People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [405]
Bush had declared as his objective the apprehension (“dead or alive”) of Osama bin Laden, and the destruction of the Islamic militant organization Al Qaeda. But after five months of bombing Afghanistan, when Bush delivered his State of the Union address to both houses of Congress, he had to admit, while saying “we are winning the war on terror,” that “tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large” and that “dozens of countries” were harboring terrorists.
It should have been obvious to Bush and his advisers that terrorism could not be defeated by force. The historical evidence was easily available. The British had reacted to terrorist acts by the Irish Republican Army with military action again and again, only to face even more terrorism. The Israelis, for decades, had responded to Palestinian terrorism with military strikes, which only resulted in more Palestinian bombings. Bill Clinton, after the attack on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, had bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan. Clearly, looking at September 11, this had not stopped terrorism.
Furthermore, the months of bombings had been devastating to a country that had gone through decades of civil war and destruction. The Pentagon claimed that it was only bombing “military targets,” that the killing of civilians was “unfortunate . . . an accident . . . regrettable.” However, according to human rights groups and accumulated stories in the American and West European press, at least 1,000 and perhaps 4,000 Afghan civilians were killed by American bombs.
It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan. Every day the New York Times ran heartrending vignettes of the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy, with accompanying portraits and descriptions of their work, their interests, their families.
There was no way of getting similar information on the Afghan victims, but there were moving accounts by reporters writing from hospitals and villages about the effects of American bombing. A journalist with the Boston Globe, writing from a hospital in Jalalabad, wrote: “In one bed lay Noor Mohammad, 10, who was a bundle of bandages. He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner. Hospital director Guloja Shimwari shook his head at the boy’s wounds. ‘The United States must be thinking he is Osama,’ Shimwari said. ‘If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?’”
The report continued: “The hospital’s morgue received 17 bodies last weekend, and officials here estimate at least 89 civilians were killed in several villages. In the hospital yesterday, a bomb’s damage could be chronicled in the life of one family. A bomb had killed the father, Faisal Karim. In one bed his wife, Mustafa Jama, who had severe head injuries. . . . Around her, six of her children were in bandages. . . . One of them, Zahidullah, 8, lay in a coma.”
The American public, ever since the calamity of September 11, was overwhelmingly supportive of Bush’s policy of a “war on terrorism.” The Democratic Party went along, vying with the Republicans on who could speak tougher language against terrorism. The New York Times, which had opposed Bush in the election, editorialized in December 2001: “Mr. Bush . . . has proved himself a strong wartime leader who gives the nation a sense of security during a period of crisis.”
But the full extent of the human catastrophe caused by the bombing of Afghanistan was not being conveyed to Americans by the mainstream press and the major television networks, which seemed determined to show their “patriotism.”
The head of the television network CNN, Walter Isaacson, sent a memo to his staff saying that images of civilian casualties should be accompanied with an explanation that this was retaliation for the harboring of terrorists. “It seems perverse to focus