Afghans claim 40 killed, 100 hurt, prompting Karzai to confront American officials in Kabul
Luke Harding, South Asia correspondent
Wednesday July 3, 2002
The Guardian
US military officials in Afghanistan have refused to apologise following the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding party on Monday which killed at least 30 people, insisting that aircraft had come under sustained and hostile fire.
The incident prompted the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to summon US military chiefs to his office and demand "all necessary measures" be taken "not to harm innocent Afghan civilians".
Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near Deh Rawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, had been firing into the air - a Pashtun wedding tradition - when American planes struck.
But a US spokesman claimed yesterday that the shooting was "not consistent" with a wedding, saying that the planes had come under attack. "Normally when you think of celebratory fire... it's random, it's sprayed, it's not directed at a specific target," said Colonel Roger King at the US airbase at Bagram. "In this instance, the people on board the aircraft felt that the weapons were tracking them and were [trying] to engage them."
The US planes - including a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter gunship - dropped seven 2,000lb bombs, he added. His unapologetic tone, after one of the worst blunders of the US-led coalition's nine-month war in Afghanistan will infuriate locals, who said most of the dead were women and children. At least 40 others were injured.
Last night a US soldier was shot in the foot as an American military convoy returning from the hospital in Kandahar where wedding party victims were being treated came under fire. Col King said the wounded soldier was taken to the US base at Kandahar airport. Afghans travelling with the convoy returned fire but it was not known if they hit any targets.
In Washington, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said of the bombing that any loss of innocent lives was a tragedy, but said he would not know what had happened until the Afghan and US investigators had reported. "I read in the paper there was a wedding," Mr Rumsfeld said. "I just don't know the facts."
US troops appear to have been carrying out a major search for Mullah Omar, the Taliban's fugitive leader.
The Afghan foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said that 40 people, all civilians, had died, and that a further 100 were wounded. "In one village, there was a wedding party... a whole family of 25 people. No single person was left alive. This is the extent of the damage," he said. Raaz Mohammad, an official at the Oruzgan governor's office in the provincial capital, Tarin Kowt, also put the death toll as high as 40.
The Pentagon has admitted that one of its bombs was "errant" and missed the target, but has refused to confirm that a missile hit the wedding party.
American confusion is compounded by the fact that it is unclear which plane was involved. The Pentagon confirmed that a B-52 bomber did drop seven "precision guided weapons" on a cave complex, one of which missed the target. But the US claims this hit an empty hillside. That still leaves questions about the AC-130 gunship that returned what was claimed to be anti-aircraft fire.
Mr Rumsfeld said he knew of no casualties, other than four "young people" brought by their father to a US base, who were then helicoptered to Kandahar for treatment. He did hint that al-Qaida training manuals gave advice on how to discredit the US in situations like this but added: "I have no reason to believe that is the case this time."
Col King said the incident occurred during an operation to track down wanted Taliban or al-Qaida personnel, arms and documents.
He said: "The US government extends its deepest sympathies to those who may have lost loved ones or who may have suffered any injuries. Coalition military forces take extraordinary measures to protect against civilian casualties."
US forces killed 15 people in the same province in January in a firefight which they later admitted was "ill-advised".
Civilian catastrophe as US bombs Afghan wedding
� 250 civilians reported dead or injured
� Witnesses say attack lasted 2 hours
� Pentagon: 'One bomb went astray'
Staff and agencies
Monday July 1, 2002
US helicopter gunships and jets today fired on an Afghan wedding, killing or injuring at least 250 civilians, witnesses and hospital officials said.
The attack occurred in the village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province, in the south of the country, where special forces and other coalition troops were searching for remaining al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.
One survivor, Abdul Qayyum, told reporters at a Kandahar hospital that the attack began shortly after midnight and continued for more than two hours until US special forces ground troops moved into the area.
"The Americans came and asked me 'who fired on the helicopters', and I said 'I don't know' and one of the soldiers wanted to tie my hands but someone said he is an old man and out of the respect they didn't," he said.
