Afghanistan 1AC - Open Evidence Archive

Afghanistan 1AC Contention One - The Language of War Afghanistan has been labeled a "good war" but escalating violence paints a
different picture. War is hell, and Afghanistan is no exception.
Jaffry '10 (Abdul-Majid, Retired Aircraft Engineer and Freelance Writer,
"Afghanistan War -- A Saga of Lopsided Death and Destruction", 5-26,
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=66378)
The frightening death and destruction that the American civil War brought
made General William Sherman, a Union general, say, "War is hell". A U.S.
Airforce Commander after the terror bombing of Dresden in the Second World
War admonished, "War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman
and ruthless." When a high-tech mighty war machine is unleashed on a nation
in a decrepit state and with a weaker or non-existent military power, the
hell becomes more intense and destruction unbelievably more destructive for
the men and women of the frail nation. One of the first major armed
conflicts between the two nations after the Industrial Revolution was the
Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Sudan. The British soldiers armed with state
of the art of the time gun boats, rifles and machine guns mowed down over
20,000 Sudanese tribesman armed mostly with swords and lances. Sudanese
suffered an astonishing 90% casualty rate. British lost only 48 men,
amounting to 2% casualty rate. British ultra superior war machinery,
compared to the Sudanese swords and lance, was chiefly responsible for the
mechanized slaughter of f Sudanese and one of the most lopsided victories
in the military history. Today, history of another lopsided death and
destruction in a war is being written. This time it's the poor and helpless
Afghans, the fourth or fifth poorest people in the world, are being pounded
by the ferocious U.S. and NATO war machine. Afghanistan is a landlocked
and resource poor country. It ranks among the bottom three countries,
second only to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the U.N. Human
Development Index in 2009. It had no army or even functioning police before
the U.S. invasion in 2001. It had no offensive capability nor defensive
mechanism to withstand foreign invasion, not even from a border patrol
armed with light infantry weapons. Afghanistan had no significant or
insignificant military installations that could have offered high value
target for bombing ("I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10
empty tent and hit a camel in the butt", Bush once said). The U.S. started
the "good war" as Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 ostensibly to
remove the Taliban from power in retaliation for the attack on the World
Trade Center. Taliban were routed soon after the war initiated. In December
2001, International Security Assistance Force was formed, and in 2003 NATO
assumed the control of ISAF. Both, the U.S. and the NATO led forces came to
Afghanistan equipped with the most sophisticated military technology.
Afghanistan provided Western forces a theatre for an impressive and flashy
demonstration of its military might with no hindrance and virtually no fear
of retaliation. Indeed, the U.S. and NATO put a spectacular show with its
fighters, bombers, missiles, cluster bombs, and Depleted Uranium weapons.
All these impressive weapons, and all the fury was unleashed upon a country
with no anti-aircraft fire, no bomb shelters, no war industry, no
ammunition factory, no railroad tracks, only villages of stone and mud
dwellings. U.S. and NATO waged a deliberately disproportionate attack on a
country that had zero capability to defend itself. In any essential sense,
it's not a real war; the barrage was solely designed to punish, humiliate
and terrorize a population and send signal to other nations. The dropping
of thousands of bombs precision-guided by satellite and laser technology in
heavily populated areas that has caused excessive civilian casualties and
widespread destruction betrays the U.S. claim that the war was launched
with the aim to uproot Taliban regime, and capture Osama bin Laden; it
appeared more in line with Bush's famous John Wayne style rhetoric, "smoke
them out" and "Bring 'em on". Shortly after the U.S. invasion, in a biting
remark, John Pilger observed in The Mirror, a British Tabloid, "The war
against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing,not a single
terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in
Afghanistan.Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has
beenterrorized by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots
have run out of dubious "military' targets and are now destroying mud
houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees." The
Guardian reported on April 10, 2002 about the number of U.S. bombs and
cruise missiles directed at poverty-stricken Afghanistan: "More than 22,000
weapons - ranging from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs - have been
dropped on the country over the past six months". US pilots dropped more
than 6,600 joint direct attack munitions (J-dams), the satellite-guided
bombs. And, this report is only for the first six months of the attack. In
Dossier on Civilian Victims of the United States' Aerial Bombing of
Afghanistan, Prof. Marc W. Herold of University Of New Hampshire, citing
different news sources, gives account of bombing in October and November
2001. For example, he writes: "October 11th - farming village of 450
persons of Karam, west of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province is repeatedly
bombed, 45 of the 60 mud houses destroyed, killing at least 160 civilians."
