How easily the value of a human life diminishes when the victims are "merely" Afghan civilians? And how impetuously the collective loss of innocent lives in that miserable part of the world can be written off as "collateral damage"; a rather callous catchphrase that sure gets tossed around casually by imperial powers to validate their own crimes and further anesthetize world public opinion. We were told that bin Laden was caught in Pakistan, executed and his corpse was thrown into the sea, yet somewhere in a remote and impoverished village in southwest Afghanistan children are still being ravaged everyday by the overpowering reality of an ongoing foreign occupation, drone warfare, and all sorts of “intelligent weapons” run by not so intelligent Western politicians.
Imagine being abruptly awoken in the middle of the night to the deafening blasts of bombs falling on your house; you take a couple of seconds to try and shake yourself out of this awful dream, but the shrieking sounds of your children screaming themselves hoarse leaves no room for doubt that it is real. The scorching thick cloud of dust fills your throat and inflames your eyes; and before you even think what to make of what’s happening, a second bomb is dropped to finish off what the first one didn’t. You feel the ground beneath you rattle and entire walls collapse before an ominous silence takes over; no screaming, not even a breathing sound is heard in a house full of people . . . only the buzzing noise of a NATO fighter jet (which by now you know by heart) fading into the distance. You realize that in a matter of minutes your whole world has violently changed, and in a very horrible way.
This is not some far-fetched scenario or one of those only-in-the-movies moments; this is exactly what happened late last month, on May 28th.
Just before midnight, an unwarranted NATO air raid targeted two civilian houses in a rural area of Afghanistan’s Helmand province, killing two women and twelve children (including a two-year-old baby); allegedly mistaking them for -- well, what else other than "Taliban insurgents".
