While air strikes in Afghanistan—recently lauded as the most accurate ever—are a major problem, they are not the entirety of the problem with regards to American strategy and tactics. Another glaring problem in how the U.S. conducts operations is the continued use of so-called “night raids.”
It is no idle concern: the last several rounds of night raids in Eastern Afghanistan—Logar, Khost, and other provinces—have prompted widespread protests by the local population and on rare occasions violence. The problem is so severe, Alex Strick van Linschoten has reported, “The early years of US raids and night abductions in Kandahar are still not forgotten.” He was talking about 2001—things, an entire era of the war, we have forgotten, still matter tremendously in terms of how we conduct ourselves.
It is nothing, contra Ralph Peters, particularly alien to anyone: being traumatized and seeking recompense for a perceived wrong is a deeply human instinct. In the three eastern provinces that make up the Loya Paktia area—Paktya, Khost, and Paktika—the problem of locals reacting to special forces conducting raids is particularly acute. Their complaints, however, are made both more important and more worrying in light of how they get treated both by the military and even the media. Accusing a group of tribal elders of, say, sabotage for conditioning their future cooperation with the U.S. on an end to random night raids and detentions that do little more than frighten people does very little to contribute to our understanding of the problems we face.
Last year, the U.S. military suffered a very serious loss of face because of the bombing incident at Shindand. In the midst of things, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, I noted:
The way the coalition has handled these incidents creates the impression that they are callous or even casual about dead civilians: repeatedly denying non-coalition body counts without evidence to back their claims, calling the dead “Taliban” when they are nothing of the sort, and disparaging human rights groups trying to confirm ground conditions. All of this serves to isolate the Pentagon from real social currents on the ground. Moreover, it sets up an expectation that, no matter what actually happened, the official response will be to deny until forced to admit—which, when its account differs so greatly from local accounts of these incidents, encourages the idea that the coalition is lying.
Lest we think this is an isolated problem relegated to the “clean” realm of messaging, information operations, propaganda, and perceptions, this misperception about the military can have serious and even catastrophic consequences. During the aftermath of the attack on the Wanat VPB, including more recent efforts to blockquote the 15-6 by Tom Ricks, very few if any people discusses the possible role of a recent spate of civilian casualties in Nuristan, Nangarhar, and Kunar might have played in creating the ground conditions under which an otherwise non-hostile village hosted hundreds of militants preparing a major attack.
So it with all of this in mind that I was just puzzled at Spencer Ackerman’s seeming comfort with both investigating civilian casualties and simply apologizing for them carte blanche. Neither actually addresses the problem that our own sloppy intelligence, and almost as importantly, our languid and robotic media and public responses to these incidents are what are the problem. Simply apologizing places the U.S. military at fault—which is not always the case. By apologizing—and, unfortunately, by allowing other agencies and units to run amok on the night raids mentioned above—we simply make ourselves the bad guys instead of the people who are hiding amongst civilians.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 04/10/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
The Taliban actively promotes the ideas that everyone we kill is innocent. I was told by a Talib (in front of a small crowd) that our killing of civilians was intentional because America hates Islam. I have also seen the coalition list casualties as all EKIA because it would “help morale.” We need to be careful first and foremost, then we need to be truthful about mistakes. REAL investigations need to be done to determine the truthfulness about claims of civilian casualties, and SOME intelligence used in targeting for night raids needs to be given to the public (pictures of weapons caches, videos of the firefight, etc…) to prove to them that it wasn’t just a “random night raid.” SF doesn’t just randomly hit houses, it is all based on intelligence, which is of course sometimes faulty, but we are working on that. All the Taliban has to do is suggest that the people were innocent and the locals accept it as truth. ISAF needs to PROVE that they were bad guys or they will lose in the information realm.