This represents 75 percent of the total dwelling and 35 percent of the
village population that were annihilated. For November 18th, he says,
"Carpet-bombing by B-52's of frontline village near Khanabad, province of
Kunduz, kills at least 150 civilians." Not only that the U.S, along with
Russia, China, and Israel refused to sign the convention to ban the deadly
cluster bombs - a cluster of bomblets - it made a liberal use of the deadly
weapon in Afghanistan, as it did in wars with other nations. Cluster bombs
severely added to the brutality of the lopsided war in Afghanistan.
According to one report, "From 2001 to 2002 in Afghanistan, the United
States used over 1200 cluster munitions that contained close to 250,000
bomblets." Cluster bombs are known to be more lethal and dangerous to
civilians then to enemy combatants. It can not be used in or around the
populated areas without causing great loss to civilian life. The violent
blow of deadly shrapnel decapitates and severs body parts. The other
unfortunate consequence of cluster bombs is that the unexploded bomblets
can lie in the ground, fields, and roads or buried in the soil for years
and keep killing long after the conflict ends. Now after securing the
intended goal uprooting the Taliban regime and crippling Al-Qaeda beyond
repair - the over 134,000 foreign troops from 50 nations from all the
continents, under the U.S. and NATO command, are for the last eight years
waging an unwinnable and untenable but ruthless and lethal war against the
insurgency to protect the west installed puppet regime of Hamid Karzai. In
doing so, a disproportionate number of civilian casualties are being
created by the indiscriminate bombings and raids by the U.S. Special Forces
on civilian population hunting for the insurgents. All reports coming from
Afghanistan clearly indicate that the civilian deaths are decidedly
excessive and unacceptable in relation to any gain against the insurgents.
These thoughtless killing of unarmed men, women, and children galvanizes
the opposition to the foreign troops presence and in turn fuel support for
the insurgency. In a moment of truth, during a videoconference with U.S.
soldiers in Afghanistan, General McChrystal candidly admitted, "We've shot
an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none
has proven to have been a real threat to the force," He further
acknowledges, "To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not
a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and
hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or
weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it." The totally
lopsided tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties and widespread
destruction and pain caused by the high-tech virtual war imposed by the
Western forces is reminiscent of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Sudan,
where the British soldiers armed with state of the art of the time gun
boats, rifles and machine guns mowed down thousands of Sudanese tribesman
armed mostly with swords and lances. And in the words of General William
Sherman, the "War is hell" for the men, women, and children of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan 1AC This sort of large-scale violence does not arise in a vacuum. The conflict
in Afghanistan, and the war on terror generally, is enabled by language
practices that divide the world into "good" and "evil", portraying civilian
deaths as mere collateral damage.
Jackson '5 (Richard, Lecturer in Politics - U. Manchester, 49th Parallel,
"Language Power and Politics: Critical Discourse Analysis and the War on
Terrorism", January,
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/jackson1.htm)
Applying a 'critical' perspective to the language of counter-terrorism, it
can be argued that the 'war on terrorism' and its domination of public
political discourse in America and Britain poses several dangers
to the functioning of political life and democratic civil society. At the
most fundamental level, the construction of large-scale political violence
of any kind entails the destruction of the moral consensus and the collapse
of the moral community-and its replacement with discourses of victim-hood,
hatred of the 'other', fear and counter-violence. Once a society embraces
these new political narratives, once it venerates its grie