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November 26, 2001
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Kalpana
Sharma
Flower
Power:
A Blow for Peace
Tony Mauro
The Quirin
Ruling:
FDR's Horrible Precedent for Bush's Terror Courts
C.G. Estabrook
American
Crusades
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
Resources:
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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November 26,
2001
Blood, Tears, Terror and Tragedy
By Robert Fisk
The
Independent
In Kandahar province
"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 centre 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 Spectre, 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 honour 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 US 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 Quetta -- 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 labourer. 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--i--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.
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