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| US admits lethal blunders Village is wiped out as 2,000lb of Allied explosives miss Taliban target Jason Burke in Peshawar Sunday October 14, 2001 The Observer Serious blunders by American warplanes may have killed at least 100 civilians in Afghanistan, according to eye-witness accounts obtained by The Observer . Two US jets, they said, had bombed a village in eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 100 people. And the Pentagon yesterday admitted that a 2,000lb bomb missed its Taliban military target at Kabul airport on Friday night, and apparently struck a residential area. The Taliban claim US and British military strikes have killed 300 or more civilians, including four workers who died earlier last week when an errant cruise missile was believed to have hit a building used by the United Nations for mine-clearing operations. Until now Western politicians have been quick to dismiss the claims as propaganda. Britain's International Development Secretary, Clare Short, said 'there had not been so many civilian casualties'. Now apparent confirmation of serious casualties among non-combatants is beginning to emerge. If the evidence is accurate, an attack on Karam village, 18 miles west of Jalalabad, last Thursday was the most lethal blunder yet by the Allied forces, and will seriously shake the increasingly fragile coalition built by President Bush and Tony Blair. Reports of between 50 and 150 deaths there provoked rage and grief throughout Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. Yesterday - as air strikes continued after a pause for Friday, the Muslim holy day - the Taliban rejected Bush's offer of a 'second chance' to hand over Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect for the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. The supreme leader of Afghanistan's Taliban militia ruled out handing over Bin Laden and appealed again to Muslims everywhere to help defend his country, the Afghan Islamic Press reported Saturday. 'We have not agreed with America to hand over anyone,' Mullah Mohamed Omar said in a statement issued in Kandahar. 'The only sin we have committed is we have enforced Islamic laws in our country and we have provided peace to the oppressed. But ordinary Muslims are being targeted.' If confirmed, the destruction of Karam will harden support in Afghanistan behind the Taliban. Previously it was hoped that moderates within the movement, or wavering individual commanders, could be split off from hardliners and persuaded to defect. 'Any civilian casualties make the Afghan people, and therefore the Taliban, look like victims,' said one Peshawar-based Afghan military commander. There were no reports yesterday of armed demonstrations against Americans in Jalalabad, previously a city where support for the Taliban was thin. Aiman Malai, a shopkeeper in the eastern Afghan village of Milka Khel, told The Observer that he was finishing his morning prayers at 3.45am on Thursday when he saw two jets approaching Karam from the north 'like two black darts shooting through the air'. From his hilltop village, Malai watched the two jets swoop low over Karam, three miles away across a valley. 'They came low over it and then there was a huge explosion and flames reaching high into the air. There was more explosive in these bombs than the ones the Russians used.' Lal Jand, 30, a farmer who was in Karam, said the planes circled for two more attacks on the village. Jand, whose hand was wounded, telephoned his uncle, Haji Awal Khan Nasr, later after going to hospital for treatment. His wife and two of his sons had been killed. 'My nephew told me the planes came in the first time and only a few people were injured. Many of the men outside were able to run away, but the planes came back two more times. All the women and children were still in the houses. They had no chance. I believe maybe more than 100 have died,' Nasr said yesterday. Nasr listed the men he knew had died. The oldest man in the village, 60-year-old Haji Ghami, perished along with all but his youngest son, Surgul, who was away, Nasr said. 'The Americans are educated people. They can see that these are not terrorists.Why do they target them?' On Friday, villagers 'were still digging bodies out of the rubble', said Zadra Azam, the region's deputy governor. The village, its population swollen by refugees, had been thought safe by many local people. Stop the war, plead parents of NY victim 'Our country is using our son's memory as justification to cause more suffering for other sons and parents in other lands' Duncan Campbell Sunday October 14, 2001 The Observer Hours after air strikes on Afghanistan began last week, thousands attended a peace rally in New York. They heard 87-year-old Reuben Schafer, whose grandson Gregory Rodriguez was killed in the World Trade Centre on 11 September, read a letter from Gregory's parents, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, to President Bush. It read: 'Your response to the attack does not make us feel better about our son's death... It makes us feel our government is using our son's memory as justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands.' The Rodriguez family is part of a growing network of relatives opposing the attacks on Afghanistan. Phyllis Rodriguez, speaking from her Westchester home, said she had been inspired by her son's 'instinctive internationalism' to register her protests. When 14 years old Gregory Rodriguez spent a month studying in Spain and was puzzled to find how much the Spanish hated the French. When he returned home he told his parents: 'Nationalism stinks.' Some 17 years after that Spanish trip, the 31-year-old head of computer security at Cantor Fitzgerald was killed in his office on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Centre. 