Blood, Tears, Terror and Tragedy Behind the Lines
by Robert Fisk

We Are the War Criminals Now
by Robert Fisk

excerpted from the book

September 11 and the U.S. War

Beyond the Curtain of Smoke

Edited by Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke

City Lights Books, 2002

p111

Blood, Tears, Terror and Tragedy Behind the Lines
by Robert Fisk

"You'll never get through," the Taliban man shouted at me. "The Northern Alliance are shooting into Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the center of the town."

"Impossible," I said. Takhta-Pul is only 24 miles away, a few minutes' ride from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. But then a refugee with a cracked face and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban- he looked 70 but said he was only 36-stumbled up to us. "The Americans just destroyed our homes," he cried. "I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that spat smoke and soaked the ground with fire."

For a man who couldn't read and had never left Kandahar province in all his life, it was a chilling enough description of the Specter, the American "bumble bee" aircraft that picks off militiamen and civilians with equal ferocity. And down the tree-lined road came hundreds more refugees-old women with dark faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in burqas and boys with tears on their faces-all telling the same stories.

Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the sweat on his face and told me how his brother-a fighter in the same town-had just escaped. "There was a plane that shot rockets out of its side," he said, shaking his head. "It almost killed my brother today. It hit many people."

So this is what it's like to be on the losing side in the American-Afghan bloodbath. Everywhere it was the same story of desperation and terror and courage. An American F-18 soared above us as a middle-aged man approached me with angry eyes. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?" he screamed. "Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people."

I pleaded with yet another Taliban fighter-a 35-year-old man with five children called Jamaldan-to honor his government's promise to get me to Kandahar. He looked at me pityingly. "How can I get you there," he asked, "when we can hardly protect ourselves?"

The implications are astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town of Zabul to Kandahar has been cut by Afghan gunmen and U.S. special forces. The Americans were bombing civilian traffic and the Taliban on the road to Spin Boldak, and Northern Alliance troops were firing across the highway. Takhta-Pul was under fire from American guns and besieged by the Alliance. Kandahar was being surrounded.

No wonder I found the local Taliban commander, the thoughtful and intelligent Mullah Haqqani, preparing to cross the Pakistani border to Qetta-for "medical reasons."

Kandahar may not be the Taliban Stalingrad-not yet-but tragedy was the word that came to mind. Out of a dust-storm came a woman in a grey shawl. "I lost my daughter two days ago," she wailed. "The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her." Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen.

Name? "Muzlifa." Age? "She was two." I turn away. "Then there was my other daughter." She nods when I ask if this girl died too. "At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three." I turn away. "There wasn't much left of my son." Notebook out for the third time. "When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sherif. He was a year and a half old."

They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story of blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she sounded like a teenager. "My husband Mazjid was a laborer. We have two children, our daughter Rahima and our son Talib. Five days ago, the Americans hit a munitions dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through our house. My husband was killed. He was 25."

At the Akhtar Trust refugee camp, I found Dr. Ismael Moussa, just up from Karachi, a doctor of theology dispensing religion along with money for widows. "The Americans have created an evil for themselves," he said. "And it will pay for this. The Almighty Lord allows a respite to an oppressor, enough rope to hang itself, until He seizes him and never lets go."

Seizing, it seems, was also on the mind of the Foreign Office, earnestly warning reporters that Taliban invitations to Kandahar were a trap to kidnap foreign journalists. Given the politeness of even the most desperate Taliban yesterday, this may fit into the "interesting-if-true" file. Dr. Moussa suggested a more disturbing reason: the desire to prevent foreign correspondents witnessing in Kandahar the kind of war crimes committed by Britain's friends in the Northern Alliance at the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.

As for Mullah Najibullah, the Taliban's only foreign ministry representative this side of Kandahar, he looked tired and deeply depressed, admitting he had left Spin Boldak the previous night and had not slept since. But Kandahar was calm, he claimed. The Taliban's Islamic elders continued to stay there. Later, he admitted that all Taliban men had been ordered to leave Spin Boldak on Saturday night for fear that Alliance gunmen would invade the camps disguised as refugees.

"Only God Almighty has allowed the Muslims to continue to fight the great armed might of the United States," he added. If he had looked out the window, he would have seen the contrails of the bomber streams heading for Kandahar.

It was an eerie phenomenon. Taliban men-rifles over their shoulders-stared into the sun, up high into the burning light through which four white columns of smoke burnt from jet engines across the sky. I stood behind them and wondered at the battle I had watched for 20 years: a swaying host of eighth-century black turbans and, just behind them, the contrails of a B-52 heading in from Diego Garcia. God against technology.

This piece was published in The Independent, 26 November 2001.

p113

We Are the War Criminals Now
by Robert Fisk

We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force bombs Mazar-e-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies-who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996- move into the city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report is a footnote on the television satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance. Perfectly normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition" of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed. Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison "revolt," in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. U.S. Special Forces-and, it has emerged, British troops-helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed" trying to escape. It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes. Within days, The Independent's Justin Huggler has found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.

The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that U.S. air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the Northern Alliance requested it." Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr. Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial over Kunduz. The U.S. were acting in full military co-operation with the Northern Alliance militia.

Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cozying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September? Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, we-the "West"-grew a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; the Entente said it would hold personally responsible "all members of the (Turkish) Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres." After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article 6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the U.N. Convention on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity." Each new post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of ever more human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values.

Over the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing-in nauseous detail-the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too. Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants-blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for our slaughter-and now we have allowed our gruesome militia allies to execute their prisoners.

President George Bush has signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services. And make no mistake about it, we are talking here about legally sanctioned American government death squads. They have been created, of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men, should they be caught rather than killed, will have no public defense; just a pseudo trial and a firing squad. It's quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the "civilized" world. We are the masters of human rights, the Liberals, the great and good who can preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered-when our glittering buildings are destroyed-then we tear up every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.

Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths- 30,000 times greater than the victims of 11 September-the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because U.S. President Truman made a remarkable decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride." No one should be surprised that Mr. Bush-a small-time Texas Governor-Executioner-should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the White house. What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schroeders, Chiracs and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly silent in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified since 11 September.

There are ghostly shadows around to remind us of the consequences of state murder. In France, a general goes on trial after admitting to torture and murder in the 1954-62 Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as "justifiable acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse." And in Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila.

Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards. They committed most of their massacres outside Mazar-e-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed women in the Kabul football stadium. And yes, let's remember that 11 September was a crime against humanity. But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that "you are either for us or against us" in the war for civilization against evil. Well, I'm sure not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the brutal, cynical, lying "war of civilization" that he has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Center mass murder.

At this moment, I can't help remembering my dad. He was old enough to have fought in the First World War. In the third Battle of Arras. And as great age overwhelmed him near the end of the century, he raged against the waste and murder of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the campaign medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived a war he had come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back, it says: "The Great War for Civilization." Maybe I should send it to George Bush.

This piece was first published in The Independent, 29 November 2001.

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