MARDAN, Pakistan — The Pakistani army denies knowing that its war against Islamic militants has caused civilian casualties, but patients and family members at a local hospital told McClatchy Thursday that multiple relatives were killed when the military shelled or bombed their homes.
So far, there appear to be just a handful of civilian casualties from the fighting in Swat, a valley 100 miles from Islamabad. More of them, however, along with damage to homes and businesses and the plight of the hundreds of thousands who’ve been displaced by the fighting, could undermine hard-won public support for fighting the Taliban.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani recognized the danger, telling parliament Thursday: “Militarily we will win the war, but it will be unfortunate if we lose it publicly.”
On a visit Thursday to the District Headquarters (DHQ) hospital in Mardan, the first major town reached by those fleeing the war zone, a McClatchy reporter found doctors and nurses struggling to cope with civilian casualties
Fareedon, a 36-year-old who goes by one name, was lying in a bed at the simply equipped and poorly maintained DHQ hospital. He said that he lost three of his children, a 12-year-old boy and girls aged 8 and 5, when a mortar hit their house in Landkhai village in the southwest corner of Swat. He said that 10 to 12 houses and a school in the village were shelled on May 11. He was injured in the foot and the thigh.
“It (mortars) is falling on our houses,” said Fareedon. “Ordinary people die. Not one Taliban has been killed.”
At Aboha village, also in southwest Swat, a shell killed six people, said Sajjad Khan, 18, who’d brought his injured 13-year-old brother, Sohail, to the hospital. They said they lost a sister and a cousin, and another wounded cousin lay on a nearby hospital bed.
“What is this child guilty of?” said Sajjad, pointing to his brother. “What is the guilt of those that died?”
He said they tried calling an ambulance but none would come because of a curfew.
In another bed was 8-year-old Aktar Mina, with a broken leg. In a two-hour attack, missiles or bombs from fighter planes hit several homes on Sunday in her village in Gut Peochar, a remote part of Swat that reputedly is a Taliban stronghold, according to relatives crowded around her bed.
Her mother carried her for four days until they could find transportation, said the girl’s cousin, 30-year-old Saeed Afzal. Eight people were killed, including the girl’s aunt and seven of the neighbors’ children who were taking shelter in the house, he said.
“When the fighting began, the Taliban all vanished. It is ordinary people being bombed,” said Afzal.
There was no way to verify the stories independently, and according to doctors at the hospital, there are only a few patients with injuries from the fighting in Swat, with four admitted on Wednesday, for instance.
“We were expecting much more than this. There’s no rush of the injured. It is a mystery,” said Dr. Wajid Ahmed, of the casualty department.
It’s possible that the badly injured haven’t been able to make it out of the war zone, said doctors, who’re also coping with an outbreak of disease among the “internally displaced people” who’re living in giant camps on the city outskirts.
The hospital’s main concern now is a flood of people with diseases caused by poor hygiene and overcrowded conditions. Out of the 582 patients seen at the hospital Wednesday, 283 were refugees from the fighting in Swat and the surrounding districts, and most fell ill in the camps.
There were three or four babies and young children on most of the mattresses in the children’s ward, where 28 exhausted little patients occupied the 10 beds. All the children were suffering from dangerous acute diarrhea.
“Let’s hope this (war) ends soon. Otherwise, as the weather gets hotter, it will be a disaster,” said Ahmed.
The Pakistani army has either declined to answer questions about civilian casualties or said it has no record of any. However, the army has produced precise claims for the number of Taliban it’s killed. Earlier this week, the army said 751 militants had been killed, and Thursday officials added 54 more.
Past Pakistani military operations against Islamic militants in Swat and in the tribal belt along the Afghan border have caused significant civilian casualties and collateral damage to houses, businesses and other buildings.
Human Rights Watch warned earlier this week that the army must avoid civilian casualties, and the army repeated its pledge to take care of civilians.
“The security forces are making all efforts to minimize collateral damage, and therefore we have changed some of our plans to ensure that we do not cause collateral damage,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army’s chief spokesman, at a news briefing Thursday. “We have taken all measures to avoid fighting in populated areas so far.”
Thousands of residents remain trapped in Mingora, Swat’s biggest town, which has no electricity, no running water and dwindling food supplies. Many Taliban militants are believed to be holed up there, and Abbas said that the army wants as many people as possible to be leave Mingora before the anticipated “street-to-street” fighting begins in the town.