'He liked the challenge of the workaday world,' said his mother. He had been at Cantor Fitzgerald for three years following seven years at Salomon Brothers, where he had met his wife of a year, Eliza Soudant. His tastes, in music as in people, were eclectic: from opera and reggae to Tom Waits and the Beastie Boys. 'He was hungry for life, a very outgoing guy and he loved new experiences and travel,' said Phyllis Rodriquez. His travels and his work took him to Cuba and Japan, Guatemala and England, hiking, scuba diving and exploring. He liked to get off the beaten track and meet people of different nationalities. Then came 11 September and his parents, like thousands of others, found themselves searching the hospitals and waiting for news. Calls were already being made for the bombing of Afghanistan, and a CBS/ New York Times poll found that 75 per cent of those interviewed favoured war, even if it meant the deaths of innocent civilians. The Rodriguez family decided they had to speak out so that such retaliation was not carried out in their son's name. 'I feel the American public has to join the international community in a meaningful way, and stop being an isolationist nation,' said Phyllis Rodriguez. 'One way we can do it is by educating ourselves. It's not part of our national consciousness - the conditions under which people live in Iraq, Rwanda, Paraguay. That's the first step: to learn about the sufferings and joys of other people. We have to find out why we are hated in other parts of the world.' The family have made contact with others who have lost members in the attacks and who feel as they do. In his memorial service speech shortly after the attacks, the President singled out an unnamed man 'who could have saved himself' but instead 'stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend'. The man was Abe Zelmanowitz, a 54-year-old computer programmer who worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield in the World Trade Centre. Matthew Lasar, Zelmanowitz's nephew, said: 'He was a warm and compassionate person, very principled, with a wonderful droll sense of humour.' Zelmanowitz had telephoned his family after the first plane struck to explain that he could not leave his friend, wheelchair-bound Ed Beyea, behind. 'He called his brother Jack, and said he was not going to come back. The two of them met their ends in the building.' A devout Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, Zelmanowitz was in the garment trade until it collapsed in the Seventies and studied computer programming so that he could begin a new career. Lasar, 46, said his cousin, Saul, and his friends had been searching the hospitals on 11 September and someone had told a reporter about his uncle's decision not to abandon his friend. The White House heard of it and it was decided to include the story in the President's speech. Lasar said : 'I can't put words into his [Zelmanowitz's] mouth, but I know a little about Afghanistan and I know it [bombing] would result in a famine of unbelievable consequences. I don't think people in this country realise we are so powerful. In terms of my own grief, I don't know how to describe it, but in the private place I am right now I don't want to see any more bloodshed. I felt I had an obligation to say that.' Other relatives have added their voices. Judy Keane, whose husband Richard was killed, told CNN: 'Bombing Afghanistan is just going to create more widows, more homeless, fatherless children.' Jill Gartenberg, whose husband Jim was killed in the attacks, told Fox news: 'We don't win by killing other people.' As for the pursuit of those who planned the attacks, Phyllis Rodriguez said she had hoped for 'due process, a fair trial, no shoot-first, bomb-first policy. It may be painful and slow, but it would be the best testament to my son and to all of those who died'. Bread not bombs By doing little to avert a famine in Afghanistan, the West is sowing the seeds for more Islamic hatred Nick Cohen Sunday October 14, 2001 The Observer The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so isn't to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, as I do, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of 11 September changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood 'side by side with us' in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was 'born out of the defeat of slavery', rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. You can hold all these views simultaneously and still argue that this war is a moral and political disaster. Its worthwhile ends are unattainable. Its means are self-defeating. The choice before America and her supporters in Britain is to back off or inflict a famine on Afghanistan which will kill tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands and take the case for a just war with them. Tolerance of starvation is unconscionable. It dumps