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BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan– So there’s this exchange between Adm. Mullen and dudes in Kandahar:
Mullen, who appeared grim-faced at moments, noted that in the past month, the Taliban killed 45 civilians, while coalition forces killed five. But once again, the elders were unmoved.
None of them would have been killed, the third elder said, “if you weren’t here.”
I don’t know if it’s worth belaboring the point. But while there’s obvious inherent virtue and wisdom in taking care to reduce civilian casualties in war, three consecutive commanders here (and especially the last two) have contended that doing so has strategic implications. If we’re to believe the Third Elder, those strategic implications and the argument behind them — reducing U.S.-caused civilian casualties and contrasting them with the Taliban’s brutality will contribute to a “strategically decisive” embrace of the U.S.’s allies in Afghanistan — have been trumped. I don’t know how smart it is to consider the Third Elder representative of Afghan opinion, but I do know how stupid it would be to dismiss him.
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It actually makes perfect sense. If you live in a village in a country where there is a war, and the people fighting that war are responsible for the deaths of your loved ones, it seems a little unrealistic for those same people want you to make careful judgments about which of them was responsible for more of the suffering. In my experience, the response is a pretty classic “a pox on both your houses”…
mikey
49 civillians killed to defeat an enemy 100-strong. Great.
You know what COINs are good for?
To cover the eyes of the dead, and pay the Ferryman for the journey across the Styx.
More on the “hearts and minds” front:
Claims of Afghan civilian deaths spark protest
LINK.
TROOPS
HOME
NOW
Your link isn’t working.
The recent Wikileaks Afghan documents release suggests that you are in effect furthering their propoganda by spreading the statement of only 5 civilian deaths without the obvious and needed question to its accuracy.
Wouldnt a stronger challenge to their supposed strategy be to point out that as much as they TALK about reducing civilian casualties, we know the reality is that has never occured.
But hey why should that stop you from peddling their propoganda for them. I mean they only killed 5 civilians this month right?
Of course. How dare he let the absurdity of Mullen’s assertion stand revealed by itself without running up a flag you can salute.
One of the things that I think they are not picking up on with respect to the elders saying that the Taliban wouldn’t be there if the Americans weren’t CONDUCTING OPERATIONS there (if you look at the article, that is what the elder was complaining about, not presence but operations (i.e. efforts to find and kill Taliban), is the fact that military operations v. security protection and support, puts our military in the role of infidel occupiers.
That’s a draw to jihad and parts of the Koran are used by fundamentalists to support that over and over – infidels occupying Muslim lands is interpreted/used by some fundamentalists as creating a requirement to go to battle against them. So when you have the military conducting occupation based exercises, it ends up being a call to more and more fundamentalists to show up and fight to push them out. As long as we have non-Muslim troops there acting in a governmental/occupational function instead of a support/security function, they absolutely do fuel the fire. I don’t think that part of the issue is getting attention and instead they are just thinking the elder is making a more inane point that the Taliban go where the troops are. His comments about not wanting the troops to leave in general are not contradictory to his other comments if you realize he was very specific about complaining about military operations being conducted in his area, not about the troops presence in general or support for security or building.
This is also why it’s a failed gameplan to hype up how “warrior warrior warrior” our troops are (abandoning an older and better soldiers creed for a warrior chant) instead of de-warriorizing our response and focusing on the Taliban as criminals and our troops as providing assistance to help address the criminals. As long as we chest thump over warriorhood, we don’t make ourselves more respected (or if we do, it’s irrelevant); what we do is more concretely help the fundamentalists make the argument that we are in Afghanistan as infidel “warriors” who are invading and occupying Muslim lands.
War is implicit in being a warrior and characterizing our situation as a ‘war’ in Afghanistan does the same thing as it did when the Soviets were at ‘war” in Afghanistan. It is going to be and remain a draw for fundamentalist response to infidels being at war in Muslim lands. And of course, then we will have to have more and more military operations to go after the “insurgents” who are trying to get the infidel warriors out of Muslim lands, and then they will have more fundamentalists convinced that they need to …