US foreign policy consists of trading bodies for approval ratings, guilt for innocence, absence for life, and strategic silencing, all for fear of a threat both feigned and self-made.
On April 13, 2017, the Trump regime dropped the GBU-43 massive ordnance air blast (MOAB) also known as the “Mother of all Bombs” in the Achin district of Nangarhar in Afghanistan. While the official statement from the Headquarters of the United States Forces in Kabul, Afghanistan, notes that the military “took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties” in what White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer called on Thursday morning a remote, mountainous area, the Achin district is, in fact, home to a population of 150,000 and sits a little over 20 miles from the capital of Nangarhar, a province in Eastern Afghanistan with a population of almost 1.5 million. This population now has to endure, at the very least, the lasting psychological effects of witnessing a massive mushroom cloud rising from their backyards, as well as the ongoing threats to their safety.
Bilal Sarwary, a journalist based in Afghanistan who spoke to locals in the area after the bombing, told BBC Friday morning that “their doors are destroyed or damaged and every single window or glass is broken … [they felt] more like doomsday … like the sky is coming down.” Fresh bombings in Achin continued through this morning, according to local sources. Nangarhar has been noted by many Afghans as one of the more beautiful parts of the country, with perpetual spring-like weather.
The US government and mainstream media’s failure to mention the presence of unmistakably large civilian populations — and the fact that these populations were placed in immediate physical and psychological dangers — is not at all an uncommon practice. Much like the history of physical, rhetorical, ideological and academic erasure of Indigenous people from North America, there is a continual erasure of mass populations in the Middle East and Africa, who are frequently invisibilized and deemed irrelevant by those who wish to craft a narrative that excuses violence and mass destruction.
Afghanistan carries a deep history of being designated as a testing ground for Western and Russian military weaponry (as India, Ghana and other Asian and African countries are for Western medicine). Although its population is significantly larger than that of Berkeley, California, Achin is portrayed as empty and vacant — a place where the dropping of a never-before-used, 30-foot-long, 21,600-pound bomb filled with 18,000 pounds of explosives is portrayed as carrying no risk of civilian casualties.
Beyond recognizing the continual erasure of civilians and populations at the state’s discretion, it is important to ask: According to the US government, who is classified as a “civilian”? Who is not considered a “civilian,” and is instead marked with the ever-shifting and contagious label of “enemy combatant”?
To answer this question, we must turn toward the foreign policy hallmark and legacy of the Obama administration: drone strikes.
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