NATO forces kill unarmed 12-year-old, three others
The Associated Press is reporting that NATO forces killed four unarmed people when they fired into a vehicle in Afghanistan on Tuesday, one of them a 12-year-old boy. NATO is claiming that two of the individuals were “known insurgents,” but President Hamid Karzai and the police chief of the province insist they were all civilians. NATO officials admit the men were not armed, and contend that their biometric identification systems identified two of the men as being eligible to be killed because they were “insurgents.”
If you are at all in touch with the value and sanctity of human life, you have to recognize how horribly immoral this occupation of Afghanistan has become. What exactly is an “insurgent?” Somebody who is mad that foreign military forces are in their country dictating terms and killing innocent people? If that happened here in America, virtually everyone I know would be an “insurgent.” To say that the “insurgents” are hiding among innocent civilians is completely asinine. The “insurgents” are native to Afghanistan. It is their homeland. The U.S.-led NATO forces murdered 2,412 innocent Afghani citizens last year. Insurgents are apparently people who the U.S. thinks might fight back as their people are being slaughtered and their culture is usurped by colonialists.That is going to make every native Afghani citizen either an open or underground insurgent.
It is true that most Americans would not want to live within the Afghani culture, but so be it. Saudi Arabia is far worse when it comes to women’s rights, draconian customs and social mores, and most of the WTC perpetrators where Saudi, but we have no problem with them. We are continually staining our hands, and our very souls, with the blood of innocent people in Afghanistan every day, and there is no way to “win.” We have been wrong all along and keep getting deeper into moral debt as we spend $57,000 a minute over there to do it.
What would you do if foreign troops killed your unarmed 12-year-old son on your own country’s soil? I would guess that you would become an, uh….insurgent. We create more of them with each person that we murder. At this point, what exactly is the objective in Afghanistan? To kill indiscriminately and expect that this will eliminate the underlying rage that can lead a few to an act of terrorism?
What we have done since the 911 event is so incredibly heinous and sad that it trumps the deeds of the WTC bombers about a thousandfold, and we keep building on that failure each day we maintain an offensive presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. A peaceful, non-military effort to improve conditions in these countries would have made us far more safe than the Bush/Obama preemptive and illegal wars of aggression that are leaving us morally and fiscally bankrupt as a nation.