supporters of bombing in the same intellectual wastebasket as those who mutter that America 'had it coming'. Afghan peasants, like the workers in the World Trade Centre, aren't strictly culpable, you understand. But if they're in the wrong place under the wrong government then, somehow, they deserve to die. I wouldn't expect everyone in a government which employs Jo Moore to be distracted by ethical arguments. I count many hardened socialists and pacifists among my friends. For all their fierce anti-Americanism, they were too filled with shock and sympathy on 11 September to match the seediness of the propagandist's cry: 'Everyone else thinks the extermination of thousands is a problem! I see it as an opportunity!' From what I hear, though, New Labour is beginning to worry about the political 'collateral damage'. The formal war aim - the defeat of terrorism - is a fantasy. More realistically, we might have hoped war would do the world a favour by bringing justice of a kind to bin Laden and the Taliban without creating the resentments which will breed further violence. Starvation in Afghanistan dashes modest hopes. It provides the inspiration for future suicide bombers while inflaming intelligent Muslim opinion. The Prime Minister's interviewer on al-Jazeera TV made a comparison I suspect we're going to hear many times in the coming months. Iraqis are still paying the price of the Gulf war of 1991, he said. 'They are under sanctions and about one million Iraqi children died because of famine. Aren't you repeating the same thing in Afghanistan now?' Blair said, quite rightly, that hunger in Iraq was the fault of Saddam Hussein. He didn't answer the Afghanistan question. FAMINE WAS COMING anyway. Oxfam warned before 11 September that drought and the economic consequences of a Taliban theocracy which couldn't create a civilisation worth clashing with would leave 1.9 million Afghans hungry by the end of the year. Clare Short and her Department for International Development had been saying for months that Afghanistan was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Christian Aid spent the summer planning an Afghan appeal for 15 September. The eradication of the means of life in Afghanistan did not therefore arrive out of a clear blue sky. The kamikaze attacks which did halted United Nations food deliveries for three weeks. They started, stopped again when the bombing began on Sunday, and then restarted. The UN had 9,200 metric tons of food inside of Afghanistan yesterday. Officials in the World Food Programme calculate the country needs 52,000 metric tons from outside a month. Their horrendous difficulty is not finding supplies. The Bush administration has belied its reputation for know-nothing callousness by being exceptionally generous in circumstances which might have induced parsimony, as, indeed, has Britain. There's plenty of food near the borders. But getting it in before winter closes the mountain roads next month is a nightmare. Afghanistan must have a five-month stockpile - 250,000 metric tons - in place within five weeks. If it doesn't, then voices as sober as Andrew Natsios, the administrator of Bush's US Agency for International Development, say 1.5 million Afghans risk starvation and seven million will face critical food shortages. To make matters worse, the Afghans aren't behaving as predicted. The United Nations and aid agencies thought that 11 September would produce a rush of refugees to the borders where rudimentary camps could be prepared to shelter them. The expected exodus has been the great non-event of the war. The Taliban have banned foreign journalists and looted UN communications equipment, so no one really knows why Afghans aren't on the move. The most frightening suggestion is that most with the ability to get out fled in the Nineties. The majority of those left behind are too young, old or sick to travel far. The people who are most likely to starve, in other words, are least able to reach food stations. Moving hundreds of convoys into one of the poorest countries in the world within weeks would probably be impossible in peacetime. It's certainly impossible during a war which Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said on Thursday would 'go through the winter and into next summer at the very least'. The bombing won't last that long; there aren't enough large pieces of rubble in Afghanistan worth smashing into small pieces of rubble. But if the predictions that an apocalypse will begin some day around 20 November are half right, any stalling of food deliveries by B52s will bring mass starvation. The officials in Whitehall who fear that Britain and America will be complicit in a calamity get angriest about the absence of co-ordination. There's no plan, they say, to share information between soldiers and aid workers and balance humanitarian and military objectives. But then an absence of coherent planning defines the conflict. YOU MAY remember that the Northern Alliance was meant to fight America's ground war by proxy. Now we're told it is almost as brutal and unfit for power as the Taliban. Last Saturday, Alastair Campbell was adamant that Britain did not want to extend the war to Iraq. On Sunday, Bush hinted strongly that he'd like to do just that. Bush had backed away from declaring war on Iraq by Friday. He was no longer sure if the complete overthrow of the Taliban remained a war aim. Elements of the Taliban could have a role in a national government if they surrendered bin Laden, he suggested. 