Imagine this scenario. Your child, or the child of another family member or friend, is seriously injured by somebody else. This other person is totally unrelated to you,  is using  guns and bombs in a battle with somebody else about an issue that you can’t even understand never mind would wish to participate in. Happening right where you live.

When you complain that somebody’s spokesperson assures you that it’s inevitable that in an operation of this particular size there would be collateral damage. In other words, shut up and put up with it.

This is exactly what military officials are saying about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The US (just for a change) and allied forces (just for a change – any British there?) are launching a huge offensive again.

Brig. Gen. Nicholson, the commander of the operation, seems to think that this “war’ justifies using airstrikes in civilian areas. Where does this guy come from? What nasty hole has he escaped from? And what country is giving him the authority to perpetrate such crimes against humanity?

It is beyond comprehension that lives of ordinary people are so totally insignificant that they become collateral damage. They become a statistic, a number, a non-entity a thing that has no rights.

How have we become so immune to the fate of people living in countries where world powers are fiddling around for some unknown reason. It’s not even as if we don’t know about what is happening there. We are watching it on TV, reading articles in the media, on blogs and on YouTube. No excuses.

And please nobody with half a brain can possibly excuse this war in Afghanistan as being part of the ‘Fight against Terror’ hype? After all how wrong were these same powers in Iraq?

Terror, what terror? Weapons of mass destruction? What weapons. Armed forces? What armed forces. Not found in any significant numbers in Iraq. Are they in Afghanistan?  A handful of Taliban? Most of them are probably sheltering in Pakistan by now.

So what is really going on in Afghanistan? What could possibly require the numbers of troops that the US is sending to this poverty stricken country? 98 000 by Summer of 2010. This is in addition to the numbers of the Allied forces which is another 40 000 or so.

Add to this the unbelievable superiority of technology such as war robots/drones, military weapons and aircraft hardware the US and Allied Forces have the use of and one wonders what is going on? What kind of resistance could possibly withstand this superiority? A handful of people in dish-dash-ah riding camels?

But besides the incongruity of the war, what we as human beings need to feel outrage over is the loss of lives. Ordinary citizens such as children and their parents and grandparents! What are we doing about this injustice. Are we just sitting back and believing this nonsense about the necessity of these deaths to secure our safety?

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmond Tutu has these perfect words to offer us: “To remain neutral in situations of injustice, is to be complicit in that injustice.” What do you think?