Killing Civilians for Sport

I had a hard time deciding the topic for today's post... Part of me really wanted to talk about the Conservatives' muzzling of federal scientists, since that's a Canadian thing and fairly recent. But I'm still pretty damn angry about the news out of Afghanistan, even if it's almost a week since the story broke, and I think it's important enough to override more local stuff. Not the least of which is because a certain perspective becomes apparent as you read the various reports on the events and the order in which they happened, one that I haven't seen much comment on.

From the Guardian article on the event:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

So, more war crimes in Afghanistan, this time of as blatant a nature as you can get. I mean, this is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a bad movie - one that would get a public outcry in the U.S. for unfairly depicting U.S. Soldiers. But here it is, and it happened in the really real world.

Of course, if you've even glanced at the story, you probably know all this. What you might not realize is something that reveals itself only by really thinking about the implications of some of the reported events:

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.

Basically, what happened was the self-described "kill squad" decided to smoke hashish in the wrong place - a recruit who was otherwise willing to look the other way if they smoked anywhere else wasn't willing to put his own ass on the line because they were using the container he was responsible for as their smoke house. So, he told on them, they found out, and then they beat him up.

Then, as revenge, he told his superiors about their war crimes.

This suggests two things: 1. He knew about the war crimes already, much like he knew about the drug use before they got him involved in it. 2. He considered their drug use in his container worse than murdering civilians, since otherwise he would have reported them in a different order, and much sooner than he did.

Think about that for a second. Of course, this should come as no surprise; according to a survey of U.S. troops in Iraq, almost half of all army soldiers (and more than half of Marines) have said they would cover up war crimes for their fellow soldiers. Moreover, if the statistics in that survey hold up for Afghanistan (and I see no reason they wouldn't), then going by the numbers there are almost ten thousand war criminals stationed there, as one in ten have admitted to committing abuses against civilians.

I'd be very interested to see how coalition forces rate against these statistics. I suspect it would be very revealing, but I've yet to see a proper survey performed.

Ultimately, all this adds up to the mission in Afghanistan being a failure - and it's likely the door for success has long passed. No "surge" strategy will work here (for that matter, the surge strategy didn't really work in Iraq, but that's a whole 'nother topic). If the coalition is even still trying to win hearts and minds, they're failing miserably - and it's because of events like this. There's even a good chance that the Army was warned after the first murder and chose to ignore the warning, though I don't know if we'll ever know for sure whether that's true.

Can anyone state the official goal of the war in Afghanistan, quoted from an official in a position of responsibility, stated for public consumption? The last thing I remember hearing is about how it's for the well-being of Afghans - particularly Afghan women - because if the coalition in general departs, and the U.S. in specific, then blood will run in the streets.

That these claims can be made when the Afghans don't want us there, when actual Afghan women's organizations want us all out because we're making things worse, not better... That these claims can be made while our side sends out murder squads both official (Task Force 373) and unofficial (this Stryker brigade)... Well. Hypocrisy ain't just for the Greeks, you know. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face the possibility that, as much as any conflict can have good guys and bad guys, we may just be on the side of the bad.

Ironically, once upon a time, I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan. I'm not sure exactly when I changed my mind on the subject, but I'm sure it was related to something like this.