May 7, 2013
Syria Is Not Iraq

The comments on this Pro-intervention Op-Ed by Bill Killer (h/t atidd) are giving me a bit more faith that people “get” the problem with intervention in Syria.  It appears that more than a decade of War has finally begun to make people weary of military intervention, however well-intentioned.  Here’s a few examples:

So we eliminate Assad’s ability to retaliate against its rebel citizens, then what is left? From what we read, the Christians and Alawites support Assad, and will be killed off by the rebels. The best financed groups come from Iraq, so how do you suggest we counter that?We might have been able to prevent this in the first place if we were able to get Assad to leave, but Russia squelched that. I suspect the Chinese do not want anything to do with it, they are not particularly fond of Islam. No matter who ends up running the country, it will be a majority Islamic faction.

Considering the atrocities carried out by Assad there will be brutal retaliation, as we have already seen. What we can not tolerate, we have no ability to stop. We are seeing the end of a brutal oppressive regime, the retaliation will be just as brutal.

All we can do is hope we can contain this civil war to Syria.

Another:

What is our national interest here? Syria was already being run by a despot hostile to ourselves and funding terrorists. Those opposing him are themselves affiliated with al Qaeda (or at least those with any chance of overthrowing him are). So who are we protecting and what are we preventing?

Another:

[Keller’s Op-Ed is] [a]n excellent example of how we get drawn into the military option. No matter how disastrously Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan turn out to be for us, there are never any real consequences to those who suck us in. Those who ought to exercise a proper caution lose their courage fearing that they will get blamed for the human costs of civil wars in other countries while knowing that as long as they show proper machismo there will be little criticism of their sending fellow citizens (younger ones) to become casualties in futile endeavors in foreign lands.

Another:

Here are a few questions I have after reading this. Where in this analysis is there room for non-militarized intervention? Why must engagement in Syria take the form of military action? Can’t you possibly think of other ways of ending the conflict? Is it really realistic to think that military intervention can result in the quick fall of Assad and his replacement with an interim authority if Russia, China, and other continue to support Assad? Who will be in this interim government and what legitimacy will they enjoy locally? 

One more:

Long winded nonsense. 

We need another war and it’s expense and social turmoil at home like we need more NRA and tax cuts for the rich. There is no longer justification for constant application of US military all over the Earth, THAT is the lesson of Iraq and as we are seeing, Afghanistan. 

Useless military buildup is an area where Democrats need to learn from Libertarians. The Defense Dept has been bankrupting America for decades, chancing bogeymen, while the Middle Class is far more scared to death of not being able to retire than the consequences of a conflict in Asia Minor.

Indeed.

11:52pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxkUwcEx
(Notes: 13)
  
Filed under: politics syria foreign policy war on terror 
May 7, 2013
"From 2003 when I walked through hospital wards and saw children dying of shrapnel wounds from the ‘precision’ missile strikes, to 2013 walking through different hospitals 10 years later seeing babies die of mysterious birth defects, it’s clear that [Iraqi] children have been the greatest victim of this war, …the young ones are dying and suffering from wounds of a war they never saw. We’ve really let the children down, in dramatic ways that will have long-term implications."

— Donna Mulhearn, via Kelley B. Vlahos’ recent article, “Iraq’s Generation Hell.”

11:45am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxkRrgRa
(Notes: 216)
  
Filed under: politics iraq war on terror foreign policy 
May 6, 2013
Should The U.S. Intervene In Syria, Ctd.

