Here in the United States, the newspapers and television stations have been filled, ever since the awful events of September 11, 2001, with news and discussion of the "war on terrorism". First it was the military operation in Afghanistan, which was advertised as a hunt for Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Then it was the invasion of Iraq, called a campaign of "shock and awe" and given the name "Operation Enduring Freedom", as if you can "shock and awe" a country into freedom.
This country has thus initiated two wars in the Middle East, and generated a huge amount of discussion. But in all of that analysis and commentary, there has been a glaring, indeed unpardonable omission: a close examination of the human consequences of those actions.
While the bombardment of Afghanistan was going on, the New York Times every day carried pictures and short biographical profiles of the men and women - almost three thousand of them -who died in the September 11 attacks. In this way, there was a recognition that there were human beings behind the statistic.
But there was no comparable recognition of the human beings in Afghanistan who died under the American bombardment, or who were wounded, mutilated in the attack by the most powerful military machine on earth against a small country already devastated by a ten-year war. [...]
