In case you wondered what is wrong with airborne assault this should make it pretty clear. The actual decision is not been make by the officer in charge on the ground with his eyeballs fully engaged on the target.
Instead he is dependent on a subordinate totally.
Mistakes are always made in war. This merely makes those mistakes many times more probable. All the events described were completely avoidable by having boots on the ground.
Let us be more specific. The body language of a combatant is obvious if you are close enough. The body language of a person at a wedding is completely different. That it cannot be determined from the air is surely well proven.
Air power is not in the business of been light infantry but are supposed to be in the business of providing close support under the direction of such. Training protocols should have that spelled out.
Instead we get a video of a couple of sky jockeys with obviously itchy trigger fingers opening up on a mob of folks. No military doctrine that I am aware of would have a gaggle of enemy combatants clump together unless it was at a whore house. They would immediately space themselves out. In fact that would be a strong indication of enemies.
We have the plentiful air power. Is close support with ground units as SOP really too difficult? Or are these guys so bored that wishful thinking takes over?
Gods and Monsters
Fighting American Wars From On High
The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus
In the last week, we’ve seen -- literally viewed -- a modern example of what it means in our day to act from the heights, and we’ve read about another striking example of the same. The website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video of two U.S. Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad
Without a doubt, that video is a remarkable 17-minute demo of how to efficiently slaughter tiny beings milling about below. There is no way American helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there -- Sunni or Shiite, insurgent or shopper, Baghdadis with intent to harm Americans or Baghdadis paying little attention to two of the helicopters then so regularly buzzing the city. Were they killers, guards, bank clerks, unemployed idlers, Baathist Party members, religious fanatics, café owners? Who could tell from such a height? But the details mattered little.
The Reuters cameraman crouches behind a building looking, camera first, around a corner, and you hear an American in an Apache yell, “He’s got an RPG!” -- mistaking his camera with its long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pilot, of course, doesn’t know that it’s a Reuters photographer down there. Only we do. (And when his death did become known, the military carefully buried the video.)
Along with that video comes a soundtrack in which you hear the Americans check out the rules of engagement (ROE), request permission to fire, and banter about the results. ("Hahaha. I hit 'em"; "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards..."; and of the two wounded children, “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into a battle.”) Such callous chit-chat is explained away in media articles here by the need for “psychological distance” of those whose job it is to kill, but in truth that’s undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you, have god-like access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity, making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.
Similarly, in pre-dawn darkness on February 12th in Paktia Province , eastern Afghanistan , a U.S.
Recently, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while U.S. military spokespeople retreated step by step in a series of partial admissions of error, leading to an in-person apology, including the sacrifice of a sheep and $30,000 in compensation payments.
Ceremonial Evisceration
Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies. And both incidentsare shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them, however, is just how humdrum they actually are, even if the public release of video of such events isn’t. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders, reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended on was a traditional family ceremony. More than 25 guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over these last nine-plus years, Afghan (and Iraqi) ceremonies of all sorts have regularly been blasted away. Keeping a partial tally of wedding parties eradicated by American air power at TomDispatch.com, I had counted five such "incidents" between December 2001 and July 2008. (A sixth in July 2002 in which possibly 40 Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has since come to my attention, as has a seventh in August 2008.) Nor have other kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather been immune from attack, including funerals, and now, naming ceremonies. And keep in mind that these are only the reported incidents in a rural land where much undoubtedly goes unreported.
Similarly, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan , recently expressed surprise at a tally since last summer of at least 30 Afghans killed and 80 wounded at checkpoints when U.S. Kabul
Or while on the subject of Reuters employees, recall reporter Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya satellite network of Dubai , who was killed on Haifa Street Baghdad in September 2004 by a U.S. Nissour Square Baghdad U.S. helicopters and unmanned aerial drones into the heavily populated Shiite slum of Sadr City
This is the indiscriminate nature of killing, no matter how “precise” and “surgical” the weaponry, when war is made by those who command the heavens and descend, as if from Mars, into alien worlds, convinced that they have the power to sort out the good from the bad, even if they can’t tellvillagers from insurgents. Under these circumstances, death comes in a multitude of disguises -- from a great distance via cruise missiles or Predator drones and close in at checkpoints where up-armored American troops, fingers on triggers, have no way of telling a suicide car bomber from a confused or panicked local with a couple of kids in the backseat. It comes repetitively when U.S. Special Operations forces helicopter into villages after dark looking for terror suspects based on tips from unreliable informants who may be settling local scores of which the Americans are dismally ignorant. It comes repeatedly to Afghan police or Army troops mistaken for the enemy.
