the day nothing happened

[Guest guest]

A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened

War on terrorism

Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan

04 December 2001

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of

a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here,

early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large

village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery

on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the

village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.

 

Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest

are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when

nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning

meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the

rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.

 

A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection

of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated

sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in

cheap bright nylon.

 

In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows

lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange

because, on Saturday morning – when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs

that killed 115 men, women and children – nothing happened.

 

We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a

Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in

eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is

meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin

Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have

wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive

statement: " It just didn't happen. "

 

So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday,

as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the desert road to Kama

Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and

innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.

 

The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western

anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied and funded

by the US government. The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's

mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out – mujahedin

soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit the

government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.

 

There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks – seven more bloody

bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse in which they were

sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday

morning.

 

Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years

against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look so vulnerable. " I sent

them there myself yesterday,'' was all he could say. " I sent them for

security.''

 

But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our own, and we set

off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the

first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished the

previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small

fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It bore the words

" Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114 " , and a serial number: 232687. It was

half-buried in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had

died: Fazil Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah.

" They were a family, just ordinary people, " said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the

local elder who was accompanying us. " They were not terrorists – the

terrorists are in the mountains, over there.''

 

So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of

al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself, are hiding in

the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black

smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was

happening over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the

pathetic remains I found only one sinister object ­ an old leather gun

holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable that a handful of

al-Qa'ida members had been spending the night there, and that US targeters

learnt of their presence.

 

But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains some military

relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban fighters for

a fortnight. Certainly there could not have been enough terrorists to fill

the 40 fresh graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact

people, but simply body parts.

 

We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry reception in the

village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair and bafflement. I

had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We

halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on

either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes

looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief,

the bomber veered away.

 

Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the

Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where

nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what

that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been

made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.