thecliffsatetretat replied to your post: Should The U.S. Intervene In Syria?
“… when the U.S. commits military forces to a foreign conflict, we necessarily have moral responsibility for the results.” Does that mean that not intervening carries no moral responsibility for the results?
I think the best way to think about this is to consider the following situation.
Let us suppose that I see a person being physically assaulted on the sidewalk.  The aggressor appears to be using their fists, but no weapons are visible.  If I see that person being assaulted, and I fail to intervene, am I morally at fault?  
This was a question faced early on by common law judges, and the answer they gave was almost universally no.  At common law, there was no duty to rescue, and there are good reasons for this.  First consider that in most cases, I will be ignorant as to the motivation for the assault I’m witnessing.  The person being assaulted may actually be the more “culpable” of the two based on some prior bad act, and I’m simply witnessing some sort of aggression in-kind.  But I have no way of knowing in the moment of initial apprehension.  Second, Intervening may require me to place myself or someone I love in harm’s way, as the aggressor may see fit to visit retribution upon me or my loved ones at a later date for becoming involved in his or her dispute.  It is selfish and reckless of me to place an uninvolved third party potentially at risk based on my desire to rescue the person in front of me from the apparent violent predations of another.  While we can agree that I may place myself at risk to rescue another, I have no moral claim on placing others at risk through my actions.   these considerations mitigate any moral responsibility to intervene I might otherwise have.
But let us suppose that I do intervene to try to save the person being assaulted, but in the process, I only make matters worse.  Perhaps the aggressor, realizing he or she is outnumbered, draws a weapon that he was not using before.  Now, what began as a fistfight has been escalated into a more lethal situation for both the victim and myself.  An aggressor who may have merely seen fit to “beat up” the victim is now rearing to kill them.  Am I morally responsible for that escalation?  Absolutely.
It is certainly possible that my intervention will only be helpful to the victim.  But the difference between our example and official state military intervention is that, as you add more human beings and political interests to the example, the potential for unintended consequences increases.  Furthermore, imagine that the last four or five times I intervened in a sidewalk assault, I ended up doing as much and more harm as I prevented.  That would certainly make non-intervention seem to be a more morally responsible action, even if there’s still a chance that I’m watching a genuinely innocent person get assaulted without just cause.
This is the set of assumptions and historical background with which we have to approach U.S. foreign policy.  When the U.S. sees the metaphorical equivalent of a person being assaulted in the street, and we know that past interventions by the U.S. Government have tended to create as much harm as they’ve alleviated, the morally responsible thing to do is to refrain from intervening.  
Note that this is not an argument for never intervening to stop a perceived injustice.  This is an argument for not intervening in a perceived injustice when you have prior knowledge and experience which suggests that your intervention will cause at least as much damage as it alleviates.  This is why, say, Oskar Schindler’s interventions on behalf of Jewish victims of the Third Reich, for example, are different than U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.  The moral calculus of humanitarian intervention changes when you have prior knowledge which suggests that your intervention will cause affirmative injuries elsewhere or in the future, even if it appears to alleviate the suffering that is in front of one’s face.

3:58pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxkNx8xk
(Notes: 10)
  
Filed under: politics syria foreign policy 
May 6, 2013
Should The U.S. Intervene In Syria?

thecallus recently wrote some reflections on Syria that I wanted to expand on a bit in light of recent events in that country.  He writes:

I was going to write some long thing about how Syria shows the limitations of foreign policy based on human rights. The conceit was that there isn’t a choice of good or bad in this case from a human rights perspective, and that the decision the world has to make should reasonably be based on state interests. In other words, the amoral environment in Syria naturally begets a kind of secular Machiavellian approach to foreign policy.

I was going to make some pro-interventionist comment about how as bad as Iraq was, it never looked like Aleppo does right now. About how gee, you wanted to be free from US influence, how’s that dream working out? Or the futility of revolutions, especially in the Middle East where you trade authoritarians for fundamentalists with brief interregnums of one-election Republicanism.

But I’d guess that only some of those thoughts are right. I’m sure that none of them are useful. And at the end of the day, like most comfortable people, I just want to forget about those images.

Humanitarian interventions are attractive because they feel like “good” wars.  They make us feel like we’re aiding helpless individuals and “fighting evil,” as it were.  Many Americans also don’t want a repeat of previous historical occurrences where the U.S. refused to intervene in tragic foreign conflicts, and it seemed to result in prolonged suffering.  There’s always been a lot of hand-wringing over Rwanda, for example, and whether it was right to not intervene in that conflict.  Standing by and watching clearly innocent people get slaughtered when we have both the means and will to help them is never a comfortable position to be in.

But the problem with humanitarian interventions is that they are riddled with unknowables and unintended consequences.  Sometimes those consequences are at least as bad as the events we’re trying to stop.  Our most recent intervention in Libya is an excellent example.  Here are some links I posted back in January:

Gadaffi’s fall created an unstable post-regime atmosphere in which ethnic cleansing has taken place.  There have been reports of Black migrant workers being rounded up an executed by Libyan rebels, in part because Gadaffi used Black mercenaries from other African countries to fight against the rebels, igniting racial tensions that fueled post-regime violence.  Doctors Without Borders reported in January of 2012 that prisoners were being tortured to death in disturbing numbers, as rebels acted out their revenge fantasies on prisoners of war.  In July of 2011, Human Rights Watch reported that NATO-supplied rebels in Libya were terrorizing civilians, using Western armaments and resources to steal from people who were trying to stay clear of the violence.  U.S. guns were being used by Libyan rebels to terrorize non-combatants in Libya. 

