Collateral death

As Americans, we are quick to see the evil that others do to us, yet are reluctant to see what we do to others. There is terror and evil on both sides.

The large number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has gone unreported in the mainstream press. Like unseen ghosts, their deaths don’t seem to matter and their pictures don’t make the front page. These are civilians—innocent mothers, fathers and children who were neither Taliban nor al Qaeda. They are the thousands of non-combatants who were killed simply because the U.S. government decided to bomb and strafe where they happened to live. Terror indeed.

But there are people who care about these innocents, people who have been trying to get at this information and get it out to the American public. The Defense Department has been reluctant to address this issue and won’t confirm numbers of civilian deaths. An American aid worker who was living in eastern Afghanistan recently told congressional investigators and reporters that he thinks 4000 to 5000 Afghan civilians have died due to the bombing.

Marc Herold, a college professor of economics in New Hampshire, has gone a step further and used his 30 years of experience with databases to compile an impressive dossier of detailed information on civilian casualties. He’s spent countless hours compiling reports from foreign newspapers, wire services and firsthand accounts and has placed it all into a report that lists location, weapon and casualty estimate.

He’s found that intensive bombing of cities and towns after October 7, combined with the carpet-bombing of areas of eastern Afghanistan in December and January, has produced thousands of unintended deaths. His estimate is that somewhere between 3,300 and 3,900 civilians were killed by American weapons.

Herold’s report has received extensive coverage in the European media, but almost no attention from American media, other than scoffing at his less-than-scientific techniques. After all, it’s a job for major corporate news media, so certainly a single man can’t get it right. But they haven’t been doing their job, and that’s why Herold jumped in.

We aren’t saying that the deaths were intentional because that would be nearly impossible to prove at this point. But U.S. citizens have to take responsibility—collateral damage kills whether it’s from a smart bomb or a terrorist’s bomb. The next time you hear about the 2,800 deaths at the World Trade Center, think of an equal number of people who were struggling to survive in Afghanistan, and our country took their lives.

No one will carry their flag at the Olympic Games.