Afghans often fire weapons during weddings in celebration. Hospital officials said a number of wounded were being brought to Kandahar. Most of the dead and injured were women and children.
"We have many children who are injured and who have no family," nurse Mohammed Nadir said. "Their families are gone. The villagers brought these children and they have no parents. Everyone says that their parents are dead."
Another nurse, Sher Mohammed, said he heard that scores were dead and injured.
At Bagram air base north of Kabul, the US military spokesman, Colonel Roger King, said an AC-130 gunship, a B-52 bomber and other aircraft joined the attack after coalition ground forces came under fire.
"Right now there are a lot of different opinions as to what happened," Col King said. He said US investigators would be sent to the area. In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said a coalition air reconnaissance patrol that was flying over Uruzgan province reported coming under anti-aircraft artillery fire.
Other coalition aircraft opened fire on the target and at least one bomb went astray.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear where the "errant" bomb hit. He said the Pentagon was aware of reports from Afghanistan of civilian casualties in Uruzgan province but it was unclear whether they were caused by the stray US bomb or by falling anti-aircraft artillery.
Gore derides Bush hunt for Bin Laden
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Monday July 1, 2002
The Guardian
Al Gore has launched a vociferous attack on the Bush administration's handling of the war against terrorism, accusing it of incompetence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Mr Gore's senior foreign policy adviser added to the force of his boss's remarks by accusing the White House of fuelling anti-Americanism abroad.
The Gore team's comments were interpreted as a strong indication that the former vice-president, who lost to George Bush in the 2000 election after a splenetic legal dispute, intends to seek the Demo- cratic nomination in 2004.
"They haven't gotten Osama bin Laden or the al-Qaida operation," Mr Gore told donors and fundraisers from his 2000 campaign, meeting in Memphis on Saturday night. "They have refused to allow enough troops from the international community to be put into Afghanistan to keep it from sliding back under control of the warlords."
His adviser, Leon Fuerth, said Mr Bush's lack of commitment to supporting democratic movements overseas had contributed to a "deterioration in support for America" around the world.
Just as importantly for domestic rune-readers, Mr Gore admitted he got things wrong in 2000, prompting speculation he was developing strategy for a new presidential bid.
"If I had to do it all over again, I'd just let rip," he said. "To hell with the polls, the tactics, and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America's future." Later, he told reporters he ought to have spent "more time speaking from the heart and ... a lot less time going to media events and making tactical moves".
No defeated Democratic or Republican presidential nominee has been nominated in the next election since Adlai Stevenson in 1956, who lost. But Mr Gore's wife Tipper said in Memphis that she wanted him to run - another sign that he plans to do so.
'Anti-American' has become a thought-killing smear
Independence Day is a good time to defend the necessity of real debate
Hugo Young
Thursday July 4, 2002
The Guardian
Between September 11 and July 4, this Independence Day in America, I find I've written 22 Guardian columns devoted one way or another to what grew out of that infamous September moment. Perhaps it was too many. For sure, these pieces contained their share of mis-spoken words and fragile judgments. But here was the big subject. It raised so many issues of global concern, from Euro-American relations, through all the Blair-Bush encounters, into the Middle East process, on to civil liberties. How to forestall and suppress global terrorism is the greatest of all contemporary challenges, subsuming many others about economic and territorial justice on a grand scale. I've tried to address them as a reporter and analyst, as much as an opinionated columnist.
Independence Day, however, is the moment to note an unhappy trend. Discourse and relationships have narrowed not broadened in 10 months. There's a hardening of tone between Europe and America. I sense trenches being dug. In particular, it becomes ever more difficult to discuss these colossal problems, rife with potential for prudent scepticism, in words that don't call forth instant labelling as to their categoric loyalty or treason. At the beginning, President Bush stared at the world and said you are either with us or against us. Time hasn't worked any refinement of his message, rather the reverse. We are all anti-Americans now, unless we happen to be pro.
Each side has made its contribution to this starkness. The Europeans began it, with the voices that refused to address what had happened. A seam of vindictiveness exposed itself. Anti-American paranoia enjoyed its finest hour, in some quarters, at the hands of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the plane-bombers.