On May 8, the Pakistani army launched its “full-scale” operations to wrest back control of Swat valley from Taliban extremists. Some 15,000 troops are involved.
Since the fighting began, the army said that some 750,000 people have fled Swat and the surrounding districts, increasing Pakistan’s population of “internally displaced people” to 1.3 million. Hundreds of thousands already had been made homeless by anti-Taliban operations elsewhere in the northwest part of the country.
(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.)
Peace and Justice Post 
Did the CIA lie about torture?
May 17, 2009It doesn’t matter if Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding. The real issue is Dick Cheney’s role in the torture scandal
Michael Tomasky | The Guradian, UK, May 15, 2009
How important is it – in terms of future national security, in terms of our obligation to history – to establish exactly when and exactly why the United States tortured, and whether that tactic yielded the positive results Dick Cheney says it did?
I think we’d all agree that’s pretty important.
How important is it – on those same two bases – to find out whether Nancy Pelosi, not at that time third in succession to the presidency but one of 435 members of the lower legislative body, knew of waterboarding in 2002 or 2003?
Not very. And that about sums up the Pelosi flap as far as I’m concerned.
For three weeks now, the Rush Limbaugh set has been banging on about whether Pelosi was telling the truth when she said a while back that she hadn’t known of waterboarding from early CIA briefings. It had been previously reported that she knew. Those previous reports came from leaks most likely from within the CIA.
The rightwing allegations crescendoed in the past week. The CIA leaked word that Pelosi had been informed. Pelosi ducked the question for several day, then obviously decided yesterday that the kitchen was getting hot enough that she’d better open a window and give her version.
To the extent that Pelosi felt she had to respond to all this (although I’m still not sure why – I’d guess that as of yesterday morning, perhaps 4% of Americans had even heard of this fight) the right won a small tactical victory here. They’re going to spend days crowing, mainly because they haven’t had anything to crow about in months.
But really. This is a complete diversion. Which is the whole reason the rightwing has pressed the Pelosi question in the first place. Every minute of cable television time spent talking about what Pelosi knew and when she knew it is a minute not devoted to talking about what Cheney ordered and when and why he ordered it. The operatives and bloggers on the right pressing the Pelosi angle understand this very well.
As for Pelosi’s comments, she says the CIA lied to Congress. Gasp! No! They’d never do such a thing. Friends, lying to Congress is a fixed part of what the CIA does. And sometimes it’s arguably necessary. But often – well, if this is news to you, go read up on the Church and Pike committees from the 1970s.
And note that the CIA did not entirely deny Pelosi’s allegation when it responded yesterday. The agency spokesperson’s language was very interesting – the CIA had a chart showing that Pelosi was fully briefed in September 2002, and that chart was “true to the language in the agency’s records“. Great! So what?
Let me stop here and say that there are hundreds of good nonpolitical professionals in the CIA who are trying to do their important and difficult jobs. The agency has been abused by today’s Republican party over and over again. Remember that during the run-up to the Iraq war, Cheney pressed the agency to find intelligence to fit the case the administration wanted to make against Iraq – linking it to al-Qaida, fabricating a story about nuclear weapons – and even set up their own intelligence unit to give them the intel they wanted.
And most of all, Bush and Cheney really harmed the agency by putting Porter Goss in charge of it. Goss was a Florida GOP congressman. He was, in 2002, Pelosi’s counterpart on the House intelligence committee and as such was briefed with her. He brought political people into the agency who wrecked the place. Some major operations were taken out of the CIA’s hands and placed in other intelligence agencies. His number-three man was convicted of bribery in a massive scandal that involved a high-ranking member of Congress and a Pentagon contractor.
This was Cheney’s man at Langley. It’s pretty hard right now not to think that some of this rightwing pushback is emanating from somewhere in the Goss universe.
But in the end, everything points back to Cheney. What certain members of Congress were told or not told, how things were phrased, who was in and out of the loop – we have ample evidence from previously published accounts that Cheney micro-managed everything that was of concern to him.
To cut to the chase, a full-on investigation could quite possibly demonstrate, then, that the vice-president of the United States directed staff to lie to Congress. The people on the right keeping the Pelosi angle alive know this, too.
They’d never admit it publicly, but deep down, they must be worried, in the same way that liberals kinda knew deep down a decade ago that that dog Clinton probably did do something inappropriate with “that woman”.
Small wonder they want to talk about Pelosi. Pay no attention to the men behind this particular curtain, and keep your eyes on the prize.
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Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, Michael Tomasky, Nancy Pelosi, waterboarding
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