It came not just to a police officer and his brother and family in Paktia Province, but to a "wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport" who, along with up to 76 members of his extended family, was slaughtered in such a raid on the village of Azizabad in Herat Province in August 2008. It came to the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander (away in another province) whose "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department” were killed in April 2009 in a U.S.-led raid in Khost Province in Eastern Afghanistan. (Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.) It came to 12 Afghans by a roadside near the city of Jalalabad
It came in November 2009 to two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, who were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City Uruzgan Province in February 2010 when U.S.
And it came this April 5th in an airstrike in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in which a residence was hit and four civilians -- two women, an elderly man, and a child -- were killed along with four men, immediately identified in a NATO press release as “suspected insurgents.” ("Insurgents were using the compound as a firing position when combined forces, unaware of the possible presence of civilians, directed air assets against it.") The usual joint investigation with Afghans has been launched and if those four men later morph into “civilians,” the usual apologies will ensue. (Of course, “suspected insurgents,” too, can have wives, children, and elderly parents or relatives, or simply take over compounds with such inhabitants.) And it came this Monday morningon the outskirts of Kandahar City , when U.S.
Planetary Predators
Whether in the skies or patrolling on the ground, Americans know next to nothing of the worlds they are passing above or through. This is, of course, even more true of the “pilots” who fly our latest wonder weapons, the Predators, Reapers, and other unmanned drones over American battle zones, while sitting at consoles somewhere in the United States. They are clearly engaged in the most literal of video-game wars, while living the most prosaic of god-like lives. A sign at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada warns such a drone pilot to "drive carefully" on leaving the base after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq
One instructor of drone pilots has described this form of warfare vividly: "Flying a Predator is like a chess game... Because you have a God's-eye perspective, you need to think a few moves ahead." However much you may “think ahead,” though, the tiny, barely distinguishable creatures you’re deciding whether to eradicate certainly don’t inhabit the same universe as you, with your looming needs, troubles, and concerns.
Here’s the fact of the matter: in the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands. Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious. Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan
Having watched the video of the death of the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in that July 2007 video, his father said: “At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth... If such an incident took place in America
Putting aside the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the hunting of wolves from helicopters in Alaska
“Quarry” has quite a straightforward definition: “a hunted animal; prey.” Indeed, the al-Qaeda leaders, Taliban militants, and local civilians in the region are all “prey” which, of course, makes usthe predators. That the majority of drones cruising those skies 24/7 and repeatedly launching their Hellfire missiles are named “Predators” should, then, come as no surprise.
Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes -- “collateral damage” -- when they are the norm, not the exception, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus , we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the “rules of engagement,” those ROEs, to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.
In this way, for instance, assassination-by-drone has become an ever more central part of the Obama administration’s foreign and war policy, and yet the word “assassination” -- with all its negative implications, legal and otherwise -- has been displaced by the far more anodyne, more bureaucratic “targeted killing.” In a sense, in fact, what “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture) were to the Bush administration, “targeted killing” is to the Obama administration.
For the gods, anything is possible. In the language of Olympian war, for instance, even sitting at a console thousands of miles from the not-quite-humans you are preparing to obliterate can become an act worthy of Homeric praise. As Greg Jaffe of the Washington
Descending From On High
And it’s not only the American way of war, but the American way of statecraft that arrives as if from the heavens, ready to impose its own definitions of the good and necessary on the world. American officials, civilian and military, constantly fly into the embattled (and let’s be blunt: Muslim) regions of the planet to make demands, order, chide, plead, wheedle, cajole, intimidate, threaten, twist arms, and bluster to get our “allies” to do what we most want.
Our special plenipotentiaries like Richard Holbrooke do this regularly; our secretary of state follows. Our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Centcom commander, and Secretary of Defensedescend from the clouds on Islamabad , Kabul , or Baghdad
We are, of course, the rational ones, the grown-ups, the good governance team, the incorruptiblecrew who bring enlightenment and democracy to the world, even if, as practical gods, in support of our Afghan war we’re perfectly willing to shore up a corrupt autocrat elsewhere who is willing to lend us an air base (for $60 million a year in rent) to haul in troops and supplies -- until he falls.
All of this is par for the course for the Olympians from North America . It all seems normal, even benign, except in the rare moments when videos of slaughter begin to circulate. Looked at from the ground up, however, we undoubtedly seem as petulant as the gods or demiurges of some malign religion, or as the aliens and predators of some horrific sci-fi film -- heartless and cold, unfeeling and murderous. As Safa Chmagh, the brother of one of the Reuters employees who died in the 2007 Apache attack, reportedly said: "The pilot is not human, he's a monster. What did my brother do? What did his children do? Does the pilot accept his kids to be orphans?"
As with tales humans tell of the gods, there’s a moral here: If you want it to be otherwise, don’t descend on strange lands armed to the teeth, prepared to occupy, and ready to kill.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in May.
[A small bow of thanks and appreciation to TomDispatch regular William Astore, who helped inspire this piece.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt
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