Afghanistan’s Phoenix Programme?

The “Phoenix Programme” is straight out of Vietnam. It entailed covert, US special forces assassination squads that raided country villages to execute suspected Viet Cong officials and sympathizers. Postwar analysis revealed their targeting information was routinely poor and they wound up murdering a lot of innocents.

Now a United Nations official is sounding the alarm about something that sounds remarkably similar underway in Afghanistan. UN rights official Philip Alston met with reporters today to disclose at least three recent raids in the south and east by foreign (“western”) intelligence agents that led to the deaths of innocent civilians.

Alston said the raids involved US personnel from a special forces base in Kandahar.

What’s particularly troubling to Alston is that no one is taking responsibility and the killers are operating with total impunity, two other characteristics of the Phoenix programme.

Alston said government officials confirmed the victims had no connection to the Taliban.

 

It’s About Bloody Time!

Finally the United States has accepted an obligation to help clean up the toxic disaster that besets Vietnam from the spraying of Agent Orange forty years ago.

70-million litres of this toxic brew were sprayed by USAF planes to defoliate vast swathes of Vietnamese jungle between 1961 and 1975. It is estimated to have caused birth defects and serious diseases in four million victims since then.

A documentary aired a few years ago showed Canadian researchers in Vietnam assessing the danger. They found the most lethal toxins could remain active in the soil for up to six centuries and that, in some areas, cleaning up the land would require scraping away several metres of surface soil.

This is an atrocity on an enormous scale, right up there with the very worst. Yet for four decades the US, mightiest nation on earth, self-proclaimed “beacon of democracy”, has refused to acknowledge any responsibility to the Vietnamese for the wholesale killer they left behind.

Today’s announcement is, however, remarkably limited. Washington has agreed to contribute $400,000 to a $1-million study directed at cleaning up Agent Orange contamination at only one spot – its former air base at Da Nang. That, kids, is a small drop in the bucket of what would be needed to clean the vast swathes of Vietnam’s countryside that will keep killing and deforming kids in their millions for centuries to come if the only nation with the wealth to act, the same nation that created this nightmare, chooses, finally, to take its long-overdue responsibility.

Ever get the idea that this one really gets me steamed?