Article on Nangarhar Incident

I'm a journalist and former Marine officer. Here's an excerpt from an April 25th piece I wrote for Salon.com. Would appreciate feedback from SWJ members. Thanks.

"As with so many issues in war, the closer you look into a situation, the harder it can be to judge. As a former Marine officer, my first impulse is, somewhat predictably, to sympathize with the troops. Judgments come easy when you're sitting in the comfort of your living room, but when you are taking fire from seemingly every direction, the finely wrought laws of war start to seem like the dreams of a war college professor. I've interviewed hundreds of soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and I'm repeatedly struck by the weighty, almost metaphysical, overtones of modern combat, in which soldiers have a half second to make the right decision and many years to live with the results of making the wrong one. (And those are only the scenarios, of course, in which the soldiers live to tell the tale.)

But one of the great tragedies of incidents like Haditha and Nangarhar is that no matter how they are adjudicated by the Pentagon, they are resounding defeats in a global conflict whose battlefield is ever media-oriented. They draw dark comparisons in the U.S. media with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, provide fodder for anti-U.S. sympathizers elsewhere, and fit conveniently into the larger meta-narrative of quagmire and American perfidy overseas."

link to article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature.../26/nangarhar/

Anymore wonderful news in SWC and I'm going to go primitive, leave my wife and home and live like a wild boar in the back woods away from everything. First I see a slick IO piece by al-jazeera which we don't seem to have an answer for, other than bombing their stations and placing a bounty on their journalists, then I read about the Air Force of all people telling the world General P. is some kind of backwards hick, then this. I once was a Hippy for a while and at times like this I wish the hell I had never left the life style.

I'm not sure what kind of feedback you're looking for. It does seem to me that there are two aspects of this which you deemphasize, which perhaps might be the productive topic of future pieces. First, while you mention that in this type of war troops have only seconds to make critical decisions, you don't really explore or explain what that means. I recently attended a conference organized by CALL focusing only on the problem of traffic control checkpoints, and I thought I understood the pressure faced by troops in that context, but it quickly became clear I had no idea. Now, I'm a civilian but I focus on this for a living -- is it likely your average reader really has thought through the types of decisions that need to be made, and the amount of time typically available to make those decisions?

Second, if you're going to discuss the propaganda impact of civilian casualties -- which I think is both entirely fair and important -- I do think you should also mention that the question is of such benefit to the other side that there is good reason to believe they'll overclaim civilian casualties, claim civilian casualties when in fact those killed were fighters, and so on. American audiences should be willing to judge the evidence as it comes in, and to believe that these events are possible, but they should by no means believe that any claim of civilian casualties is true simply because a claim of civilian casualties is made.

Hi Hostagecow,

Le me toss on a third area to the two Cori listed: the military justice system. I note that on the second page of your article, you say:

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Among many troops I have spoken to about U.S. atrocities, there is a sense of rank unfairness about the military justice system. With few notable exceptions, it is always lower-ranking enlisted men and most often infantrymen who stand accused. Pilots, artillerymen and officers above the rank of captain are almost never charged with war crimes -- never mind civilian leaders at the Pentagon, elected officials or members of the foreign policy establishment who advocated the wars in the first place. "#### runs downhill," the saying goes, and as a rule in the military, it's true. To be sure, the commander and senior enlisted man of the Marine unit at Nangarhar were relieved of their command positions, but, as of yet, no charges have been filed against them.

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This, to my mind, raises some really interesting problems in a number of areas. First, there does not appear, although I could be wrong, to be a unified military justice system that operates across the coalitions. Right now, I'm thinking back to the dual investigations of the friendly-fire deaths of Canadian soldiers by US pilots some years ago as an exemplar of this problem. While there are international "laws" governing conflicts, these will be interpreted differently on the ground by different national troops, which would also cause frictions of the "hey, why can they do this and we can't?" type.

Second, it strikes me that if "justice" is going to be applied to incidents, then from a purely IO+PSYOPs stance, it should be applied to the Taliban and AQ as well. Now, that probably sounds somewhat wacky, but I suspect that some of the tensions are coming from that "hey, why can they do this and we can't?" feeling relating to the enemy. If the laws of war are supposed to "govern" conduct in the field, holding a double standard, whether it be from nation to nation or force to force will inevitably create resentments.

