Are U.S. Forces Executing Afghan Kids?

Our current methods of warfare show a real disregard for human life and have taken a heavy told on civilians where ever we aim our awesome fire power. In my last post I told of the killing of children in Yemen on Dec. 20th by air strikes. A week later it was high school students (and younger) of Afghanistan that were robbed of their New Year by the U.S. War Machine.

This attack was even reported in the NY Times, a unique break from the usual silence with which such war crimes are met with in the American Media:

The head of a presidential delegation investigating the deaths of 10 people in a village in eastern Afghanistan said Wednesday the team has concluded that civilians -- including schoolchildren -- were killed in an attack by foreign troops last weekend, denying NATO reports that insurgents were the victims.

Asadullah Wafa, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press by telephone that among the victims discovered in a village house in the Narang district of Kunar province were eight schoolchildren between the ages of 12 and 14.

Juan Cole went into more detail in his blog:

the US military launched a raid in Kunar Province two days after Christmas on a village at night, in which President Hamid Karzai alleged that 10 civilians, some 8 of them schoolchildren, had been killed (some say dragged out of their beds and executed). The NYT reported the head of a Kabul delegation to the village saying,"They gathered eight school students from two compounds and put them in one room and shot them with small arms." (The spokesman is a former governor of Kunar and now a close adviser to President Hamid Karzai-- i.e. not exactly a pro-Taliban source). The charitable theory is that in a nighttime raid, US troops got disoriented and hit the wrong group of young men.

The outraged Afghan public saw this raid as an atrocity, and on Wednesday
December 30, they mounted street protests against the US in Jalalabad, an
eastern Pashtun city, and Kabul. In Jalalabad, hundreds of university
students blocked the main roads, and then marched in the streets, chanting
"Death to Obama" and "Death to America," and burning Obama in effigy. (If
they go on like that, the anti-imperialist Pashtun college students of
Jalalabad may attract the support of Fox Cable News . . .)

Even while the protests were taking place in Jalalabad and Kabul, a NATO
missile strike on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province was
alleged to have killed as many as 7 more civilians, some of them children.
Now the Afghan public was really angry.

From from the London Times we have this report:
In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. "Seven students were in one room," said Rahman Jan Ehsas. "A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed."

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. "I saw their school books covered in blood," he said.

The dirty little secret behind all these recent American atrocities is the U.S. has been relying on agents like the Jordanian double-agent that killed 7 CIA officers recently for their targeting information. With such 'reliable sources' is it little wonder that strikes, rather than killing al-Qaida are actually doing the recruiting for them?

But perhaps the most telling comment was the one posted by Chris Floyd:
What an instructive contrast. In one story, an attack which did not happen and which killed no one shakes the entire world. In another story, ten human beings, including eight children, were slaughtered in a sneak attack by night -- and the world can scarcely be bothered to notice.