An Eye For an Eye Will Make Us All Blind

By: Douglas Mattern

The bombing of Afghanistan is escalating and so is the number of civilians being killed. A U.N. source reports, "the situation is completely untenable inside Afghanistan... unless the U.S. air strikes stop, there will be a huge number of deaths".

The use of 1,000-pound cluster bombs, each scattering 200 "bomblets" over a large area, along with B-52 saturation raids, and B-1 bombers raining their destruction on this improvised country is not winning the hearts of minds of the Afghan people, but rather producing an unknown number of new terrorists for which future innocents will pay the price.

As the author John LeCarre writes, "What America is storing up for herself... is yet more enemies; because after all the bribes, threats and promises that have patched together the rickety coalition, we cannot prevent another suicide bomber being born each time a misdirected missile wipes out an innocent village, and nobody can tell us how to dodge this devil's cycle of despair, hatred and - yet again - revenge".

Cluster bombs are designed to kill and main, and they are indiscriminate killers. Moreover, the high percentage of cluster bombs that do explode lie on the ground to be stepped on by innocent people often years later. In the Plain of Jars, a 500-square mile region in Laos, people are still being maimed and killed by U.S. cluster bombs 26 years after the war. It's estimated that it will take another 50 years to clear all the unexploded U.S. bombs in that devastated Third World country.

In his book Voices from the Plain of Jars, Fred Branfman writes: "In September 1969, after a recorded history of 700 years, the Plain of Jars disappeared.It had become the first society to vanish through automated warfare."

To understand what people in Afghanistan are facing, consider this 1971 essay by a 35-year-old woman refugee from the Plain of Jars who said this about American bombs:

"The roar of the bombs and the noise of the planes frightened me terribly. Our lives became like one of animals who search to escape the butchers. Each day, across the forests and ditches, we sought only to escape from the bombs. When looking at the face of my innocent child, I could not stop crying for his future."

As if using cluster bombs was not enough overkill, the U.S. is now using 15,000-pound bombs, called "daisy cutters", the world's largest non-nuclear bomb. This bomb creates a huge explosion that incinerates everything within up to 600 yards. The shock wave can be felt miles away. This is fighting terrorism with larger terrorism and falling into the trap warned by Mahatma Gandhi that the policy of an "eye for eye" will make us all blind.

Senator Joseph Biden said, "The United States pays an escalating price in the Arab world, and faces complaints that it is a high-tech bully that only attacks from the air". Afghanistan, by the way, is at least the 15^th Third World country the U.S. has bombed in recent decades.

The Taliban are completely surrounded, isolated, and without support from any country. They cannot survive under these conditions, and terrorists within their borders have nowhere to go. So why the massive bombing? It has set in motion a great human tragedy with at least 5 million Afghans facing starvation as they flee the bombing only to find closed borders. Trucks filled with relief food are standing still as the drivers will not cross the border into Afghanistan because they fear the bombing.

The rational way to deal with terrorism is not in waging war against an entire country, but through international cooperation of all nations using their resources of intelligence agencies, police, and military (without the bombing) when necessary to root out the terrorists. This is a global problem that requires a new U.N. Agency to combat terrorism on an ongoing basis, including the establishment of a new U.N. court specifically to try terrorists.

As Mikhail Gorbachev stated:

"I believe the United Nations Security Council should take the lead in fighting terrorism and in dealing with other global problems... It's time to stop reviling the U.N. and get on with the work of adapting the institution to new tasks."