Marc

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marct

[I]t strikes me that if "justice" is going to be applied to incidents, then from a purely IO+PSYOPs stance, it should be applied to the Taliban and AQ as well. Now, that probably sounds somewhat wacky, but I suspect that some of the tensions are coming from that "hey, why can they do this and we can't?" feeling relating to the enemy. If the laws of war are supposed to "govern" conduct in the field, holding a double standard, whether it be from nation to nation or force to force will inevitably create resentments.

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Marc,
Back when I taught just war theory issues at a small military leadership academy on the banks of the Hudson River in New York, my students would routinely ask me the same question. We discussed it, for example, with regards to differing application of standards in regards to POW abuse by our opponents in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. My response was and will always be along the lines that we, as the military representatives of a civilized nation, need to take the moral high ground, that we cannot apply a consequentialist approach (the end justifies the means). Our only recourse is to be moral absolutists in our conduct on the battlefield simply because that is the right thing for civilized folks to do.

More to the point of your post though is the following. How do you propose to apply the same standard to the other side in the GWOT? By classifying them as terrorists, we have already placed them outside the bounds of the law of armed conflict (LOAC). We cannot expect them to conform to the rules because of how we have labeled them. All we can really do is try to show how morally bankrupt the opponents are and use the court of public opinion to try to undermine their popular support. The bad news is that fear and coercion seem to be much more effective for garnering support in the short term. Additionally, every time our side slips from the moral high ground, those we are trying to convince lose a little more faith in the truth of our proclamations about our noble motives.

Hi WM,

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Originally Posted by wm

Back when I taught just war theory issues at a small military leadership academy on the banks of the Hudson River in New York, my students would routinely ask me the same question. We discussed it, for example, with regards to differing application of standards in regards to POW abuse by our opponents in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. My response was and will always be along the lines that we, as the military representatives of a civilized nation, need to take the moral high ground, that we cannot apply a consequentialist approach (the end justifies the means). Our only recourse is to be moral absolutists in our conduct on the battlefield simply because that is the right thing for civilized folks to do.

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I do agree with that, although I would point out that, operationally, there are some differences in application between coalition forces. For example, the Canadian Minister of Defense just announced that the Canadian government and military will be monitoring all captives in Afghanistan that are turned over to Afghan forces.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wm

More to the point of your post though is the following. How do you propose to apply the same standard to the other side in the GWOT? By classifying them as terrorists, we have already placed them outside the bounds of the law of armed conflict (LOAC). We cannot expect them to conform to the rules because of how we have labeled them.

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I agree that this is problematic, and for the very reasons you list. On a purely pragmatic level, I would argue that we should generally adopt a tactic that has been used with some success in Iraq,namely, after ever atrocity committed by the Taliban and AQ in an AO, flyers should be put up listing all of the specific war crimes that have been committed. At the same time, I would also suggest that they be sen to be investigated as war crimes. In other words, exactly the same investigative, and more importantly semantic, standard should be applied to AQ and Taliban ops as are applied to coalition troops.

The problem as I see it stems from the us of the concept of "unlawful combatant". As you note, they have been automatically defined as "criminals" by the very semantic constructions we have used. This, however, creates a situation where on the ground and n the eyes of the people, we have automatically created a double standard. I think the we should stop that. Purely on a personal level, believe that the Taliban should be granted "limited belligerent" status, but I doubt that will happen.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wm

All we can really do is try to show how morally bankrupt the opponents are and use the court of public opinion to try to undermine their popular support. The bad news is that fear and coercion seem to be much more effective for garnering support in the short term. Additionally, every time our side slips from the moral high ground, those we are trying to convince lose a little more faith in the truth of our proclamations about our noble motives.

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I think we can do more than show how "morally bankrupt" they are - I think we have the potential to "convict" them, albeit in absentia, of war crimes.

Honestly, I am by no means an expert in the legal side of the system (maybe LawVol cold comment?), but from a symbolic angle, I think that a "justice system" that meets both international and host country legal requirements would help to strengthen our ongoing symbolic war.

Marc

If I sound like a broken record on this point it is because the media still does not get it.

The reasons civilians are at great risk in this war is because of the enemy's violation of the Geneva Conventions requirement of wearing an identifiable uniform. Any story that claims to be about civilian casualties should start with that premise. When the enemy camouflages himself as a civilian, he puts all civilians at risk. None of the incidents in Haditha or other locations would have happened if the enemy did not camouflage himself as a civilian and use civilians as human shields when he is not deliberately targeting them.

That is what makes these prosecutions so dubious. If they are being done to make a political point that is even worse. If they are going to be done at all the enemy troops who precipitated the events should at least be indicted as war criminals.

I also agree with Cori's comments.