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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05152009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05152009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">May 15-17,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Obama Picks Up
Where Bush Left Off <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
From My Lai to Bala Baluk
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By MIKE
WHITNEY <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">B</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>arack Obama is aggressively stepping up the
war in Afghanistan. He's intensified the cross-border bombing of Pakistan
and he is doubling the number of U.S. troops to 68,000 by 2010. He's also
a strong proponent of pilotless drones even though hundreds of civilians
have been killed in bombing raid blunders. <br><br>
On May 4, 2009, 143 civilians were killed in a bombing raid in Bala
Baluk, a remote area south of Herat. Obama brushed off the incident with
terse apology never intimating that the US policy for aerial bombardment
would be reviewed to avoid future mishaps. Patrick Cockburn gave
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05112009.html">a summary of
the incident</a>:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>I did not meet survivors but I did talk to a reliable witness, a
radio reporter called Farooq Faizy, who had gone to Bala Baluk soon after
the attack happened. He (had) some 70 or 80 photographs and they bore out
the villagers' story: there were craters everywhere; the villages had
been plastered with bombs; bodies had been torn to shreds by the blasts;
there were mass graves; there were no signs of damage from bullets,
rockets or grenades.<br><br>
</dl>US military spokesmen denied the news reports and concocted a wacky
story about Taliban militants rampaging through the village hurling
grenades into buildings. It was a ridiculous narrative that no one
believed. The facts have since been verified by senior government
officials, high-ranking members of the Afghan military and
representatives of the Red Cross. The United States military killed 143
unarmed villagers and then they tried to cover it up with a lie. None of
the victims were fighters. After the bombing, the villagers loaded body
parts onto carts and took them to the office of the regional governor who
confirmed the deaths. The photos of grief-stricken Afghans burying their
dead have been widely circulated on the Internet. <br><br>
From Reuters:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Ninety-three children and 25 adult women are among a list of 140
names of Afghans who villagers say were killed in a battle and U.S. air
strikes last week, causing a crisis between Washington and its Afghan
allies.<br><br>
<dd>The list, obtained by Reuters, bears the endorsement of seven senior
provincial and central government officials, including an Afghan two-star
general who headed a task force dispatched by the government to
investigate the incident.<br><br>
<dd>Titled "list of the martyrs of the bombardment of Bala Boluk
district of Farah Province", it includes the name, age and father's
name of each alleged victim.<br><br>
<dd>The youngest was listed as 8-day-old baby Sayed Musa, son of Sayed
Adam. Fifty-three victims were girls under the age of 18, and 40 were
boys. Only 22 were men 18 or older. ("List of 140 Afghan Killed In
US Attack Includes 93 Children", Reuters)<br><br>
</dl>Neither Obama nor anyone in his administration has acknowledged that
93 children were killed by American bombs. <br><br>
Military operations in Afghanistan have increased under Obama especially
in the south where the Taliban are most heavily concentrated. The
fighting has spread into Pakistan where President Asif Ali Zardari has
been pressured into deploying his troops the Swat Valley to fight
militants despite growing public disapproval. Nearly 850,000 people have
been forced from their homes in the last few weeks to seek shelter in the
south. For the most part, the humanitarian crisis has gone unreported in
the western media, but Obama knows what is going on and is sticking with
the same policy. Hundreds of thousands of people are now living in tent
cities without food or clean water because of the escalation in the
violence. It's a disaster.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">OBAMA PICKS A GENERAL: Enter
the assassination squads<br><br>
</b></font>This week, General David McKiernan was replaced by Lt. Gen.
Stanley A. McChrystal as Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan. Here's
how the Washington Post summarized McChrystal's qualifications for the
job:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"McChrystal kills people. Has he ever worked in the
counterinsurgency environment? Not really," said Roger Carstens, a
senior nonresident fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a
former Special Forces officer.... <br><br>
<dd>Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former Special Operations chief
who is President Obama's new choice to lead the war in Afghanistan, rose
to military prominence because of his single-minded success in a narrow
but critical mission: manhunting. As commander of the military's
secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly five years
starting in 2003, McChrystal masterminded a campaign to perfect the art
of tracking down enemies, and then capturing or killing them. He built a
sophisticated network of soldiers and intelligence operatives who
proceeded to decapitate the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and
kill its most notorious leader, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi.("High-value-target hunter takes on Afghan war"
Washington Post)<br><br>
</dl>Obama chose McChrystal because of his "black ops"
pedigree, which suggests that the conflict in Afghanistan is about to
take a very ugly turn. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh, McChrystal ran the "executive
assassination wing" of the military's joint special-operations
command. (JSOC) The experts believe that he will breeze through
congressional confirmation hearings because many Senators believe that
his counterinsurgency theories helped the surge in Iraq to succeed.
There's some truth to this, too. But it would be more accurate to say
that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad helped to reduce the violence. That
is the truth about the surge; it's a public relations moniker for ethnic
cleansing.<br><br>
McChrystal's appointment suggests that Obama supports the idea that
hunter-killer units and targeted assassinations are an acceptable means
of achieving US foreign policy objectives. Obama supporters should pay
close attention; this is a continuation of the Rumsfeld policy with one
slight difference, a more persuasive and charismatic pitchman promoting
the policy. Other than that, there's no difference.<br><br>
Obama knows of McChrystal's involvement in the prisoner abuse scandal at
Baghdad's Camp Nama, just as he knows of his role in the cover-up in the
friendly-fire death of ex-NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman. None of
this matters to Obama. What matters is winning; not principle, ideals,
human rights or civilian casualties. Just winning.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">FROM MY LAI TO BALA
BALUK<br><br>
</b></font>On March 16, 1968, the US military was involved in a similar
incident which soured the public on Vietnam and eventually helped bring
the war to a close. Barack Obama was only seven years old when Charlie
Company--led by platoon leader second Lieutenant William Calley--entered
the small hamlet of My Lai and proceeded to slaughter 347 unarmed
civilians. This is Sam Harris's account of what took place on that day 40
years ago:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by
helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and
animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was
fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down
every house. They raped woman and girls and then killed them. They
stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off
their hands or scalps. Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and
were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with
bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time,
including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch.
In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed." (Sam Harris from
his book
"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393327655/counterpunchmaga">
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of
Reason</a>")<br><br>
</dl>The only difference between My Lai and Bala Baluk is the degree of
savagery. In both cases the guilt can be traced directly back to the
White House.<br><br>
Obama believes that civilian casualties are an unavoidable part of
achieving one's policy goals. The end justifies the means. He has
strengthened the Bush policy, not repudiated it. So much for
"change".<br><br>
Mike Whitney</b> lives in Washington state. He can be reached at
<a href="mailto:fergiewhitney@msn.com">fergiewhitney@msn.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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