But more importantly, our intervention in Libya helped spark a civil war in Mali:

In the aftermath of Libya, Tuareg mercenaries who were fighting for Gadaffi packed up and returned home to Mali.  When they left Libya, they took all the military weapons and resources that once belonged to the Libyan army with them.  This huge influx of Libyan weapons gave them the resources they needed to wage a successful rebellion against the Malian government alongside disparate hard-line Islamist groups in Northern Mali.  What was once a complicated regional dispute which goes back nearly a century is now an international incident, in part because the U.S. decided to pick a winner in Libya’s civil war.

It is also important to remember that when the U.S. commits military forces to a foreign conflict, we necessarily have moral responsibility for the results.  Many of the rebel factions opposing Assad are hard-line Islamist rebels, many of them affiliated with Al-Qaeda.  Intervening to depose Assad inevitably means that we have to worry about these factions gaining control of post-Assad Syria.  If they do, that would arguably be just as bad a result for many of the people of Syria as living under the Assad regime itself.  Or perhaps not.  We don’t know.  But the Syrian people should be the ones making that decision independent of U.S. intervention.  We simply don’t know how the Syrian conflict will sort itself out in light of these competing interests.

Some might argue that the possible use of chemical weapons makes Syria different than Libya.  I’d have to disagree with this argument on the basis that, although chemical weapons have scary implications, the wounds that Syrians have suffered from conventional warfare are at least as gruesome as what may be suffered from a chemical weapons attack.  This video of a Syrian child with his jaw blown off does not strike me as more or less disgusting or reprehensible than a child who falls victim to a Sarin gas attack.  Chemical weapons can kill more people more quickly, but it seems a flimsy basis for a “red line” when we’re dealing with a regime that has already shown it doesn’t need them to slaughter its own people wholesale.

Furthermore, we have no reason to expect that the more extreme factions of the Syrian opposition won’t behave with equal repugnance.  The U.N. has already accused opposition fighters of various abuses.  And here again, prior experience with “limited” interventions should inform our analysis of the Syrian conflict. As Doug Bandow wrote back in March:

In Kosovo NATO went to war to stop ethnic cleansing and stood by as the victorious ethnic Albanians defenestrated a quarter of a million Serbs, Roma, and others. In Syria the potential for a violent breakdown if the rebels triumph is even greater. Warned Holliday: “The remnants of the Syrian military and the powerful pro-regime militias are likely to wage a fierce insurgency against any opposition-led Sunni government in Syria if the Assad regime collapses.” At the extreme, imagine Iraq redux.

So there’s a lot of evidence which suggests that U.S. humanitarian interventions often have unintended consequences that are sometimes as bad as the events we’re trying to stop.  That’s because when dealing with state violence and competing political factions, the sum of the situation is always greater than its parts.  

Every sane person with a functioning human heart feels pain for the unbelievable human suffering that is happening in Syria right now.  But past experience shows that the U.S. is terrible at intervening in foreign affairs without causing additional problems that are often at least as bad as the events we tried to stop.  I think this alone should counsel the U.S. against intervening in Syria.  As the old saying goes, we shouldn’t forget history, lest we continue to repeat it.

11:29am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxkN0btR
(Notes: 107)
  
Filed under: politics syria foreign policy 
May 3, 2013
BREAKING: Israel Launches Airstrikes Into Syria

And the U.S. gets dragged into yet another non-essential conflict in 3…2…1…

9:49pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxk9qwQA
(Notes: 249)
  
Filed under: politics israel syria foreign policy 
April 18, 2013
"Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate."

— Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

(via azspot)

10:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxj0betE
(Notes: 98)
  
Filed under: politics glenn greenwald foreign policy war on terror boston 
April 18, 2013
On the Boston Bombings: "I’m safe. You are safe. 99.999999% of the country is safe. But there never is a completely safe, and there never will be. I refuse to give up another right to prevent another 'Boston.' The bomber isn't the only one who wants you to be afraid. Remember that."

