Killing Unnamed Children in Afghanistan

by Jacob G. Hornberger
Dec. 03, 2013

When I read this Washington Post article about the two-year-old child that U.S. forces just killed in Afghanistan, I wondered what the child's name was. Nowhere was it to be found in the article. Maybe the Post hadn't acquired the name. Or maybe it just doesn't matter. It's just one more death among the countless Afghan deaths at the hands of U.S. forces during the past 12 years.

The commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., issued an apology for killing the child. I wonder if he cited the child’s name in his apology. In any event, no doubt Dunford is hoping that the apology will help the U.S. government secure permission from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past 2014.

The child's death was justified by the same rationale that has been used to justify the deaths of countless other Afghan people since the U.S. invasion 12 years ago: what U.S. officials call "collateral damage." U.S. officials said that they were targeting a "mid-level Taliban commander who had been involved in attacks" on coalition troops and "organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area." The two-year old just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

For 12 years, the U.S. government has had carte blanche to kill as many people as it wanted in Afghanistan. Whenever U.S. forces have dropped bombs and fired missiles at suspected "terrorists," "militants," or "insurgents," there has been no second-guessing on the part of U.S. officials, no matter how many non-terrorists, non-militants, and non-insurgents have been killed in the process. Oh sure, apologies are oftentimes rendered and nominal payments of money are made to aggrieved families, but nothing has stopped the onslaught of death for 12 long years.

If they haven't killed all the bad guys by now and if they haven't trained the Afghan government to stand on its own, then it's time to just declare the entire venture a failure and bring all the troops home now.

Let's face it. That two-year-old didn't have to die. If U.S. forces had already exited Afghanistan, then U.S. forces wouldn't have been there to fire the missile that killed that kid.

Of course, U.S. officials would respond that then they wouldn't have been able to kill that militant -- the one who is "organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area."

Well, let's ask ourselves why that Afghan is a militant and why he's engaged in that activity. It's not because he was involved in the 9/11 attacks or planning on coming to get us here in the United States. It's because that militant is trying to rid his country of a foreign occupier -- and a brutal foreign occupier at that, one that fires missiles at people in reckless disregard of whether there are two-year-old children in the vicinity.

Long ago, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan devolved into a war that targets people who are resisting the foreign occupation of their country and a war to prop up a corrupt, illegal pro-U.S. regime, one whose president requires bags full of cash to be regularly delivered to him by the CIA.

What about the possibility of the Taliban's regaining control of the government? Who cares? What difference would it make? Even those who cite the ballyhooed terms "terrorism" and "national security" don't get very far with those justifications anymore. After all, let's not forget that if Karzai says no more occupation, U.S. forces are exiting the country regardless of who raises those ballyhooed terms. If “national security” was really at stake (whatever that term means), would U.S. officials really be exiting the country just because Karzai wanted them to?

Moreover, let's face it: If terrorists want to attack the United States, they don't need a friendly government in Afghanistan to do it. They can always find friendly governments elsewhere in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, or simply some nice hotel room in Pakistan, Yemen, or even Berlin or London. Moreover, let’s not forget that the reason there is anti-American terrorism in the first place is owing to the U.S. national-security state’s interventionism in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the region. Stopping the interventionism equals stopping the terrorism.

For 12 long years, Americans have been subjected to a constant deluge of death of foreigners at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. Death has become an everyday part of our lives. It seeps into our pores. It's ingrained into our minds. Death has become so ordinary that most people don't even wonder what the names of those who have been killed were or what kinds of lives they were living when they got killed.

It just doesn't matter. All that matters is that the national-security state is "keeping us safe" by killing a never-ending stream of people. I wonder how many Americans ever consider the possibility that it is this constant barrage of death and destruction at the hands of U.S. forces that is generating the very militancy, insurgency, and terrorism that U.S. forces continue targeting.

It's obvious that the U.S. Empire wants to continue occupying Afghanistan indefinitely into the future, knowing full well that that will ensure the endless cycle of death and destruction. My hope is that Karzai stands fast, as did the Iraqis, and kicks the American forces out of the country, preferably now rather than later. It would be the greatest gift that Karzai could give his country, the United States, and the world. At the very least, it would mean that there would be no more deaths of two-year-old unnamed children at the hands of U.S. forces, no more deaths of Afghans who are doing nothing more than trying to rid their country of a foreign occupier, and no more deaths of U.S. soldiers who kill and die for nothing.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.