The root of the problem
Amid the huge acreage of newsprint about the “friendly fire” killing of three British soldiers by an American F-15 on August 24, there was only one article in the British daily press about the hundreds of Afghan civilians who are losing their lives as “collateral damage” at the hands of the occupation. You can read that article here.
The three soldiers’ deaths, by contrast, warranted two days of front page stories (among them the Evening Standard, Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Telegraph) and huge spreads inside about the men who died, the loss felt by their families, and agonised speculation about how further deaths could be avoided.
Comparison with the scale of civilian deaths warranted one line in articles in the Independent, the Scotsman, the Guardian, and right at the end of stories in the Herald and the Daily Record.
A day after the incident, Afghan elders said that airstrikes had killed 12 civilians in Helmand. This incident went unreported in the British press.
Even the Afghan government says some 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the conflict in 2006 alone. In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year. The rate has been increasing. Aid agencies say that in 2006 the number of civilians killed by both sides was 700-1,000, the highest figure since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.
There is a word for the enormous disparity between the media’s concern for “our” troops and Afghan civilians. It’s called racism.
P.S. The Financial Times covered the friendly fire story as a 60-word brief on page 6 (Aug 25).
