Afghanistan, Where Empires Come To Cry
The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan are the highest they have been since the invasion in 2001, according to the latest statistics from the United Nations; since January alone the United States of America, and collaborating NATO forces, have been forced to “apologize” for civilian casualties caused by air-strikes, the burning of the Qur’an, massacres and photographs and video footage of U.S. soldiers gleefully posing alongside mangled Afghan limbs and urinating on the corpses of Afghans.
January 12: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta orders Marines and Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine Corps officer who commands coalition forces in Afghanistan, to investigate a video showing four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.
January 19: A night raid by NATO forces kills six civilians; A woman and a child were among the dead
February 13: NATO admits that 8 Afghan children were killed during a bombing raid in the northeast province.
February 15: U.S.-led military coalition, NATO, regrets the killing of eight civilians in a NATO air strike this month in eastern Afghanistan; seven victims were boys between the ages of 6 and 14 and one was a mentally ill young man around 18 to 20 years old.
February 21: General John R. Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force apologizes for ‘unintentional’ burning of Qur’ans.
February 22: Nine Afghan girls injured in NATO air raid.
February 23: NATO forces chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal publicly apologizes for 27 Afghan civilian deaths in a US airstrike.
March 11: U.S. government reportedly gives $50,000 each to the families of the 17 Afghan villagers slain by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, most of them women and children.
April 18: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta apologizes for photographs that appeared in an American newspaper of U.S. soldiers posing with the maimed bodies of dead Afghans.
As stated in a previous entry, the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan is a ruthless, intrinsic perversion and it is marginalized, as the majority of all narratives routinely attempt to absolve Western forces of the barbarity of the imperialist occupation itself. Each casualty referenced in Afghanistan is propagated as being an irregularity, a contention that is deeply farcical; the entire occupation reads of being nothing more than a tiresome killing-spree.
Civilian deaths in Afghanistan are commonplace because this is the reality of life under brutal imperialist occupation; from drone-strikes in Yemen to “botched” raids in Afghanistan, the victims of foreign military hostilities are expendable. The “concerned” public audiences have long forgotten the blood soaked dress of the partially burned Afghan child and the parched bones of a young boy’s feet peaking out from beneath a torn and scorched blanket. They have expelled from their mind the heart-wrenching image of the tears of an Afghan father who could not protect his young children from the fate which awaited them that dark night. Just as Iraq has escaped from the memory of Americans, so will Afghanistan.
As the Obama administration marches forward to the beat of the same militaristic drums as that of the previous administration their apologies are all for naught. The tears of the occupier are hollow things, that spill forth with no meaning; vacant of all honesty and empty of conscience.
So long as the US and NATO forces continue to occupy Afghanistan their circadian “apologies” will carry forward with the same emptiness as they had before, because the tears of an occupying entity are inconsequential, so long as the reason for these deaths is maintained; so long as the illegal occupation of Afghanistan endures.
