Hatred at Home: al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest

13. Collateral Damage

 13 Collateral Damage In the early hours of July 1, 2002, residents of the central Afghanistan village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province were celebrating an upcoming wedding. Dozens attended a party at the home of Mohammed Sherif, brother of a close ally of Afghan president Hamid Karzai . The festivities honored Sherif’s son, Abdul Malik, who was to be married later in the week. Nearby, at the home of Muhammed Shah, some partygoers were sitting on cushions in a courtyard, while others relaxed on the house’s flat-topped roof. People were dancing and singing and enjoying themselves in ways that had not been possible under the authoritarian rule of the Taliban. Villagers could hear the sound of planes overhead but didn’t pay much attention. Such flights had become common since coalition forces invaded the country the previous fall after the Taliban’s refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden.1 Suddenly, without warning, explosions and gunfire rocked the village. An American AC-130 gunship roared overhead and opened fire. As the plane’s cannons and howitzers blasted away, terrified villagers , many of them women and children, ran into rice and corn fields and nearby orchards to hide. Some survived by fleeing, others were killed or wounded as they ran. It was a scene repeated in several nearby villages. At Sherif’s home, 25 people were killed, all members of an extended family. When the attack ended, at least 44 villagers were dead and 120 wounded. U.S. officials called the attack a response to incidents of antiaircraft fire directed at the plane from the compound. Villagers said they had been firing rifles as part of the festivities, as was common at such events in Afghanistan, but had not fired any shots for several hours before the attack.2 The incident further inflamed anger within Afghanistan over the deaths of civilians during the invasion and later operations to hunt down Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. The anger was as old as the war itself. On October 27, 2001, two weeks after the United States began its Collateral Damage  bombing campaign, a woman was sewing clothes for her brother-inlaw ’s wedding in a village north of Kabul when a bomb went astray and landed on her house, killing her and seriously wounding her two young children. Earlier in the month, the Pentagon acknowledged that one of its missiles went off course and hit houses in Kabul, with reports that four people were killed. It also confirmed the deaths of four Afghans who had been working with a UN-supported demining program in Kabul. Near the end of October, Taliban rulers said that up to four hundred people, mostly civilians, had been killed in two weeks of air strikes around the country. The Pentagon called those figures exaggerated but also said civilian casualties were likely in a war.3 Collateral damage, the anticipated killing of nonmilitary combatants and destruction of civilian infrastructure, is as old as warfare itself. In Vietnam alone, an estimated 182,000 North Vietnamese civilians died during the United States’ Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign from 1965 to 1968. The issue was especially problematic in Afghanistan, where hundreds if not thousands of civilians were killed in the decade following the U.S. invasion. As early as October 2001, UN secretary general Kofi Annan urged combatants to avoid such casualties whenever possible.4 In December 2002, Human Rights Watch reported the United States had dropped nearly a quarter-million cluster bomblets in Afghanistan that killed or injured scores of civilians, especially children . It cited data from the International Committee of the Red Cross that identified 127 civilian casualties from cluster bomb duds as of November 2002. As of March 2002, the provincial government of Kandahar had filed more than seventy compensation cases with the central government in Kabul involving U.S. air attacks.5 The Pentagon was defensive about its Afghanistan operations. It said military forces were doing all they could to avoid accidental killings. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blamed the death of every single Afghan and American on the Taliban and al-Qaida. “Their leaderships are the ones that are hiding in mosques and using Afghan civilians as ‘human shields’ by placing their armor and artillery in close proximity to civilians,schools,hospitalsandthelike.WhentheTalibanissueaccusations of civilian casualties, they indict themselves,” Rumsfeld said.6 on august 6, 2002, one month after the Uruzgan killings, Abdi, Faris, and Paul met for coffee at a Caribou Café in suburban Upper...