An Irishman's Diary

One reads some of the commentaries about the war against terrorism in Afghanistan with the peculiar sensation that in a distant…

One reads some of the commentaries about the war against terrorism in Afghanistan with the peculiar sensation that in a distant time might have resulted from a few grammes of the best Moroccan, muses Kevin Myers

That war has been turned by certain commentators into "the war on Afghanistan", which is being prosecuted by "indicriminate bombing". Furthermore, casualty figures dreamt up by some loony-tunes professor of women's studies in New Hampshire which suggest that more Afghan civilians have died in the war than were killed in the World Trade Centre have now been magicked by some clowns into an irrefutable documentary reality.

Far out man, enough to blow your mind, wow is that some joint there, look at that green ostrich coming through the wallpaper. . .

A couple of straight truths. The war is not against Afghanistan; well, the government in Kabul doesn't think so, and I suppose it would know. Moreover, it seems to accept the need for the use of US military air power against Taliban and Al-Qaeda strongholds. Nor has that bombing been indiscriminate, for if it were, many, many thousands of people would be dead.

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There have, of course, been mistakes, all of them tragic. But at time of war, there are mistakes: and however deplorable they might be, the killing of civilians by the US, unlike the mass murder in the twin towers, has been entirely accidental.

Unintended killings

No Afghan authority, outside the ranks of the murderously demented in Taliban and in Al-Qaeda, seriously suggests that there is a comparison between the intentional killings in the twin towers and the unintended killings of Afghan civilians by the US. That is why they share no moral equivalence, any more than there is a moral equivalence between deaths on US roads and the numbers of dead in the World Trade Centre.

But what of the death toll in Afghanistan? How many civilians have been killed? Well, since the Afghan authorities don't appear to know, how is it possible that over there in New Hampshire - let me see, some 20,000 miles away - a professor of women's studies does know? How? Simple. By employing the same intellectual rigour that goes into women's studies in the first place, that's how.

Marc Herold, professor of economics, international relations and women's studies, has taken casualty figures from a variety of secondary journalistic sources and totted them up as if their mere presence on the printed page is in itself proof of their veracity. This shows a touching belief in my profession, as if we hacks consult a divine oracle which gives us the uncontaminated body-count. Well, Prof, old chap, if you believe everything you read in newspapers, I bet you have no trouble believing the National Enquirer story about the crashed B-17 on the surface of the moon.

Choice of news media

As you might expect from a woman's studies professor in New Hampshire, he is determinedly non-ethnocentric and non-occidental in his choice of news media; thus reports of casualties from Iranian radio, Al Jazeera, Afghan Islamic Press and the Pakistani News Service are accorded the same respect as those from the BBC or the Times.

Which is grand. Because in such matters, there's no reason to know who is telling the truth. Afghanistan has an area of 250,000 square miles - the size of France, Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Merely because one is in Afghanistan doesn't mean one is closer to the factual truth, any more than a Frisian sheep farmer can tell you what is happening in Marseilles, though no doubt he has heard of bad things there. Knives in the ribs, etc.

And such has been the basis of much reporting from Afghanistan. Refugees arriving in Pakistan report to an aid agency of such-and-such a village having been bombed, and so many people killed. Did they see it? No, but they met a woman on the road to Kandahar who said that. . .This rumour is then passed from the aid agency to the wire services in Pakistan, to be repeated by newspapers round the world. At no stage is there any authentication; mere repetition alone establishes it as a "truth".

Thus this fine women's studies prof has used reports in one Pakistani newspaper, five British and one US media outlets to justify a claim that US bombers killed between 100 and 160 people in the Afghan village of Karam on October 11th. (Which is it, Prof : 100 or 160?) And since no primary source is quoted, and the casualty figure has such a huge range, clearly no one knows the correct figure; therefore, might it not be fewer? And what figure went into the making of the prof's alleged Afghan death-toll?

Worse still, the professor treats reported allegations from the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan as fact: and worse even still, allegations from this worthless scoundrel that the first night's bombing by the US had killed 20 people across Afghanistan were then exaggerated in the Herold report into 20 deaths in Kabul alone.

Gobbledegook

This is the sort of methodological gobbledegook for which journalism students at DCU are beaten to death at dawn with rolled-up copies of An Phoblacht containing iron bars. Yet far from being treated with the derision that it so richly deserves, every US-basher has been quoting from the Herold report like some pompous undergraduate popinjay during a college debate.

Which is not to say the US shouldn't tread carefully. The prisoner-cages in Guantanaamo Bay navy base are not merely a public relations disaster, but an affront to the human values for which the US stands. Some advice: Rule not by your enemy's standards, but by those you defend. Ignore your foe; but heed your friend.