these repeated air-power “incidents” lead into conceptual territory that is simply never touched upon in our mainstream media.

read more | digg story