Afghan children watch US Marines patrol with Afghanistan National Army (ANA) soldiers in Helmand Province, Afghanistan (Getty)
Sickening.
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.
The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.
So senseless. And for what? In the entire year of 2005, there were 465 insurgent attacks. There were 1,344 such attacks in JANUARY alone.
“As soon as we heard about the attack on the village’s children, all the village men rushed to the mountains to find out what really happened,” said Ashabuddin, a shopkeeper from Manogai, a nearby village, whose nephew Khalid was among those killed.
“Finally we found the dead bodies. Some of the dead bodies were really badly chopped up by the rockets,” he said. “The head of a child was missing. Others were missing limbs.”
“We tried to find the body pieces and put them together. As it was getting late, we brought down the bodies in a rope bed. We buried them in the village’s cemetery,” Ashabuddin added. “The children were all from poor families; otherwise no one would send their sons up to the mountains despite the known threats from both insurgents and Americans.”
Khalid, 14, was the only male in the family, Ashabuddin said. “He was studying in sixth grade of the orphanage school and working because his father died four years ago due to a long-term sickness. His father was a day laborer. He has 13 sisters and two mothers. He was the sole breadwinner of the family. I don’t know what would happen to his family to his sisters and mothers. They are all female and poor.”
The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the more damage we cause, the more enemies we make. Obama has repeatedly promised to begin pulling out in July 2011. He needs to follow through not just on that promise, but on a plan to get us out sooner, rather than however many Friedman units Gen. Petraeus thinks he needs to win this unwinnable war (2014, at last check).
The Democratic National Committee, at the very least, is on it.