Freedom Next Time by John Pilger

Author:John Pilger [Pilger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781407083865
Google: grcb3zchpwYC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-03-08T14:49:16+00:00

5

Liberating Afghanistan

The people there are dead because we wanted them dead.

Pentagon spokesman on the bombing of a village that killed 93 civilians

Traffic jams are a sign of prosperity and this is what my government has managed to achieve.

Harmid Karzai, US-installed President of Afghanistan, 2003

KABUL HAS CONTOURS of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light or heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pockmarks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips; the buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of defunct vehicles erected by the Khmer Rouge at the dawn of ‘Year Zero’.

There is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan. On the edge of Kabul, my footsteps echoed through the once grand Dilkusha Palace, built in 1910 to a celebrated design by an English architect, whose circular staircase and Corinthian columns and stone frescoes of biplanes lie in ruins. From its cavernous, bombed-out shell emerged reed-thin children like small phantoms, offering yellowing postcards of what it had looked like thirty years ago: a vainglorious pile at the end of an Afghan Champs-Elysées. Beneath the sweep of the derelict staircase were the blood and flesh of two people blown up by a bomb the day before. Who were they? Who had planted the bomb? In a country in thrall to mass murderers, or ‘regional commanders’, as the Americans prefer to call the mujahedin warlords, the question itself is surreal.

A hundred yards away, men in blue moved stiffly in single file: mine-clearers. Mines are like litter here, killing and maiming, it is calculated, every hour of every day. Through a line of red flags fluttering in the haze, the silhouette of a man marched, waving his arms and shouting. A refugee recently returned from Pakistan, he was determined to reclaim his home even though it was surrounded by mines. ‘It is my right!’ he shouted. Two days earlier, another man and his family had done the same, and the men in blue collected their remains in a sheet.

Nearby are the remains of Kabul’s famous art deco cinema, where the masonry crackles and falls on children playing in its rubble. There are posters warning that unexploded cluster bombs, ‘yellow and from the USA’, are in the vicinity. The children chased each other into the shadows, watched by a teenage boy with a stump and part of his face missing. People still confuse the cluster canisters with the yellow relief packages that were dropped by American planes in October 2001, after the invading ‘coalition’ had stopped relief convoys crossing from Pakistan.

‘Does anyone read the posters?’ I asked a policeman.

‘They can’t read,’ he replied.

While the number of civilians killed directly by the post-September 11 US bombing and invasion of Afghanistan is conservatively estimated at between thirteen hundred and eight

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