Killing Civilians: How Safe Do You Actually Want to Be? (Page 2)

his article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

What Your Safety Is Worth

All of this was little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan (and increasingly in Pakistan), civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as "collateral damage," increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the collateral activity.

Pretending that these "mistakes" will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all, "mistake" after "mistake" continues to be made. That first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001, when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers, with only two survivors. The fifth one on record was blown away last year. And count on it, there will be a sixth.

By now, we've filled up endless "towers" with dead Afghan civilians. And that's clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when US forces are planning to "surge" into the southern and eastern parts of the country later this year, while the CIA's drone war on the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It's being done, so we've been told, for our safety and security here in the US. The previous president regularly claimed that we were fighting over there, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, to keep Americans safe here; the former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11; and when, on March 27, President Obama announced his latest Afghan bailout plan, he, too, played the 9/11 card heavily. As he was reported to have put it recently, he is "not 'naïve about how dangerous this world is.... I go to bed every night worrying about keeping the American people safe."

Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from Al Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The ragtag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two US embassy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those two towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, Al Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn't have cared less about Al Qaeda at the time. The "Defense Department" imagined its job to be "power projection" abroad, not protecting American shores (or air space), and our sixteen intelligence agencies were in chaos.

So those towers came down apocalyptically and it was horrible--and we couldn't live with it. In response, we invaded a country ("no safe havens for terrorists"), rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security (and while they were at it, in part through the new Department of Homeland Security, they turned "security" into a lucrative endeavor).

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited--or the money-grubbing and money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper, "Weeki Wachee mermaids in terrorists' cross hairs?" It began:

Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids? It staggers the imagination. Still, the US Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to "harden the target" by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason.... Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be "security breaches," he said. But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds.

This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an Al Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its "Global War on Terror," while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling insecurity.

Let's for a moment assume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What's your "safety" really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan's family for a blanket guarantee of your safety--and not just his family, but all those Afghan 1-year olds, all those wedding parties that are--yes, they really are --going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

If, in 1979 as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty years; that, even then, no end would be in sight; and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars.

Now, three decades later, it's possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans. Unless somehow we can think our way out of a strategy guaranteed to kill yet more civilians in expanding areas of South Asia, it will only get worse still.

Maybe it's time to suck it up and put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and Dick, is now in the process of breaking us. Looked at reasonably, even if Dick Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there's no evidence he did), in doing so look what he brought down around our ears. What a bad bargain it's been--and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan's to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan and who knows where else for the next seven years? Or the next thirty, for that matter? Does that seem reasonable? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

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