The Military & The Monetary (*)
As the war in Iraq has degenerated and with operations in Afghanistan not looking too good either, I have cut way back on blogging about collateral damage — the unfortunate instances in which civilians are bombed by mistake.
It’s quite simple: I have a deep empathy for the boots on the ground, if not the knuckleheads in Washington, and don’t want to appear to be piling on. But with possibly hundreds of Afghan civilians being killed in U.S. bombing raids this year that were supposed to target the Taliban, the situation seems to be way out of control.
How out of control? So out of control that a senior British commander in southern Afghanistan says he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people
Now I will be first to acknowledge that targeting terrorists and insurgents who live and operation among civilian populations is extremely difficult, but the U.S. has a well-documented track record of defaulting to the use overwhelming force — the very thing that causes collateral damage — time and time again in Afghanistan.
More here.
Meanwhile, I usually don’t get my nose out of joint when the president says something utterly vacuous and isn’t challenged by the White House press corpse.
But I did get a little more than upset yesterday when this feckless crew let pass George Bush’s remark at a press conference that the best way to honor former NFL player Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death while serving in Afghanistan “is to find the truth.”
The president, of course, failed to note that as commander in chief he has been notably uncurious about the ongoing scandal, including not telling a congressional committee about when he first learned of the Army’s cover-up because it’s a matter of executive privilege.
John Amato at Crooks and Liars more than carries my water on this one:
“And they ask us to blindly believe everything a man in uniform says with orders from their superiors . . . Supporting the troops in battle and in health is of paramount importance to all of us, but the Pat Tillman saga exposed the lies that the highest ranking generals were willing to commit in order to cover up the heroic Pat Tillman. A reporter should have followed up by asking Bush why they are using executive privilege over the Tillman documents.”
Indeed.
And finally, word comes that the Bush administration -– the folks who lavished enormous tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans — opposes a Democratic effort to restore full educational benefits for returning veterans.
Senate Democrats want the government to pay every penny of veterans’ educational costs, from tuition at a public university to books, housing and a monthly stipend. In other words, a return to the historic 1944 G.I. Bill, which put more than eight million U.S. soldiers through college and is credited by historians as fueling the expansion of America’s middle class in the post-war era.
In recent years the benefit has dwindled; under the current law, passed in 1985, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can expect Uncle Sam to cover only 75 percent of their tuition costs.
Reports The Blotter:
“That’s not enough, say Democrats and veterans’ advocates.
“More than 450,000 used the benefit last year, at a cost to taxpayers of $2 billion, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which administers the program. The Democratic proposal would cost an additional $5.4 billion a year, the VA estimates — and that’s too much, it says.
“Keith Wilson, the VA official who oversees the education benefits program, told senators last Friday the proposal would make ‘administration of this program cumbersome,” and its costs would “tax existing VA resources.’ “
More here.
(*) The headline above is a riff on lyrics from “Poem For Peace” by the great Gil Scott Heron:
“The Military and the Monetary,
they get together whenever they think it’s necessary.
War in the desert sometimes sure is scary,
but they beamed out the war to all their subsidiaries.
Tried to make So Damn Insane a worthy adversary,
keeping the citizens secondary,
scaring old folks into coronaries.”
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13 Responses to “The Military & The Monetary (*)”
In re: the British commander’s criticism of US Special Forces, as noted by Shaun.
I would argue the British criticism is self-serving and full of shit, on two points:
1) The British forces in Afghanistan see this as low-intensity conflict. They were particularly embarrassed…after brokering cease-fires with the Taliban, that allowed the Taliban to re-supply and concentrate for a “Spring Offensive”…that the US deployed its forces when they took over command and rapidly decimated the Taliban.
Result: Look in the media this spring…lots of talk of offensive…then a series of US strikes…then no Taliban Spring Offensive.
Yes, US Special Forces are not in the regular chain of command. That is one reason they are particularly effective.
In the view of most military onlookers, the British goofed badly in letting the Taliban regroup. The British have to recover face…and how better to do that then criticize those “American cowboys”. That always gets great play in the British media (the BBC in particular loves that meme).
2) Collateral damage is a part of war. Most Islamic fighters are very aware of the media value of collateral damage…and the Taliban have shown themselves eager to exploit Western media’s focus on civilian dead by basing themselves among civilians.
Airstrike technology has, in reality, grown more precise over time. Today it is a quantum level beyond the technology of the Vietnam War, and even Gulf 1. However, if a group of Taliban use a civilian compound as a firebase, what is the US ground commander to do?
British critics of the US, of course, would say it is better for US forces to endure any amount of casualities than to fire back and endanger civilians.
Bottom Line: The US strategy stopped the Taliban’s Spring Offensive (that was allowed to develop because of the UK command’s incompetence). The British have to save face.
Ah, but you miss the point, Shaun. These sheep might not have been Taliban, but they most certainly were harboring Al Qaida within their country. And as President Bush so eloquently stated, we will go after any sheep that harbor terrorists within their country.
Airstrike technology has grown more precise, and yet you’ll still find that a vast majority of the munitions used are still good old “dumb” bombs.