'If you cough him up and his people we will reconsider what we are doing to your country.' America can't define her enemies. If the Taliban are ejected, she doesn't know who should form the next government. Blair and Bush, however, are aware that they must convince the Muslim world that they are acting justly if they wish to escape a new generation of bin Ladens. Yet their war will exacerbate a famine which may further shred America's reputation in the region. The alternative to hunger is a generous bombing pause so food can be delivered and Washington can work out what this war is for. The Taliban aren't going anywhere and can be defeated at any time. When you don't know what you're doing it's usually best to adopt the pose of masterful inactivity and do nothing. Watch out, there's a dinosaur about Broadsheet pundits and academics were arguing before 11 September what description best suited an American Right which was tearing up every treaty. 'Isolationist' was rejected by one and all. The Bush administration didn't give a damn about world opinion, but was very keen on global dominance. 'Unilateralist' was the preferred label of right-thinking people. Only Dan Plesch of the Royal United Services Institute and a few other Leftish dons argued that America's refusal to recognise international law meant that technically it was an 'anarchist' state. I saw their point, but thought they were pushing it a bit after 11 September. A generous but not necessarily inaccurate explanation of Blair's willingness to stand by America come what may is that he is trying to persuade Bush to accept the need for global security. He could have argued that US's sabotaging of controls on chemical and biological weapons in the summer, for instance, was folly when hindsight proved that no crime was unimaginable. To call America anarchist after what she has suffered seemed cruel, until I read the debates on Jesse Helms's Amendment to Protect Servicemen From International Criminal Court. An urgent task in the 'war' against terrorism was, said the far-Right Senator, the undermining of international justice. America must not accept the jurisdiction of a court for war criminals, even though it was supported by Britain and every other civilised country. Her military should be free to take 'any necessary action' - including the deployment armed force - to 'free US soldiers' from its cells. 'Nothing is more important that the safety of our citizens, soldiers and public servants,' said Helms. 'The terrorist attacks of 11 September have made that fact all the more obvious.' Attacking the law against war crimes after the crimes of 11 September was at best frivolous - weren't their more pressing matters to discuss? - and at worst insane. Arguments against an impartial court which might try the bin Ladens of the future weaken America's attempt to build coalitions and present her case in the Muslim world. To then propose surgical strikes on the citizens of her allies was, surely, the ravings of a dinosaur. Yet a proud Helms told the Senate that his amendment was 'endorsed by the Bush administration'. 'Anarchist' was the mot juste, after all. Save the children The most potent weapon in the West's arsenal is aid, not armaments. Mary Riddell Sunday October 14, 2001 The Observer The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy. The verdict on General MacArthur's proposal to take the Korean conflict into China in 1951 also applies to Afghanistan. Bombing rubble looks increasingly like thuggery. The élite of al-Qaeda are as likely to be found in Claridge's as in Afghan camps. Air strikes, if not quite a kneejerk response, are a genuflection to public demand in the US. And Osama bin Laden is an unsatisfactory enemy. Potential winners always are. His lead has baffled those assuming an accused murderer of thousands deserves pariah status throughout the Muslim world. We have talked up his evil brilliance, some say. The opposite is true. The mistake was to think him an unsophisticated zealot with a bad beard. No one told us that he was so clever. If only western tacticians had grasped that earlier, it would have been obvious that this is a mousetrap war. The atrocities of 11 September were bait. For bin Laden to build a support base depended on provoking the sort of American, and British, reaction, that would disturb even Arab moderates. For a week, Afghanistan has been bombed to quarks. Each day, reports of civilian casualties build, and so does Muslim unrest. How bin Laden must glory in the folly of a West that moves to the danse macabre he choreographed. At home, there is smugness, as Tony Blair's diplomacy earns him Churchill status. Three-quarters of all British people supposedly back air strikes. It is easy to see why. We were promised a new war, but we got the old sort, only better. Looking macho without disgusting levels of civilian deaths appeals to a Western culture averse to self-blame. Sanitised war, like fat-free muffins and diet cola, offers satisfaction without guilt. The first tests of a virtuous war are whether it is just, honest and as respectful as possible of civilian life. This one fails all three. In his conference speech, the Prime Minister enumerated the beneficiaries of British goodness. 