(Source: liberalsarecool, via progressivefriends)

10:11pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxj0TXsc
(Notes: 153)
  
Filed under: politics boston national security foreign policy civil rights 
April 15, 2013
Fear Of A Muslim Bomber

When I first heard about the bombings in Boston earlier this afternoon, my reaction was sterotypical: I was shocked and saddened.  My heart went out to the victims and their families.  An event that is literally world-famous, which draws tens of thousands of competitors annually, and which is a boon to the Boston business community, and is often associated with charitable causes, has been scarred by a particularly horrifying form of violence.  It is a tragedy at the cultural level, and also at the personal level for all those involved.

Details are still trickling in, but there is no question that this appears to be a particularly gruesome attack.  Many people lost limbs.  As of this writing, the Boston Globe (who has dropped their paywall in light of the attacks), is reporting 3 killed and 125 140 injured.  I am sure those numbers will rise as hospitals get their numbers in order.  They are rightly focused on helping the victims, rather than getting the numbers straight.

Very shortly after the attacks, officials began reporting that undetonated explosive devices were being discovered elsewhere in the city.  At that point, it became clear that this was an intentional attack.

And my heart sank.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack on American soil—apparent, actual, or threatened—two phenomenon generally accompany it.  First, there is a general desire to discover “what went wrong” in the aftermath.  We look at the Government entities who were supposed to prevent these tragedies from occurring, search for flaws, and try to fix them.  This is understandable—everybody wants to figure out how to prevent future tragedies from occurring.

Unfortunately, the “fixes” that get proposed almost always involve significant deprivations of the civil liberties of innocent and law-abiding people who had nothing to do with the attack.  In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress passed the infamous PATRIOT Act, in all of its glory.  Inside the PATRIOT Act is a particularly insidious provision which provided for “Delayed-Notice Search Warrants.”  These new warrants, which allow police to enter and search a home without notifying the owner until months after the search was conducted, were supposed to help federal officials catch terrorists more easily.  Instead, more than 9 out of every 10 applications for delayed-notice search warrants were used for narcotics enforcement.  A device that was supposed to help us fight terrorists is being used instead to fight the notoriously failed War on Drugs—a realization that has left many to realize that the expansion of police power authorized by the PATRIOT Act was, for the most part, unnecessary and ineffective in helping the country to counter terrorist threats.  

And that’s the problem with the first post-terrorism phenomenon: people immediately become willing to sacrifice their civil rights, despite the fact that those sacrifices, almost without fail, are later revealed to be ineffective and unnecessary in the long run.  As Justice Brennan said in 1987:

For as adamant as my country has been about civil liberties during peacetime, it has a long history of failing to preserve civil liberties when it perceived its national security threatened.  This series of failures is particularly frustrating in that it appears to result not from informed and rational decisions that protecting civil liberties would expose the United States to unacceptable security risks, but rather from the episodic nature of our security crises.  After each perceived security crises ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.  but it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along.

Despite this well-recognized pattern of history, I have no doubt that when the dust settles on this latest tragedy, we will see pundits and officials scrambling to figure out what went wrong in Boston.  They will ask how we could’ve missed the explosive devices before they were detonated.  And they will seek to discover what part of our law enforcement institutions and national security apparatus must be “strengthened” in order to prevent another tragedy like this from happening in the future.  It is unfortunate that “strengthening” those institutions often comes at the cost of marginalizing various groups within American society.  

This brings me to the second phenomenon that occurs in the wake of national tragedies in America: the rousing of dormant Islamophobia and animosity towards Arabs.  While things are not as bad as they were in the wake of 9/11 when hate crimes towards Arab and Muslim Americans skyrocketed, one can already see the tendrils of hatred towards Muslim and Arab citizens creeping into the public sphere.

This is particularly frustrating.  As I was browsing the twittersphere for news about the Boston Marathon bombing, I made a point to sample some of the reactions from Muslim tweeters.  Muslims of diverse backgrounds were as horrified by the violence as anyone else.  Here is a small sampling of some of the reactions:

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And yet, despite the outrage and empathy, there is also fear.  It is a fear that every Muslim person has when a large tragedy of any sort occurs in America.  It is a fear that leads Muslim citizens to mutter phrases such as “Please don’t be a Muslim” in the wake of an attack:

 [A] Libyan Twitter user named Hend Amry wrote, “Please don’t be a ‘Muslim.’” Her message was retweeted by more than 100 other users, including well-known journalists and writers from the Muslim world.

