Costs of War: Ghosts of Civilian Casualties Haunt US Forces
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
The external pagefootage is shocking. And it has been viewed millions of times, in both its edited and unedited forms - giving rise to external pagean often-predictable storm of commentary and controversy in the blogosphere.
Asked on ABC Television over the weekend whether the video’s release would “damage the image of the US in the world," Defense Secretary Robert Gates external pagereplied, "I don't think so."
Unfortunately, he is almost certainly wrong about this.
Some have external pagecharged that the edited version of the video, released by whistleblower and transparency website Wikileaks.org, is editorially slanted. But even the unedited footage plays well into a long-standing, widely believed (and alas largely true) storyline about the US military in Iraq - that they were often not careful enough to minimize civilian casualties.
In a very real sense, this video shows the tip of an iceberg. Although Wikileaks, in accordance with its commitment to protect the identity of its sources, will not say how it got the 38 minutes of footage, it is reasonable to suppose that the video, though classified, got wider circulation as a result of a FOIA request by the Reuters news agency, which employed the two photojournalists killed.
“How many other civilians were killed in similar circumstances whose names we will never know, because they had no powerful Western employers to publicize their deaths?” external pageasked The Economist.
And how many similar videos are out there? Wikileaks has already external pagereportedly said it will release footage from US aircraft called in to bomb Taliban insurgents in Farah, Afghanistan last year - an attack that an independent Afghan inquiry said killed 97 civilians.
Gates and others have defended the troops’ actions in the Iraq video saying several of the group of eight men the helicopters fired on were armed, and that the photographers - who were not wearing any distinguishing clothing to identify themselves as journalists from a distance - only later turned out to be innocent bystanders.
"They're in a combat situation,” said Gates of the helicopter crews. “The video doesn't show the broader picture of the firing that was going on at American troops.”
He acknowledged that it was “a hard thing to see. It's painful to see, especially when you learn after the fact what was going on. But you - you talked about the fog of war. These people were operating in split second situations."
Indeed, even when it comes to the external pagemorality of the soldiers involved, the video reveals a more nuanced pictures than many critics of the US military would like to believe.
Yes, they make external pagecallous jokes, and yes they (wrongly, in terms of counterinsurgency theory) dismiss the injuries to a small child as “their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
One gunner does not fire upon a wounded man because he does not have a weapon. “Come on, buddy,” he urges the man crawling towards the roadside a few seconds later, “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”
As George Packer so external pageeloquently observed “Anyone who sends young troops into war should expect them to kill innocent people by mistake, and to crack jokes about the people they’ve killed. This doesn’t make them war criminals, or even moral monsters.”
But external pagesome of those who have offered the most cogent defense of the helicopter crews’ initial decision to fire on the group of men have also external pagequestioned whether their subsequent shooting at a van and a building can also be external pagejustified.
As far as the US military is concerned, the troops acted within the US external pagerules of engagement at the time and external pagethe case is closed. And that means the legal process is over as well, at least unless Congress wants to get involved.
“We've investigated it very thoroughly,” Gates said Sunday, calling the situation “unfortunate" and "clearly not helpful,” but predicting it “should not have any lasting consequences."
The next day’s news from Afghanistan, however, brought a fresh reminder that three years on, and in a different theater of war, the issue of civilian casualties continues to pose a challenge to US-led coalition military operations.
Four civilians were external pagekilled and 18 injured when ISAF troops fired on their bus in the Zhari district of Kandahar province just before dawn on Monday, news agencies reported.
Victims told external pagethe Independent that the bus was stationary, pulled over at the side the road when it came under fire, but a external pageNATO statement said it was accelerating as it approached a slow-moving convoy searching for roadside bombs.
"Perceiving a threat when the vehicle approached once more at an increased rate of speed the patrol attempted to warn off the vehicle with hand signals prior to firing upon it.”
The statement added that, “Upon inspection, ISAF forces discovered the vehicle to be a passenger bus,” whereupon they “provided immediate medical assistance to five injured civilians, some of whom were transported by ISAF to local medical facilities for care.”
A combined Afghan and NATO “incident assessment team” was in the area “in order to review the events leading to this regrettable loss of life.”
In many ways, the accounts of the shootings echo detail familiar from dozens of stories of shooting by US forces at checkpoints in Iraq - which became a major “hearts and minds” issue there.
But advocates say US military policy on civilian casualties has changed for the better since the incident in the Iraq video.
“In Afghanistan now, with [US Commander Gen Stanley] McChrystal’s new tactical directives, I would think, I would hope, that shouldn’t happen” Sarah Holewinski of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) told ISN Security Watch.
CIVIC works on behalf of civilians killed and wounded by US forces and monitors the military’s efforts to compensate them.
Holewinski said that new rules of engagement McChrystal had issued had contributed to a fall the UN recorded last year of almost a third in the number of civilian casualties caused by coalition forces.
“They did a great job last year” in bringing down the numbers, she said, adding that CIVIC was carefully watching stepped up US military operations this year.
During recent operations in Marjah, for instance, she said the US military, as in the Kandahar bus shooting had immediately acknowledged when they had killed civilians.
“Whenever they did it, they owned up right away,” she said. “It’s really important for Afghans to see international forces take responsibility” for their errors.