ENDI 2010 1
Critical Afghanistan
Afghanistan 1AC
Contention One – The Language of War
Afghanistan has been labeled a “good war” but escalating violence paints a different picture. War is hell, and Afghanistan is no exception.
Jaffry ’10 (Abdul-Majid, Retired Aircraft Engineer and Freelance Writer, “Afghanistan War -- A Saga of Lopsided Death and Destruction”, 5-26, http://www.uruknet.info/?p=66378)
The frightening death and destruction that the American civil War brought made General William Sherman, a Union general, say, "War is hell". A U.S. Airforce Commander after the terror bombing of Dresden in the Second World War admonished, "War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless." When a high-tech mighty war machine is unleashed on a nation in a decrepit state and with a weaker or non-existent military power, the hell becomes more intense and destruction unbelievably more destructive for the men and women of the frail nation. One of the first major armed conflicts between the two nations after the Industrial Revolution was the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Sudan. The British soldiers armed with state of the art of the time gun boats, rifles and machine guns mowed down over 20,000 Sudanese tribesman armed mostly with swords and lances. Sudanese suffered an astonishing 90% casualty rate. British lost only 48 men, amounting to 2% casualty rate. British ultra superior war machinery, compared to the Sudanese swords and lance, was chiefly responsible for the mechanized slaughter of f Sudanese and one of the most lopsided victories in the military history. Today, history of another lopsided death and destruction in a war is being written. This time it's the poor and helpless Afghans, the fourth or fifth poorest people in the world, are being pounded by the ferocious U.S. and NATO war machine. Afghanistan is a landlocked and resource poor country. It ranks among the bottom three countries, second only to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the U.N. Human Development Index in 2009. It had no army or even functioning police before the U.S. invasion in 2001. It had no offensive capability nor defensive mechanism to withstand foreign invasion, not even from a border patrol armed with light infantry weapons. Afghanistan had no significant or insignificant military installations that could have offered high value target for bombing ("I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt", Bush once said). The U.S. started the "good war" as Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 ostensibly to remove the Taliban from power in retaliation for the attack on the World Trade Center. Taliban were routed soon after the war initiated. In December 2001, International Security Assistance Force was formed, and in 2003 NATO assumed the control of ISAF. Both, the U.S. and the NATO led forces came to Afghanistan equipped with the most sophisticated military technology. Afghanistan provided Western forces a theatre for an impressive and flashy demonstration of its military might with no hindrance and virtually no fear of retaliation. Indeed, the U.S. and NATO put a spectacular show with its fighters, bombers, missiles, cluster bombs, and Depleted Uranium weapons. All these impressive weapons, and all the fury was unleashed upon a country with no anti-aircraft fire, no bomb shelters, no war industry, no ammunition factory, no railroad tracks, only villages of stone and mud dwellings. U.S. and NATO waged a deliberately disproportionate attack on a country that had zero capability to defend itself. In any essential sense, it's not a real war; the barrage was solely designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a population and send signal to other nations. The dropping of thousands of bombs precision-guided by satellite and laser technology in heavily populated areas that has caused excessive civilian casualties and widespread destruction betrays the U.S. claim that the war was launched with the aim to uproot Taliban regime, and capture Osama bin Laden; it appeared more in line with Bush's famous John Wayne style rhetoric, "smoke them out" and "Bring 'em on". Shortly after the U.S. invasion, in a biting remark, John Pilger observed in The Mirror, a British Tabloid, "The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing,not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has beenterrorized by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military' targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees." The Guardian reported on April 10, 2002 about the number of U.S. bombs and cruise missiles directed at poverty-stricken Afghanistan: "More than 22,000 weapons - ranging from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs - have been dropped on the country over the past six months". US pilots dropped more than 6,600 joint direct attack munitions (J-dams), the satellite-guided bombs. And, this report is only for the first six months of the attack. In Dossier on Civilian Victims of the United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan, Prof. Marc W. Herold of University Of New Hampshire, citing different news sources, gives account of bombing in October and November 2001. For example, he writes: "October 11th - farming village of 450 persons of Karam, west of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province is repeatedly bombed, 45 of the 60 mud houses destroyed, killing at least 160 civilians." This represents 75 percent of the total dwelling and 35 percent of the village population that were annihilated. For November 18th, he says, "Carpet-bombing by B-52's of frontline village near Khanabad, province of Kunduz, kills at least 150 civilians." Not only that the U.S, along with Russia, China, and Israel refused to sign the convention to ban the deadly cluster bombs - a cluster of bomblets - it made a liberal use of the deadly weapon in Afghanistan, as it did in wars with other nations. Cluster bombs severely added to the brutality of the lopsided war in Afghanistan. According to one report, "From 2001 to 2002 in Afghanistan, the United States used over 1200 cluster munitions that contained close to 250,000 bomblets." Cluster bombs are known to be more lethal and dangerous to civilians then to enemy combatants. It can not be used in or around the populated areas without causing great loss to civilian life. The violent blow of deadly shrapnel decapitates and severs body parts. The other unfortunate consequence of cluster bombs is that the unexploded bomblets can lie in the ground, fields, and roads or buried in the soil for years and keep killing long after the conflict ends. Now after securing the intended goal uprooting the Taliban regime and crippling Al-Qaeda beyond repair - the over 134,000 foreign troops from 50 nations from all the continents, under the U.S. and NATO command, are for the last eight years waging an unwinnable and untenable but ruthless and lethal war against the insurgency to protect the west installed puppet regime of Hamid Karzai. In doing so, a disproportionate number of civilian casualties are being created by the indiscriminate bombings and raids by the U.S. Special Forces on civilian population hunting for the insurgents. All reports coming from Afghanistan clearly indicate that the civilian deaths are decidedly excessive and unacceptable in relation to any gain against the insurgents. These thoughtless killing of unarmed men, women, and children galvanizes the opposition to the foreign troops presence and in turn fuel support for the insurgency. In a moment of truth, during a videoconference with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, General McChrystal candidly admitted, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force," He further acknowledges, "To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it." The totally lopsided tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties and widespread destruction and pain caused by the high-tech virtual war imposed by the Western forces is reminiscent of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Sudan, where the British soldiers armed with state of the art of the time gun boats, rifles and machine guns mowed down thousands of Sudanese tribesman armed mostly with swords and lances. And in the words of General William Sherman, the "War is hell" for the men, women, and children of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan 1AC
This sort of large-scale violence does not arise in a vacuum. The conflict in Afghanistan, and the war on terror generally, is enabled by language practices that divide the world into “good” and “evil”, portraying civilian deaths as mere collateral damage.