Jenan Moussa, a journalist for Dubai-based Al-Aan TV, retweeted the message “Please don’t be a ‘Muslim’” and added that the plea was “The thought of every Muslim right now.” Moussa’s message was forwarded more than 200 times.

Every time a large tragedy occurs in America, Muslims pray for the safety of their families.  They are forced to hang their heads low and dutifully remind everyone that they hate being bombed too, as insultingly obvious as that should be.  They are forced to do this despite being the vast majority of victims of terrorist violence, and despite the fact that on the same day as the Boston Marathon bombing, 231 Iraqi citizens were killed or injured in bombings in three cities in Iraq, and America did not even bat a lash.  Dead innocent Muslim bodies in foreign countries are ignored, while living innocent Muslim bodies in America are forced to vicariously answer for the depraved actions of mad men, latter of whose colleagues may have killed the former’s loved ones in a previous attack.

And thus, we see reactions of this sort:

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And yet there is some hope.  The initial backlash against Muslim citizens seems to be less intense than it has been in the past.  Nonetheless, it remains.  In light of this, it is helpful to remember the words of Max Fisher, who offered the following extraordinarily insightful remarks at the Washington Post:

There will be displays of true sympathy from the Muslim world regardless of the religion of those responsible for the fatal blasts in Boston — as there were after both Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadly December school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Should the incident turn out to have even the slightest connection to a professed observer of Islam – a possibility that, according to Moussa and others, some Muslims are dreading – those gestures of support may look something like the handmade posters in Benghazi last September, a declaration of solidarity and a gentle reminder that Muslims despise terrorism just as much as anyone else.

11:18pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxioj_lB
(Notes: 295)
  
Filed under: politics war on terror national security foreign policy boston 
March 29, 2013
"

Paradoxically, aiding the resistance [in Syria] could drive some Syrians who desire a negotiated solution toward the government. The Financial Times recently reported: “As the civil war becomes ever dirtier, rebels’ actions are starting to mirror those of the regime.” In fact, opposition fighters increasingly kill regime soldiers and supporters, and have turned to crime, including kidnapping, to raise funds…

Intervening would give Washington ownership for the conflict’s outcome without control. Americans have no moral obligation to support either warring side in an increasingly complex conflict — think Spanish Civil War, for instance. However, helping one side win would make Washington accountable for the winner’s conduct.

In Kosovo NATO went to war to stop ethnic cleansing and stood by as the victorious ethnic Albanians defenestrated a quarter of a million Serbs, Roma, and others. In Syria the potential for a violent breakdown if the rebels triumph is even greater. Warned Holliday: “The remnants of the Syrian military and the powerful pro-regime militias are likely to wage a fierce insurgency against any opposition-led Sunni government in Syria if the Assad regime collapses.” At the extreme, imagine Iraq redux.

"

— Doug Bandow

11:25pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxhS1nEe
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: politics kosovo bosnia syria foreign policy 
March 28, 2013

fotojournalismus:

Afghan Villagers Flee Their Homes, Blame US Drones

“Barely able to walk even with a cane, Ghulam Rasool says he padlocked his front door, handed over the keys and his three cows to a neighbor and fled his mountain home in the middle of the night to escape relentless airstrikes from U.S. drones targeting militants in this remote corner of Afghanistan.

Rasool and other Afghan villagers have their own name for Predator drones. They call them benghai, which in the Pashto language means the “buzzing of flies.” When they explain the noise, they scrunch their faces and try to make a sound that resembles an army of flies.

“They are evil things that fly so high you don’t see them but all the time you hear them,” said Rasool, whose body is stooped and shrunken with age and his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Night and day we hear this sound and then the bombardment starts.”

The Associated Press — in a rare on-the-ground look unaccompanied by military or security — visited two Afghan villages in Nangarhar province near the border with Pakistan to talk to residents who reported that they had been affected by drone strikes.

“These foreigners started the problem,” Rasool said of international troops. “They have their own country. They should leave.”

From the U.S. perspective, the overall drone program has been a success.

Rasool said his decision to leave his home in Hisarak district came nearly a month ago after a particularly blistering air assault killed five people in the neighboring village of Meya Saheeb.

