Sgt. Michael Cable, 26, is another casualty of your senseless war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon first announced his death last week as a casualty of injuries sustained when his unit was attacked by enemy forces, but CBS News and Stars and Stripes reveal a different story: he was killed by a 16-year-old boy named Khalid who came up behind him as he was playing with children and stabbed him in the neck with a knife. Sgt. Cable was guarding a building where Afghan and U.S. officials were meeting. Other guards were in the area but didn’t realize what happened because there was no gunshot. Khalid escaped across the border into Pakistan and joined the Taliban there. What drives a 16-year-old boy to do such a thing? 16-year-olds don’t just walk up to soldiers in full battle gear and stab them. What put that hatred in him? Was it revenge? Had he witnessed atrocities by Americans? Family members killed by drone or helicopter gunship? Raids at 3 AM by Special Forces or Marines who kicked down doors and cursed them in a foreign language, pushed them around, took away a brother, father, uncle, cousin? Tore apart his home searching for weapons and explosives? Hatred is not inborn; we learn it and we create our enemies. With every civilian killed there is an enemy born, maybe 10, maybe 100. The Arab code, the need for honor, respect and dignity, the need for revenge. After 8 years in Iraq and 12+ years in Afghanistan, we have learned nothing. I watched Empire on Al Jazeera this morning, a panel of 4 Middle East scholars and journalists, and what struck me most was Robert Fisk’s statement that what the people want is dignity and justice and they realize that America will give them neither. We dehumanize and objectify them, then invade their countries, imprison them, torture them, kill them with impunity. We send drones and teams of assassins wherever we please to kill those we deem insurgents, we ignore sovereignty and international law (and our own), we ignore the Geneva Conventions and basic human rights. We do not understand their language, their culture, their history; we do not even recognize them as human. In Iraq we destroyed their country and their society in our lust for oil; in the 1980s we used the Afghans as proxies in our war with Russia, then abandoned them to civil war and the Taliban and now we’re back, kicking down doors, raining bombs and bullets on them and Khalid and Sgt. Cable are the collateral damage of the war you refuse to end.
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| Sgt. Michael Cable in Afghanistan, Undated (Photo: U.S. Army) |
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