Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 14:24:01 -0800 (PST)
From: "S. w." <chemicalis-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Afghanistan bombing still not justified 


http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2001/1031/opt2.htm

Afghanistan bombing still not justified 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Vincent Browne 

There is so much else to write about - the failure in
Northern Ireland to resolve conclusively by far the
most important issue: policing; the deepening poverty
here and the widening of the inequality gap; the
continuing nonsense of the Garda obsession with
cannabis and their "triumph" with the "biggest ever
haul"; the disappearance of the Celtic Tiger almost
overnight; the impact of the recession on the media.

But how can we divert our horrified gaze from the
awfulness of what is going on in Afghanistan? After
nearly 24 days of bombardment you wonder what is there
left to bomb in Afghanistan? They are dropping
hundreds of bombs per day - say 300, each of about
2,000 lbs: that's 600 times per day what was detonated
at Omagh and for each of 24 days. We know now they
have twice bombed the warehouse of the International
Committee of the Red Cross, they have bombed a mosque,
a hospital, a village, wiped out a family: that's what
is admitted. The Taliban says there were more than
1,000 civilians killed in the first week. We can
discount that but are we to believe that only a
handful have been killed by these "surgical strikes",
when we know the strikes are not "surgical" and we
know the explosives used are anything but "surgical"?
I am referring particularly to the thousands of
"cluster bombs" that are being dropped every day.

These bombs were used extensively in the 78-day
bombardment of Yugoslavia two years ago. A House of
Commons Defence Committee report, Lessons of Kosovo,
commented on these cluster bombs: "Each of these
weapons contains 147 bomblets, primarily firing a
plasma-jet able to penetrate armour but having a
secondary anti-personnel effect with over 2,000
sharpened pieces cutting into the casing." The report
states that between eight and 12 per cent of these
cluster bombs (i.e., between 42 and 64 bombs), each
with 147 bomblets and 2,000 shrapnel pieces, failed to
explode and therefore are lying around on the ground
in Yugoslavia. It quotes a report which states that
only 31 per cent of these cluster bombs hit their
targets and a further 29 per cent cannot be accounted
for.

So we can believe that about 70 per cent of these
bombs, each with 147 bomblets and 2,000 shrapnel
pieces, do not hit their target and that thousands of
them have been dropped in the last 24 days? How could
it be that thousands of civilians have not been maimed
by these bombs? How could it be, even if the bombing
stopped now, that thousands more civilians will not be
maimed or killed by the unexploded "bomblets" that
will lie around on the ground for years to come?


One of my correspondents (having got 330 emails after
my column of two weeks ago I got over 400 to last
week's column, this time most of them supportive of
the anti-war stance) has challenged me on what my
attitude would be if a loyalist gang had hijacked
three Aer Lingus aircraft and flown them into office
areas of Dublin, killing 5,000 people, and if this
gang was harboured by a loyalist government in
Northern Ireland, that the gang had gone on to call
for a holy war to kill all Catholics, including all
Catholics in the South, what would be my attitude
then? Would I favour the kind of response to the
Northern state that the Americans are making to the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, assuming that the
Dublin government had the military prowess to respond?

The answer is: I do not know how the emotional trauma
of that event would colour my judgment but how should
I respond? I believe it would be wrong to bomb
Northern Ireland in the way that the Americans and
British are bombing Afghanistan. I believe it would be
wrong to use cluster bombs or any other kind of
indiscriminate weapons. I believe that before anything
was done militarily every effort should be made to
secure the extradition of the culprits either to the
Republic or to an agreed third state. And I think that
would be the right response even if my own children
were victims of the attack on Dublin (although, of
course, in that event my judgment would be entirely
overwhelmed by the catastrophe that had occurred).


But what is going on in Afghanistan is worse than just
the killing and the maiming caused by the bombing.
There is also the vast humanitarian crisis. More than
six million people were "causing concern" to the aid
agencies prior to the commencement of the bombing -
"causing concern" is a nice way of saying on the verge
of death from starvation. Surely thousands of these
have died by the withdrawal of aid since October 7th,
when the bombing started? And, as I have written
before, what is the point of it all? John Ashcroft,
the US Attorney General, said last week the attack on
America of September 11th was planned in Germany. Most
of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a few from
Egypt. Some of these may have been in Afghanistan at
some time, but so what? They could not have learnt any
skills in Afghanistan relevant to what they did on
September 11th. Their fundamentalism was engendered
not in Afghanistan but in Saudi Arabia (the major
centre for that kind of fanaticism but that can't be
mentioned because of the oil) or Egypt or Germany.

Postscript: Those of us who regarded decommissioning
as an irrelevance can hardly now claim it is historic.
More importantly, the real issue is, and always was,
policing and the focus on bringing republicans into a
consensus on that seems to have been lost. That is far
more important that decommissioning or the restoration
of the Executive.


vbrowne-AT-irish-times. 





====SW

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