'The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan; these too are our cause.' Last year, as winter fell and the temperature dropped to 26 degrees Celsius, an Afghan aid worker watched, helpless, as 100 children died of cold. In Herat, a young Unicef volunteer found a father, a mother and their three children huddled in a frozen embrace of death. This year, human ice sculptures will go unnoticed. As many as seven million Afghan citizens may perish in the months to come unless food convoys resume immediately. Even if the UN's pleas for a ceasefire are heeded, it will be too late for many. Last year, one in four Afghan children died before the age of five. This year, they will not be so lucky. Scattering food parcels, whose rations are unsuitable for starving children, has been insultingly useless. Even if all the airdrops missed minefields and reached the neediest, the $320 million earmarked by the US would feed only a quarter of the hungry for one day. It would hardly be less useful to bombard starving Afghans with Jamie Oliver cookery cards. For the fate of the dying to be exploited in teary rhetoric designed to disarm the Labour Party conference is despicable. That is not all the fault of Blair, a genuine humanitarian who must bend to the Bush agenda. But the upshot is that most people think this war means meals on wheels. 'Kick ass, Tony,' the Sun advises as ground battles loom. While foreigners have rarely triumphed in Afghanistan, there is little doubt that Genghis Blair can do it. But do what, exactly, when options for an alternative government sway between a neocolonial protectorate and a coalition involving everyone from the Garrick Club wing of the Northern Alliance to an ossified king? Concentration on pick'n'mix government does, however, distract from bigger issues. As bin Laden knows, war has its own momentum. Malaysia and Indonesia stir. Pakistan looks increasingly fissile. The relief that Bush has, for now, backed off Iraq ignores the fact that Saddam Hussein also plays battle chess. Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, believes that he will, within three to four weeks, begin air movements around Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and may move ground troops towards Kuwait. Would Bush's alliance dare do nothing in the face of such provocation? In July 1995, the US Naval War College played out a game designed to explore the development of a major crisis in the Persian Gulf. A resurgent Iraq killed so many in the region with biological weapons that the only endgame for America's better military brains was a nuclear attack on Baghdad. It is three years since the UNSCOM inspectors left. Everyone believes Saddam's biological stockpile will now be fearsome. For the West to believe itself the sole driver of events is madness. Saudi Arabia, the core of Bush's war, grows more febrile. There is no afternoon tea for Blair, nor any gesture that might inflame bin Laden's desire to depose a corrupt royal family and remove 5,000 US troops sullying the land of Mecca and Medina. He longs to collapse the degeneracy of its thousands of princes, with their leather-upholstered Mercedes and dinky mobile phones, into an underlying culture in which Valentine and Pokémon cards are banned, and 100 public beheadings take place every year. Beneath the veneer of lush globalisation, Saudi is dying. Per capita income has halved to $7,000 over 20 years, unemployment is vast, and 10,000 half-educated graduates of Wahib apostasy have emerged from its religious schools. These are bin Laden's acolytes, bred to die and weaned on hatred; 12 of the 19 US hijackers were Saudi-born. Until Iran and Iraq are brought back into the US fold (or the West learns to use less oil), America relies on Saudi for its survival. Should bin Laden win control of the country, Western economies would be crippled. If America has begun to work out how to deal with a nation that is now both its scourge and salvation, there is little evidence. Instead, we get such clodhopping DIY lessons in Islam that it is not difficult to see how the mildest of mullahs despair. For Islamic scholars to be treated to the Robin Cook version of the Koran must be tiresome. For people who have never given a thought to the Taliban's take on glitter nail varnish to proclaim this a feminist war must be baffling. The treatment of Taliban women is a disgrace. But if right-wing female British commentators have a long-held desire to get Muslim women out of burkas and into Stella McCartney T-shirts with 'Bristols' emblazoned on the front, they should have said so earlier. This war is fought for phoney reasons, by protagonists who, Blair apart, rarely exude charisma or even competence. Perhaps our politicians do not have the knowledge or the insight or the moral authority to lead us through this morass. Why should they? Since Nasser's day, the Arab world has inched from socialism to secularism to nationalism to religious fundamentalism. A government that struggles to run a health service or a railway cannot be instantly expert on Islam's tussle between the modern and the arcane. When politicians falter, it is incumbent on ordinary citizens to be wise and critical. That makes it all the more pernicious that dissent is barely possible in liberal Britain, where opponents of this war - far more than the opinion polls reflect - were derided as woolly peaceniks or callous anti-Americans, as