AFGHAN PROTESTS – WHO CARES?

Legal immunity and moral impunity is a gift enjoyed by few. Nonetheless, university students in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, took to the streets to protest the collateral damage, otherwise murder of civilians, in this case children.

AFP reports, via The Raw Story:

Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting “death to Obama” to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.

Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.

“The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces),” students from the University of Nangahar’s education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted “death to Obama” and “death to foreign forces”, witnesses said.

The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.

“Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country,” Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP.

“They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children,” he added.

Civilian deaths in the eight-year war to eradicate a Taliban-led insurgency are a sensitive issue for the Afghan public, and fan tensions between President Hamid Karzai and the 113,000 foreign troops supporting his government.

A similar protest was planned in Kabul against the “killing of civilians, especially the recent killing of students in Kunar by foreign forces,” said organisers from the youth wing of Jamiat Eslah, or the Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development.

“The demonstration is to show our hatred, anger and sorrow about the current situation,” said Sayed Khalid Rashid.

“Our main request is that the American and NATO forces must leave the country and Afghan people must have political autonomy,” he said, adding that he expected hundreds of people to turn out for the march through western Kabul.

Counter-insurgency, the preferred method of illegal waging war in Afghanistan, is by its nature a covert operation, as befits an invasion of significantly mercenary and covert operations, run by the CIA. As one political observer, for example, commented it is such a sound circumstance that Obama is not “a starry-eyed idealist”.

There is a story here about how decisions are made in the Pentagon, then finessed through the Secretary of Defence, inherited from the Bush Administration, the absence of formal Cabinet decision making and the lack of Congressional oversight. Then there is the role of the media to set the agenda, and here I suspect that Obama does have culpability as was indicated in the example as a Candidate in relation to Revered Wright. In that instance, we got to hear what he said and what said about Obama’s former pastor. Obama, independent of his personal qualities, probably due to inexperience and perhaps temperament, has become a captive of the system woven around him, in part because of appointments and the existing decision making culture that had developed under Bush.

Nonetheless the killings are war crimes.