A village is destroyed:
And America says nothing happened
Richard Lloyd Parry
in Kama Ado, Afghanistan
Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in
the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes.
At the
moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado
were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning
of the
Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble, dented and ripped,
are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.
A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the
blast; a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned
pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal chest contains
scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.
In another room are the only riches that these people had,
six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this
is
very strange because, on Saturday morning - when American
B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children -
nothing happened.
We know this because the US Department of Defence told
us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of
civilian
casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they
were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting only military
targets associated
with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon
utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no
retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just
didn't happen."
So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped
through yesterday, as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the
desert
road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted
with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound
nothings.
The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the
pro-Western anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied
and
funded by the US government. The previous day I had followed
him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being
laid out
- mujahedin soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed
when US bombs hit the government office in which they were sleeping. And
now,
it had happened again.
There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks - seven
more bloody bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse
in which
they were sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit
by bombs at 6.30am yesterday morning.
Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the
mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look
so
vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yesterday,'' was
all he could say. "I sent them for security.''
But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of
our own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins
of the office
where the first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse
where they perished the previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a
family
house, was a small fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end
of a compact bomb. It bore the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM
114", and a serial number: 232687. It was half-buried
in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had died: Fazil
Karim, his
brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah. "They
were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the local
elder who
was accompanying us. "They were not terrorists - the terrorists
are in the mountains, over there.''
So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains,
where hundreds of al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself,
are
hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high
in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley.
Something, surely, was happening over there. And then
we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the pathetic remains I found only
one sinister
object an old leather gun holster with an ammunition
belt. It is conceivable that a handful of al-Qa'ida members had been spending
the
night there, and that US targeters learnt of their presence.
But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains
some military relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban
fighters for a fortnight. Certainly there could not have
been enough terrorists to fill the 40 fresh graves. One person told me
a few holes
contained not intact people, but simply body parts.
We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry
reception in the village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair
and
bafflement. I had only one moment of real fear, when an
American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our convoy, clambered out of the
cars and
trotted into the fields on either side. The plane did
a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the
only traffic
on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered
away.
Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad
telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the
village
where nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these
looking-glass times, what that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that
telephone
call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened
to me too.