Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is cited as a human-rights organization whose reporting helps document consequences that official accounts of military action can leave in the background. In Noam Chomsky’s discussion, its evidence connects the destruction of medical capacity in Sudan and the record of armed factions in Afghanistan to wider civilian and humanitarian costs.

Reporting on Sudan

In examining the 1998 U.S. bombing of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, Chomsky turns to reporting on the aftermath rather than treating the attack as a single, completed event. He cites accounts that the factory had supplied affordable medicines, including treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, and that sanctions restricted Sudan’s ability to replace what had been lost. The resulting harm, in this account, could accumulate through illness and lack of treatment long after the bombing itself.

Chomsky also cites a Human Rights Watch report on the immediate disruption to relief work after the bombing. U.N. agencies based in Khartoum evacuated their American personnel, and other relief organizations followed. Aid efforts were delayed, including a U.S.-backed International Rescue Committee project in a government-held town where more than fifty people from southern Sudan were reportedly dying each day. The report places the attack within a humanitarian emergency in which the interruption of assistance carried consequences beyond the factory and its workers.

Afghanistan and armed factions

In discussing Afghanistan, Chomsky cites Joost Hiltermann, identified as Human Rights Watch’s arms division director and a Middle East specialist. Hiltermann characterized the armed factions’ period in power from 1992 to 1995 as the worst period in Afghan history. Chomsky also invokes human-rights groups’ reporting that faction members killed tens of thousands of civilians and committed rape and other abuses, with violations continuing after the Taliban drove them from power.

The account gives specific examples attributed to Human Rights Watch: in 1997, the factions reportedly killed three thousand prisoners of war, carried out extensive ethnic cleansing in areas thought to support the Taliban, and left burned villages behind. These details inform Chomsky’s warning that empowering the factions again could revive violence that had helped lead parts of the population to accept Taliban rule. The organization’s reporting thus serves as a counterweight to treating armed opposition to the Taliban as automatically protective of civilians.

Evidence and argument

Across these cases, Human Rights Watch functions as a source for tracing effects that are indirect, delayed, or obscured by the language of military action. In Sudan, the relevant measures include access to medicine and the interruption of relief operations; in Afghanistan, they include the past conduct of armed groups and the risks associated with renewed support for them. Chomsky uses these reports to assess policy through its consequences for people caught in conflict, not only through its stated purposes or immediate targets.