These are some of the relevant facts:
- The story is based on hundreds of pages of previously unreleased military documents, including transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the results of two Pentagon investigations and interviews with the officers involved as well as Afghans who were on the ground that day.
- This incident happened on a cold morning of Feb 21, 2010. Meaning, this was after we have been there for close to 9 years. We still cannot distinguish between insurgents and harmless folk with women and children among them and no identifiable weapons.
- "We all had it in our head, 'Hey, why do you have 20 military age males at 5 a.m. collecting each other?' " an Army officer involved in the incident would say later. "There can be only one reason, and that's because we've put [U.S. troops] in the area." In a hair-trigger environment, critical life and death decisions can be made based on such flimsy premises.
- Cell phone chatter was intercepted and they suspected a high-level Taliban Commander was nearby. But neither the identities of those talking nor (more importantly) their precise location was known. But that's all it took for them to conclude that these folks were insurgents.
- By the U.S. count, 15 or 16 men were killed and 12 people were wounded, including a woman and three children. Elders from the Afghans' home villages said in interviews that 23 had been killed, including two boys, Daoud, 3, and Murtaza, 4. Regardless of who got the figures right, it is horrible and preventable tragedy.
- McChrystal issued letters of reprimand to four senior and two junior officers in Afghanistan. The Air Force said the Predator crew was also disciplined, but it did not specify the punishment. No one faced court-martial, the Pentagon said.
- Several weeks after the attack, American officers travelled to the villages to apologize to survivors and the victims' families. They gave each survivor 140,000 afghanis, or about $2,900. Families of the dead received $4,800.
If there's a silver lining, it is only the fact that we can get hold of this information through the FOIA. Awareness helps us understand what we are up against. The military has taken steps to address the problems that caused this tragedy. When two cultures, vastly different from each other, are forced to co-exist in a violent environment such mistakes are inevitable. But a justifiable war at one stage is turning slowly but surely into a catastrophy.
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Very tragic on many of levels. First, mistakes such as this undermine the mission of defeating the insurgency. It turns friends into enemies. The Hazaras have the most to lose if the Taliban win and have been our staunchest allies in Afghanistan.
ReplyDeleteSecond, the human cost is incalculable. There is of course, the victims. But imagine the psychological cost to the men who killed "friendlies" to include children. Military live to kill "bad guys" and dispense justice. That's the kind of men and women we have on our side. Most also have families. Yet they are human and they will bear the burden of guilt when they pull the trigger and kill innocents. They will carry that guilt with them the rest of their lives. And many times, they are harder on themselves than any armchair warrior could be.
Of course it is very easy for us sitting at our desk to judge these men who spend years away from their loved ones, of their own free will.
ReplyDeleteWar is very ugly and tragedies such as this happen more than people realize. Our enemies certainly have no qualms about killing innocents, and there is no FOIA for them. We certainly hold ourselves to a higher standard, as we should. In a sense, we're boxing and they're street fighting.
I would add to your silver lining the fact that this incident details the great lengths we go through to avoid killing innocents, even at great risk to our own troops. The bureaucracy sounds silly at times. However, like all human systems it fails. War is emotional and ugly. We here at home want it to be clean and sanitized. Our warriors are doing their best to accomplish the fight with dignity and honor. The rules of engagement in this fight are the most restrictive we've seen in any war zone. We need to keep that in mind when we see mistakes made by these professionals.
For every tragedy like this, I would guess there are twice as many stories where our warriors have stayed their hand and paid the cost for it with life or limb.