This lack of empathy, though no longer so pitiless, is still apparent in Europe. Despite the best efforts of some reporters, the European mind - which includes the British mind - recoils from what America has embraced. It does not understand the enormity of what happened not only to New York and Washington but to the psyche of a once invulnerable nation. Most of Europe still tends to take its own experience of terrorism as a reason to disdain Americans' over-reaction to their own taste of it, and I'm speaking of the citizens at least as much as the political leaders. Ultimately, there's a difference of caring and a want of rage.
This has led Europeans into some amnesiac generalisations. They speak about Americans without remembering history, or distinguishing between the people and the Bush regime. They overlook American generosity both as a world power - which nation was it that saved the world from German and Soviet tyranny? - and as a nation of open doors and open hearts. Though the government, even one with a mandate as doubtful as George Bush's, can be said to be acting for the people, it seems important to be as careful in vaporising about Americans as about, say, Jewish or black people. Ethnic monoliths are a curse at every level of humanity.
But some Americans are moving down the same slope. Europeans too are generalised into infamy by the east-coast zeitgeist. Europe has been smeared as generally anti-semitic, on the basis of a microscopic number of voters in two or three countries. Europe is stigmatised as wimpish if not cowardly, because it does not place the same faith as America in the military response to terrorism.
To some extent, each continent is reacting according to the facts of geo-politics. Lesser powers have always sparred with great ones, as jealousies collide. No formerly lesser power knows this better than America. In 1795, John Adams, on the brink of the presidency of a new country still suffering under the transatlantic yoke, wrote to his wife Abigail: "I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull. But he is not yet sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of America one day to beat down his pride."
Now that the beating is long done, Europeans have a problem that's acutely visible at this time. They may never be sufficiently humble, but they should at least be clear. Neither the most pro- nor the most anti-American European governments, including this one, are unambiguous about what they want America to do or be. Sometimes, as in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they want intervention of a certain kind. Other times, they rail against American interventionism as if it were an ideological disease. There is justice in the Pentagon's scorn for a continent that wants America to do the heavy lifting against terror, while it dithers on the side.
Americans also need to consider some unlearned lessons. In power politics, the present period cannot be characterised as one of their magnanimous phases. Donald Rumsfeld is as insolent as John Bull used to be. At the grass roots, the soil is even more acidulous than it was a little while ago. I judge from the email responses I've had, often in massive quantities, to some of those 22 columns, almost entirely from the US, where the Guardian website seems to be a must-read. While it's true that more anti-Bush voices are starting to surface, the vocal majority have become more inflexible, more righteous and more harshly scathing of European critics than they were at the turn of the year.
And now we hear their British echoes, from people drawn towards the same stark analysis. Iraq is being prepared for its role as this generation's Vietnam. Long before an invasion happens, adamancy is beginning to prevail. Positions about pre-emption are being pre-emptively demanded: will you be with us or against us, whatever we choose to do? The question is asked at dinner as well as at Camp David. To give the wrong answer is to face certain ignominy from one side or the other, for failing or passing a simplistic loyalty test on an issue no longer to be treated as amenable to honest argument.
It would be another simplistic error to think these attitudes can be reconciled. Good will is not enough to bury such visceral differences as exist on a familiar and lengthening list of issues. The continents are without doubt drifting apart. They have interests in common, but also interests around which America, as now led, has the power and the hardness to insist on non-negotiable policies that we can take or leave. There are few cosy solutions to anything much, which the allies in the old western alliance will any longer unanimously sign up to.
But it only demeans things further to pre-stigmatise all debate with the mark of "anti-American". Some Europeans deserve the label, but very few. Most want to share in a dialogue where they are listened to, especially when they disagree. The crisis is far, far too serious for its terms to be entirely coloured by that convenient, thought-killing smear. The US, I think, will do what it wants anyway. But I don't think it's anti-American to say so. The real anti-Americans - anti-worlders, in fact - are those who don't want a serious discussion.