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, confirmed an airstrike on Feb. 24 at Meya Saheeb, but as a matter of policy would neither confirm nor deny that drones were used.

Rasool said that he, his son, half a dozen grandchildren, and two other families crammed into the back of a cart pulled by a tractor. They drove throughout the day until they found a house in Khalis Family Village, named after anti-communist rebel leader Maulvi Yunus Khalis, who had close ties to al-Qaida.

The village is not far from the Tora Bora mountain range where in 2001 the U.S.-led coalition mounted its largest operation of the war to flush out al-Qaida and Taliban warriors.

“Nobody ever comes here. It’s a little dangerous sometimes because of the Taliban,” said Zarullah Khan, a neighbor of Rasool’s.

But the historic significance of his newfound refuge was lost on Rasool.

“Who’s Khalis? We stopped when we found a house for rent,” he said, grumbling at the monthly $200 bill shared among the three families packed into the high-walled compound where he spoke with the AP.

Standing nearby, Rasool’s 12-year-old grandson, Ahmed Shah, recalled the attack in Meya Saheeb. The earth shook for what seemed like hours and the next morning his friends told him there were bodies in the nearby village. A little afraid, but more curious, he walked the short distance to Meya Saheed.

“I wanted to see the dead bodies,” he said. And he did — three bodies, all middle-aged men.

ISAF reported five militants were killed, but Rasool claimed they were businessmen. One of the dead had a carpet shop in the village, he said.

Disputes over the identities of those killed have been a hallmark of the 12-year war.

At the other end of the province from Meya Saheeb and Khalis Family Village lies the village of Budyali. To get there, one must drive along a long, two-lane highway often booby-trapped by militants, before turning turning off onto a narrow, dusty track and finally cross a rock-strewn riverbed.

A Budyali resident, Hayat Gul, says the sound of “benghai” is commonplace in the village. He says he was wounded nearly two years ago in a Taliban firefight with Afghan security forces at a nearby school that led to an airstrike.

Tucked in the shadow of a hulking mountain crisscrossed with dozens of footpaths, the school now is in ruins.

The early morning strike on the school took place on July 17, 2011, hours after the Taliban attacked the district headquarters and the Afghan National Army appealed to their coalition partners for help.

Gul said he and a second guard, 63-year-old Ghulam Ahad, were asleep in the small cement guard house at one end of the school. They awoke to the sound of gunfire as more than a dozen Taliban militants scaled the school walls around midnight, chased by Afghan soldiers.

A bullet struck Gul in the shoulder. Frightened and unsure of what to do, Ahad stepped outside the guard house and was killed. Bullet holes still riddle the badly damaged building.

Village elders and the school’s principal, Sayed Habib, said coalition forces responded to the army’s request for help with drones, fighter jets and rockets.

The air assault, which residents say began about 3 a.m. and likely included drone strikes, flattened everything across a vast compound that includes the school. Habib said 13 insurgents were killed.

ISAF confirmed that airstrikes killed insurgents in the Budyali area on that day but would not say what type of airstrikes or provide any other details.

Habib and a local malik or elder, Shah Mohammed Khan, said that in the days leading up to the airstrikes the sound of drones could be heard overhead.

“Everyone knows the sound of the unpiloted planes. Even our children know,” Habib said.

The elders were critical of the U.S. attack. They said they would have preferred that the Afghan soldiers try to negotiate with the Taliban to leave the school and surrender.

Habib and the village elders recalled the attack while sitting in the middle of the devastated school, where debris was still scattered across a vast yard. They pointed toward a blackboard, pockmarked with gaping holes.

“Shamefully they destroyed our school, our books, our library,” said Malik Gul Nawaz, an elder with a gray beard and a pot belly.

The roughly 1,300 students now take classes at a makeshift school made up of tents provided by UNICEF. Gul, who was taken to a U.S. military hospital at Bagram Air Base after the attack and treated for the bullet wound to his left shoulder, is now a watchman at the new school.

He held a small photograph of his dead colleague, Ahad, in his trembling left hand.

“We want to end this war,” Gul said. “Enough people have been killed now. We have to find unity.”

Photographs were taken on March 19-20, 2013.

[Credit : Anja Niedringhaus/AP]

LTMC: Hearts and minds.

12:03pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxhKKzee
(Notes: 841)
  
Filed under: politics drone attacks foreign policy afghanistan obama 
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