Jackson ‘5 (Richard, Lecturer in Politics – U. Manchester, 49th Parallel, “Language Power and Politics: Critical Discourse Analysis and the War on Terrorism”, January, http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/jackson1.htm)
Applying a ‘critical’ perspective to the language of counter-terrorism, it can be argued that the ‘war on terrorism’ and its domination of public political discourse in America and Britain poses several dangers to the functioning of political life and democratic civil society. At the most fundamental level, the construction of large-scale political violence of any kind entails the destruction of the moral consensus and the collapse of the moral community—and its replacement with discourses of victim-hood, hatred of the ‘other’, fear and counter-violence. Once a society embraces these new political narratives, once it venerates its grievances and truly hates and fears an enemy ‘other’, public and political morality is quickly lost in the maze of national security expediencies. There is no starker illustration of society’s current moral vacuity than the serious public debate about torturing terrorist suspects—not to mention its all too common practice by America and its allies. This is the moral mathematics of Hiroshima , where ‘9-11’ (the new ‘Ground Zero’) represents Pearl Harbor . According to this logic, if the torture/nuclear incineration of thousands of evil terrorists/treacherous Japanese people will save American lives by preventing another 9-11/Pearl Harbor, then it is morally acceptable. As Slavenka Drakulic expresses it, ‘once the concept of “otherness” takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible.’[57] The once unimaginable has in fact, become normal in our societies and we see it all around: in the failure to demand investigation into documented war crimes and atrocities committed by Coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; in the muted criticism of gross mistreatment of terrorist suspects, especially the legal minors (children) or those who are interrogated and tortured for years and then released without charge; in the broadening victimisation and discrimination against the Muslim/Arab ‘other’ by the authorities and society at large; in the lack of protest at the policies of assassination and extra-judicial killing, or the brutality of the occupation of Iraq; and in the widespread acquiescence to the insidious erosion of long held political and civil rights. The simple reason for this tacit complicity is that these kinds of all encompassing and smothering discourses destabilise the moral community and replace non-violent political interaction with suspicion, fear, hatred, chauvinism and an impulse to violently defend the ‘imagined community’. In addition, they automatically foreclose certain kinds of thought, simply because the language with which to frame doubts or question official justifications no longer exists or is inaccessible. While some individuals may initially feel unease at pictures of abused and humiliated ‘terrorist’ suspects at Camp Delta , of tortured Iraqi prisoners or dead Afghan civilians, they have no language or frame of reference in which to articulate those doubts. As time goes by, and when the discourse has been effectively absorbed by society, they may jettison such feelings altogether and consider the harsh treatment of suspects or the ‘collateral damage’ from bombing campaigns to be both justified and morally acceptable. Certainly, this process of destabilising the moral codes of individuals has already taken place among many in the armed forces. The pictures of abused Iraqi prisoners in April 2004 which sent shockwaves around the world were in this regard, not unexpected; they were the direct consequence of a discourse that constructs the enemy ‘other’ as inhuman and evil. This is also an example of the well-known mimetic nature of violence—the instinctual psychological tendency to respond to an act of violence with identical or greater violence, to mimic the attacker—which has been a feature of virtually every war and counter-terrorist campaign. Charles Townshend argues that, ‘Probably the biggest hazard inherent in reactions to terrorism is the impulse towards imitation.’[58] History is replete with examples of just such mimetic counter-terrorist violence: Israel’s targeted killings and assassinations mimic Palestinian attacks on Israelis; in Northern Ireland the British security services mimicked the IRA when it too began killing members of the para-militaries extra-judicially; and during Reagan’s war against terrorism, CIA officers in Beirut tortured suspects to death during interrogation and then sponsored a car bomb aimed at Sheik Fadlallah in revenge for the Marine barracks bombing—it missed the Sheik but killed 92 bystanders and injured more than 250 others.[59] Within the atmosphere created by the present discourse of counter-terrorism it passes almost unnoticed that both sides (America and al Qaeda) are employing exactly the same discursive strategies—both appeal to victim-hood and grievance, both enlist religion as supreme justification, both frame the struggle as one of good versus evil, both demonise and dehumanise the other and both claim the mantle of a just/holy war/jihad.[60] The result of this discursive mirroring is predictable: the killing of civilians without pity or remorse, whether by suicide bombers hoping to force the American military out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia or by Apache helicopters hoping to suppress the rebellion in Fallujah. There is no escape from the fact that in American and Britain discrimination and the abuse of human rights has now been normalised and is considered an inevitable if regrettable part of the counter-terrorist effort, including judicial abuse, torture and war crimes; we are now firmly ensconced in a ‘dirty war on terrorism’ both at home and abroad.