From: "Walter Lippmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [CubaNews] U.S. Raid Kills Unknown Number of Afghans >From this report one might think either Rumsfeld and company haven't read Dale Carnegie or else they read the parody edition with the revised title: "How to not win friends and disinfluence people." ========================== October 13, 2001 U.S. Raid Kills Unknown Number in an Afghan Village By BARRY BEARAK PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 12 - Karam is a village in the hills of eastern Afghanistan, barely an hour from the border with Pakistan. Villagers say a training camp for Islamic guerrillas was once situated nearby, though it has been closed for several years. Whether that camp was the intended target of the American bombers that swooped overhead on Wednesday, or whether there was somebody or something in the village that American military planners wanted to hit, may never be known. What does seem clear is that Karam was bombed. One eyewitness account comes from a respected Pakistani journalist, working temporarily for The New York Times and exploiting connections at the border. He was able to get to Karam late on Thursday, returning today. Villagers told him that 53 people had died, though only 22 bodies had yet been pulled from the wreckage. They said the radical Islamic Taliban government seemed inclined to inflate the toll. The journalist, who could not be identified because his travel in Afghanistan was not authorized, had a close-up look at only three corpses in a hospital. They were all mutilated, he said. The face of one victim, a man named Shaqib, was torn away. A relative was patiently cleaning the body, preparing it for burial. This relation, on seeing a Taliban official, began to shout. "I'm angry at the Americans and I'm angry at you," he said. "This is the result of your jihad." Karam appeared thoroughly destroyed. Dead livestock lay about. Villagers, many in tears, were pulling away debris, looking for the missing. Throughout the area, Taliban soldiers sped by in pickups, reinforcing positions on the hilltops with antiaircraft guns. The fog of war is always dense, with each side projecting its own claims and its own views of the conflict. In Afghanistan it is denser than usual because of the inaccessibility to Western journalists of the areas being bombed. This morning Pakistani newspapers reported that the hamlet had been obliterated and that more than 100 people were believed to be dead. Late today the Afghan Islamic Press, a news service, quoted a Taliban official who said the body count had reached 160 and was likely to exceed 200. The Taliban are almost certainly inflating casualties and, with Taliban-controlled territory closed to foreigners and the movement of even Afghan journalists limited, it is difficult to know how much about Karam there is to regret. In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked about the Taliban assertions, repeated assurances that United States strikes were not aimed at innocents. "There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily that there are going to be unintended loss of life," Mr. Rumsfeld said on a day when the bombardment had slowed. "And there's no question but that I and anyone involved regrets the unintended loss of life." People in Karam said they had felt in no particular danger of an American attack. "We were eating our late meal when the planes came, dropping their bombs," said Shah Mehmood, a farmer. "I was knocked out completely, and I still have shrapnel in my neck. My 8-year-old son, Najib, he was knocked out, too, but I think he will be O.K. now." Maulvi Abdullah Haijazi, an elder from a nearby village, had come to assist. "These people don't support the Taliban," he said. "They always say the Taliban are doing this or that and they don't like it. But now they will all fight the Americans. We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill. These bombs from the sky we cannot fight." Today's papers, whether in Urdu, Pashto or Punjabi, were filled with horrors: a civilian death toll placed at anywhere from 200 to 500; 10 members of a family killed in Kabul; a mosque leveled in the Surkh Rud district of Nangarhar Province; 11 unexploded missiles lying in the area around Jalalabad. All of the dead were referred to as "martyred." None of those reports could be independently confirmed today, including a story that said the 10-year- old son of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, had been killed in the air raids on Kandahar. That item, based on a single unnamed source, was published on the front page of several newspapers, including Pakistan's largest, The Daily Jang. The Jang, an Urdu paper, also ran a front-page cartoon portraying Uncle Sam as a munitions dealer boasting that his latest products were being field-tested in Afghanistan. The reports reveal the gulf in perceptions between Pakistan and the United States about the war. Although Pakistan is nominally allied with the United States in its quest to eliminate the terrorist cells in Afghanistan responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, sympathy for the plight of Afghans is strong here. Items published here often seem eerie twists on items appearing in the United States. Ausaf, the second largest daily, ran what purported to be an announcement from Al Qaeda offering $50,000 for the capture of an American soldier and $3,000 for the uniform of a dead one. At a protest rally here today, 1,000 people marched from one of Peshawar's famous mosques to one of its famous bazaars, chanting anti-American slogans all the way. "Death to Bush!" they yelled. In the United States, the "war against terrorism" is described as a duel between good and evil. But most of the protesters are working from a much different set of premises. To them Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden - from a remote perch in Afghanistan - is an unlikely suspect in the terrorism of Sept. 11. Rafatullah, a well-groomed wholesaler of medical supplies, said, "I think the Americans are anti-Islam, and their assault on Osama without proof is a tragedy." By then another protester, this one with an unkempt beard and a raging tone in his voice, declared that the Muslims of the world had decided to wage jihad against the Americans. Yet another man intervened. "We will have our vengeance," he said, unfolding a newspaper he had placed in his pocket. He pointed to the news about the village of Karam. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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