Were 3,000 Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By?

“I’ve asked my national security team to…collect the facts,” President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, “we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together.”

Probably.

Such was Obama’s tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged “mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.”

Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn’t he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime.

There are two things Obama doesn’t want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved 12 times as many murders as My Lai.

The last major battle for northern Afghanistan took place in the city of Kunduz. After a weeks-long siege marked by treachery—at one point, the Taliban pretended to surrender, then turned their weapons on advancing Northern Alliance solders—at least 8,000 Taliban POWs fell under the control of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord with a long record of exceptional brutality.

I described what happened next in my column dated January 28, 2003:

“Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pick-up trucks…They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. ‘It was awful,’ Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England’s Guardian newspaper. ‘They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only ten of us were alive.’

“One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says that the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders ‘told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside.’ Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container.”

According to Scottish filmmaker Jamie Doran, the butchery continued for three days.

Doran’s documentary about these events, “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” was shown in 50 countries but couldn’t get a U.S. release by a media wallowing in the amped-up pseudo-patriotism that marked 2002. Doran’s film broke the story. (You can watch it online at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493.) My column brought it to a mainstream American audience:

“When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan,” I wrote in 2003, “the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison’s front gates…’ Everything was under the control of the American commanders,’ a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, ‘Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot’ while ‘maybe 30 or 40’ American soldiers watched.”

The Northern Alliance witness told Doran that American commanders advised him to “get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken.” Indeed, satellite photos reveal that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government dispatched bulldozers to the mass grave site in 2006 and removed most of the bodies.

World’s Most Dangerous Places writer Robert Young Pelton, a colleague who (like me) was in and around Kunduz in November 2001, denies that Dostum’s men or U.S. Special Forces killed more than a few hundred Taliban prisoners. However, the U.S. government started receiving firsthand accounts of the events at Dasht-i-Leili in early 2002. According to the Times “Dell Spry, the FBI’s senior representative at…Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been ‘stacked like cordwood’ in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled.”

“At the very least,” Doran says now, “American forces and CIA personnel stood by and did nothing…But if numerous witnesses are to be believed, their involvement went much further than that.” Will Obama hold them accountable? Not unless we insist.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?

Robert McNamara, one of the “best and the brightest” technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary “The Fog of War,” were greeted with derision.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” editorialized The New York Times in 1995. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

McNamara’s change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn’t you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn’t you listen to the millions of experts, journalists and ordinary Americans who knew that death and defeat would be the only outcome?

Though Errol Morris’ film served as ipso facto indictment, its title was yet a kind of justification. There is no “fog of war.” There is only hubris, stubbornness, and the psychological compartmentalization that allows a man to sign papers that will lead others to die before going home to play with his children.

McNamara is dead. Barack Obama is his successor.

Some call McNamara’s life tragic. Tragedy-inducing is closer to the truth. Yes, he suffered guilt in his later years. “He wore the expression of a haunted man,” wrote the author of his Times obit. “He could be seen in the streets of Washington—stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind—walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.” But the men and women and boys and girls blown up by bombs and mines and impaled by bullets and maimed in countless ways deserve more vengeance than a pair of ratty Nikes. Neither McNamara nor LBJ nor the millions of Americans who were for the war merit understanding, much less sympathy.

Now Obama is following the same doomed journey.

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” McNamara warned long after the fact, speaking of “America’s enemies” but really just about people—people who live in other countries. People whose countries possess reserves of natural gas (Vietnam) or oil (Iraq) or are situated between energy reserves and deep-sea ports where oil tankers dock (Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Why can’t President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can’t he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm’s way?

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women and children,” McNamara said. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He—and I’d say I—were behaving as war criminals.” 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all.

At least Japan started the war. What of Afghanistan and Iraq, where approximately 2,000,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. forces? Neither country attacked us. Shouldn’t Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest be prosecuted as war criminals? Why not Obama? After all, Obama is leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq after the war there is supposedly coming to an end. He’s escalating the unjustifiable, unwinnable tragedy in Afghanistan—there are 68,000 U.S. troops there now, probably going up to 100,000 by next year—while spreading the conflict into Pakistan.

“Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan,” concluded the Atlantic Council in 2008. Things have only gotten worse as U.S. troop presence has increased: more violence, more drugs, less reconstruction.

Like McNamara, Obama doesn’t understand a basic truth: you can’t successfully manage an inherently doomed premise. Colonialism is dead. Occupiers will never enjoy peace. Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Pakistanis will rest until we withdraw our forces. The only success we will find is in accepting defeat sooner rather than later.

“What went wrong [in Vietnam] was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” McNamara said in his Berkeley oral history.” Today’s domino theory is Bush’s (now Obama’s) clash of civilizations, the argument that unless we fight them “there” we will have to fight them here. Afghanistan and Iraq don’t present security threats to the United States. The presence of U.S. troops and drone planes, on the other hand…

In fairness to McNamara, it only took two years for him to call to an end of the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1966 he was advising LBJ to start pulling back. But, like a gambler trying to recoup and justify his losses, the president kept doubling down. “We didn’t know our opposition,” concluded McNamara. “So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don’t know our potential opponents today.”

Actually, it’s worse than that. Then, like now, we don’t have opponents. We create them.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL