The Others (Page 2)

Listening to the repeated excuses given by Bush, Rumsfeld and others, one recalls Colin Powell's reply at the end of the Gulf War, when questioned about Iraqi casualties: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in." If, indeed, a strict definition of the word "deliberate" does not apply to the bombs dropped on the civilians of Afghanistan, then we can offer, thinking back to Powell's statement, an alternate characterization: "a reckless disregard for human life."

The denials of the Pentagon are uttered confidently half a world away in Washington. But there are on-the-spot press reports from the villages, from hospitals where the wounded lie and from the Pakistan border, where refugees have fled the bombs. If we put these reports together, we get brief glimpses of the human tragedies in Afghanistan--the names of the dead, the villages that were bombed, the words of a father who lost his children, the ages of the children. We would then have to multiply these stories by the hundreds, think of the unreported incidents and know that the numbers go into the thousands. A professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, Marc Herold, has done a far more thorough survey of the press than I have. He lists location, type of weapon used and sources of information. He finds the civilian death toll in Afghanistan up to December 10 exceeding 3,500 (he has since raised the figure to 4,000), a sad and startling parallel to the number of victims in the twin towers.

The New York Times was able to interrogate friends and family of the New York dead, but for the Afghans, we will have to imagine the hopes and dreams of those who died, especially the children, for whom forty or fifty years of mornings, love, friendship, sunsets and the sheer exhilaration of being alive were extinguished by monstrous machines sent over their land by men far away.

My intention is not at all to diminish our compassion for the victims of the terrorism of September 11, but to enlarge that compassion to include the victims of all terrorism, in any place, at any time, whether perpetrated by Middle East fanatics or American politicians.

In that spirit, I present the following news items (only a fraction of those in my files), hoping that there is the patience to go through them, like the patience required to read the portraits of the September 11 dead, like the patience required to read the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial:

From a hospital in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, reported in the Boston Globe by John Donnelly on December 5:

"In one bed lay Noor Mohammad, 10, who was a bundle of bandages. He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner. Hospital director Guloja Shimwari shook his head at the boy's wounds. 'The United States must be thinking he is Osama,' Shimwari said. 'If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?'"

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