The wedding bombers are back! Here’s an early dilemma for Obama: to bomb or not to bomb weddings?

IHT

6th November, 2008

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Five weddings and many funerals

Tensions between American forces and the Afghan government over civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes spiked again on Wednesday with a report by Afghan officials that a missile from a United States aircraft killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in the southern province of Kandahar.

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John Pilger

New Statesman

24th July

I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children to a US bomb – but mass murder in Afghanistan isn’t news

On 12 July, the Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “high drama” and “meticulously practised routine” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “saving a life took precedence over [their] security”. Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday”.

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Tom Engelhardt

Asia Times

15th July, 2008

It was a tribal affair. Against a picture-perfect sunset, before a beige-colored cross and an altar made of the very Texas limestone that was also used to build her family’s “ranch”, veil-less in an Oscar de la Renta gown, the 26-year-old bride said her vows. More than 200 members of her extended family and friends were on hand, as well as the 14 women in her “house party”, who were dressed “in seven different styles of knee-length dresses in seven different colors that match[ed] the palette of … wildflowers – blues, greens, lavenders and pinky reds”. 

Afterwards, in a white tent set in a grove of trees and illuminated by strings of lights, the father of the bride, George W Bush, danced with his daughter to the strains of You Are So Beautiful. The media were kept at arm’s length and the vows were private, but undoubtedly they included the phrase “till death do us part”. 
That was early May of this year. Less than two months later, halfway across the world, another tribal affair was underway. The age of the bride involved is unknown to us, as is her name. No reporters were clamoring to get to her section of the mountainous backcountry of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We know almost nothing about her circumstances, except that she was on her way to a nearby village, evidently early in the morning, among a party 70-90 strong, mostly women, “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates”. 

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