fools, heretics or cynics. And so we get signed up to a war devoid of limit and so thin on enemies, beyond the spectral bin Laden that we are forced to invent some back-up villains. Yvonne Ridley, Kate Adie and Jo Moore are this week's baddies. Next week will produce another crop unless bin Laden strikes again, as the FBI warns he may. Perhaps, or maybe the terrorist masterminds are too shrewd for that. Anthrax notwithstanding, the suspicion is that bin Laden waits as we, squandering the righteousness of our cause, blunder into an ugly war whose worst impact is on people who have done us no harm. Not a single Afghan citizen took part in the World Trade Centre bombings. But we had to do something, everyone says. We were entitled to strike back. Of course, but the issue is not the mandate but the method. Building on cross-cultural sympathies, dealing with the root causes of terrorism and seeking to try bin Laden in a newly-created UN court, devised with American co-operation, was the proper route. But right-wing America clamoured for a war now skewered on its own crossed wires. The battle cannot be moved outside Afghanistan without calamitous consequences. Yet global terrorism can never be defeated in the Afghan dustbowl. It is still not too late to stop the bombing, abort any ground war and pour aid into Kabul. To do so would constitute the first move that Osama bin Laden has neither planned for nor foretold. It would also acknowledge the fact, clearer by the day, that world war is so much more deliverable than world peace. U.S., Others urged not to useLandmine Use in Afghanistan (New York, October 12, 2001) The United States should not use antipersonnel landmines in Afghanistan and should take extra care not to drop food into areas that have been mined by others, Human Rights Watch urged today. In a new backgrounder released today, Human Rights Watch said that only two of Afghanistan's twenty-nine provinces are believed to be free of mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). The most heavily affected provinces are Herat and Kandahar, the latter being the Taliban's chief stronghold. The provinces bordering on Pakistan and Iran, which are the most common destinations for refugees fleeing the country, are also heavily mined; they include Farah, Paktia, Kabul, Zabul, Ghazni, and Paktika. Even the capital, Kabul, is mine-affected. "Afghanistan is already one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and the United States should not be making it worse," said Joost Hiltermann, executive director of the Arms division of Human Rights Watch. "Landmines are indiscriminate weapons that will still kill civilians even if the Taliban is ousted." Landmines may already kill or maim more civilians in Afghanistan than in any other country. In the year 2000, there were on average about eighty-eight recorded mine/UXO casualties per month. It is believed that the actual number of mine victims could be 50 percent to 100 percent greater, taking into account those deaths and injuries that go unreported. And the toll is likely to grow significantly with the rapid and chaotic movement into unfamiliar territory of civilians who fear U.S. airstrikes and military operations by the various Afghan forces. The New York Times reported on its website October 11 that American B-52 and B-1 bombers dropped "area munitions," including CBU-89 Gators. The CBU-89 Gator is a mixed-mine system containing both antipersonnel and antivehicle mines. If confirmed, these drops would mark the first time the U.S. is known to have used antipersonnel mines since the Gulf War ten years ago. Human Rights Watch has not been able to verify whether U.S. food drops have in fact landed in mined areas. But since Afghanistan has been heavily mined by various parties over two decades of war, the United States should take extra precautions to avoid mined areas. While virtually all combatants in Afghanistan in recent decades are thought to have used mines, most were laid by Soviet and pro-Soviet Afghan government forces from 1979-1992. The Taliban claims to have stopped the use of antipersonnel mines in 1998, declaring it un-Islamic and punishable by death. There has been no credible evidence of use by Taliban forces since 1998, though some allegations have emerged in recent weeks. The opposition United Front are believed to be continuing their use of antipersonnel mines. "Even if no new landmines are laid, efforts to demine the country will undoubtedly be scaled back for the duration of the armed conflict," said Hiltermann. "The grim reality is that the mine situation in Afghanistan can only be exacerbated by the current crisis." A total of 142 countries have joined the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel landmines under any circumstance and requires destruction of stockpiled and emplaced mines. On Tuesday, Algeria became the latest country to ratify the treaty, which has been ratified more quickly than any multilateral treaty in history. The United States has not joined. As a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), Human Rights Watch is a staunch supporter of the call for a total ban on the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel landmines. It serves as Coordinator of the ICBL's civil-society based verification initiative, the Landmine Monitor. |
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