We’ve come a long way since 2002, when NRO’s shining beacon of light Macubin Thomas Owens was highlighting the virtues of the Pentagon not tracking how many innocent people it killed. First off, let us all be thankful they’ve taken a slightly less cavalier attitude about the innocent people they kill, even if the tendency to write off reports of civilian casualties as Taliban propaganda until days later is annoying. Hamid Karzai has become increasingly vocal in his complaints that the U.S. and NATO do not use enough caution in their targeting, most recently over the deaths of some 76-odd civilians in Shindand district of Herat. The Afghan government insists 76 people died, all without connections to militancy, while the U.S. military insists 30 Taliban were killed in the bombing.
BBC Persian went out to investigate the competing claims. Their findings were troubling:
‘’A man was killed a few months before and there was a religious ceremony for his death. But someone had reported to the Government officials that Taliban fighters were brought up to the village to attack the Airport of Shendan district. I was there and I did not witness any Taliban fighters or Al Qaeda members.”
BBC news reporter: This person that was his death ceremony, how he got killed?
Villager Ahmad Andiwal: His name was Temor he was martyred in a tribe fighting.
BBC Reporter: Don’t you think the person who reported of Taliban gathering in the village, was related to Temor’s rivals?
Villager Ahmad Andiwal: Yes.
This does not mesh well with the U.S.’ portrayal of the events, which claim a nearby convoy was ambushed before the bombs fell.
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How can I respond to this post without a blatant insult concerning the bias you display?
I can’t so I’ll leave it alone – excepting a note that you don’t know what you don’t know about ISAF ROE. For someone who distains MSM reporting you seem to embrace it when it suits your purpose.
Greetings from the web page you love to hate. Hope all is well on your planet.
Dave
Off-topic: Georgia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia
Comments?
His remarks strike me as basically solid although I disagree somewhat with his prescriptions/conclusions
Dave Dilegge, it helps to fully read what you’re criticizing. I am saying the reporting coming from the area (my complaints about coverage elsewhere is when a report about a conflict or event is datelined from hundreds of miles away) does not mesh with official U.S. reporting. I don’t recall taking sides here, aside from noting Hamid Karzai’s increasing anger over these unplanned strikes. But when a reporter on the ground is reporting local people saying this stuff, it is dishonest to pretend those voices don’t matter.
Dave Schuler, can you just start emailing me that kind of stuff? We should keep these comment threads on-topic.
Actually, an “ambush” on a patrol wouldnt necessarily be out of character. If I had a cunning plan to make NATO bomb my neighbour, it certainly would involve a three-step use of an informer: 1) Inform about Talibans in area. 2) Make said Talibans appear, wich means fire some shots at a random US patrol. 3) Report in that you know *exactly* where these Talebans are gathered. Wait for explosions.
What is remarkable is that after all these years the US IO-people have not understood that a lie is ten times worse than silence. The arch of this story is weird, the US went out and bragged about bagging 30 enemy fighters including a named leader *before* the Afghan minstry of interior went out and called the killed *martyrs*. While the Afghan ministry of defence, whose commandoes seem to have called in the strike, are in unison with the US forces in the subsequent denial, Al Jazeera has been showing films of the dead children. Wich makes the US look incompetent and stupid.
It seems some kind of reality-shift has taken place inside the US bunker, a belief that denial will win over the pictures on television. Either that, or the US IO people just dont care at all anymore about managing the info-output and just want to go home.
Well, the stateside audience hears the denials (and the crowing) but probably won’t see the television pictures. To this extent that they see it, that it’s from al Jazeera will undermine its credibility and ppl will give benefit of the doubt to the US forces and their rules of engagement.
Of course, the locals as well as various ME/Cent Asian audiences who watch al Jazeera (in fact, the latter far more than the former–they rely much more on TV, after all, for their information) could give flying f**k about US ROE. They are predisposed to distrust US gov’t anyways. Even without official US pronouncements, they’ll get plenty via their news sources. That really forces US spokespeople, at least in short to medium term, into a difficult bind: if it announces high civilian casualty figures, it reaffirms al Jazeera and others’ reports (whether they are strictly “true” or not.); if it announces low figures, it reaffirms the populaces’ existing belief that US gov’t lies; if it says nothing, then it concedes the ground to the other actors who are not (at least when it comes to reporting on the Muslim world) are not friendly to US itnerests.
This is the problem with the whole information dissemination problem in Afghanistan (and Iraq, too–the military part of it may have gotten more or less settled, for now, but the political parts remain unstable and could easily re-spark real fighting if left unaddressed.) US policy is made strictly with the domestic audience in mind and is completely ignorant of what the other people see, hear, and think. Dangerous since it’ll be mostly the foreigners who become anti-American radicals of whatever stripes, not Americans.
Foust – I fully read everything I comment on. – Dilegge
fnord, kao,
This is where Dilegge’s allegations about my knowledge of ISAF/US ROE become silly (he enjoys casting aspersions on people who think differently): if it was a retaliation strike after the fact, there’d be better intel and we’d know for sure. Their pre-planned strikes have either a zero-collateral or very close to a zero-collateral damage record, which is really impressive.
The problem comes in emergency response actions, namely if either a plane on patrol or some asset on the ground comes under attack. Part of the reason those two wedding parties in Jalalabad and Nuristan were bombed is because they were shooting into the air, and nearby CF assets thought they were being fired on. I really believe it was an honest mistake, but the way the incidents were handled — which is the point I was getting at with this post — ruined ISAF’s credibility, by insisting that the women and children were just Taliban until they really knew, ISAF spokesmen made it that much harder to persuasively argue the next time that they were really getting bad guys when locals complained of innocent people being bombed.
Here, the facts are not yet in. Dilegge can accuse me of whatever bias he wants (I feel no shame in not accepting whatever the PAO says wholesale), but the facts remain there are competing accounts of what was actually bombed in Azizabad, Shindand, and unfortunately locals of multiple ethnicities all allege a wedding party was bombed. That does not bode well for the U.S. blithely insisting it was a group of Taliban who were bombed.
Actually, the story is getting stranger and stranger: Today Karzai fired general Jalandar Shah Behnam who was responsible from the Afghan side. AIHRC confirms the civilian casualties. Reports are of 12-15 houses destroyed. And the US response is total denial, repeating its claims that only enemy fighters were killed.
Dilegge: This is not a story about US cruelty and bad ROE, this is primarily a story on how hamfisted Information ops can ruin an actors credibility. Why on earth should one believe anything the US says when it is openly and brazenly stonewalling in the face of evidence? And if the main part of the COIN fight is to keep the host-governments legitimacy, why is the US flatly denying Karzais version of the story?
Thanks Josh. That’s pretty much my point: if “the other people” don’t believe what US/ISAF has to say, it doesn’t matter whether what US/ISAF says is true or not–and the way ISAF is handling it is just destroying its credibility vis-a-vis these people.
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