According to Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, as reported this morning on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” radio program, the American military has now killed as many Afghani civilians as the civilians who were killed in New York in the WTC attacks on 9/11.
Herold compiled his data starting in early October from a variety of international sources. His data can be found at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mherold/. He suggests that the 3700 to 5000 Afghani civilian deaths should be compared, in Afghani terms (a country with roughly 1/10 the US population) to the 50,000 deaths of US soldiers during the Vietnam war.
I would like to suggest another comparison, that of equivalency of terror. It is likely that the Afghani civilians killed suffered similar terrific kinds of deaths to those in the WTC towers, such as death by being blown into smithereens, death by incineration and death by being crushed during collapses of buildings. In terms of terror experienced by those living in New York within sight and sound of the WTC explosions, I would suggest that those couple of hours that encompassed the plane crashes and building collapses were somewhat less terrifying than the experiences of Afghani citizens who have been seeing and hearing exploding bombs for a good couple of months rather than hours.
I am writing my warrior-Senators Feinstein and Boxer to ask them what multiple of, say, 4000 civilian deaths might lead them to question the ethics of our military strategy.
Mike Ferro