Most of that is probably simple economics. It’s simply faster and cheaper to make big “dumb” bombs that don’t have active guidance systems.
I don’t hear too much about civlian casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan when they are caused by allied forces. But even so, what choice does the Taliban have? They can’t very well create large easily distinguishable military bases. That said, it doesn’t excuse careless bombing on the part of the United States or our allies. There are still real innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq being killed by this stuff.
Would we be understandably pissed if the British massacred entire towns during the revolution because insurgents were among them?
..and the only time commenters around here get lathered up about “hyperbole” is when I post something that criticizes a lefty…
:rofl:
BTW, Prof. Colin Kahl, formerly of the University of Minnesota and currently at Georgetown University, published a comprehensive analysis of U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq (I doubt they are substantially different in Afghanistan, though I’m open to hearing actual evidence to the contrary) in last fall’s Foreign Affairs. He found that U.S. compliance with non-combatant immunity is high by historical standards and, contrary to both the predictions of realism and the hyperbole of the uninformed/biased, has been improving over time.
As I recall, I referred you to this research previously, Chris, and you specifically refused to even look at it.
I will admit I am not familiar with specific battles in Afghanistan. However! I’m a quite familiar with the careless destruction of an entire town called Fallujah.
Furthermore, I wasn’t saying that Americans were going around blowing up entire towns. That’s why my hypothetical British troops were doing.
Play nice Chris, sarcasm is an acquired taste.
Rudi… it’s 100 degrees outside and my air conditioning unit is broken… my clarity of thought it quite low at this point…
When attacking the war in Iraq is too tiresome, or you have run out of ideas after posting them 50-100+ times, then attack the war in Afghanistan, too.
Why not?
> Collateral damage is a part of war.
The Taliban’s cowardly and criminal misuse of civilians (and their livestock and anything else misused for poor emotional appeals) are the Taliban’s fault alone; nobody has forced them to be cowards and criminals, but it has been solely of their own choice.
Absolute nonsense. Meanwhile, what did sane, moral people say when Americans were killed in that city? “[sigh] Get our people out of there, then flatten the place.” Why is that cesspool still in existence?
Chris,
With respect, you have no idea what you’re talking about. The article you cite was about the 1991 Gulf War (what locals call the 2nd Gulf War). In that war, we used a lot of “dumb” bombs, but the circumstances were much different and technology has changed a lot in 16 years.
As someone who as actually deployed to the theater (most recently in 2005) and actually knows what the actual aircraft loadouts are (sorry, they’re classified), I can assure you that we no longer carry non-guided munitions on our aircraft. Even so-called “cluster bombs” are GPS-guided now – though even so they are very rarely used.
Furthermore, we have fast-tracked new, smaller and more precise weapons. When OIF first began, our only GPS-guided bomb was a 2000 pound class. Now we are fielding a 250 pound class-bomb, and are working on a variant with a non-metallic case to further reduce the lethal radius. The Army has now deployed GPS-guided artillery rounds and there is work on a new small guided missile system. All these program have been fast-tracked in an effort to prevent civilian casualties.
Tell me, what efforts do our enemies make in that regard? Theirs are quite the opposite, actually.
Yes, Fallujah was destroyed – that’s why no one lives there now right?
Now, WRT to the original post, the question of fire support (be it airstrikes, artillery, helicopters, or ground-based missiles like Javelin) is an enduring and problematic one in this type of conflict. As Jason said, our ROE is pretty restrictive and if we KNOW there are civilians present then we generally do not attack. Inevitably, mistakes are made, though they are often not mistakes of intent. Either the ordnance malfunctions, the coordinates were wrong, or there was simply no evidence of civilians. When a platoon is engaged in a 2-3 hour firefight with a large group of insurgents inside a building, it’s not exactly easy to know that those insurgents have children or other noncombatants inside, particularly if the insurgents make no effort to protect them or get them out of the line of fire as we would were the situations reversed. If other options are employed to deal with the insurgents besides an airstrike, those civilians will still likely die. Those deaths are a tragedy but the ultimate responsibility falls on those who put them in harms way – namely the insurgents themselves. Doing so is actually a prosecutable war-crime.
And that’s exactly what Chris is doing here – making excuses for war crimes. They don’t need to make “large and easily distinguishable military bases,” they simply need to endeavor to keep the civilian population out of the fight, just as we do. Perhaps that’s too much for Chris to ask of the Taliban, foreign fighters, militias and various salafists we’re fighting.
I’ve referred Chris to specific research (easily accessible online) on this several times. He once specifically refused to even look at it and has since simply ignored the references and changed the subject.
In short, I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere. Chris appears determined to stick with his rather wild assertions and to actively avoid any information that might challenge his beliefs.
It is too bad because it is completely unnecessary. As can be seen by several of the people who post here, it is easily possible to oppose U.S. policy without repeating the Vietnam-era error of stereotyping the military as “baby-killers”.
I’m not sure how Jason is so certain I didn’t even look at it.
Maybe because you said directly at the time that you didn’t intend to look at it.
If you looked at it anyway, kudos. But there is no sign that you’ve taken corrected information into account in your comments, so weak kudos only.